Thread: Couple of war stories

On one of my recent overseas trips I spent a week with an ex US Army Ranger, a couple of years out of the army and very well travelled.
He'd done tours in every hotspot you could imagine and some he was obviously staying mum about. He grew up wanting to be a Navy Seal, got to the point where he had the Navy Seal contract to sign and pulled out at the last moment and went down the route of joining the Army Rangers (better contract).

His unit didn't have a dedicated sniper but since he was a pretty good shot he ended up being a part timer. His rifle of choice was the AI 300 win mag. Over the course of the week I got to hear of some of the stuff they got involved in. Bloody interesting listening to him actually.

A couple of stories he had were funny as. They were in Afghanistan and his unit were doing a patrol thru a village when two ragheads opened up on them with AK's, by the time the army boys got organised and set up to return fire one of the ragheads disappeared into a building while his offsider started to run up a hill in plain view of the partime sniper. The distance was to far for his mates to drop him and a discussion was had on how far he would get before said raghead would need to stop for a breather, it turned out that 800 yards was the magical number and he was sent packing to meet the virgins.

Another story was when he was in Iraq, 50 deg c during the day and that was the time the army boys retired to there air conditioned huts to sleep. Part time sniper was quite a senior person and had been out doing his job for a number of days, got back to there base camp for well earned feed and rest. A couple of hours into his sleep (middle of the day) one of his people bang on his door to wake him up like there's an emergency. The yanks had set up a heap of cctv cameras looking down roads and covering intersections and monitored them remotely from there camp. During the day when it's 50 deg c all the locals are inside but here's a dude riding a motorbike down the main drag with a bucket strapped to the seat.

The cctv guys know what's about to happen so send one of the boys in to wake up the boss. Boss is not to happy being woken up and threatens them with some shit work if it's turns out they have wasted his time. He arrives in the monitoring room and watches as the motorbike slowly winds it's way up the street and stops next to a donkey. Guy gets off the bike and unties the bucket, places the bucket behind the donkey, guy stands on the bucket and has his way with the poor donkey, meanwhile everyone's pissing themselves with laughter.