Reminders

Sometimes it’s easy to forget where we are.

Then something like this shows up on Facebook from a friend:

;

That’s a locker in a transient tent at an American base my friend was at recently for a course (one of the guys I went to Germany with, I mentioned the story about his friend who was killed in a rocket attack in Iraq I think).

While he was asleep ten feet from that locker, a mortar impacted and hit it. It was probably a Chinese or Russian 82mm. Had it detonated, it would have had a lethal blast radius of around 25 metres or 75 feet. Luckily for everyone in the tent, it didn’t. Either the fuze failed (which isn’t uncommon given that often the ammo is ancient and has been buried or otherwise poorly stored), or as sometimes happens, the idiots firing it forgot to pull the pin on the round. Regardless, that’s how random things can be, and how lucky.

And you know what he had to say? After they returned to the tent and saw the gaping hole? Referring to the brilliant cartoon series Archer we’re all fans of, he simply groaned “THIS IS HOW WE GET ANTS, PEOPLE.”

This kind of thing happens. A friend of mine deployed to Kandahar a few years ago forgot to pick up his laundry as he was returning to his shacks. He turned to return to the laundry facility and minutes later a Chinese 107mm rocket slammed into the building he lived in. Another rocket hit the bedspace of someone who’d gotten up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. It’s possible to get complacent, to forget where we are, to forget that things like this happen.

But as best as we can, we laugh about it. It’s kind of a warped gallows humour thing, but it takes the edge off.