Naming of Operation Red Wings
The initial convention by which Red Wings was named - that of naming operations after sports teams - began with the 3rd Battalion of the 3rd Marines (3/3) which named operations primarily after Texas sports teams. At first, 3/3 used Texas basketball teams for naming their operations (San Antonio Spurs and the Dallas Mavericks). The operational shell that would become Red Wings, which was developed by 3/3, was named Stars, after the Dallas Stars hockey team. The focus on Texas teams was due to 3/3's battalion commander being from Texas. When the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Marine Regiment (2/3) took the Stars model and developed the specifics of it, 2/3's operations officer, Major Thomas Wood, instructed an assistant operations officer, 1st Lieutenant Lance Seiffert, to compose a list of hockey team names. 2/3 would continue the use of hockey team names for large operations, just not from teams from Texas. The Seiffert list included ten teams, including the New York Rangers, the Philadelphia Flyers, and the Detroit Red Wings. The battalion settled on the name Red Wings, as it was the fourth one down on the list, and the first three, New York Rangers, Chicago Blackhawks, and New Jersey Devils each could be misconstrued as a reference to military units currently in Afghanistan at the time.
The name has been widely mis-stated as "Operation Redwing" and sometimes "Operation Red Wing." Operation Redwing was a 1956 series of nuclear weapons tests. This error began with the publication of the book Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10, which was written by Patrick Robinson based on unrecorded interviews with Marcus Luttrell.
2/3 would eventually abandon the convention of naming operations after American sports teams out of sensitivity to the local population, instead opting for using Dari names for animals, including Pil. (elephant) and Sorkh Khar (red donkey)
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