Famous US Special Forces operations

Here are six of the most famous successful American special operations missions in recent memory.

3. Captain Richard Phillips

Official U.S. Navy photo/Reuters
The lifeboat that Maersk-Alabama captain Richard Phillips is held hostage in is seen in this U.S. Navy handout photograph taken by the Scan Eagle UAV on April 9, 2009 over the Indian Ocean.

In April 2009, the Maersk Alabama, an American cargo ship with an armed security team on board, was hijacked by Somali pirates.  The captain, Richard Phillips, was held for ransom along with his crew as hostages.  Three shots each from three Navy SEAL sharpshooters from the USS Bainbridge killed two pirates, ending the five-day standoff.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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