Mike Vining grew up in Greenville, Michigan, ordered a manual on making small explosives from an advert in Popular Science, and spent his teenage years experimenting in a way that would today produce a visit from the authorities. He watched the Tet Offensive on the news, enlisted in 1968 the week he finished school, and was sent to the Army's explosive ordnance disposal course.
He spent a year in Vietnam with the 99th Ordnance Detachment taking apart things designed to kill whoever touched them, left the Army, worked a five-hundred-ton press at a Ford parts plant in Michigan — and went back in 1973, because the factory was not the work.
In 1977 he answered a notice for a new unit that would not say what it was. He passed the first Delta Force selection course and became one of the founding members: the explosives and breaching specialist of an organisation that did not appear in any public document for years.
He was at Desert One in 1980, on the ground in Grenada in 1983, in Panama in 1989 for the operation that took Manuel Noriega, and in Iraq in 1991 hunting Scud launchers in the western desert. He retired in 1999 as a sergeant major after thirty-one years in uniform, twenty-two of them in Delta.
Almost everything he did remains classified, which is the point of him being in this catalogue: for every operator whose story is told in a book or a film there are dozens like Vining, who spent a career in rooms nobody photographed and left with a pension and a wall of certificates that do not say where they were earned.
Foto: Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia