Rogers' Rangers

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Rogers' Rangers, Green Mountain Boys, similar-

Yeah

... you know, the, the, the forerunners of rangers, forerunners of game wardens, if you ask me.

since the first settlers got here.

As a matter of fact, uh, even Rogers' Rangers, which were during the, during the, uh, uh, War for Independence, um, one of our s- first special forces.

In, in Colonel Rogers' journal, he wrote about asking his men to fire a volley of shot over the heads of some bears that were throwing rocks at them.

Well, I don't know about you, uh, Rob, but I'm not familiar with what kind of bears throw rocks.

And, uh, and I was into history.

My, my dad and my mother were into history, and so we'd take family vacations to historic sites, so I'd go see Rogers Rangers stuff out in the, in the, uh, Adirondack Mountains and, and we'd go down to Washington, D.C. once a year.

So that's- I was into history and I was into sports and outdoor things.

How did you...

They'd been working on this contingency, and it was to go to Somalia and deal with the situation that was deteriorating over there.

They'd been working on this all summer.

Um, the way the culture worked back then was, you know, the Rangers still support, uh, tier one units on missions, but back then we really weren't given a lot of information.

We were basically told just to kind of fall in and do what you're told, and that's essentially what happened.

It's changing nature today, but that's another story.

Um, but John Stark, General Stark, who had been a hero of the French and Indian War before, uh, fighting with Roger- uh, Rogers' Rangers, which, who were the, uh, really the origin point, the fathers of, uh, special forces in the world, of American special forces.

Robert Rogers was an American from Massachusetts, not far from where I live, who had the sensible idea of, uh, realizing, as everyone in America did, that the Indians were unsurpassed, un- unbeatable in, in warfare, and certainly in warfare, how it sh- needed to be fought in the Americas.

And he consciously adopted, uh, Indian tactics and explicitly learned from them, how do they conduct raids? How do they do surveillance? How do they move through the forest with speed and no supplies? Um, and that became what are now the American Special Forces, Robert Rangers, Rogers' Rangers.

John Stark had been a ranger in the 1750s and early '60s, and now he's an American commander of the militia.

He commands the army, um, that opposes the, um, the detachment, but it was, it was thousands of men, uh, heading to Bennington to try to get some cattle, in particular, and supplies and, and wheat, uh, to provision, uh, Burgoyne's army.