They never tell you how far it is.
At the end of Delta Force selection, after weeks of solo land navigation in the West Virginia mountains, sleep debt, and a rucksack that only gets heavier, candidates are handed a map point and told to move.
It's called the Long Walk, and it's roughly 40 miles over steep, broken terrain with a loaded 70-pound rucksack, done alone, with no announced distance, no remaining mileage, and no published time standard.
At each checkpoint a cadre member confirms you arrived and gives you the next point. Nothing else. They don't tell you how far you have to go or how far you've already gone.
The course was built from the British SAS endurance march Charles Beckwith brought home, and the cruelty is the information gap: you keep walking until someone tells you to stop.
What the Long Walk selects for is the willingness to keep moving when the finish is invisible, the feet are wrecked, and quitting would be rational.
Delta Force needs the right kind of operators in The Unit, and the Long Walk reveals who they are.
Now that Baker wasn’t a factor and nothing can be blamed on him, some of you can open your fucking Baker hater eyes and see this whole entire team is an issue starting with coaching!!
Oct 2, 1780. Tappan, New York. Around noon, Maj. John André walks up a hill and sees the gallows for the first time.
He'd asked Washington to let him be shot like a soldier instead of hanged like a spy. Washington never answered. André found out what the answer was right there, at the top of the hill. He stopped for a moment. Then he said he was reconciled to his fate, but not to the manner of it.
Here's the part most people don't know. One of the American officers who guarded André in his last days was Maj. Benjamin Tallmadge, Washington's spymaster. Tallmadge had gone to Yale with Nathan Hale. They were close friends. Four years earlier the British had caught Hale behind their lines in civilian clothes and hanged him the next morning with no trial at all.
Now Tallmadge was watching the same thing happen to a British officer. And he couldn't stand it. He'd come to like André so much that he later wrote he'd never been so attached to a man in such a short time, and that he cried when it was over.
André had sent for his full British uniform so he could die in it. A large crowd of soldiers and locals gathered. He climbed onto the wagon under the gallows, took the noose from the hangman, put it around his own neck, and tied on his own blindfold. When he was asked if he had anything to say, he asked the men watching to bear witness that he met his fate like a brave man.
The wagon pulled away.
The man who'd sold out West Point, Benedict Arnold, was safe in New York with a brigadier general's commission and a cash payment from the British.
André was buried right there at the foot of the gallows. In 1821, 41 years later, the British dug him up and moved him to Westminster Abbey, where he lies today among kings and poets. Nathan Hale's body was never found.
Pick your poison for lower metals: higher US$, higher Oil (Iran/GCC Hormuz talks postponed indefinitely + Saudi shutting the East-West pipeline), inflation fears reviving Fed hike odds, AI-slowdown demand-destruction risk for Base/PGMs/Silver, and US tariff uncertainty on top.
The model-implied Gold price is $3,970 given mkt pricing 2 Fed hikes within 6mo. Weds hike is fully priced with focus on the SEP dots & Warsh's presser, which carry more weight than the hike itself to pressure test whether this is a new hiking cycle
Technically: 50 DMA sits ~$4,270. A new downtrend line has formed off the $4,700 post-FX/bond-intervention peak — echoes the Q1 ATH downtrend that compressed price into the ~$4K base, this time base support is ~$4,300, signaling persistent CTA selling. That downtrend break on the JPY intervention trigger was worth a $700 rerating.