AC-130 "Spectre" Gunship Pics.....

[lesofprimus]

Its a foot that we happened to come across while doing some BDA north of An Nasiriyah... It actually was quite common to find shoes and feet...

 

[evangilder]

Is your BDA the same as mine...Battle Damage Assessment?

 

[lesofprimus]

Yup. We did alot of that........

 

[evangilder]

Ugh! I know how gruesome that one can be.

 

[lesofprimus]

It was like looking at roadkill.... U become used to it.....

There was one area that we went into after a daisy cutter had been dropped, and i literally counted 35 single feet laying about..... Kinda funny actually......

 

[evangilder]

They don't leave much, so I have heard. So that's 17 able bodied dead and one cripple dead? Sorry, that was really bad.

I know you get used to it, it was the smell that I never got used to.

 

[lesofprimus]

I always carried a tube of ben-gay with me. Alittle under ur nose and no more smell...... Good for other things too hehe....

 

[plan_D]

My dad says you Yanks are weird 'cos in the first Gulf he was cleaning up the main road to Basra after US A-10s had 'cleaned it up' and there were burnt out trucks, cars..everything...along with burnt up bodies and stuff...and he thought, naturally, it was vile at first but he had to clean it up anyway. But loads of Americans were jumping up and getting their pictures taken with burnt out corpses!

 

[evangilder]

I wish I had known that trick, Les. I used to carry a bandana to cover my nose and mouth which doesn't help at all, especially after just a few hours. If the dead are fresh dead, it's not that bad.

 

[lesofprimus]

But loads of Americans were jumping up and getting their pictures taken with burnt out corpses!

Ill tell u what... That was one of the big things that i had problems with over there, and have fired rounds and gotten into fights over it before... Stupid Ass Jarheads and their cameras....

We were hardly ever allowed to bring cameras along with us, and when I did it was a POS disposable one at that..... I only have a few pics that I took, and a few that I got from pals and the PR peeps at ST2..... I dont throw those pics out very often....

 

[evangilder]

Yeah, that's weird. We were checked for cameras before we went some places. Maybe that policy has laxed since when I was in. They always told us not to. If caught with one, you were in deep guano.

 

[lesofprimus]

It was all about mission security and deniability for us.... Alot of the stuff we did was HEAVILY Classified, and still is..... Cameras dont add into that equation....

Which is fine and dandy for me, as some of the shiit i witnessed i'd never want to be reminded of anyways.....

Posing with dead bodies??? Someones been watching too much Full Metal Jacket in the barracks before going overseas...."Today is his Birthday..."

 

[evangilder]

No shit. To be honest, I wouldn't have wanted pictures of stuff like that for my kids, or grandkids to find later. Better that they don't know everything about what I did, or had to do. I think you probably feel similar in that regard.

 

[trackend]

Not very pleasent Les I dont envy you one bit.

 

[lesofprimus]

Im unfortunatly one of those kids that found their fathers Vietnam Picture Collections.... Not cool as a 12 year old.....

Yes i agree, as does any parent... TV and movies are ruining the youth of America... Theres no more innocence in the younger generation... (Sumatran Jungles excluded of course)

My son, being almost 18, has started learning some of the more "Detailed" parts of what his dad did in the Navy......

 

[evangilder]

That's a touchy one. I know at some point I will probably talk to my son about some of my stuff. Are you giving him the whole picture, or parts of it. I know they see a lot more in movies and on TV growing up, but it's still detached. It's another thing altogether when you find out something that a relative did.

There is certainly stuff I did that I'm not proud of, but it doesn't make me any less of a man. Sometimes there are situations where you pick the shallowest shit. None of it is good. I guess it's a balance of things. How does he take the details?

 

[plan_D]

My dad, generally, tells me anything I ask him. When I was younger he did refuse to tell me some things. I haven't asked him about those things since but he'll probably get on to them when he goes on one of his big rants.

I don't know how they got the cameras there but my dad is still sickened by it today. He's not too bothered about the fact he had to clear the corpses up [although he still says he remembers the smell] but the people taking pictures with them!

Oh yeah and that the MOD said he was going to get paid more for doing it, which he never did.

 

[evangilder]

There are definitely places that cameras do not belong. I don't have any gory pics like that as I never took cameras to places where they weren't supposed to be, with a couple of exceptions that were only on the flightline. Off base on TDY, if they said no cameras, it stayed home. Like Les said, anything on you that could give the bad guys anything or give them evidence of your presence is no good.

 

[Medvedya]

I know that my Dad and Grandad were very matter of fact if I wanted to know something, they'd just tell me.

I remember when I was quite young that my Grandad told me that bullets do not make nice neat holes as they do in the films, and neither does the person being shot drop down tidily on the floor.

The way I, and they see it, little lads like war, guns, killing - they're practically pre-programmed to, and rather than ban it, or feed them B.S, it's better that they know about the courage and strength that conflict brings out in people, but also the sheer horror, misery and bestial side of it as well.

 

[evangilder]

Makes sense. I guess it is also knowing at what age it is appropriate to mention those kinds of things. Hollywood definitely tones down what happens, which is probably the right thing to do. If the real thing were shown in all of it's gory details, it would cause a lot of trauma.