Original subtitles

They are 'Mission Impossible'.

An elite soldier cloaked in secrecy.

They're deployed everywhere.

There's places that they're at right now

that nobody knows about.

Built to strike with deadly precision

and overpowering force.

Delta Force is called into action

when American's lives are at stake.

A lifetime of training for a moment of action.

It's muscle memory. If I see a threat, I kill it.

Warriors aren't born...

they're built.

Understanding how reveals the true nature

of their greatness.

From the cradle to the grave,

these are the steps to creating...

History's Greatest Warriors.

For a Delta Force operator,

no mission is too difficult.

The Delta Force operator is probably the highest trained,

most professional soldier in the world.

His training and expertise make him

an elite warrior unlike any other.

I was fortunate in my career...

to walk amongst giants, to walk amongst people that

I do think are some of the greatest warriors in history.

The men of the Delta Force

are built to take out any enemy.

They go after America's most sought after targets.

The snakes in the grass, terrorist networks...

drug networks, or narco terrorist networks...

war criminals.

You can think of them as the tier one unit of

Special Forces operators in the US military.

It's really the best of the best, the most elite,

in terms of precision, marksmanship, skill.

Delta Force is under

Joint Special Operations Command.

This is the president's go-to command,

the army's premier counterterrorism unit.

If there's an emergency, he's gonna

pick up the phone and call Delta Force.

Its structure is always built on teams,

typically teams of four men.

Some may have different skills.

A team is a part of a larger troop,

which is part of a squadron.

As far as we know, there are seven squadrons

in Delta Force at the moment.

They work on the Delta Force compound at Fort Liberty,

formerly known as Fort Bragg.

Delta Force has a number of different names and acronyms.

The classified name is 1st Special Forces

Operational Detachment Delta.

Delta Force members will refer to it,

oftentimes in public, simply as 'The Unit'.

The journey to becoming a Delta Force operative

will require extreme sacrifice.

He must endure years of training...

become expert with all the modern weapons of war,

and use precision tactics- and violence-

to take out the enemy.

It is a path first charted

by one fiercely determined man.

Charlie Beckwith is a captain in

the US army. He's a Green Beret.

In the early 60s, he sees how the British SAS

do their training, he actually embeds with them

when they go into modern day Malaysia,

and he is totally impressed.

Beckwith's exchange with this

British Special Air Service really affects him.

What he is seeing is people who are

not just trainers, but are doers.

They can operate independently.

They can go undercover.

Beckwith sees that the US doesn't really

have this type of commando force.

And he wants to bring some sort of force like this

to the US military.

The upper brass, they don't see the need for

some sort of specialized unit like this.

In 1970, the jungles of Vietnam become

a proving ground for America's elite warriors.

But it's a test they're not ready for.

A lot of this idea germinated in the aftermath

of the Son Tay raid, a POW rescue mission.

The rescue force is recruited from the Green Berets.

At the time, they are the premier

special operations force in America.

But as good as the Green Berets are,

it just takes them too long to train for this mission.

The POWs are long gone by the time the team finally arrives.

The military sees the need for something like

what will become the Delta Force.

Charlie's real insight was that you cannot create

a unit like this in response to an emergency.

You need to have a force that is already trained and

selected and ready to go.

Then, a wave of terror sweeps the globe

in the 1970s.

This is a new world, and warfare is changing.

You have, for example, a Swiss Air jet that

is blown up, killing many Americans.

The US ambassador to Sudan is assassinated.

Generals turn to Charlie to put together this force,

to put together the training, to figure out

how this thing would be created.

Built to fight terror and rescue hostages,

Delta Force is deployed for situations that

seem like 'Mission Impossible'.

In 1989, Kurt Muse

is working in Panama.

It's been alleged that he was an employee of the CIA.

And he was taken hostage by Noriega's forces

and held in a prison.

Several Little Bird helicopters

land operators on the roof of the prison.

They breach it.

Operators flow to to this jail cell

where Kurt Muse is held.

They blow the jail cell open.

They give him a vest, they give him a helmet.

And then they make their way onto the Bird,

which then takes them out.

They rescue him in 6 minutes.

This was really exactly the type of mission that

Delta Force was designed for.

They planned and executed the first successful army,

American-led hostage rescue

in history.

To execute these high-risk missions,

the Delta Force demands a special class of warrior.

Unlike other warriors in history

who are molded from birth,

the selection process for a Delta operator

begins with those already considered to be

"the best of the best".

They take applicants from all across the army,

even other services.

You could be a Green Beret.

You could be a Ranger. But now, with Delta,

things are raised up a notch.

They're looking for the person that has that

individual initiative.

Somebody who can make quick decisions...

under stress, when they're tired-

in combat conditions.

I was in Third Ranger Battalion.

Once I learned about The Unit,

I was very motivated and very excited

to try and work my way there.

I spent two years going through

Special Forces jump school.

I always wanted to climb up, and when I heard about

The Unit the first time, it sounded intriguing.

They were superheroes to us.

They were exactly what we wanted to grow up to be.

Recruiters came and found me, actually,

and said, "We think you have what it takes.

You should try out for Selection."

Recruits face a battery of brutal tests.

Most will fail.

It's designed to show you who might quit

during a combat situation.

The 'Stress Phase' is a physical and mental trial

designed to push Delta Force candidates to the edge.

The rules and requirements are

deliberately shrouded in darkness.

You start in the middle of the night.

You're given your first rendezvous point and,

off you go into the woods.

Here, alone in the Uwharrie Mountains,

comes a battle within oneself.

You are asked to move from point A to point B.

You're not given a time standard.

You just have to move as quick as you can.

I'm broken, I'm destroyed, I'm sick.

My boots are wet.

I have blisters all over my feet.

My rucksack is getting heavier and heavier

as the constant rain weighs it down.

They don't know when they're gonna stop.

It's to see how far you can push yourself.

If you can endure, if you can go beyond

what normal human limits are.

The mastery of land navigation on hostile terrain

is essential to building an elite warrior.

Behind enemy lines, these skills will

determine who lives and who dies.

When one goal is achieved,

another is immediately assigned.

The whole process is about you

battling your own will.

It was just one foot in front of the other.

I kept going... I didn't stop.

I moved as quick as I thought I could.

For the few who make the cut,

another phase awaits.

Here, it's not the body, but the mind,

that's pushed to the limit.

At the end of the Stress Phase is nearly

a week of psychological evaluations.

I enter the room.

It is full of people I've never seen in my life.

And they start asking questions.

There is no way to prepare for such a test.

Only those who can function at an elite level,

under intense pressure, will continue.

I wanted to pull my hair out.

Then I would get another test. Thousands of questions.

My mind is thinking at the time,

"These are trick questions."

It has to do with your personal psychology

and your emotions.

They're tired, under duress, hungry,

been really pushed to their limits.

That's what they're assessing for-

how they make decisions under pressure.

Are they able to do that when exhausted?

So, you've got this huge attrition rate,

where it's only gonna be- not just the

physically strongest, but the most mentally strong.

Only 5% of personnel in the military

qualify to even try out.

Out of that, 90% will not make it

through the actual selection process.

That leaves only half of a percent of the entire

military making it through selection.

After a gauntlet of conflict and chaos,

the candidate faces his defining moment.

And they looked at me, and they said, "Okay.

You're young." My shoulders drop.

"But you're very young."

I immediately wanted to start crying and

run out of the room.

And then it comes up, the last sentence:

"But we think you have what it takes.

Welcome to The Unit."

But the selection process is only the beginning.

What comes next is even more arduous.

After demonstrating perseverance, stamina,

and mental toughness, the recruit has been

selected to join Delta Force.

Now, he must learn new ways of tracking,

of fighting, of killing.

If you make it through selection and

you get asked to attend the Operator Training Course,

you go back to zero, and it builds on the basics.

It is approximately a six-month course

designed to teach an individual everything

they need to know to be an operator in The Unit.

I entered OTC thinking I knew everything in the world,

and I was ready to roll.

And then I realized I didn't know anything.

A core set of skills

are the building blocks of a Delta Force warrior.

Hostage rescue operations are going to involve

breaking and entering, breaching,

different types of artillery.

You need to have people with these different

sets of skills, and combine them so that

you can deploy and be more flexible and agile.

For six months,

the recruit's mind is methodically shaped.

He learns, he grows...

He evolves.

He is built to become a superior warrior.

They teach you everything that you're gonna

see possibly in combat.

We learned how to drive every type of vehicle,

off road, on road.

Suburbans, military vehicles.

We learn how to protect VIPs around the world,

whether they be ambassadors or generals.

You end up learning how to skydive, free fall.

We focused on different means of

infiltration and exfiltration.

Whether it's getting to the target on foot,

in a vehicle, in a helicopter.

Explosive breaching, I spent a lot of time doing it.

You want to use the absolute

minimal amount of explosive.

You don't want to hurt or damage anything

behind that door,

particularly in a hostage rescue scenario,

it becomes absolutely critical.

The Delta Force operator trains to fight the enemy,

and to protect the innocent.

He'll be called to carry out missions

in an unforgiving landscape.

The idea behind the arduous training that

these guys go through is that

when they see it in real world scenarios,

it's not something new, it's not something

they've never experienced before.

I think that paid a lot of dividends

for these guys in Afghanistan.

The Battle of Tora Bora is a

US military operation to try to go after

the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Bin Laden at this time, he's hiding in the caves

of the Tora Bora mountain range.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks,

Delta Force is deployed to Afghanistan.

The mission is to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden,

America's public enemy #1.

Delta goes out and begins conducting reconnaissance.

This is where you see the training that Delta

goes through- carrying a lot of equipment,

carrying heavy rucksacks-

you see it pay off in Afghanistan.

Every training we do is exactly as we would do it

as in war, because when you're in stress

you revert back to what you know the most.

It's treacherous terrain.

The mountains are so high that

you can start suffering from altitude sickness,

or hypoxia, when your body is deprived of oxygen.

This was about as tough as it gets.

Bin Laden and his fanatically loyal followers

hide among towering mountain peaks.

They're dug in, ready to face off against

a highly skilled adversary- The Delta Force.

They're climbing through the terrain in winter.

in the snow, to find out exactly

what is happening to the enemy.

And a short-wave radio captured from an

al-Qaeda fighter lets Delta teams listen in on

bin Laden's radio comms.

They use that intel to get closer and closer

to bin Laden's hideout in the caves.

Delta snipers pinpoint

Osama bin Laden's cave hideout.

With their target surrounded, they call in bigger guns.

The intelligence that is gathered at that time is that

bin Laden was indeed up in the Tora Bora mountain range.

They call in airstrikes,

using lasers to designate targets.

The mountain fortress of a determined enemy is

pounded by the US Air Force's

most destructive bombers.

Delta Force operators scour through the rubble.

Delta Force operators are really

the tip of the spear there. Al-Qaeda retreats,

and Delta operators enter the caves.

They find basically empty camp sites.

There's spent ammo on the ground,

there's documents in Arabic.

But they don't find bin Laden.

The battle of Tora Bora reveals the terrifying power

unleashed by Delta Force.

But their target escapes their grasp.

It appears that during that bombing raid,

Osama bin Laden was actually injured.

They came very close to nabbing him before

bin Laden slipped across the border into Pakistan.

Delta Force training builds warriors

who can endure fierce elements,

battle through extreme discomfort,

and through it all make clear strategic decisions.

At the end of the day,

the human brain is the ultimate weapon.

These guys have to master a whole slew of different

skills that range from combat medicine...

explosive breaching,

using advanced pieces of technology.

We are trained for multiple scenarios, in case,

you know, anything goes wrong.

We always train for the worst possible scenario.

♪ SFX: [Helicopter blades flapping] ♪

♪ SFX: [Helicopter blades flapping] ♪

Every mission reveals new lessons for the warrior,

even encounters that end in tragedy.

It's the early 1990s, and Somalia is

in the midst of a real terrible famine.

Warlords start going after the UN peacekeepers,

and really stopping the aid that's coming in.

The US sends in the Delta Force

to go after these warlords.

A Black Hawk helicopter is shot down.

Rangers and the Delta operators are both stranded

in the city of Mogadishu overnight,

with practically the whole city coming down on them.

I was in Somalia, 1993.

Black Hawk Down. And we were getting hammered.

We were trapped in a house.

We wouldn't leave the house because the crash site

is outside the door, and there's...

bodies of pilots trapped underneath.

We couldn't get the helicopter off of them,

so we had to wait.

It really does become kind of a...

just all out drag that night

as these two forces are fighting each other,

as one Delta operator described it to me,

they're turning the handle on the meat grinder.

Disaster strikes.

Besieged Delta operators are forced to improvise

in an all-out fight for survival.

The most elite modern fighters in the world

have their backs against the wall.

The Black Hawk Down incident,

it is a watershed moment for special operations.

Six Delta operators are killed in the ambush,

two others are gravely injured.

Two American helicopters shot out of the sky

in Sunday's fighting in Somalia...

It's a haunting operation that provokes change...

from, you know, how we use night vision goggles to

how we plan different contingencies.

Delta Force rehearsed and trained that mission over and

over and over again for years after the incident because

what had happened out there bothered them so much.

The tragedy spawns hard lessons.

The Unit never stops training.

The ever-changing battlefield always demands more.

They're constantly striving to be

a little bit better and a little bit better.

And I think that qualifies Delta Force

as today's most elite warriors.

Six months of grueling training transforms

already skilled soldiers into

the most elite fighters in history.

At the end of it, I'm a million times better than

the soldier that I was before I started.

Confident that if I have to go to war tomorrow,

you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that that you are

one of the best trained people on the planet at what you do.

Built to rescue hostages and destroy targets,

the Delta Force operator is now

mentally and physically trained.

Next, he must be equipped with the weapons

he will use to fight a determined enemy.

His body has been strengthened,

and his mind has been sharpened.

It is now time to arm the warrior.

When people ask you...

how you do it: "How can you shoot a human?"

I look at them, I say, "It's the training."

It's literally the training where it's beat out of you.

It's muscle memory. If I see a threat, I kill it.

Your core level of proficiency is on your issued

primary and secondary weapon system.

Your primary being your rifle.

Your secondary being your pistol or your sidearm.

Different guys on different teams

carry different lengths of rifles.

Snipers and your reconnaissance guys

carry much longer-barreled rifles for taking longer,

more precision shots.

The 416 was shorter.

I think it was a 14-inch barrel.

Just a little easier to handle in confined spaces.

The Delta Force operator is trained to engage

with his primary weapon...

but he will carry a backup

for life and death emergencies.

The quickest thing to do if you have a malfunction

with your rifle is to transition to your pistol.

I started carrying a 9-millimeter Glock.

You know, whether it was dirty or it was wet,

or it was muddy or whatever, I knew that thing was gonna

go bang when I pulled the trigger.

A member of The Unit must be outfitted

for any combat scenario.

When a conflict escalates,

he will need a weapon to match it.

Probably the scenario in which an operator would use

a grenade launcher is if you started receiving effective

enemy fire, and now you're gonna put away the little

peashooter pistol, you're gonna go to

something a little more heavy duty.

One particular instance,

we were on a target on a rooftop.

We had nothing but hostiles inside the building

across the street, and we were able to use

grenade launchers to suppress that building,

to hit 'em hard with high explosive.

The weapons needed to

confront any threat are in hand,

but to become an elite Delta Force warrior,

a trainee must go from excellent to expert.

It doesn't matter if you're a Green Beret,

an Army Ranger, or a mechanic in the army.

It starts at square one.

You're shooting at 50 meters, you're shooting at 100 meters,

you're shooting at 200 meters, and then,

you're looking at your bullet strikes,

and then you're continuing to practice the fundamentals

to decrease the diameter of your shot group.

So, what I want to develop is muscle memory.

How's my trigger finger gonna work?

How's my grip? How's my breathing?

When do I pause?

Am I looking at my front sight and looking at my rear sight?

You continue to build- shooting on the move,

whether you're in the prone, or you're on a knee,

or you're standing.

Over and over again- did I jerk the trigger?

Is my finger on that trigger properly?

But can he hit the target, and only the target?

There is no margin for error.

You're gonna have civilians,

hostages intermingled with terrorists,

so they have to be very precise in how they fire.

He has to strike fast, be aggressive,

go after the target, go after the terrorist,

but also be sensitive to the lives that are at stake.

As much as the warrior trains how to use his weapon,

what makes him great is knowing when to fire.

We started our training in the shooting house.

I look around at all the targets in the room-

everyone has a gun in their hand.

I'm like, "This is so easy." We're lining back up outside,

I'm looking at the instructor. He's like, "You ready?"

Like, "We're ready." He's like, "Go."

I enter, turn, live rounds, right. Shoot, shoot, shoot.

We're shooting everything in the room.

Two in the head, two in the head.

I'm good to go.

The instructor walks in, he goes,

"Why did you shoot 'em?" I start looking at him,

and then my, my face makes it down to the hands.

And none of them had a weapon.

Not one target in that room had a weapon.

He said, "That's one."

"Another one and you're out."

When you train for hostage rescue,

the most nerve wracking is knowing that a shot that's,

that's even an inch off of where your intended

aimpoint was could be catastrophic.

They'll remove some targets out of the rooms,

and they'll put students in there to sit and watch.

Now I'm shooting in a room with paper and humans.

Perfection is the only standard.

There are no shortcuts.

I learned quickly that you don't look at faces.

To know what a threat is, you have to look at the hands.

Reliable weapons and elite training

are critical when building a warrior who must

respond to the most extreme of surprise attacks.

It's 2015, in the capital of Mali,

when terrorists take over the Radisson Blu Hotel.

Delta Force operator, Kyle Morgan,

is serving as a special adviser to the ambassador.

He is woken up with a phone call that

there's gunfire at the Radisson Hotel.

He gets into action.

"We got to respond. Let's, let's do something."

Gunmen start assassinating people.

That's what they do.

Kyle Morgan, when he enters the foyer of the hotel,

he sees dead bodies.

Kyle responds unilaterally and

took the initiative and went out there to try to save

as many people as he possibly could.

He's not there deployed for combat.

But of course, as a Delta operator,

he has his combat gear.

Kyle Morgan is wearing a bodycam,

his recording gives us an inside POV of what he faces.

He doesn't know how many enemy are there.

He doesn't know exactly where they are.

Kyle Morgan relies on the grueling weapons training

that has equipped him with focus and stamina.

He's in there for six hours, saving people.

He makes his way through the hotel.

He's clearing rooms.

This is where that training around uncertainty is key.

You have to look and focus on so many things

at a time- behind every obstacle,

every door, every window, every rooftop.

Grenades are tossed in his way.

He actually ends up in a stairwell face-to-face with

the enemy, gets shot at, shoots back.

Militants take 170 hostages,

and they end up killing 20 of them.

Without Kyle being there,

it likely would have been a disaster for

many more people.

He's really a hero.

Selected, trained, and now armed,

a warrior's true mettle will be tested next...

on the battlefield.

After 7 months, the Delta Force operator

is honed and ready for combat.

Built to execute missions-

dangerous, deadly, and extreme.

When it comes to actual man-to-man combat,

the Delta Force operator is probably the highest trained,

most professional soldier in the world.

Delta Force operators are, in some ways,

today's Samurai.

It takes audacity, it takes courage,

and it takes a person who can reach rage through training,

and keep it controlled and still get the mission done.

We were afforded the opportunity to train on

mixed martial arts,

literally every day if you wanted.

The warrior has been trained to fight with any weapon.

And, if he is unarmed,

he must become the weapon.

Delta Force, they do not want to engage hand-to-hand.

But they know to be ready for combat

without any weapons at all.

Abu Sayyaf is the ISIS commander

who controls the oil and gas operations.

So, the US military goes after him,

and Delta is leading the charge.

And it's actually Kyle Morgan who's a part of that team.

They get involved in a firefight,

there's even hand-to-hand combat with some of the

ISIS fighters and the Delta operators.

They're able to get to Abu Sayyaf.

He resists, fires, they kill him.

Although trained to defeat the enemy

with devastating violence,

lethal force is often a last resort.

The tenets of close quarters battle is surprise,

speed, and violence of action.

I would love to find you in your bed asleep at night,

handcuff you, and take you away.

You know, I don't want to shoot people unless I have to.

So, if I can surprise you, that's number one.

It's not always possible to have the element of surprise.

Once the fight is out in the open,

they need to neutralize that other opponent very quickly.

So there's no playing around about let's block and punch.

This is a life and death situation.

The elite warrior reads his enemy.

You're assessing the entire body.

The way he walks, the way his stance is.

There's a million things going through your mind

in milliseconds.

Some weapons pose unique threats.

Bladed knives takes me back to...

the Medieval days of, "You're gonna slash me?"

You want to make sure that you're definitely

not being sliced.

We all have typically around six liters of blood in

our body, but it can move out of us pretty quickly.

Now, do I want to get tied up in a knife fight?

Absolutely not. It's never a good thing to do.

But, the mindset is to win at any cost.

The 21 foot rule is,

any expert with a bladed weapon,

can probably close a gap of 21 feet with someone

with a handgun by the time they can pull it out.

They're already on top of them stabbing him to death.

It's pretty brutal, and it's been proven many times.

Combat is chaotic, and requires the warrior

to assess a violent encounter in real time.

The goal is to capture the high value target.

If the person picks up a weapon and tries to fight,

then they're taking their life into their hands.

That's that.

In a one-on-one fight, silence may be the

Delta Force operator's greatest ally.

Enemy reinforcements could mean death.

A jab right in the throat,

the esophagus area and the windpipe.

If I nail you really hard there,

you're not gonna be talking for a quite a while.

Training with the unit prepares the warrior

for a key principle of combat.

Most hand-to-hand encounters end up on the ground.

It's hard to detain someone who doesn't want to be.

When it's life or death, you find that energy that

you've never had before and that strength.

The Delta Force operator has mastered

close quarters combat,

but his greatest accomplishments

will come with his unit, on the battlefield.

The warrior has been selected, trained, and armed.

Now, he awaits orders.

Delta is given exceedingly difficult target sets.

Quite frankly, they are 'Mission Impossible'.

But, no matter how difficult the mission is,

if the president tells them to go, they will.

♪ SFX: [Helicopter blades flapping] ♪

There's a situation where maybe Americans are

taken hostage, where a plane is hijacked.

There are terrorists in control.

In order to stop them, it's gonna take a

precise action by a small group of individuals,

going quietly where time is of the essence.

Speed is a key factor with every mission.

But when the target is the most wanted man in the world,

the strike must be carried out quickly

and with precision.

So, for Operation Red Dawn,

I'm in charge of a troop that's in Baghdad.

The Pentagon issues playing cards.

And so, you have a deck of 52,

and each card has a different high value target.

We'd hunting Saddam.

He's the top, he's the Ace of Spades.

The Saddam Hussein operation is the result of

months and months of intel work by Delta.

That was a high, high priority target,

the highest in the country at the time.

Deploying with high level intelligence,

Delta Force teams hunt for

Saddam Hussein's safe house.

They're getting reports that

Saddam Hussein is here.

He's at X, he's at Y.

We were bouncing all over the country.

We've been hunting Saddam the entire time.

We've been hunting his handlers.

We're hunting his family,

we're hunting anything attached to him.

You know, they'd pass some information to us,

and we would launch on a target.

A lot of those leads

eventually turned up being dead ends.

The 'Ace of Spades' can't be found,

but every Delta operation turns up more intelligence,

and the pursuit picks up speed.

Within the Delta operator, you don't just have someone

who's carrying a rifle and who's just going after a target.

You actually have someone who does intelligence analysis.

Delta is uniquely suited for going after somebody like

Saddam Hussein, because of specific man hunting

capabilities that they've developed.

The US Special Forces have been engaged in the

secretive campaign to capture or kill Saddam Hussein.

We're gonna go out and conduct

high frequency of operations.

We're gonna hit a lot of low-level targets and

generate intelligence that's gonna

lead us to bigger targets.

We'd been chasing Saddam for nearly a year.

We had a lead on a, on a guy.

We called him 'The Golden Ticket'.

He was supposedly the one individual that

knew where Saddam was.

That night I get an intel hit that there's

one of his handlers in town.

And here's the location we think.

My mind's going, "I've heard this before."

You know, it's, it's gonna be a no, but let's go.

Tom had noticed- as we had rolled up to target-

a couple individuals walking down the street.

And just kind of on a hunch, thought, "You know,

maybe we should go check that out."

We started taking fire,

pretty far away, from an open field.

I'm talking to the troop, I'm thinking, "Why?"

I think they just were trying to draw us away.

So, that's when I sent a team.

I said, "Walk down to that house.

It's like three houses down, you know, look for that-

look for the guy that went in there and

take that house down."

One team went to the door upstairs on the left.

My team went to the door upstairs on the right.

I was the team breacher.

I slung my weapon to the side,

and pulled out an explosive charge.

This guy comes to the door so quickly I pulled

my pistol out and stuck it up in his face, and I said,

"Open the door." He just looked at me and nodded.

They saw a mattress on the floor...

And they flipped it up, and there he was laying

underneath there with a toy AK 47, plastic.

It's him, it's the 'Golden Ticket'.

We brought him back to our interrogation cell at Baghdad.

And he is giving up the goods.

He knows exactly where Saddam is,

he knows who's around him, and he's gonna show us.

Delta Force teams home in on their target.

They infiltrate the home town of the fallen dictator.

They identified two targets.

A house in a village,

and a farmhouse outside of that village.

A year's worth of intelligence gathering

leads to this final mission.

That evening, we went to the house in town.

Went up to the exterior gate, placed a charge on

the exterior gate, blew the exterior gate open.

We blow the door open, we go inside...

We find Saddam's cook.

I'm on a radio going, "He knows where Saddam's at!"

Meanwhile, another team is raiding the farmhouse

outside the village. They're very persistent,

they don't just go to that one location.

They go to the adjoining locations.

At first, there's no sign of Saddam.

The troop that hit the farmhouse,

they were looking around.

You know, was there a hidden room someplace?

We knew he was hiding out there somewhere.

We just didn't know where.

Sergeant Major was kind of looking around,

and he sees this rug laying in the dirt,

which didn't make a lot of sense.

They lift up the cover...

♪ SFX: [Helicopter blades flapping] ♪

And they find Saddam Hussein there.

The call that came over the radio was:

"We have a possible for #1",

which to all of us meant, we got him.

That's the result of good intel work, persistence,

and being able also to deal with sources,

talking to people on the ground.

And it was a successful operation.

I see him handcuffed and looking, you know,

with a leaf in his beard. I said,

"He looks like dirty Uncle Fester,"

and that's when he spits at me.

Witnessing him walk out, for me,

was a pretty, pretty profound moment.

You just removed an evil dictator

from being the head of a country.

Fighting terror in the 21st century means

operating on a rapidly - evolving battlefield.

It poses a challenge

for even the greatest warriors.

The Delta Force operators are the tip of the spear-

built, trained, and counted on

to protect Americans and their allies

from an aggressive and merciless enemy.

Delta force has been involved in some of the more prominent

military operations that you've seen in headlines.

This is the unit that killed al-Baghdadi in Syria,

the leader of ISIS.

Delta Operators successfully get to him,

and he's killed when he blows himself up in a suicide vest.

To me, it's like being in the NFL at the Super Bowl

every day- crushing skulls and winning the game.

And it's painful.

And as you get older, you break down.

It's a young man's game.

It is.

This job takes a lot of wear and tear on

the body and the mind,

and, and on the families of these guys.

As an old warrior leaves the battlefield,

a new warrior takes his place.

Here, the storied history of the Delta Force

precedes him.

The new fighter, carefully selected and trained,

stands on the shoulders of the elite few

that came before him.

There is a mindset that comes with being a warrior.

The ones that are successful are the hungry ones,

the go getters, the ones with drive that don't need

somebody to tell them to do it, to do it.

It's that thing in your character that

makes you want to go above and beyond.

The ultimate warrior doesn't want to lose anything.

The ultimate warrior wants to battle through

anything possible, and to do that,

you have to be always improving,

always growing.

The need for Delta isn't going away as we think about

warfare further into the 21st century.

What worked a few years ago no longer works.

The enemy is adapting, learning,

changing, getting better.

They're using special operations tactics.

That's the type of warfare that is ahead of us.

So, there's gonna be a bigger need for

The Unit.

Their mission set has evolved greatly in the

weapons of mass destruction space,

counter proliferation operations.

There are also, you know, World War 3 type scenarios

that The Unit has to be prepared to respond to.

Delta is not waiting for

terrorists to do something.

Delta is now...

going to target terrorists where they actually

are operating, where their command is,

crushing their network, seeking them,

finding them, killing, capturing.

As the battlefield evolves, as the enemy evolves,

your training and the education you're giving to

new operators coming up through the course

is evolving with that.

I do think it's one of the things that sets us apart.

The future is kind of transpiring right now,

and it's starting to look more and more

like science fiction.

Delta Force operators continue to

deploy around the world.

They have capabilities that the world

has never seen before.

They train in some very dynamic scenarios

that have never been revealed.

They've never needed to be revealed, thankfully.

They're always deployed.

They're deployed now, they're deployed everywhere.

There's places that they're at right now

that nobody knows about.

Let's just say that these warriors are smart.

They're not resting on their laurels.

They're noticing how the enemy is adapting.

They're noticing how the threat is changing,

and are adapting accordingly.

His extraordinary effort to become the best,

his state of the art tactics and covert training...

and, his determination to carry out the

most difficult missions ever

earn the Delta Force operator

his rightful place among

History's Greatest Warriors.