North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2010-2011, Richard Mosse
The Mark I tank was my favorite armored vehicle as a child (is that a thing with young children?). Born of the need to break the domination of trenches and machine guns over the battlefields of the Western Front, it was the first vehicle to be named “tank”, as an expedient to maintain secrecy and to disguise its true purpose. It was developed to be able to cross trenches, resist small-arms fire, travel over difficult terrain, carry supplies, and to capture fortified enemy positions. It is regarded as successful in many respects, but suffered from many problems owing to its primitive nature.
These armoured behemoths were thirty two feet long, weighed twenty eight tons and could reach a maximum speed of four miles per hour. They were powered by a 105hp hand-cranked Daimler engine and had a crew complement of eight. It took four of them just to turn the starting handle. It also took four men to drive it. The driver and tank commander sat up front in a small cabin. Each tank track was also controlled by separate secondary gears, manned by two gearsmen at the rear. The other four crew were gunners and loaders.
Lost a yahoo auction last night for the Undercoverism forest print windbreaker. Solid Snake halloween costume put on hold indefinitely.
Winston Churchill on Military Codenames →
1. Operations in which large numbers of men may lose their lives ought not to be described by code words which imply a boastful or overconfident sentiment… . They ought not to be names of a frivolous character… Names of living people–Ministers and Commanders–should be avoided… . 2. …the world is wide, and intelligent thought will readily supply an unlimited number of well-sounding names which do not suggest the character of the operation or disparage it in any way and do not enable some widow or mother to say that her son was killed in an operation called “Bunnyhug” or “Ballyhoo.” 3. Proper names are good in this field. The heroes of antiquity, figures from Greek and Roman mythology, the constellations and stars, famous racehorses, names of British and American war heroes, could be used, provided they fall within the rules above.
I used to draw underground military compounds in grade school. I learned it from watching you, Viet Cong.
This patch was used by the United States Army’s 7th Service Command from 1941-1946. It is made of embroidered felt. This variation of the 7th Service Command patch was never authorized by the Army. I have also read that this black felt design was only worn by officers.
The Distant Executioner →
Crane had spotted another fighter in the distance. He was holding a radio, as if directing the attack, but before Crane could kill him, he ducked behind a large rock. Crane used a laser range finder—a device that he had brought from home—and measured the distance as 806 meters. That is the distance from Crane’s stone house to the road in Texas, and then half again as much, plus some. Crane had been issued the army’s standard sniper rifle—a 7.62-mm. bolt-action Remington M24, shooting a medium-weight, 175-grain match bullet and equipped with a fixed 10-power scope. He dialed an elevation into the scope to correct the aim for the ballistic arc at 800 meters, then braced the rifle on the hood of the Humvee, sighted it at the rock, and waited. Soon enough the gunfire ebbed and became sporadic. At that point, stupidly, the man behind the rock stood up to look around. Crane saw him clearly through the scope: he was a Pashtun, and in Crane’s view a typical Hajji with a scraggly beard and a man-dress on. Centering the crosshairs near the man’s groin to compensate for the tendency of rounds to go high when fired upslope, Crane squeezed off a single shot. The bullet flew for about a second and hit the man squarely in the chest, raising a little cloud of dust as it punched through the fabric of his clothes. He must have been surprised at being killed from so far away. He felt the blow and likely died before hearing the shot, the sound of which arrived three seconds later. He fell straight back like a firing-range silhouette, and did not rise again. At 806 meters it was Crane’s longest kill in combat. He pocketed the spent cartridge, the “kill brass” that had done the job. No Americans had been hit. A few Afghans in the convoy had been wounded, but none had been killed.
