More than a century before a $25 million reward was offered for information on Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts -- and almost 125 years to the day before the terrorist mastermind was killed in a raid by SEAL Team Six -- on May 3, 1886 the U.S. House of Representatives introduced a joint resolution “Authorizing the President to offer a reward of twenty-five thousand dollars for the killing or capture of Geronimo.”
U.S. forces had already been hunting the Apache war captain for nearly a year by the time of the resolution, and by May 1886 five thousand troops -- a quarter of the entire U.S. army -- were deployed in pursuit of Geronimo throughout the American Southwest and northern Mexico. It was the first of almost a dozen such campaigns in U.S. military history, the most recent and longest of which ended dramatically Sunday in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
This web log, drawn from my book "Wanted Dead or Alive: Manhunts from Geronimo to bin Laden" (forthcoming in July from Palgrave Macmillan) is a history of these strategic manhunts (defined as military campaigns in which U.S. forces are deployed abroad with the operational objective of killing one man). I'll provide links to and non-partisan commentary (okay, 99.9% non-partisan) ongoing operations in the War on Terror. I will also post photos from my travel to the dangerous and exotic places (alas, not Vegas) that my day job takes me to periodically.
For now, I'm happy to allow comments on posts, as I enjoy good debates about military history, and believe that people on all sides of the political spectrum can contribute to discussions on national security. All I ask is that if people engage with others through comments they remain civil.
To quote Patrick Swayze/"Dalton" in that immortal classic of the modern cinema, "Road House": "Be nice."
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