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There's a vague story my brother said while he was one of the Marines President Bush 1 deployed to Somalia.
The way he told it, the CO of his platoon offered fifty dollars to anyone in said platoon if they could wreck a Humvee to the point it was rendered inoperable.
So on Landing craft exercises, instead of waiting for the ramp to drop, the Humvee operaters instead put the pedal to the metal as soon as they saw daylight, and caught air off the ramp.
And on manuevers, if not on freetime they took the Humvee's out into the Somali countryside and would bang them up on anything that could -and did- cause dents. Trees, reasonably tall sand dunes, an old stone wall, and he mentioned Camels. Needless to say after all the wanton destruction, not a single Humvee was banged up enough to have to be towed or pushed back. The CO got to keep his fifty dollars.
And there's a story of my own, not exactly military but rather the earliest tragedy I ever witnessed with my own two eyes. What happens when lightning strikes an American flag.
The time & place was a rainy early afternoon, Fourth of July. During a rather bad downpour, and thunderstorm I happened to be looking out the window at what otherwise would have been a cookout at my Grandmother's old farm. Looking right at the American flag, which was soaking wet due to the rain, and the metal pole it was attached to, set into a wooden support beam on the side porch.
I turned away for a second and noticed a lightning flash, but thought nothing of it. Then turned back to the general direction of the flag and saw that despite beign soaked by all the rain the flag was almost completely burned up, except for a small portion of it that was completely black and had smoke pouring from it. The metal pole the flag itself was set into hadn't faired much better either...it was glowing red, had either sparks or embers flying off it, and looked like a freshly used sparkler.
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