Tuesday, June 23, 2015

That's gonna leave a mark

A 60mm mortar round mark.  Good thing it didn't go "boom!"


3 comments:

  1. When I saw "Quimbaya" on that uniform, I thought it was possibly the correct spelling of "Kumbaya".

    So, I Googled it and found "Quimbaya" is completely unrelated to "Kumbaya".

    "Quimbaya" is an ancient South American civilization in Colombia, noted for gold and coffee.

    "Kumbaya" is "Come By Here" in the Gullah dialect of the Creole language, spoken by escaped slaves and free Negroes living along South Carolina's coast.

    The song was first recorded in 1926.

    Thus, I'm guessing the wounded soldier is Colombian, probably engaged in their perpetual wars of illegal narcotics and Communist insurgencies.

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  2. I wonder if the surgeons were able to save his arm?

    I remember a similar situation occurring during the earlier years of the war in the old Republic of Viet Nam, several years before I got there.

    As I recall, I think they evacuated the wounded soldier to Bangkok, Thailand to operate on him, but I could be mistaken.

    Maybe it was in Saigon?

    Anyway, they had him surrounded with sandbags, with the surgeons wearing heavy ballistic armor, and the LIVE B-40 rocket was successfully removed from his torso, without detonating it.

    It was a lead story on all the network television news reports.

    That may even have happened more than once, but I don't know for certain.

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  3. The guy looks surprisingly calm, considering the circumstances. Sounds like the surgeons rose to the challenge like champs in your example.

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