Find The Boots

Rantings from a few corporate types about life, technology, travel, guns, politics, and everything good in the world.

Required Reading....

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

I recently finished "Marines in the Garden of Eden" by Lowry and quite enjoyed it. It suffers a bit from "and the third platoon advanced 12 feet to the left, not aware..." type of problem, but you can easily gloss over that for the read value.

I'll bring in some stuff I pulled out that I thought was very interesting and why today's 'Battle Books' really suffer when compared to Sledge et. al.

Anyway, next up is "Take Down: The 3rd Infantry Division's Twenty-One Day Assault on Baghdad" which seems like it may avoid some of the ills of Eden above. A pre-release quote made me laugh:

We were in an overwatch position after the battle of As Samawah. I was watching through the thermals and I see this Iraqi attempting to sneak up on us in the dark. He gets about seventy-five meters away when all of a sudden this bull comes out of nowhere and demolishes the guy. Really lays him out and thrashes him. The whole platoon is watching and is in absolute hysterics.

Then somehow the guy manages to stab the bull and it bellows and runs away. Using his rifle as a crutch he then starts back towards my vehicle! He then falls down and begins to crawl towards us.

When he is about thirty-five meters away he aims the rifle at us so we killed him with the coax. His rifle was a really nice .303 British so I kept it for a while. Later in the war I was shooting RPG guys from two hundred plus meters away. When that .303 hit them they stayed down for good.

Anyway later that night the bull came back and stomped on this guy for hours. He would gore him, throw him up in the air, and then stomp on him some more. The next day the guy was about three inches thick! We later protected the bull the whole time he was there. We conducted first aid for his wounds and gave him all the water and vegetables we could find. We also protected him from other Iraqis and other soldiers.

Check it out - men to be proud to know.

0 Comments:

Find The Boots

An executive goes on a business trip. When he arrives, it's raining cats and dogs. To avoid ruining his shoes, he purchases a pair of galoshes for $15, which he expenses under "Misc." on his expense report. A week later, the accounting department rejects his expense report, with a post-it note that says that the company does not reimburse for items of clothing. The next trip, the executive turns in an expense report without the galoshes, but with a post-it note that says "FIND THE BOOTS!".