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The Las Vegas perp shot himself in the head — 50 Comments

1. “Authorities”?
   After Comey, Strzak, the FBI salting Mar-a-Lago, Jack Smith, who believes in authorities anymore? They tell us what they think we should believe.

2. “Acted alone” my aunt fanny.
   Pull my other one.

3. Let’s see how many false narratives can get cranked out in the first 96 hours and compare: between this incident and the “PhD student” lit on fire on the subway and the NOLA terrorist who “acted alone” and was in cahoots with four others.

4. Given the recent events in New Orleans and Las Vegas, rest assured that the top Biden administration officials will tell us all that the largest threat facing the American citizenry are white supremacists and anti-Muslim extremists.

5. Green Berets are not, although they could be, super hard-hitting commando teams. Not like SEAL and DELTA.. Their primary role is to organize native resistance behind enemy lines, as with the Jedburgh Teams and OSS in WW II.
   This connects, selects, infects, arrangements with the intel community.
   This guy, with his connections, could have had twenty pounds of Semtex, or C4. Knows how to make stuff from scratch (am/fo) or purchase dynamite. Instead, he had small gasoline cans–no word if they were full or empty–and show-off pyrotechnics.
   Then he killed himself. Can’t courtmartial a guy for stealing military explosives if he’s already dead, so hoping to get away with it wasn’t in the cards, thus no problem with the big stuff.
   Considering all the trucks he could have rented, he chose one which would reduce the immediate effect of the blast.
   Not sure what others wanted him to do, but this looks like sending a message. “Imagine what we could have done, might do.”
   Was the plan that he set a timer and then wander off into the anonymity of the intel underworld? Which might not be as mellow as advertised, but the witness protection program seems to work.
   Was he down with the movement, or was he threatened in some way?

6. Slightly OT…that is, if anyone is still wondering how absolutely delusional (and dishonest) the “Biden” administration is…

   “Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan offered to resign over chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal…”—
   https://www.foxnews.com/media/biden-national-security-adviser-jake-sullivan-offered-resign-over-chaotic-afghanistan-withdrawal-report
   Key grafs:

   National security adviser Jake Sullivan reportedly offered to resign from President Biden’s administration after the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, according to The Washington Post’s David Ignatius….

   …Wall Street Journal national security reporter Alex Ward, who wrote “The Internationalists,” a book about the president’s foreign policy team, noted that the advisers he spoke to for the book said no one offered to resign….

   …Sullivan evaluated his performance towards the end of the interview with Ignatius.
   “Are our alliances stronger? Yes. Are our enemies weaker? Yes. Did we keep America out of war? Yes. Did we improve our strategic position in the competition with China while stabilizing the relationship? Yes. Did we strengthen the engines of American economic and technological power? Yes,” he said.

7. WSJ head presently reads “Las Vegas Explosion Not Linked to New Orleans Attack”.
   That seems so very obvious to me.

8. “…apparently shot himself in the head.”

   Or was he killed and placed in that Tesla postmortem by the bombers?

9. If so, how did he get there, Erasmus, without the proposed other bombers being seen on security footage?

10. I question that timing of events. I suspect he detonated the explosion, started burning, and shot himself. I’d have to watch the video again to see if there was some sort of blast in the driver compartment before the explosion. There seemed to be some smoke below the vehicle before the rear explosion.

11. Barry Meislin @ 5:02

    “Jake Sullivan … according to The Washington Post’s David Ignatius….”

    Lost me right there. Ignatius is the designated receiver for IC lies. If he prints it then it what the IC wants folks to believe instead of the truth.

12. Erasmus:

    Unless they wore invisible cloaks, your theory wouldn’t work. I believe there is security footage.

13. We haven’t heard much yet about the Las Vegas suicide’s personal life. Sounds like he committed suicide, but was learned enough in explosives to chose materials and a vehicle which would limit the damage to anyone other than himself.

14. Could LV be a blackmail case? Do this or your family gets it. He screwed something up so bad, no other way out?
    Not that any of us will really know.
    Ugly way to start the year

15. Despite what you see in movies, cans of gasoline don’t really explode. In fact the way to make a gas can explode is to leave just a little gas in the can and create a spark in the air above the gas. It is possible the perp hoped to start a large fire that a responding fire department would try to douse with a lot of water, possibly igniting a lithium battery fire. That would make more sense than just igniting gas in the bed of the Cybertruck.

    And there are uses for your average fuse that you light with a match, but that’s not the way someone trained by the military in explosives would do it. They have igniters that do a very good job of starting a fuse burning.

    There is a place for commercial fireworks in terror attacks, but not as an igniter for gas or explosives. They were effectively used by Antifa rioters to keep law enforcement and fire officials away. Having fireworks in the bed of the Cybertruck doesn’t make a lot of sense.

    In sum, this doesn’t seem much like a terror attack designed by a trained Green Beret. It seems more like an effort to make a statement about Trump. If he had wanted to cause massive damage to the hotel and make a lot of casualties, he would have used ANFO, as Timothy McVeigh did in Ok City. ANFO requires readily available ingredients — Ammonium Nitrate fertilizer and Fuel Oil. It does require a high-order explosive to initiate the detonation of the ANFO, and that is not so readily available, but McVeigh found what he needed.

    Finally — the guy who drove the truck to the Trump building reportedly killed himself with a pistol shot. His body was burned recognition, but he conveniently left identification behind, and the ID was recovered with only minor burns.

    All of which makes me wonder:

    1. Was the perp the person whose ID was found in the truck?

    2. And did he really drive there and kill himself, or did someone else drive him there and kill him just before getting out and lighting a fuse that was to ignite the gasoline and lantern fuel?

    3. No matter who did it, what did he want to accomplish? If he wanted to make a political/social/religious statement, one would expect him to leave a statement behind. There is no mention of any statement.

    Given the lack or information following the mass shooting in Las Vegas several years ago, it is probably too much to hope we’ll get answers to these and other questions.

16. Gee:

    I wonder if anyone has ever thought of using an electric, clockwork, chemical, or electronic time delay fuse for a bomb?

    Only bombmakers. It ain’t rocket science.

    Don’t rule out Unicorns! :0

17. Telemachus,
    Right.
    Absolutely correct.
    A glaring red flag.

    But it’s not only Ignatius who’s a red flag. It’s Sullivan himself.

    Strange thing—at least so it seems to me—is that Sullivan recently started to make noises again after being pretty quiet for the past longish while, appropriately so, given his abysmal track record. (I assume you’ve read the expose on him in Tablet Magazine several good months, perhaps even a year, back.)

    Actually, I can’t really understand why he’s still around at all given his deservedly shredded reputation following the debacle of October 7, 2023.

    I can only assume he’s trying to salvage something of his “good” name for posterity—“last licks”?—even if there’s precious little, if anything, to salvage…

    OTOH, that’s the typical “Biden” MO, isn’t it: dangerous, toxic make-believe….

18. Family says that the guy was a huge Trump supporter, and point out that someone with his training would very likely be able to construct a much better explosive.*

    Add this death to all of the other suspicious deaths of supposed “perps” over the last few years.

    * See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/01/update-he-would-have-been-able-make-more/

19. Recent report says his wife hadn’t heard from him in days. Dispute over “infidelity”. No further details.

    If true, I suppose being on one side or the other of an infidelity situation might cause a particular personality type to suicide.
    So, suicide first, explosion second?

20. It’s odd in several ways. The body was burned totally, but ID information was not.

21. My first thought about the Vegas “attack” was that it was a Never Trumper trying to make a statement using a Musk cyber truck to damage a Trump property.

    But his family says he was pro Trump. So, what’s the motive? Very strange. Well, it’s early days.

    I’m expecting more violent “incidents” as we approach the inauguration. I hope I’m wrong.

22. People make a lot of assumptions about “Special Forces” that are entirely unjustified.

    For one, not everyone in SF is an actual Q-course graduate authorized to wear an SF tab, and even those guys have their specializations. From what has been publicized so far, Master Sergeant Livelsberger was an 18X enlistment contract, which means he went to Special Forces straight from being a civilian. Unlike the old days, where you had to first prove yourself as a regular old soldier and gain some rank before even attempting the Qualification Course, he went directly into the SF community with no other military experience. As people will tell you, since they started doing that, SF is a different beast from the days of yore when they were the absolute best soldiers you’d expect to run into. Most of the time, in the old days, when you found out you were sharing your NCO academy class with SF guys, you basically gave up on any hope of getting honor graduate of the course; the SF guys were taking it. Almost automatically. Whenever you did training with an SF team, whether you were supporting them or working for them as their surrogates, those bastards always knew your conventional job better than you did. If you ever had the opportunity to have them serve as instructors for something conventional, they were absolutely an asset.

    That changed massively after SF became its own branch with its own Military Occupational Specialties. I can’t speak to their own SF-specific skills, but after that whole shift to their own separate MOS system, the majority of the time, they could not be trusted to properly perform conventional Army tasks or training. It was a massive cultural shift for everyone involved, and I can’t evaluate the SF mission, but as far as conventional stuff…? No bueno; you could have, in the old days, used an SF NCO as a plug-and-play replacement for any job in your conventional unit. After the change…? No. Just… No. We used to cross-fertilize, a lot; I had a couple of super-studly type SF-qualified guys in my units that everyone looked up to, and they were usually there because they’d gotten broken, somehow. Usually due to a bad parachute jump… Even with their newly-acquired physical limitations, they were always stellar performers, men to look up to.

    Today? It’s a different beast, entirely. Once upon a time, I’d have relied on an SF NCO as a trainer for any task in his conventional specialty, but no more. Cross-training is pretty questionable, these days; you can’t automatically count on everyone being some expert explosives and demolitions expert. Which, even in the old days, was not a guaranteed skill for everyone on the team.

    Which is to say that it’s not out of the realm of possibility that MSG Livelsberger might not have been the most astute VBIED builder out there. From appearances, he didn’t even do that good a job of building the damn thing, and did not use the techniques and materials I’d expect to see from an actual SF-trained Engineer NCO.

    Hell, I’d be willing to lay long odds that any of the young men I trained as a line Combat Engineer could probably do better. Much better; we used to train improvised explosives fairly extensively, mainly because while you were very limited on what they’d give you in terms of actual military explosives, the improvised stuff came out of a different budget, and it was a lot easier to lay your hands on. We did a lot of ANFO stuff, during the Clinton years and even after 9/11. Any of the guys I taught the techniques to back then would have been easily able to put something like the OKC truck bomb together, using stuff you could get without too much trouble.

    So… Looking at this from the perspective of someone who knows how to do this sort of work? It does not look like MSG Livelsberger was actually trained in the field, and I strongly suspect that this was some kind of “gesture” attack, in that it was not serious. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that he was actually not the person behind this, and may even have been an unwitting victim they put into the driver’s seat and then somehow driven remotely or otherwise. There is a reason they picked a Tesla, here… I can’t imagine why a serious attack on a Trump building would not use a rented truck and a lot more “BANG”, the way they did in OKC.

    Something about this does not feel at all correct; MSG Livelsberger may have gone off the reservation and lost his damn mind, but… A Tesla truck and the half-ass explosives setup? WTF? No self-respecting SF-trained Engineer would pick that sort of attack, and if they did do an attack like that, I would expect it to be far more destructive and better constructed. As in, a lot more of that building would be damaged.

    From what I’ve read, MSG Livelsberger was assigned to something termed “G8”, which seems to be what they’re calling the comptroller, these days. The “G” indicates that it’d be a General Officer-level staff section, which confuses the snot out of me because he was apparently assigned to 10th SF Group in Germany at Bad Toelz… A G8 assignment would be something I’d expect up at SOCOM level, because that’s where you first start running into that sort of rank and staff support. Groups are not commanded by GO ranks; they’re full Colonel-level commands. Unless they’ve repurposed the staff designations again, I have no idea why the hell they’d have someone forward-deployed in Germany with a comptroller specialty or assignment, at all.

    This whole thing is surpassingly weird.

23. I wonder if the security cameras have actually captured the perp’s suicide after he pulled in to the valet station, just before the device was set off. And absent that, I’m wondering about the self-driving capabilities of the Cybertruck, too.

    It would seem on the surface of it, that this was intended as a statement about Trump and Elon Musk, primarily using this kind of rudimentary symbolism. But the pyrotechnics don’t seem to be up to the abilities of the perp’s background and training – it seems awfully amateurish to set up fireworks and camping fuel and imagine that they would do much damage, so maybe it was just to grab attention and cause confusion. Doesn’t really add up very well, does it, a Green Beret coupling a suicide with such a pathetic effort?

24. Kirk.
    Thanks. I made the point that SF is connected with intel more than most. Is that still true?

25. @Richard Aubrey,

    SF does a lot of things. They do nation-building missions, military support missions, counter-terrorism, and… On and on, really. Intel is one of those things.

    The fact that MSG Livelsberger was/is assigned to a G8 slot, if that report is accurate, implies some things that are quite interesting. If the assignment is legit, and that is what he’s doing, that’s sort of a “end of career” sort of assignment for an SF guy. It’s something that they might put someone into in order to let them get enough time in to retire, while not disciplining them for anything that would require punishment for misconduct. MSG Livelsberger might have been injured such that he couldn’t be assigned to a team, he might have had “issues” from PTSD such that he’d been assigned to what was effectively an admin slot, or any number of things. He might have been in that job to “round out his career”, as well.

    Or, the assignment was camouflage for working elsewhere… That’s an actual “thing”, but nowhere near as common as the trope would be in fiction.

    My guess is that if he was indeed assigned to a G8 slot, then he was likely on a track to retire; in a line unit, that same sort of slot would be something like “Ammo NCO”, the guy who’s responsible for managing a battalion-level unit’s ammunition supply. Typically, if you were off the promotion track? That’s where you might wind up, particularly if you were broken such that a leadership position was out of the question. Competency is another issue; very often, these admin roles are going to be filled by people who’re never getting promoted again… Ever.

    Which, I suppose, might be an argument for saying that MSG Livelsberger might have been a deeply disaffected sort whose career and marriage were self-destructing, and if he was the sort of person who couldn’t manage that…? Well, he might have been nuts enough to do something like this.

    Nowhere near enough information to say, as of yet. The whole thing is just… Weird. I’m not kidding when I say that the vast majority of the privates I trained as Combat Engineers should have been easily capable of putting together a much more impressive VBIED than this, which really makes me wonder what the hell an actual active duty SF senior NCO is doing involved in it all… I mean, it’s horrible to say, but I kind of expect a much higher level of “professional” when one of those guys goes off the reservation, ya know?

26. Kate: Neo:

    I understand. I didn’t check to see if there’s a complete reel of the vehicle from pulling up to the curb, until explosion. When I see that video as the sherriff’s press conference played it, I see vehicle operation that could easily performed by the Tesla Cybertruck in guided, autonomous mode. Remember Occam’s Razor!

27. Kirk

    If he got anywhere near an actual, shooting gun, he must have had something approximating 11B AIT. In which he would be shown how to use a Claymore. Blasting cap. Wire.. “clapper”. Or a good-sized battery. Back in the day, PRC25 batteries, if discarded in the field, were hacked up pretty good to prevent their use in booby traps. But all you need to start the party is a blasting cap.

    You don’t make gasoline explode except confining it as vapors. But if you blow up a tank holding it, you get a sheet of flaming gas in all directions. He didn’t do that, either. Cherry bomb taped to a Pepsi 2-liter. Nope. Nada.

    Strikes me the average high school chem student could have made worse things happen.

    So, given the surmising so far, it would look as if he deliberately avoided using the simplest techniques available to cause damage and went with maximum showing-off.

    And suicide. If he didn’t want to hurt anybody, why bother? You can suicide without making a fuss.

    One report is that he shot himself before the truck detonated. So, pull trigger with one hand, hit “START” in whatever form he had for the show. with the other.
    One or two second delay. Could happen, I suppose. But you’d want to START first, just to make sure….

    Somebody made him do this?

    Thanks again.

    11B 71542

28. @Richard Aubrey,

    My experience during my military career leads me to want to say two things that I think are true simultaneously… One, that this supposed “suicide terrorist attack” does not conform with what I’d expect from someone who became a professional SF NCO. It “feels off”, to me and my somewhat attuned sensibilities. Any of the SF NCO friends and acquaintances I had might have done a bunch of strange things when their marriages and careers went tits up, but I can’t think of any that would do anything at all like this. Most of them would choose one of two paths: Either internalize the whole thing and quietly gone off somewhere isolated and committed suicide in some entirely non-attributable manner… Think running off the road into a tree on a motorcycle, or going free climbing without a rope. They would do it in such a way that you’d be left entirely unable to prove they’d committed suicide…

    Second option would be something spectacular yet personal, like a family annihilation murder, taking out their perceived enemies. That’s what those guys down at Bragg did, under the (possible) influence of Lariam. They’d have been entirely non-political about it all, going after who they thought was at fault.

    The other thing I believe from experience is that there are some military suicides that go entirely off the rails and are entirely inexplicable and impossible to explain. I once ran an inspection on a subordinate unit, which went very well indeed for the guy I was inspecting. We went into a long weekend, and the following workday, we got news that he’d flown back to his previous duty station in Hawaii (without any form of permission or leave) and then rented a car, driven out to the housing area at his previous assignment and parked outside his old boss’s housing. Old boss wasn’t there, he was on vacation with wife and kids; our guy shot himself in the head, his old boss came home with wife and kids, noted the parked car, investigated… And, that’s when he found the guy, who’d been dead for two days at that point.

    CID and the medical authorities did all sorts of investigation, psychological profiling and what-not. After weeks and weeks of work, they all threw up their hands and said “We don’t know what the hell was going on, here…”

    The theories they came up with… Dear God. There are some highly professional and excellent CID investigators out there, but there are also some that make Inspector Closeau look like Sherlock Holmes.

29. Would appear that Europe has been shooting itself in the head on a continual basis…

    “Europe’s Fireworks Frenzy Turns New Year’s Eve Into Deadly Mayhem”—
    https://blazingcatfur.ca/2025/01/02/europes-fireworks-frenzy-turns-new-years-eve-into-deadly-mayhem/

    + Bonus:
    https://europeanconservative.com/

30. “And suicide. If he didn’t want to hurt anybody, why bother? You can suicide without making a fuss.”

    The problem is that it could have easily gone bad. He missed the girl at the valet stand by 20 minutes. Ditto, the baggage handlers (who take luggage in from the curb to the bellmen, who take it up to the rooms). They hang out between the valet stand and the front doors. Or the guy who cleans up outside, polishes the brass, etc. plus, very often there are guests waiting in line at the valet stand, then, when their cars are ordered, move across the 3 lanes to the other side, to wait for their cars – right where the truck vented and blew up. A half an hour later, and it could have killed a dozen people.

31. The more information that comes out on this event, the more I categorize it as a “WTF? Really?” military suicide.

    Dude’s on his second marriage. That blows up because she didn’t follow him on an overseas tour to Germany (not an unusual thing, either), and he’s contacting ex-girlfriends out of the blue. He’s renting a vehicle that he’d be nuts to buy because it’s so impractical and out of his economic price range–There’s no way in hell a guy with two divorces under his belt, even being a Master Sergeant, is going to afford a vehicle like that on military base pay.

    I don’t think this had anything at all to do with terrorism or rational thought. My guess is they’re going to do a psychological autopsy on him, and it’s going to boil down to “Yeah, we’ve got no idea…”, which is one of the two modes you see from these guys. I have no idea what was going through his head at the time, but from the outside looking in? This was a very tightly-wired guy whose mental faculties spun the f*ck out of contact with our shared reality.

    It’s possible that it wasn’t meant as an attack on Trump or Musk at all, but more of a cry-from-the-heart homage to one or both of them from someone who was in a lot of pain and saw no way out of the situation they’d gotten themselves into.

    I think it’s easily apparent from the fact that I’m pretty sure he had the tools to do a lot more damage, but made this way more of a “gesture” kind of thing than anything else.

    As an aside… Supposedly, he bought the guns on the 30th of December… WTF? Where? How? Doesn’t newly Communist Colorado require a fairly significant waiting period? If he didn’t buy them in Colorado, where he had military orders to, then where the hell did he get them? Something tells me that this detail might be important.

    Also, he managed to either “accidentally” miss killing anyone else, or he deliberately timed the attack to miss the Trump employees who’d have been near enough to get hurt in his “attack”. This speaks more to a man in pain committing a really bizarre suicide than a “terrorist attack”.

32. MSgt (E8) – not likely to ever see E9 if Army is like it was 58-60 years ago.

    I had two brothers stationed in Germany – both hated it, with one volunteering for Vietnam to get outta there.

    Had been to Ukraine at some point, and now in Germany ‘managing ’ drone operations – remote and autonomous systems which would seem useful in the SF, if they are the same as 58-60 years ago. Wish I knew more on when and why he was in Ukraine, and how good were his connections there.

    Germany used to be a three year assignment – MSgt’s 2nd wife apparently didn’t want to go there. Married in 2021 (?) with a 1-2 (?) year old kid afterwards. She looked pretty hot to me, but just left him days before over his cheating on her.

    Divorced from 1rst wife in 2018 (?). Tough run w/ women over past 3-7 years. Prior to killing himself he had reached out to past ‘girlfriends’ – suggesting he may have been deeply hurt by 2nd wife confronting him with his cheating—then leaving him.

    Guys kill themselves over women.

    Why the Tesla in front of Trump building? What was point of childish bomb?

    Ukraine & Trump?

33. kirk, karmi

    Makes sense. Being crazy doesn’t mean being stupid. You can be clever in doing crazy stuff.

    Long tours can be okay. Back in the day, I saw two 2LT trying to figure out where they’d met before. Played against each other in the playoffs–various DoD high schools in Germany. Imagine two and a half dozen burly American football players getting on the train to, say, Graf, along with half a dozen cheerleaders. Got a couple of young folks in our church who thought Seoul was kind of fun when they were growing up.
    Guess it depends on the assignment of the soldier in question.

    This guy had a lot of girlfriends, if I read this right. Or at least two or three. While married. Fair amount of women looking for a guy, it seems. Singles not finding singles and going for the married guy.

34. Kirk:

    Your comment about buying the pistols in CO on 12/30 also caught my eye, as he would not have had time for the waiting time to run. Then I got to thinking that perhaps the 12/30 date was the END of the waiting period, so he took possession on that date. That would make more sense. Then I wondered why buying two pistols on the same day, and likely with a military discount, wouldn’t trigger a straw purchase alert. In this case it does not appear to have been a straw purchase, but it still sounds unusual for a purchase to go through on the same day.

    Everything about this situation is strange.

35. @ F > “Everything about this situation is strange.”

    About as strange as: the Trump assassination attempts, the 2017 Las Vegas shooter resolution never happening, the hidden manifestoes of mass killers, the J6 Fed-complicity obfuscations, and many more.

    Everything about 2024 was strange, and it isn’t getting better.
    I wish I had bought futures for tin foil.

36. Reports are the guy’s first wife is in Mexico. Cartel bait. Happens to be a plot item on a recent episode of Blue Bloods.
    But the cartel’s business is…not being bombed, I suppose.

37. Kirk,
    It’s pretty neat, but very weird, checking boxes very very neat.

38. If somebody else drove him there, that person would probably show up on surveillance video. If the cybertruck were guided there remotely that’s something new. I suppose Musk would be able to access data showing that to be the case? I’m thinking he probably made the device himself and drove himself there. In the past, incidents like this have sparked speculation about government mind control programs. I think that’s unlikely, but as conspiracy theories go, it’s not the wackiest one around.

39. 2024 is the new 1968.

40. The more I hear and read about this case, the more I think this was a “gestural suicide” that doesn’t fit anyone’s preconceived notions of what a military-member suicide would look like.

    I’ll lay you long odds that we’re going to find out that his military career was just about culminated, and he wasn’t going anywhere from where he was; E9 was probably unlikely, and I suspect he had a lot more of himself invested in the Army and Special Forces than is really healthy. From the reports, like a lot of “successful” SF guys, he had problems forming a family of his own outside the unit; I’d wager that he probably spent more time with his team than his family, and that was likely a reason he wound up a two-time divorcee.

    One of the really difficult things for outsiders to understand about the military is that there are a lot of guys who’re superstars in their jobs, but absolute messes in their personal lives. I worked around a guy when he was a platoon sergeant that I only knew from the time I was around him at the unit and in the field. He was a consummate leader, someone who could get his guys to do stuff without ever even issuing a direct order. He had some weird-ass Zen thing going on, and about the best way I can describe his leadership style was “leadership by misdirection”: He’d gently push in here, and the spectacular results would pop out, waaaaay over there. His guys would probably have committed murder for him, and it was a huge problem for the platoon he led when he left and another friend of mine took over. As in, there was a whole story revolving around the father-figure leaving for another company in the unit, and the new platoon sergeant going through hell trying to make the platoon his. Now, the guy I’m talking about? His company was a marvel; he turned it into the best one in the battalion in very short order, wrapped the unit around his finger.

    Now, what I didn’t know until years after this? Dear God… His personal life was a huge, huge mess. Especially his kids. I had come back to the assignment from two others, and had to find a job due to a need for a compassionate reassignment slot in my MOS, soooo… Looked him up, found a job with him on staff where he was then assigned, and got to know him a lot better, including after hours stuff. I had more rank by then, so that was another thing.

    His personal life, family? LOL… Let me just lay out the fact that his daughter decided to invite half the gangs from Hilltop over for a “house party” while he and his wife were on vacation. House got wrecked, cops got called, and it was epic, in terms of “Holy f*ck, that really happened…? To *him*?”

    One of the first things I did as a personal favor once I got the assignment to work for him was to go out and help him clear his son’s apartment, ‘cos his son was in jail, and on his way to prison for a fair chunk of state felony time due to drug dealing and some other stuff…

    So, yeah… The guy I knew at work as probably one of the best troop leaders I ever witnessed in operation had “family issues” from hell. If someone were to tell you that there was that much dysfunction in his personal life, from observing him on duty? They’d likely call you a delusional liar.

    However, once you start paying attention, that’s a fairly common syndrome throughout the military at all levels. The guys who have it together at work and at home both are actually the exceptions, and even they’re hard to really judge without a lot of time observing them in both situations.

    It’d be my guess that MSG Livelsberger had a whole lot of his psyche invested in his military career and unit, didn’t develop any outside support networks, and when he was faced with the effective end of his career in the military, didn’t want to lose the whole “Cool Factor” thing he had going in SF. It’s a hard thing, for a lot of guys. You have a sense of purpose, a sense that you’re needed, and then you wake up one morning and realize that the Big Green Machine doesn’t actually need you, specifically, and that you’re just a cog in the whole thing. It’s a sobering realization, and one that can break people who’re living the high-speed, low-drag sort of lifestyle. I watched that exact same syndrome work out with a guy I knew from 2/75 Ranger Battalion, after the medical board got done with him. He had basically about 3-4 years to retirement, but the idea of doing it outside the Ranger Regiment? Nope, nope, and nope again; couldn’t face losing his identity as a badass Ranger NCO.

    I still think the car “accident” that killed him on the way home one night was actually more of a suicide, but that’s just my opinion. From what I understand, his wife wasn’t even surprised when they notified her. She’d been expecting it, and had told everyone in the chain of command that the med board was effectively killing him. Chain of command really had no damn choice, from what I understand; the doctors at the hospital were the ones driving it all, based on his condition after yet another parachute “issue”.

41. It would take a serious attachment of one’s personal identification with a particular role and unit type to grudge two or three years of clock-punching to get to the pension. After which you can do anything, since the pension is backing up what might not work out as planned.
    Or double-dip, getting a job as post engineer, driving around changing light bulbs. I once was tasked with tailing a particular truck for a morning to see what they actually did. Not much.

    Might refer Forester’s “Rifleman Dodd” for a version.

42. Kirk: new information on Livelsberger:

    https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/03/pro-isis-group-called-for-attacks-against-crusaders-on-new-years-eve-no-link-found-between-new-orleans-and-las-vegas-attacks-livelsberger-had-manifesto/

43. Being Gung ho can have its drawbacks. MSgt Livelsberger had all kinds of negatives working against him:

    • Serious family issues—divorce in 2018 & 2nd wife splits recently after they just had a baby. Reached out to ex-girlfriends.

    • one ex-girlfriend claims he told her ‘that he’d suffered a traumatic brain injury while deployed overseas.‘

    • his recent notes, emails, messages, and “Alleged Manifesto” point to all kinds of issues. 24/7 instant news blaring away about Drones over NJ, over military bases, etc. causes issues for many people. World is speeding up every day.

    • PTSD – I had missed that possibility until last night.

    Several commenters have pointed out other issues. Kirk mentions losing the “Cool Factor” – which is probably akin to Police Officers suicides.

    Served his country well—tough to see him go out like that…

44. He sent a manifesto of sorts before the suicide and was apparently trying to get it out on several youtube subscription sites. It had to do with a 2019 civilian massacre targeting drug manufacturing labs that he had personally been involved with in Afghanistan and for which he had deep remorse. There was also a supposed exposé explaining the flurry of drones off the East Coast as “anti-gravity” technology of the Chinese. Nut case? I really don’t think so. Rather he appears to be a man wracked with guilt and convinced that we are close to war with China.

45. TBI, PTSD… All indicators.

    It’s my heartfelt contention that a lot of these things could be identified beforehand, and if not treated, then at least used to identify high-risk people and get them some damn help.

    Here’s a news flash for the general public: Your kids? They mostly ain’t “alright”. Every single one of the guys that the career professional types looked at and said “Yeah, *he’s* gonna have issues…” went to war, and… Surprise: Came back with issues.

    Of course, so did a bunch of other folks who we didn’t identify going in, but here’s the rub: Those guys recovered better than the first category. The ones who had irrecoverable “issues” shared a lot of indicators: Came from broken homes; no form of religious belief; weak families; substance abuse issues; high-risk adrenaline-seeking hobbies. Nothing in the way of support groups outside the military; the service was almost always the sole stable social structure they participated in.

    All the guys who had trauma-related issues and recovered? Strong, stable family structures to fall back on, religious institutional support, strong belief systems. Significant investment in the military, yet the military was not the only source of stability. They had lives outside the service.

    I remain convinced that there’s a lot that’s *knowable* about the men and women who fall victim to this crap, and that if we bothered to look, you can find those knowable things in their lives well before you even start recruiting them. And, you should not recruit them into jobs where you absolutely KNOW they’re going to have these stresses dumped on them.

    The Army (or any other service) should not be in the business of taking functioning human beings out of civilian life, breaking them, and then dumping them back out into the civilian world with the minimal resources we give them.

    I worked around a guy who was an absolute massive success story for the Army. At least, when you looked at him through rose-colored lenses, and ignored a bunch of other stuff; he was from a profoundly broken home, had suffered incredible abuse as a toddler from his mother and her succession of halfwit drug-using lovers. Got taken out of that, with siblings, at about the age of 8; went from there to a couple years of relative normalcy with grandparents who then died when he was about 10, went into foster care where he had the snot abused out of him, then onto the streets where he became a street kid/drug abuser/dealer. I mean, seriously… You name it, he had it happen to him.

    Somewhere in there, during his late teens, he pulled himself out of it all by his bootstraps. Got clean, got his act together, managed to find his way to the Army, where he took to the culture with a born-again fervency that was actually kinda scary. He was a “soldier’s soldier”, a stellar performer. Wound up as a successful senior NCO, moving up the ranks.

    Small problem: In Iraq, he had some severe IED-related trauma, lost a bunch of his “kids”, the junior soldiers he was responsible for. He felt like it was his fault, and within less than 18 months of his return to the US, he was on his way out of the Army with a bad conduct discharge due to alcohol and prescription drug abuse, as well as personal and professional misconduct charges. Iraq quite literally broke him, and it’s my personal belief that he never should have been recruited for a job that was highly likely to do that to him in the first damn place. Looking back on it, from what I saw of him, a lot of the “fragility indicators”, if you will, were present. I think the Army broke him, and did so with an oblivious glee that I really cannot countenance these days. The military has a responsibility to the human material it takes up, and it is not fulfilling that responsibility in the way that it should. I think they can do better, and the way to start doing that is by actually taking a long, hard look at people as they were before enlistment, during their service, and then afterwards. By doing the longitudinal tracking and research, they should be able to find some of these risk factors, and then screen for them.

    Case in point: I retired from the Army, and while I was going through the process, there were also a bunch of guys from 1st SF Group and the Ranger Battalion going out. Interesting thing to be noted, there: Every one of the guys who were over six feet tall and around 180 pounds? Medical records that looked about like they were the size of the Los Angeles phone book. All the smaller guys? The little wiry bastards? Hardly anything in terms of their medical records, and most of them got flagged only for things like hearing loss. All of us big guys? Broken bones, permanent musculo-skeletal injuries with lifetime implications, and on and on. Talked to the VFW rep that was helping with the retirement medical assessments for the VA, and he said that the “Short King” guys all averaged maybe 10% disabilities, if anything. The big guys? 60% or higher.

    You might learn a lot from doing longitudinal studies, and then working the results for meaning. To me, what I observed suggests that maybe, just maybe, the Airborne community ought to be assessed for an ability to bounce, rather than splatter, before they get sent off to Airborne school.

    The mental/psychic stuff ought to be tracked and evaluated the same way. Maybe I’m just guilty of projection or seeing things due to “Anecdote”, but I’m morally certain we could be doing a much better job than this.

46. Recall in jump school, the LZ jump masters yelling into their megaphones how to steer the chute–1970 model–so that the smallest guy in the drop didn’t drift off into the woods.
    One guy, who didn’t quite make it to defensive line for the Colts–out of Alabama–passed me going down, and i was 205.

    Maybe fall more slowly and allow for steering, and the little guys might pop a panel or something if they were in a hurry.

47. One of the reasons I never went either Airborne or SF boils down to two connected facts I observed: One, I wanted a full career and a retirement absent physical debility, and two, every single Airborne or SF guy my size that I knew out in the line units was there because “Broken”.

    Great guys, but… They’d failed the Airborne Bounce Test. All of them. The odds had inevitably caught up with them.

    It’d be my strong suggestion that just maybe, the Powers That Are™ in the Army ought to do some studies starting with “What sort of condition are these men in before Airborne”, and ending with “Just how much are we spending on them at the VA?”

    My money would be on “Yeah, maybe we ought to invest in some better parachute systems, ones that don’t result in so much injury to the parachutist…”

    Or, alternatively “Let’s recruit smaller people for Airborne…”

48. Talked to the VFW rep that was helping with the retirement medical assessments for the VA, and he said that the “Short King” guys all averaged maybe 10% disabilities, if anything. The big guys? 60% or higher.

    Kirk:

    Great comments! I hope to hear more from you.

    So you are saying that the Big Guys in Special Forces suffered more debilitation because of physics?

49. @Huxley,

    Physics, or something else. My guess? Physics.

    See, here’s the thing: Some things are eminently knowable, if you’re only smart enough to actually observe things. I was a Combat Engineer for my entire career; I’m a fairly stocky, Neanderthal-ish sort. My joints are two to three times the typical size for my height, and I can outlift and outwork most of my peers. Can’t move very fast, but I can do more actual work than people with smaller frames than I have. I have broken 2X4 dimensional lumber with my face, and managed to shake it off.

    The physique gifted me by genetic lottery is good for some things, not so much for others. I don’t bounce well; that’s a thing. Those larger bones and joints are more prone to arthritis, and there are a few other disadvantages there, as well.

    Now, here’s the thing: You can observe, fairly easily, should you bother to actually look at things, whether or not certain specific types function well in specific jobs. You do not want itty-bitty people as Combat Engineers; there are only a couple of very limited places they can do much of value, and they’re overall a disadvantage. One of the more memorable injuries I got as a private stemmed from being partnered with a total POS weak link on a Bailey Bridge construction site, and the stupid bastard dropped his end of the load, which resulted in me having about half the muscles along one side of my spine ripped out. Still feel that one in the morning… You want to reduce the number of debilitating injuries resulting in VA claims? Spend some damn time observing what actually causes those, and stop recruiting people into those jobs who’re physically unfit for them. And, yes… That would reduce in female slots being reduced to the point where only about 4-5% of the general female population would qualify for those jobs. I could reel off dozens of occasions where male soldiers were horrendously injured because they had to do things by themselves that females couldn’t do, like lift wheel/tire assemblies into the trucks or move something that required a multi-man lift when there weren’t multiple men available. Machinery has drastically widened a lot of career fields to the physically incapable, but the bottom line is that you can’t rely on the equipment being there when you need it under fire. Small people can’t hack a lot of jobs; medium-size wiry bastards like Audie Murphy? Probably ideal for Airborne and SF assignments. The big guys, as I said, tend to break when they hit. Not under load, necessarily; just when they impact things.

    It’s a bit of a gamble, really: Those big guys make for really good things to have around when people are shooting at you, but they’re like the old Percheron-like horses we used to put under knights of yore: The odd Mongolian pony or Arab courser is going to still be going strong when that big-ass horse wears out or isn’t taken care of properly.

    Interesting detail from the Falklands War, which is on everyone’s scope because of the anniversary: Nearly all of the physical fitness instructors wound up being MEDEVAC cases for exhaustion and exposure; they didn’t have the reserves they needed, and once they’d burned through their fat reserves, which the other guys around them still had, they were done. There’s a monograph or white paper out there that I read discussing this issue, and the British Army doctors writing it wound up questioning the basis for a lot of the decisions made before and after the Falklands due to everyone failing to honestly evaluate the data: Where the conventional wisdom became “We need fitter soldiers…”, the actual reality was “We need them fit, but… Not *too* fit.”

    I forget the actual way they worded it, but the guy who was the main author on the paper basically said that the squaddies who’d been more likely to spend time in the pubs rather than at the gym were rather more likely to come through with less in the way of injury and better overall results.

    As an aside… Deprivation training is basically stupid. I had a young lieutenant in one of the units I was assigned to, and I watched this young man go from “Super-stud rugby-playing monster” of a soldier to “Emaciated concentration camp victim” over the course of his attempt at passing Ranger School. The young man would simply *not* quit; he recycled at Ranger School so many times he set a record for it, and the school cadre finally asked our battalion commander to fly out on a welfare visit and try to convince him to come back to the unit and try to recover. The LT never withdrew, spent a few more months there, finally graduated. When we got him back? Duuuuuude… He was a walking advertisement against going to Ranger School. Took him a year, just to get back to the point where he could do more than the minimums on the APFT, and when I ran into him years down the road, he still looked emaciated and scrawny, compared to what he’d been before he went off to Ranger School.

    I’ve no doubt he’s gotten a hefty VA disability rating, if he even got to retirement.

    That said, I think they ought to be doing longitudinal studies based on thorough assessments performed before enlistments, at completion of significant training events, and then periodically during careers. Run those against genetic scans, and anything else that makes sense. Evaluate if there are actual problems with certain traits, then modify your recruitment schemes based on those. There are a lot of people who not only should not be recruited, but who’re positively morally wrong to even try to recruit, because of what you’re going to do to them.

    I think a lot of crap would come out of doing those studies which would surprise a lot of people; things like “Yeah, flat feet aren’t as bad as we thought…”, as well.

    Trouble is, nobody looks at this crap. We really ought to be, if only to reduce the VA bills…

    I mean, to a degree? It’d be nice to know that we ought to limit big muscular guys who weigh over 180lbs and who’re over six feet to, say, five years Airborne status, because statistically, that’s when they break the most. Also, age has a role; big guys over 30 who burn in on jumps? Broken, almost universally. Big guys who burn in on jumps when they’re 18? Not so much of a problem; if you find out what the parameters are on “Irretrievably broken”, and then screen around them? Vast increase in quality of life, unit efficiencies, and reduced bills on the end-of-career VA bill.

    See, one of the things nobody ever does on the manpower part of the force equation? Life-cycle costs, all the way out through retirement: How much does it cost the nation, when you recruit itty-bitty easily broken women to do heavy physical tasks? Not just to their personal lives and fitness, but the budget at DA and the VA?

    I had the questionable privilege of being the platoon sergeant for the very first battalion support platoon in the entire combat engineer force to integrate females into it. Overall, they were great people, hard workers, and I had no problems with them.

    There’s a huge “However…” to that, though. As an example, the first three that I got in? Not a one of them managed to complete their initial enlistment physically intact. They all wound up with permanent debilitating injuries, mostly musculoskeletal in nature, ones that precluded continued military service. They didn’t have the durability of the males, and trying to keep up? They literally broke themselves doing it. The road marches were the worst issues, along with doing all the varied physical tasks like erecting tents, maintaining the vehicles and all the rest. You can’t get around the physics; things weigh what they weigh, and when you replace half your males with females, a lot of problems result: The males get injured because they’re going to get partnered with inadequate female soldiers doing physical tasks like lifting things into trucks that require reasonable equivalency in strength, and you wind up putting all your males on anything physical which results in a bunch of the females standing around watching while the males run themselves into the ground trying to do things that were stupid-easy before you took away half or more of the physical strength on the team.

    I started that experiment with an open mind and the idea that there’d be a few issues, but that we could work around them. I ended with the opinion that the women we were likely to get in as recruits absolutely did not belong in front-line combat units, period. Not based on anything at all sexual, but simply on the observed physical capacities. You do not have the Gina Carano types walking into recruiting stations; that sort of woman has a lot of other options, and she represents maybe 4-5% of the population, anyway. You cannot operate a military effectively on the theory that the typical performance of the 95th percentile is common to the rest of the range you’re going to have joining; you have to set your expectations on the “most likely to enlist”, and those aren’t the Gina Carano types, at all. The ones you are going to get do not have the conditioning or the early life experience in terms of muscle/bone density development that you have to have in them, and you ain’t changing that in a few short weeks of training.

    You probably could take the average female recruit and train her to do what the average male recruit can be easily brought to, but the problem is that you’d have to have started with them pre-puberty, and put them through a regimen similar to what you do with an Olympic-caliber gymnast, with all that implies. The usual get-a-ride-down-to-Starbucks-that-is-two-blocks-away sort of Suzy Cheerleader young lady does not have the bone density or muscle attachment strength that she really needs to survive in a military environment, and I know that from observation. You have no idea how many torn ligaments and tendons those young women managed, trying to keep up with male peers. They all tried very hard, but in the end? It was my opinion that they never should have been there in the first damn place. It’s an institutional betrayal, when the Army says “Yeah, you can do this…” and then Mother Nature weighs in with “…but you shouldn’t try…”

50. Kirk:

    True. Motivation goes a long way, but Nature, as our green friends say, bats last.

    I had a surfer buddy who made Green Beret. He was about six foot, 155#, looked great in aviators. He just missed the Vietnam War. He left the Army, looked for work as a pilot, found none, ended up running drugs. turned Christian, then KKK. He got into trouble with the Feds, served time.

    I was struck by your comments above about the super-soldiers you knew who were super together on the field but otherwise were a mess.

    And I think of my friend.

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