Killing Insurgents and Counting Coup: American “Special Forces” and the Adoption of Iconography from Indigenous Americans

The Rangers and the Navy SEALS rode out in Blackhawk helicopters to kill Geronimo. Geronimo was, perversely, the American-assigned code name for Al-Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden. The assassination was a team effort, but the man who pulled the trigger kept the (metaphorical) scalp mounted on his Twitter handle for years: @mchooyah, “I shot a famous guy”. Though far from camera shy, Robert O’Neill’s profile picture eschewed a selfie, and instead showed a picture of his Navy Seal kit, including the Red Squadron logo that featured the profile of a Native American warrior. The warrior’s gaunt face was framed with the image of two stone tomahawks, but on top of the flag, there was a steel tomahawk with a wooden handle, made by the same artisan who crafted weapons for the ‘Last of the Mohicans’ movie. The paper examines how it became honorable for U.S. soldiers to emulate indigenous Americans and to adopt their iconography, and how the far-flung nature of the Global War on Terror led to an imitation of the frontier spirit. In the same instance, the use of special forces during the Global War on Terror was a display of the incredible reach of American power, and a severing of the controls that enabled American civilians to monitor, direct, or even understand their military. The paper draws on interviews, oral histories, unpublished and published government reports, secondary literature, social media, and the National Archives.