Welcome Guest [Log In] [Register]

Locked Topic
Where the hell it all began...; A brief history of the G.I. Joe team
Topic Started: May 21 2009, 09:05 PM (36 Views)
The J Writer
Member Avatar
Administrator
Where the hell it all began…

[From the personal papers of Brigadier General James Longstreet Flagg]

Most people in the intelligence and special ops communities will tell you that G.I. Joe was a program born out of the dust and death of September 11th, 2001. While they’re half-right, they’re also half-wrong. G.I. Joe goes back to 1993, right after the first attempt by Ramzi Yousef and his pals to blow up the World Trade Center. This incident, along with a bunch of related terrorist attacks you’ll never read about in any newspaper article thanks to diligent cover-ups and deliberate misinformation, led certain parties within Department of Defense to try assembling a no-holds-barred special operations team that could and would do the sorts of things that the U.S. military (due to a lack of subtlety and brains) and the CIA (due to a lack of muscle and balls) could not do.

Like many good ideas, it fizzled before it even started thanks to bureaucratic infighting and budgetary disputes. Goddamned paper-pushers.

9/11 and the ensuing incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan – with the innumerable cans of pissed-off worms they opened – revived the G.I. Joe program. The conventional methods of fighting terrorism just weren’t working. We were using sledgehammers to swat flies. G.I. Joe was to be a scalpel: a unit with military expertise and firepower but also the freedom of movement and tactics usually only available to a civilian intelligence operation. Off the radar, off the books, out of sight, and outside the usual rules of war. The personnel were cherry-picked by yours truly and a few other prime movers behind the project from the armed forces, civilian intelligence, and federal and local law enforcement. Once assembled, G.I. Joe went right to work. In one short year operating in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Indonesia, and Sudan, the G.I. Joe team apprehended or killed more important terrorist leaders and operatives than the regular U.S. military and the CIA had done in the six years previous. The ‘unwinnable war on terror’ was looking slightly more winnable to some of us.

Then, out of left field, came a guy with a blue hood and a snake fetish.

In six short months, this fruitcake from Springfield turned our world upside down and upended pretty much everything we thought we knew about terrorism. The real threat wasn’t coming from some bearded nut wearing a dirty turban and screaming about Jihad on grainy videotapes filmed at his hidey-hole in the Hindu Kush. Yes, of course it’s a problem when someone wants to destroy your way of life and turn the clock back to 1400 A.D. But that’s nothing compared to what we soon realized the man known as Cobra Commander was doing.

Here was a terrorist who wasn’t trying to destroy our way of life; he was trying to own it, to manage it. His organization wasn’t just selling advanced weapons technology to terrorist fronts around the globe. They were reinvesting the money in assets that were impossible to tie back to the gunrunning. Cobra Commander had not only the prerequisite violence-crazed fanatics on his payroll, but also bona fide financial and political geniuses who knew how to manipulate the gears of money and power that drive the world. For every guns-and-bombs operation Cobra was carrying out, they were carrying out a parallel cash-and-info operation that allowed them to profit handsomely from all the chaos they were causing as well as spin the outcome to garner as much or as little media attention as served Cobra’s needs at the moment. Imagine Hezbollah meets Hollywood meets Wall Street, and you’ll have a pretty good picture of Cobra Command.

Understandably, Cobra threw the geopolitical landscape into chaos in no time at all. The Middle East became even more unstable and violent thanks to an influx of weapons and money from Cobra. Far-right and far-left factions within the Russian Federation’s government were goaded into vicious infighting as Cobra attempted to destabilize the effective if tyrannical rule of the Federation's ex-KGB president. Anti-Japanese and anti-Western elements of the Chinese Communist Party enjoyed support from Cobra operatives masquerading as Maoist sympathizers from abroad, and on the other side of the Sea of Japan, Cobra cultivated hard-line nationalist, imperialist candidates within the Japanese National Diet. Don’t even get me started on what Cobra's working on in North Korea.

G.I. Joe was about the only group in the United States government trained and equipped to deal with this sort of threat, and overnight G.I. Joe’s primary mission was changed. Today, G.I. Joe exists to battle Cobra and prevent the organization from achieving its goals of global domination. Its activities known only to a few within the government and its existence known to the public only as a conspiracy theory, G.I. Joe serves the interests of the American people in the shadows, doing battle in the backwaters and dead-end streets of the world in the name of the United States and her allies.

Only time will tell if G.I. Joe will prove up to the task of defeating Cobra and restoring peace and security to the globe. I’ll admit it: there are days when even I have my doubts. But it’ll be a cold day in hell when I, or any member of the Joe team, lay down our arms and put up the white flag.

So until that day that’ll never come…Yo Joe, and give ‘em hell!
Offline Profile Goto Top
 
1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous)
ZetaBoards - Free Forum Hosting
Create a free forum in seconds.
Learn More · Register for Free
« Previous Topic · History & Information · Next Topic »
Locked Topic


Theme by Sith of Outline