War Stories & Rumors
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Russian Tank near Tarin Kot
02 March 2011
There are always the stories. Some true, some not, most are hybrids. There was the story in Iraq of the farmer who found a crashed UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). The farmer thought it might try to fly away so he tied it to a tree. There was the rumor among some Iraqis that the UAVs were piloted by mice.
When I went through the excellent British tracking school on Borneo island, British instructors warned about Afghans who can track you across the rocky desert. The instructors said a sniper team had moved into place in Afghanistan, was tracked down and killed. Such tracking would be easy to do in most places here. If you move during daylight--making it easier to hide your tracks--you might be spotted from miles away. But if you move at night for any appreciable distance, you’ll almost certainly leave behind an easy to follow trail. You might was well drop a red marble every ten steps.
I heard a story that, given the source and circumstance, had the ring of truth. It went like this: Taliban had been attacking some cooperative villagers with IEDs along a road. In response, one of our Special Forces sniper teams secretly moved into place to shoot the Taliban. The sniper team, out there on its lonesome, spent the night waiting. Patience is ninety percent of their game and with sunrise they had gotten nothing. But the team had been compromised, and an Afghan was coming straight toward them and when he finally got close, he found them pointing weapons straight at him. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot! I am from the village!” The man was not the enemy, but was sent to bring a “grocery list” from the village to the Americans hidden on the hill. Nobody was hurt.
There is no telling how much of this story is true, though it’s good for a laugh, and is in character of the place, the Afghans, and, for sake of storytelling at least, it’s true enough.
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Comments
I always thought what a waste, and it would be cool to set up some kind of recycle plant in these countries to process that old metal. It would provide jobs, it would add more steel and needed metals to the market, and would clean up the countryside of that junk. Not to mention all the old bombs that are burned out or the fragmentation. The Chinese are really into the metals recycle thing, and their demand as well as other country's demand for these metals, will only increase over time.
This is so heartbreaking...........
No doubt influenced by the Bugs Bunny cartoons of my childhood, which, we can only hope, are now corrupting the minds of many Iraqi youth.
What a better world it would be if the Gremlin delivering the IED would run out of gas just before detonation.
With the increased uncertainty at the moment, with the Libya starting (we need an end), best wishes to all those involved in active duty. The Polimil Team
World record
Just saying
You mean the same Reagan who swore revenge on those who killed 241 Americans in the bombing of the Marine Barracks in Beirut then did ... nothing? That Reagan?
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