The Day the Earth Shook | A Special Forces Team responds to the catastrophic 2015 Nepal Earthquake

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Two Special Forces Teams arrive in Nepal to conduct a training exercise with the host nation's military but immediately find themselves in the middle of leading crisis response efforts after a massive earthquake hits Nepal in 2015. Luckily, one of these teams was a special skills mountaineering team already acclimatized to extreme altitudes.

Dan Kurtenbach is a former Army Special Forces and Infantry officer with Special Operations and conventional assignments in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. Notably, he led and Infantry platoon in Iraq, commanded the Special Forces “A” team responsible for conducting rescue operations during the 2015 Nepal earthquake, and subsequently led a Special Operations element in the US Embassy in Bangladesh during the 2016 Dhaka terrorist attacks.

He is currently a Director at an AI/ML company and a doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins SAIS. He was previously a White House Fellow (2020 – 2021) and a program manager for new product introduction at Apple in Silicon Valley.

Dan earned a B.S. from West Point, MBA from MIT, and an MPA from Harvard.

Sergeant Major (Retired) Mitch Elwood is a retired Green Beret from 1st Special Forces Group with 25 years of active service. He stomped ground and broke bread in 35 countries during that time, and conducted combat operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the highly contested area of the southern Philippines. He served on Special Forces ODA 153/1223 as a Medic and ODA 1121 as a Team Sergeant – all Mountain Teams! Mitch is a disaster magnet having found himself in the Philippines during Typhoon Yolanda in 2013, in Nepal for the 7.8 magnitude earthquake in 2015, and responded to Indonesia for the tsunami and liquefaction event of Sulawest in 2018.

When he wasn’t on an ODA he worked as an Operations NCO for Special Operations Task Force 511, Joint Special Operations Task Force – Philippines, and a future plans Sergeant Major in 1st Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group in Okinawa, Japan.

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