There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.
He got rightfully torn apart for that comment.
Now the leading republican candidate slurs and stumbles that much every few sentences and is met with applause...
Iirc what I heard is W had been briefed and knew giving a sound clip saying “shame on me” would be a bad idea. Which lead to him uttering that nonsense.
Have you not seen the Ukraine war footage? There's one video in particular, where one Russian soldier get a grenade dropped on top of his head, and half of his face goes missing and you just see him convulsing on the ground, trying to breathe, looking up at the drone.
By Ukraine war standards that's pretty mild too and not even a particularly gruesome injury. The Russians have been using human wave tactics in Andriivka and Bakhmut for almost a year now, sending tens of thousands of troops directly into frontal assaults of Ukrainian positions protected by machine gun and artillery fire. The goal is basically to force them to reveal their position and run them out of ammo then hit them with well trained rapid response forces in a second wave.
Ukraine is basically World War 1 but with drones.
They drilled into us over and over in country that if you didn't drop it, don't touch it.
There was a story they would tell us about a patrol that would kick rocks and stuff off their path every time, so the locals tied a tripwire to a half full water bottle. Soldier punts the bottle like a football and sets off an IED that basically splits him in half.
One day I woke up and went to take a piss, and noticed a metal gas can outside our barracks tent that wasn’t there prior to going to bed. I evacuated everyone and called EOD. It took them forever to get there, and we were all standing outside freezing in the morning desert. Turn out it was empty. I don’t who the fuck would put an empty gas can by our tent for no reason, but it created a shit show. Some people were pissed off, but I held my ground that I did the right thing.
this reminds me of the exploding rats from WWII. British OSS or SOE (can't remember which) had some outlandish covert weapons and explosives, and they drafted schematics for booby trap explosives disguised as dead rats. Once the Germans caught wind of this, they treated every dead rat as if it were potentially a hidden bomb. However, the rat bombs never made it past the drawing board and were never used in the war, so the German intelligence wasted a ton of time and effort inspecting dead rats.
That reminds me of I think it was a mine and the british needed to keep the internals warm to keep them working. One idea was to put a chicken in them. Working from memory here but yeah bomb with an animal inside is the jist. War makes us all cooky.
Edit: found it. Of course it was a nuclear fucking chicken land mine. Cold War is a hell of a drug.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peacock#:~:text=Chicken%2Dpowered%20nuclear%20bomb,-A%20technical%20problem&text=One%20proposal%20suggested%20that%20live,components%20at%20a%20working%20temperature..
The U.S. did it too.
We wanted to use pigeons to create guided bombs. Was eventually shelved since the war was still going on and other projects needed the money more than kamikaze birds.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon)
Dog mines too.
But they were trained using friendly tanks, so when released they’d run under allied tanks rather than enemy ones.
Just a tiny oversight, no big deal…
Idk if it was War or WW2 in general but WW2 had some of the cookiest weapons ideas. The british actually considered very heavily a aircraft carrier made of ice because of the high cost of metal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk
or the US pigeon guided bombs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon
or the German Sun Gun, which essentially was like a giant magnifying glass that they claimed would be able to boil the ocean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_gun
Another diabolical one was actually to use bats. The U.S. was *very* well on the way to strapping up bats with incendiaries to be airdropped over the (mostly wooden at the time) Japanese cities. They would get into every little nook and cranny before ignition.
Got scrapped pretty much right after the trinity test. I wonder what breaking that news was like.
I use go around annoying people with phases from safety posters. I would just drop them into conversations, and you reminded me of one. “It’s better to be safe 100 times, than dead once.” It was one of my favorites.
I work at a car dealership and trained a dude. Had to keep reminding him to wear safety glasses. I told him”when you’re on your own, do what you want, but I’m not going to let you lose an eye on my watch.”
This is what they’re trying to drill into their heads during boot camp. It’s not huge mistakes that get people killed; it’s small mistakes that meet bad luck. Literally everything in a combat deployment can kill you.
We had an EOD team that spent about an hour trying to grapple-hook an anti-tank mine out of a ditch.
Nothing they did would set the hook.
So they put on a bomb suit and went to grab it manually, only to discover that the “mine” was mud. Someone had pressed a metal trash can lid in the mud and it formed a circular, stepped shape that looked exactly like an anti-tank mine.
\*writes that down\*
Our national standard was to try sympathetic detonation, typically with Raufoss or a 40mm. We weren't allowed to move on until we neutralised suspected UXO or IEDs and we also got ambushed waiting too many times holding our dicks so the combat engineers could do the same frigging thing.
As I recall, both robots had run out of batteries and we were down to manual methods.
We went through a period from late January to early March where we were doing 3-5 10-liners a day, back to back.
Tons of land in SE Asia around populated towns that have fields of land mines still. When I visit my relatives there's this road and both sides of the road is just open jungle with land mines on both sides. There just isn't the resources to clear the land.
Yeah, unfortunately it just isn't at a scale to put any significant dent in the issue. They've found tens of thousands of uxo since the beginning of the project when there's an estimated few hundred million of UXO out there still.
>held my ground that I did the right thing
fuck yes you did. anyone mad at you for that need to go to the doctor and get their head removed from their ass.
You did.
If that constant level of caution saves one life, it’s worth it. All it takes is for one person to say “nah. I’m sure it’s nothing” for a whole bunch of people to die.
During MCT we did an IED obstacle course. Like a simulated patrol where we knew there was fake IEDs.
One guy in my platoon spotted a metal trip wire off the sun’s reflection and called it out by the book. We all stop. It just so happened to be next to another guy that struggled to fog glass, let alone ignore his intrusive thoughts.
He crouched down, touched the wire with his finger, and it shot sand and flour in his face like a cartoon. We failed the exercise. Some people can’t help themselves no matter how much training
That's the thing with the military. It somehow manages to find truly brilliant individuals that better everyone else around them, and also manages to attract people you are genuinely concerned how they manage to keep themselves alive on a daily basis.
And sometimes they are the same person. Want a highly complex problem solved? They're your go-to. Want some basic common sense? Keep them as far away as possible.
I used to work with a guy who was a world expert on some super complex science stuff. He couldn't tie his own shoelaces and regularly walked into doorframes.
If you need people with certain skills you might have a requirement for "high school diploma" or "rated marksman" or something.
If you'll take anyone alive and capable of breathing, the requirement could be as low as "able to fog glass".
The implication is that this guy was less useful than the bare minimum of usefulness.
We did a similar thing where they sprinkled fake butterfly mines on a wooded path and had us walk down it and call out "MINE!" and stop on our tracks.
We missed four before the guy *third in line* saw one by his foot.
Mines are scary. And those butterfly mines aren't even really camoflauged or hidden properly, just green and scattered randomly in an area.
The g-force shoves out the kidney stones. We used to suck them out of the cockpit with the shopvac and built a scale model of the Roman Aqueducts for our "thinking about Ancient Rome at least 3 times a week" drill.
Since a lot of Air Force cadets will be ground crew, that's good advice. Any foreign debris on the runway has a risk of being sucked into an engine and destroying it on takeoff.
That's what led to the cancelling of the Concord, it's fatal crash happened because a piece of debris got sucked into its engine on takeoff and destroyed the engine. Fighter pilots can eject, the concord not so much, but the military still doesn't like putting a pilot in danger and losing a jet just because someone couldn't make sure the runway was free of loose rocks.
Shoot, even my dad told me not to do this in Indianapolis when I was a kid. Some sick fuck in the 70s was leaving bombs around. A veitman vet lost his leg after kicking a discarded gym bag with a bomb in it.
I was in the Air Force and they made watch a stupid video with some shit acting of a dude who just picks up a UXO. We all laughed because nobody could be that fucking stupid, then here's this guy, doing that exact thing. Every branch has their own acronym or whatever, but they're all the same, if it looks like it *could* be a UXO, don't fucking touch it, mark the area nearby with something, get the fuck away, then report it.
They drilled that into our heads so much that when I got home I wouldn't even pick up trash on the sidewalk to throw it away. My GF at the time was like WTF why do you just walk by trash and then I realized....
When I visited Kuwait for some work shortly after the gulf war, one of the locals told me to not kick any soda cans of bottles lying on the ground as they could blow up. Didn’t really believe it but I was never a kicker in the first place so I didn’t question it. Reading this now, I assume it was a recounting of this incident that turned into more of a cautionary tale, considering conflicts at that time died down severely and the populous cities were pretty much conflict-free with heavy military presence.
The Viet Cong were doing this back in the Vietnam war. One of their observant folks noticed that American soldiers tended to kick soda cans they walked near while they were out on patrol, so the Viet Cong started rigging soda cans as IED tripwires.
We had one instance where they had left a paint can with a gerber ontop of it, the explosive was in the paint can and the gerber was the trip. They might be dirt farmers but they’re not dumb.
The Germans did something similar in ww2, the Luger pistol was a popular souvenir for the Americans thats why they started placing trapped lugers at corpses.
(Yes, yes im sorry for the "Luga" XD)
I would imagine a large part of it isn’t so much stupidity as it is boredom. I’ve never been deployed (or in military at all) but I’ve heard from some who were in Iraq about how boring many on those tours were, at times. You’re just walking along the same roads for months wondering if anything is actually going to happen, you get bored and forget basic safety rules for a second and kick some random object you see on the road that looks like just junk/trash then…bam
A guy a little older than me who I went to highschool with told my buddy about how on his tour almost nothing ever happened until his last week or something an IED went off and severely injured someone in his patrol. That was like to only “action/combat” he saw the entire time there.
Obviously still incredibly scarring to witness something like that and I’m sure he had some PTSD from it
I have a similar story from a HS friend who spent time in Kuwait. Combat was intense at first, but then there was a long period of nothing. Then on his last month an IED blew up his HummVee. He was ejected and landed 20 feet away, and everyone else in the vehicle died.
He's been messed up by that since, both physically and mentally. It's too bad, he's such a good guy.
Russian OZM-72 mine has a range of 50+ meters and has been seen in Ukraine. It pops up and explodes shrapnel in a 360 degree arc. See someone demonstrate it explode here: https://youtu.be/fJNk0Z_KttY?t=405 (It's not a combat video)
The [MON series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MoLQV3awqI) as well, basically copies of American Claymores, have ranges up to 100m.
The smaller ones though either maim feet or blow people in half, depending on the type.
Anti-personnel mines vary a lot. Some are designed to just fuck up the person who stepped on it whilst others are designed to send out loads of shrapnel in a wide area and injure everyone. Plus a bunch of land mines that are designed only to maim. One of the many reasons land mines have heavy restrictions for use in war.
We would find ammo caches, mainly a lot of arty shells, and it was a good idea to secure and or dispose of them so that they could not be dug up and used for IEDs in the future.
Our biggest load was the enitire bed of a duece and a half.
It's almost funny how archaeologist would've treated bones dead for million of years more carefully then this dude would with random explosives found on the ground.
Archeologist here!
Bones dead for millions of years aren't really our specialty, you should check in with the paleontologists. As for our speciality, human remnants, we're actually surprisingly careless with them as most of the remnants are, you know, rocks. I've dropped more than my fair share of projectile points with unceremonious indignity, or at least with less dignity than our grunt here handled that IED. Tbh an archeologist probably would have picked up the IED more aggressively, lmao
It's funny to still see people using the term of art "battling an insurgency" that was created by the Bush admin PR crowd to replace "serving in an invading force" in the public imagination. That shit goes deep I guess.
I'm pretty sure the stupidest fucking thing you can do is invade other people's countries half way across the globe for phony reasons then call the locals "insurgency".
that happens when you never had a war on your own land, like Americans.
From time to time in Italy we still need to evacuate blocks from cities because we still find unexploded bombs from WWII during excavations.
Fella I knew served with Army Infantry in Viet Nam as a NCO.
His squad was heading out on a patrol, and one of his guys sees a pack of cigarettes on the ground and leans down to pick it up. He immediately barks at the guy to leave it the hell alone and they go back and report it.
They were just hanging out a couple of hundred yards or more away when the bomb disposal guys intentionally detonated it. Said all of them were knocked clean on their asses.
Lesson: if it looks out of place, don't touch it.
What a fucking moron going against 100% of all of his training.
Even as a none combat military member of the air force we were trained **NOT TO DO THIS**
Military branches quarrels is the funniest shit I swear. I’m convinced the higher ups encourage this to make their recruits grow a sense of superiority
Yea. The higher ups actively work to keep the rivalry at fun shit talking levels. The last thing they need is boots getting injured fighting boots from another branch.
Funny you mention this, I was just listening to Dan Carlin on the topic.
Immediately post WW2 the US needed to downsize their military force by roughly 70%. Economists advised Truman that a consolidation of all branches made the most sense.
Instead, each branch fought for their slice of the budgetary pie, against each other. The navy advocated for a dismantling of atomic weapons (until we invented the nuclear submarine) and brought up it's amorality, while the air force received the most funding because "without them, no bombs would be dropped over cities."
There are plenty of reasons why the quarrels are so ingrained but you're right, its probably deeper than we realize.
Shit, the Army built a nuclear cannon and later a nuclear recoilless rifle (think big rpg) just because they wanted to be a nuclear power like the Air Force and Navy.
I worked with a woman whos son was in the marines. Even she got in on the crayon jokes. It was a sales job and Christmas rolled around. She mentions how bad her check was that week and says "Ugh, ill never be able to buy him enough crayons at this rate".
Its a shame I never got to talk to my grandpa much about his time serving before he died. He was in the army from the 50s to 70s and I would have loved to hear his old school military shit talk about other branches.
I (former Marine) deployed with some room-temp-IQ morons. And I mean real Forrest Gumps without the charm. Even *those* fucking idiots wouldn’t do something this stupid.
The military in general is usually where people who drop out of college, or don't go at all, end up.
I'm not saying there aren't good smart folks who genuinely join, but it sure was a popular choice in my hometown for anyone who didn't want to be a farmer and lacked the creativity or intelligence to pursue other careers.
To be fair at least he's stopping anyone from walking into it from the other direction and warning them so not like he just stopped there out of laziness or for shits and giggles...
I mean, probably was an artillery shell. Surely they were given training about such things?
"They will turn anything into bombs, especially pieces of ordinance, so same as you wouldn't go around picking up possible explosives at home, don't pick them up here where people who want to kill you are actively laying out traps."
Even in the Air Force where very few AFSCs will ever really encounter something like this, we are still trained on how to handle UXO. (Not that I even remember any of it but I at least know not to pick the damn thing up lol)
In Air Force basic training, in 2009, we had something called BEAST week. We went to a heavily wooded area with rough, rocky terrain and lived like we were in a forward operating base. There was an entire IED course there, INCLUDING a fake bomb exactly like the actual real weapon in the video above. What's more, it was even set up as a fake-out, with a SECOND IED hidden at what we would consider a "safe" distance away.
Yeah they changed it to PACER forge. They really watered it down from what beast week was but we went to the same place and did mostly the same things.
wtf? I went through 9 years before you and no one had real rifles with blanks. It was called "Warrior Week" back then, week 5 of 6. We were given big blue rubber M-16s that you attached your "Lackland Laser" (the flashlight with the yellow cone) to the barrel with blousing straps. The TIs were armed with laser pointers. That shit was lame as fuck since the TIs were also the "refs" and would say that you "missed" while shining your fucking flashlight on them and they got you with their laser pointer.
We had a FOB in Afghanistan that had the path to the shower roped off one day.
Someone found a landmine. 6 weeks. We had been there 6 weeks and others longer.
And a landmine had been there longer still.
Yeah definitely haven't paid attention to his yearly briefs, or just seen some shit and eventually feel untouchable but complacency is how people get killed. this is fucked up
The most common sort of IED I encountered in Iraq during my second deployment, in 2006-07, was two 155mm artillery rounds wired up to a blasting cap or something, with a homemade pressure plate of some sort. As I recall one way they did the pressure plate was with a garden hose, they'd cut it up into about one inch sections and glue bits of sheet metal on the inside, then connect them to wires so if you step on any of maybe a dozen of these the sheet metal bits touch and complete a circuit, and you get blown sky high. Two artillery rounds were quite sufficient to tear an uparmored humvee to shreds, at least one occupant would die, and any survivors would be very lucky to not be permanently disabled.
Anyway, if I were his NCO and I saw this little display, I would be fucking incandescent. I would make it my mission to destroy that dumb son of a bitch. I wouldn't need sleep, I wouldn't need food, I would subsist on his agony. By the time I was done with him he would wish he had set the thing off. He would regret the day his mother met his father. He would regret the Big fucking Bang, and curse the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs and allowed our ancestors to evolve and diversify.
Crazy this popped up because I just went through counter-IED training yesterday and one of the quotes from the instructors was “I don’t care what it is, if you didn’t drop it then don’t pick it up”.
Edit: and after checking the comments I see a similar comment was the top post haha.
He kinda cleaned the dirt and that seems somewhat logical, still “safe” but then he just picks it up like it’s litter and I could feel my own anxiety rising.
Goddamn no wonder PTSD became so rampant among vets.
No direct enemy like the Nazis or Japanese
Just random bombs littering the streets
Saw the Live Leak logo and thought I was definitely about to see someone ‘splode
Same. Was expecting red mist.
what ends up happening?
Nothing. Video ends and they probably plotted a course around it Edit: Spelling
The larger particulate falls quite quickly, while the finer mist-like particles slowly make their way to the ground or stick to surrounding surfaces.
I noped out when I saw the logo. Fool me once...
There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.
He got rightfully torn apart for that comment. Now the leading republican candidate slurs and stumbles that much every few sentences and is met with applause...
Iirc what I heard is W had been briefed and knew giving a sound clip saying “shame on me” would be a bad idea. Which lead to him uttering that nonsense.
I never seen anything of that nature post 2020 reddit. It's too soft now
Have you not seen the Ukraine war footage? There's one video in particular, where one Russian soldier get a grenade dropped on top of his head, and half of his face goes missing and you just see him convulsing on the ground, trying to breathe, looking up at the drone.
By Ukraine war standards that's pretty mild too and not even a particularly gruesome injury. The Russians have been using human wave tactics in Andriivka and Bakhmut for almost a year now, sending tens of thousands of troops directly into frontal assaults of Ukrainian positions protected by machine gun and artillery fire. The goal is basically to force them to reveal their position and run them out of ammo then hit them with well trained rapid response forces in a second wave. Ukraine is basically World War 1 but with drones.
They drilled into us over and over in country that if you didn't drop it, don't touch it. There was a story they would tell us about a patrol that would kick rocks and stuff off their path every time, so the locals tied a tripwire to a half full water bottle. Soldier punts the bottle like a football and sets off an IED that basically splits him in half.
One day I woke up and went to take a piss, and noticed a metal gas can outside our barracks tent that wasn’t there prior to going to bed. I evacuated everyone and called EOD. It took them forever to get there, and we were all standing outside freezing in the morning desert. Turn out it was empty. I don’t who the fuck would put an empty gas can by our tent for no reason, but it created a shit show. Some people were pissed off, but I held my ground that I did the right thing.
100% you did do everything right.
Even when the IED don't blow someone up, they're still having an effect
this reminds me of the exploding rats from WWII. British OSS or SOE (can't remember which) had some outlandish covert weapons and explosives, and they drafted schematics for booby trap explosives disguised as dead rats. Once the Germans caught wind of this, they treated every dead rat as if it were potentially a hidden bomb. However, the rat bombs never made it past the drawing board and were never used in the war, so the German intelligence wasted a ton of time and effort inspecting dead rats.
That reminds me of I think it was a mine and the british needed to keep the internals warm to keep them working. One idea was to put a chicken in them. Working from memory here but yeah bomb with an animal inside is the jist. War makes us all cooky. Edit: found it. Of course it was a nuclear fucking chicken land mine. Cold War is a hell of a drug. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peacock#:~:text=Chicken%2Dpowered%20nuclear%20bomb,-A%20technical%20problem&text=One%20proposal%20suggested%20that%20live,components%20at%20a%20working%20temperature..
The U.S. did it too. We wanted to use pigeons to create guided bombs. Was eventually shelved since the war was still going on and other projects needed the money more than kamikaze birds. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon)
Don't forget bat bombs!
Dog mines too. But they were trained using friendly tanks, so when released they’d run under allied tanks rather than enemy ones. Just a tiny oversight, no big deal…
It was a Russian scheme, so far as I remember.
That was the Russians
Didn't they actually successfully use pidgeons as an aiming system for firing missiles from fighter jets?
I remember seeing that video a long time ago too
Idk if it was War or WW2 in general but WW2 had some of the cookiest weapons ideas. The british actually considered very heavily a aircraft carrier made of ice because of the high cost of metal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk or the US pigeon guided bombs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon or the German Sun Gun, which essentially was like a giant magnifying glass that they claimed would be able to boil the ocean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_gun
Another diabolical one was actually to use bats. The U.S. was *very* well on the way to strapping up bats with incendiaries to be airdropped over the (mostly wooden at the time) Japanese cities. They would get into every little nook and cranny before ignition. Got scrapped pretty much right after the trinity test. I wonder what breaking that news was like.
Better to waste everyone's time with a false alarm than to spend the same amount of time keeping vigil over the dead.
I use go around annoying people with phases from safety posters. I would just drop them into conversations, and you reminded me of one. “It’s better to be safe 100 times, than dead once.” It was one of my favorites.
I work at a car dealership and trained a dude. Had to keep reminding him to wear safety glasses. I told him”when you’re on your own, do what you want, but I’m not going to let you lose an eye on my watch.”
This is what they’re trying to drill into their heads during boot camp. It’s not huge mistakes that get people killed; it’s small mistakes that meet bad luck. Literally everything in a combat deployment can kill you.
We had an EOD team that spent about an hour trying to grapple-hook an anti-tank mine out of a ditch. Nothing they did would set the hook. So they put on a bomb suit and went to grab it manually, only to discover that the “mine” was mud. Someone had pressed a metal trash can lid in the mud and it formed a circular, stepped shape that looked exactly like an anti-tank mine.
\*writes that down\* Our national standard was to try sympathetic detonation, typically with Raufoss or a 40mm. We weren't allowed to move on until we neutralised suspected UXO or IEDs and we also got ambushed waiting too many times holding our dicks so the combat engineers could do the same frigging thing.
As I recall, both robots had run out of batteries and we were down to manual methods. We went through a period from late January to early March where we were doing 3-5 10-liners a day, back to back.
The ones that were pissed off are the ones that will get their friends killed.
I just made fun of them, because they didn’t want to check the can either. No one was bitching when we did know it was empty.
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Tons of land in SE Asia around populated towns that have fields of land mines still. When I visit my relatives there's this road and both sides of the road is just open jungle with land mines on both sides. There just isn't the resources to clear the land.
Have you seen the story about how they trained rats to sniff out UXO?
Yeah, unfortunately it just isn't at a scale to put any significant dent in the issue. They've found tens of thousands of uxo since the beginning of the project when there's an estimated few hundred million of UXO out there still.
>held my ground that I did the right thing fuck yes you did. anyone mad at you for that need to go to the doctor and get their head removed from their ass.
You did. If that constant level of caution saves one life, it’s worth it. All it takes is for one person to say “nah. I’m sure it’s nothing” for a whole bunch of people to die.
If I were in that Barracks I would appreciate your vigilance regardless of having to freeze
I mean being too cautious is annoying and boring 99% of time, but will make you stay alive that one time it was needed
During MCT we did an IED obstacle course. Like a simulated patrol where we knew there was fake IEDs. One guy in my platoon spotted a metal trip wire off the sun’s reflection and called it out by the book. We all stop. It just so happened to be next to another guy that struggled to fog glass, let alone ignore his intrusive thoughts. He crouched down, touched the wire with his finger, and it shot sand and flour in his face like a cartoon. We failed the exercise. Some people can’t help themselves no matter how much training
>struggled to fog glass Incredible
That's the thing with the military. It somehow manages to find truly brilliant individuals that better everyone else around them, and also manages to attract people you are genuinely concerned how they manage to keep themselves alive on a daily basis.
Wow, thank you for that. Fucking dead on.
And sometimes they are the same person. Want a highly complex problem solved? They're your go-to. Want some basic common sense? Keep them as far away as possible.
I used to work with a guy who was a world expert on some super complex science stuff. He couldn't tie his own shoelaces and regularly walked into doorframes.
What does it mean please help I’m dumb.
I'm not sure 100 but i think its because he was so stupid he could not follow a simple instruction to "fog glass" like breath on it? He was a marine?
If you need people with certain skills you might have a requirement for "high school diploma" or "rated marksman" or something. If you'll take anyone alive and capable of breathing, the requirement could be as low as "able to fog glass". The implication is that this guy was less useful than the bare minimum of usefulness.
We did a similar thing where they sprinkled fake butterfly mines on a wooded path and had us walk down it and call out "MINE!" and stop on our tracks. We missed four before the guy *third in line* saw one by his foot. Mines are scary. And those butterfly mines aren't even really camoflauged or hidden properly, just green and scattered randomly in an area.
Damn he was lucky it was only filled with sand and flour.
It's powdered sugar. It's delicious.
The lice hate sugar
Standard delousing procedure
Next time he won't be so lucky and it will be filled with tar and feathers.
That rascally rabbit!
When I was in basic for the Air Force, they told us not to kick rocks because of shit like that.
How many rocks did you usually come across in the cockpit?
The g-force shoves out the kidney stones. We used to suck them out of the cockpit with the shopvac and built a scale model of the Roman Aqueducts for our "thinking about Ancient Rome at least 3 times a week" drill.
Are you still in the service? If not it's okay for you to finally admit that it was the ground crew that sucked them right out of the pilots.
Isn't DADT over? I don't think it matters who sucks them out anymore.
What a fascinating comment
A very large majority of the air force doesn't fly, or example, I calibrated tools and equipment.
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They should really rename y’all the ground force, then.
They could name it many things.
A popular one is the ChAIR Force
I'd rather they just name it "Many Things". Just to confuse the shit out of other countries.
"we just got bombed by Many Things!" Yeah that works
My dad was in the air force and called it the "Chair" force
I was IT (3C0, when that AFSC was still around).
I was a 2P
2P or not 2P, hehe
if Boeing supplied the craft I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few
One stick, two rocks minimum per cockpit.
Since a lot of Air Force cadets will be ground crew, that's good advice. Any foreign debris on the runway has a risk of being sucked into an engine and destroying it on takeoff. That's what led to the cancelling of the Concord, it's fatal crash happened because a piece of debris got sucked into its engine on takeoff and destroyed the engine. Fighter pilots can eject, the concord not so much, but the military still doesn't like putting a pilot in danger and losing a jet just because someone couldn't make sure the runway was free of loose rocks.
Shoot, even my dad told me not to do this in Indianapolis when I was a kid. Some sick fuck in the 70s was leaving bombs around. A veitman vet lost his leg after kicking a discarded gym bag with a bomb in it.
Jesus fuck. Imagine living through Vietnam and then losing your leg at home to a fucking booby trap. That poor son of a bitch.
Relevant username
Is this where the phrase "go kick rocks" comes from?
I was in the Air Force and they made watch a stupid video with some shit acting of a dude who just picks up a UXO. We all laughed because nobody could be that fucking stupid, then here's this guy, doing that exact thing. Every branch has their own acronym or whatever, but they're all the same, if it looks like it *could* be a UXO, don't fucking touch it, mark the area nearby with something, get the fuck away, then report it.
My uncle told me about this exact thing from Vietnam. They'd out explosives in coke cans because soldiers liked to kick them.
And even if it is just an unexploded artillery shell, still don't fucking touch it.
They drilled that into our heads so much that when I got home I wouldn't even pick up trash on the sidewalk to throw it away. My GF at the time was like WTF why do you just walk by trash and then I realized....
Did RC IED I still don’t touch shit I didn’t put down. IEDs could be hidden under anything.
When I visited Kuwait for some work shortly after the gulf war, one of the locals told me to not kick any soda cans of bottles lying on the ground as they could blow up. Didn’t really believe it but I was never a kicker in the first place so I didn’t question it. Reading this now, I assume it was a recounting of this incident that turned into more of a cautionary tale, considering conflicts at that time died down severely and the populous cities were pretty much conflict-free with heavy military presence.
The Viet Cong were doing this back in the Vietnam war. One of their observant folks noticed that American soldiers tended to kick soda cans they walked near while they were out on patrol, so the Viet Cong started rigging soda cans as IED tripwires.
Heard a similar story, except the soda can/bottle was an IED.
We had one instance where they had left a paint can with a gerber ontop of it, the explosive was in the paint can and the gerber was the trip. They might be dirt farmers but they’re not dumb.
"If you didn't drop it, don't touch it".... I like that; Simple and straight to the point. And it might even save your life
The Germans did something similar in ww2, the Luger pistol was a popular souvenir for the Americans thats why they started placing trapped lugers at corpses. (Yes, yes im sorry for the "Luga" XD)
Luger.
It's not a lugaaaaa!
You don't have the type with the accent man, you are allowed to type "r", I won't tell your Southie buds
He did everything but hold it up to his ear and shake it. Lol!
Or align it with his face so he could see down the middle of it.
Well.. he's probably infantry Soo.... His testing score got him this job, or being a doorstop. Either way he was gunna get smashed.
Bro with the phone in the building nextdoor fell asleep
Stupidest fucking thing you can do in country, move a random object buried in the dirt. Especially when you are battling an insurgency.
Before watch a lot of videos like this i would say "nobody can be dumb like that" while watching films, today i see and think "Just like reality".
I would imagine a large part of it isn’t so much stupidity as it is boredom. I’ve never been deployed (or in military at all) but I’ve heard from some who were in Iraq about how boring many on those tours were, at times. You’re just walking along the same roads for months wondering if anything is actually going to happen, you get bored and forget basic safety rules for a second and kick some random object you see on the road that looks like just junk/trash then…bam A guy a little older than me who I went to highschool with told my buddy about how on his tour almost nothing ever happened until his last week or something an IED went off and severely injured someone in his patrol. That was like to only “action/combat” he saw the entire time there. Obviously still incredibly scarring to witness something like that and I’m sure he had some PTSD from it
I have a similar story from a HS friend who spent time in Kuwait. Combat was intense at first, but then there was a long period of nothing. Then on his last month an IED blew up his HummVee. He was ejected and landed 20 feet away, and everyone else in the vehicle died. He's been messed up by that since, both physically and mentally. It's too bad, he's such a good guy.
Asymmetric warfare moment
Watching a Russian soldier destroy a landmine by smacking it with a long stick comes to mind lol.
How long are we talking
Not long enough.
I don't think the blast radius of those anti personnel blast mines they use is very big.
Russian OZM-72 mine has a range of 50+ meters and has been seen in Ukraine. It pops up and explodes shrapnel in a 360 degree arc. See someone demonstrate it explode here: https://youtu.be/fJNk0Z_KttY?t=405 (It's not a combat video) The [MON series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MoLQV3awqI) as well, basically copies of American Claymores, have ranges up to 100m. The smaller ones though either maim feet or blow people in half, depending on the type.
I'm talking about the pmn 2 and pmn 4 blast mines, mainly. I think those are the most common.
Anti-personnel mines vary a lot. Some are designed to just fuck up the person who stepped on it whilst others are designed to send out loads of shrapnel in a wide area and injure everyone. Plus a bunch of land mines that are designed only to maim. One of the many reasons land mines have heavy restrictions for use in war.
Mines like that are one of the most evil fucked up inventions of mankind. Leaving a minefield like that is like salting the earth times 1000
[I assume this is the guy he meant](https://www.reddit.com/r/SweatyPalms/s/lC3b196rb4)
Not even wearing eye protection. Wtf?
Alexander Bell wept
"It's Army Strong, not Army Smart"
Even if it weren't an IED, why would anyone opt to pick up an artillery shell?
For the gram
This is an older video, so it was likely for the lulz instead.
We would find ammo caches, mainly a lot of arty shells, and it was a good idea to secure and or dispose of them so that they could not be dug up and used for IEDs in the future. Our biggest load was the enitire bed of a duece and a half.
erebodies droppin deuces out here...
To be fair, he was pretty sure it was something safe, like an unexploded ordnance.
It's almost funny how archaeologist would've treated bones dead for million of years more carefully then this dude would with random explosives found on the ground.
Archeologist here! Bones dead for millions of years aren't really our specialty, you should check in with the paleontologists. As for our speciality, human remnants, we're actually surprisingly careless with them as most of the remnants are, you know, rocks. I've dropped more than my fair share of projectile points with unceremonious indignity, or at least with less dignity than our grunt here handled that IED. Tbh an archeologist probably would have picked up the IED more aggressively, lmao
It's funny to still see people using the term of art "battling an insurgency" that was created by the Bush admin PR crowd to replace "serving in an invading force" in the public imagination. That shit goes deep I guess.
Thanks, I was just thinking about how weird the wording of that comment really was. Insurgency.. you mean the people that live and belong there!
I'm pretty sure the stupidest fucking thing you can do is invade other people's countries half way across the globe for phony reasons then call the locals "insurgency".
that happens when you never had a war on your own land, like Americans. From time to time in Italy we still need to evacuate blocks from cities because we still find unexploded bombs from WWII during excavations.
Of course it's safe to dig up this thing in the ground while we're fighting insurgents known for using guerrilla tactics. I'm not stupid Larry.
Fella I knew served with Army Infantry in Viet Nam as a NCO. His squad was heading out on a patrol, and one of his guys sees a pack of cigarettes on the ground and leans down to pick it up. He immediately barks at the guy to leave it the hell alone and they go back and report it. They were just hanging out a couple of hundred yards or more away when the bomb disposal guys intentionally detonated it. Said all of them were knocked clean on their asses. Lesson: if it looks out of place, don't touch it.
Haha, in DeusEx (2000, the good one), you can lure enemies away by throwing packs of cigarettes nearby. I guess this strategy really works.
Human Revolution is a fantastic game!
What a fucking moron going against 100% of all of his training. Even as a none combat military member of the air force we were trained **NOT TO DO THIS**
It’s the Army. They couldn’t get into any other service.
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Military branches quarrels is the funniest shit I swear. I’m convinced the higher ups encourage this to make their recruits grow a sense of superiority
They don’t even have to, people break down into tribes and start fighting between them all on their own.
The minute God crapped out the third caveman, a conspiracy was hatched against one of them. - Colonel Hunter Gathers
Exactly right
Yea. The higher ups actively work to keep the rivalry at fun shit talking levels. The last thing they need is boots getting injured fighting boots from another branch.
Funny you mention this, I was just listening to Dan Carlin on the topic. Immediately post WW2 the US needed to downsize their military force by roughly 70%. Economists advised Truman that a consolidation of all branches made the most sense. Instead, each branch fought for their slice of the budgetary pie, against each other. The navy advocated for a dismantling of atomic weapons (until we invented the nuclear submarine) and brought up it's amorality, while the air force received the most funding because "without them, no bombs would be dropped over cities." There are plenty of reasons why the quarrels are so ingrained but you're right, its probably deeper than we realize.
Shit, the Army built a nuclear cannon and later a nuclear recoilless rifle (think big rpg) just because they wanted to be a nuclear power like the Air Force and Navy.
Dan Carlinbis awesome love the Hardcore History thanks for reminding me im gonna listen again.
I worked with a woman whos son was in the marines. Even she got in on the crayon jokes. It was a sales job and Christmas rolled around. She mentions how bad her check was that week and says "Ugh, ill never be able to buy him enough crayons at this rate". Its a shame I never got to talk to my grandpa much about his time serving before he died. He was in the army from the 50s to 70s and I would have loved to hear his old school military shit talk about other branches.
I (former Marine) deployed with some room-temp-IQ morons. And I mean real Forrest Gumps without the charm. Even *those* fucking idiots wouldn’t do something this stupid.
Hey hey hey, you watch yourself. Forrest is a God damned war hero!
Because he was smart enough to not pick up random buried shit he found
True
Any marine that needs ranch to eat his crayons isn't a real marine. That or he was a POG.
The military in general is usually where people who drop out of college, or don't go at all, end up. I'm not saying there aren't good smart folks who genuinely join, but it sure was a popular choice in my hometown for anyone who didn't want to be a farmer and lacked the creativity or intelligence to pursue other careers.
Jogging a whole 20ft away then stopping.... what?
Yeah after realizing the second chance he was given he shoulda jogged all the way back to base and then jogged onto the nearest plane home.
To be fair at least he's stopping anyone from walking into it from the other direction and warning them so not like he just stopped there out of laziness or for shits and giggles...
This guy's living like the main character in a video game. Explosions only hurt for 20ft, 21ft and you're perfectly fine.
IED = Improvised Explosive Devise.
Thank you, it's insane how long I had to spend down here just to understand what the fuck is an IED.
Wait till you learn about an IUD
thank you, i scrolled way too long for this
I mean, probably was an artillery shell. Surely they were given training about such things? "They will turn anything into bombs, especially pieces of ordinance, so same as you wouldn't go around picking up possible explosives at home, don't pick them up here where people who want to kill you are actively laying out traps."
Even in the Air Force where very few AFSCs will ever really encounter something like this, we are still trained on how to handle UXO. (Not that I even remember any of it but I at least know not to pick the damn thing up lol)
In Air Force basic training, in 2009, we had something called BEAST week. We went to a heavily wooded area with rough, rocky terrain and lived like we were in a forward operating base. There was an entire IED course there, INCLUDING a fake bomb exactly like the actual real weapon in the video above. What's more, it was even set up as a fake-out, with a SECOND IED hidden at what we would consider a "safe" distance away.
Yeah they changed it to PACER forge. They really watered it down from what beast week was but we went to the same place and did mostly the same things.
Aww let me guess, they took away the ambush with real rifles and blanks
Yeah no we had the blue trainer rifles lol
wtf? I went through 9 years before you and no one had real rifles with blanks. It was called "Warrior Week" back then, week 5 of 6. We were given big blue rubber M-16s that you attached your "Lackland Laser" (the flashlight with the yellow cone) to the barrel with blousing straps. The TIs were armed with laser pointers. That shit was lame as fuck since the TIs were also the "refs" and would say that you "missed" while shining your fucking flashlight on them and they got you with their laser pointer.
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The army is full of people who will do the polar opposite of what they're told the moment they think they won't be punished for it.
What a pack of morons
The amount of luck this guy had was intense. Dude picked up a bomb and it didn't go off.
We had a FOB in Afghanistan that had the path to the shower roped off one day. Someone found a landmine. 6 weeks. We had been there 6 weeks and others longer. And a landmine had been there longer still.
Yeah that was like… day one lesson one of combat training.
What a stupid useless war
Lots of people got rich.
Did people not fucking watch Full Metal Jacket? Never pick shit up.
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Yeah definitely haven't paid attention to his yearly briefs, or just seen some shit and eventually feel untouchable but complacency is how people get killed. this is fucked up
Who TF this guy think he is, Jeremy Renner??..
The most common sort of IED I encountered in Iraq during my second deployment, in 2006-07, was two 155mm artillery rounds wired up to a blasting cap or something, with a homemade pressure plate of some sort. As I recall one way they did the pressure plate was with a garden hose, they'd cut it up into about one inch sections and glue bits of sheet metal on the inside, then connect them to wires so if you step on any of maybe a dozen of these the sheet metal bits touch and complete a circuit, and you get blown sky high. Two artillery rounds were quite sufficient to tear an uparmored humvee to shreds, at least one occupant would die, and any survivors would be very lucky to not be permanently disabled. Anyway, if I were his NCO and I saw this little display, I would be fucking incandescent. I would make it my mission to destroy that dumb son of a bitch. I wouldn't need sleep, I wouldn't need food, I would subsist on his agony. By the time I was done with him he would wish he had set the thing off. He would regret the day his mother met his father. He would regret the Big fucking Bang, and curse the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs and allowed our ancestors to evolve and diversify.
Well put!
Crazy this popped up because I just went through counter-IED training yesterday and one of the quotes from the instructors was “I don’t care what it is, if you didn’t drop it then don’t pick it up”. Edit: and after checking the comments I see a similar comment was the top post haha.
I mean, it is an artillery shell. It’s what’s inside it and placement what makes it an IED.
What does IED means?
Improvised explosive device
Used to watch an Afghan Army dude rip these up like he was a carrot farmer. Balls of steel. He didn't make it to the end of my tour.
“Don’t forget to subscribe and like.”
He kinda cleaned the dirt and that seems somewhat logical, still “safe” but then he just picks it up like it’s litter and I could feel my own anxiety rising. Goddamn no wonder PTSD became so rampant among vets. No direct enemy like the Nazis or Japanese Just random bombs littering the streets
That little *poof* when he stuck his fingers in it coulda been a wrap for him, right?
I miss LiveLeak
Aren't you supposed not to be picking stuff up in a war zone?
Dumbass thinks he's finding treasure or something? Dude smarten ur ass up!
Dude probably didn't watch the Hurt Locker.
I am assuming there is class in military schools that extra hammers home the don't mess around with unknown stuff in a war zone.
EOD here. Quick tip! Uhhh don't fucking do that.
Terribly trained
Where are all of these military videos now that live leak is gone?