Mediocre propaganda video

I just watched about forty minutes of Iraqi “insurgent” propaganda video on Google video.

It’s like all military recruiting films. There are lots of explosions and weapons firing, there are scenes of the defeated enemy, and there is the testimony of happy members of the team. I did learn some things about these guys from the video.

Whenever they are mortaring or rocketing their enemies, there is someone whose job it is to yell “Allahu akbar!” every time the mortar or rocket fires off. This is a much, much better job than dropping the shells in the mortar or lighting off the rockets.
They aren’t doing too well at shooting down airplanes. There are a few sequences in which they shoot missiles at aircraft, and one in which they appear to hit one, but no crashes. They proudly display a few crashed/shotdown UAVs, which are like big model airplanes and don’t look so good on film.
They couldn’t get a lot of guys together for this film. The best they can do for the “masses of our victorious hordes” shot is about seven of them running through the desert and rocks looking like Power Rangers.
They aren’t so good at the showmanship. They keep trying to do things like jump on top of a disabled truck and yell victory and pump their fists but they look kind of dorky doing it, and confused, like they’re saying “DO I YELL ALLAHU AKBAR YET OR KEEP WAVING THE HELMET OF THE ENEMY? A LITTLE HELP?”
Their music sucks in the same way that military music sucks everywhere.

Operation Lot’s Wife is a Go, Colonel

According to Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, we’ve been flying exercise missions off the Iranian coast doing “over the shoulder” nuclear weapons delivery demonstrations for their radar operators. Classy. Also, check out the Rube Goldberg meets Jack D. Ripper technique below:

over the shoulder

DEAR JAPANESE PEOPLE

More Octopus! TV Show for Japanese Kids includes wacky slapstick skits about the oppression of the workers, dictatorship, torture, the dangers of digging up unexploded bombs, and voodoo!

It’s sort of a Japanese Krazy Kat too: both the octopus and the peanut are in love with the walrus. You know.

WFMU has more and the videos at this link

I for one welcome our new explosively burrowing bunker buster smart bomb overlords.

Deep digger falls out of the sky, sticks in the ground, and then uses a cannon to chew through concrete before it explodes. It can grind through at least 10 meters of concrete while reporting its progress and coordinating with other burrow bombs to meet and greet and blow up.

I think it’s behind me right now.

This would be very useful during zombie attack

For those who need a machine gun that just keeps on firing, and firing, and firing, and firing, we present the E4 Revision of the M60 Machine Gun

Looks like it would be particularly handy if you were covering a general retreat from the mall and the zombies were surging out of the food court by the score.

One Weekend a Month, My Ass!

The Exploding Aardvark linked me to a beavo-buttheadian news story about our boys overseas.

Screencap of the story, for when it’s gone, is behind the cut.

SHUT UP, BEAVIS

Naval Security, South of Da Nang

Talked to Trout at length last night. He showed me some of his photos from Vietnam, including him looking 40 at age 18, various sandbags and weapons, and the view of the landscape south of Da Nang that he looked at from his guard post.

I also saw the “welcome back” letter from Reuters giving him his job in Manhattan again, in March 1969. That didn’t last.

Bob saw a lot of stuff that stays, even now. Mostly kids. “Those little black-haired kids, I still see them.” He told me about an orphanage he and his partner went by a lot, run by a convent. They’d bring food over for the kids every time, huge quantities of stuff from the base. The French nuns would whack them on the head for looking at the teenaged girls, and everyone was delighted at the stolen food they brought.

One time they came by and everyone was dead and dismembered. The VC had made a point, as their guerrilla manual told them to. There were a lot of points like that made, and a lot of dismembered kids. After 30 years and lately, some happy pills Bob can tell that particular story without crying now.

Later on he and his buddy were sent into the jungle, heavily armed but not uniformed, to “fuck shit up” within certain map quadrants. They were dropped by helicopter near some people who needed to be blown up, or by boat near some people who needed to find out how well our new night sniper scope worked. A lot of “heavy shit went down”, as they said.

But it’s the kids he still sees. When he got back to New York he didn’t last too long at Reuters. He got a job working construction because he’s a big strong guy who doesn’t mind picking up joists all day. And he drank for 30 years, and other things. By the time he came out west in ’75, Bob was in full swing as a PTSD poster boy. A lot of other “heavy shit went down” in those years.

Bob has some advice for guys coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. “Paxil,” he says, “therapy. Happy pills and talking. Don’t drink, don’t smoke. It’s hard to really enjoy cocaine and heroin without a drink and a smoke. Mostly don’t drink. I spent thirty years drinking and denying, but the kids didn’t go away.”

Bob’s house up in the hills has roses and razor wire around it real tight.