Sounds kind of absurd that a miltary man would be this clueless. Is this storyabout the rubber bullets true?
What do rubber bullets do exactly? Do they disable the people hit with them?
No rubber and plastic bullets are less than lethal, but if fired directly at a person can be a blunt force trauma enough to cause death.
It was SOP in Northern Ireland to use them in grazing fire, where the round was fired at a slight downward angle, and would skip up to chest height after striking the ground , I believe. By the time the round hits , most of the kenetic energy would have been used up and the unfortunate target would basically get no more than a donkey punch.
What happened in practice varied depending on the political mood of london at the time or if enough documentation existed that showed British or Para Military forces were being generous in their interpretation of their ROE.
When I was growing up , my relatives would bring over samples of both. The plastic bullet was butter yellow in appearance and was an inch in diameter and about 4 to 5 inches long, and the full round was inside an aluminum cartridge. The rubber bullet had about the same dimensions and cartridge, but looked more deceptive because it was pliable, not soft but you could bend them slightly. The plastic rounds were solid.
Declan
I don’t know if the story is true, but so it was more likely about protecting the hostages from accidental death rather than preventing the hostage-takers from being killed. In any case, the entire rescue effort was somewhat ill-considered given the number of hostages to be extracted, the paucity of on-ground intelligence, the logistical difficulty in insertion and extraction, and the lack of training and inter-service coordination for this kind of operation especially with regard to air transport. Like the Son Tay raid, this required a lot of coordination; unlike Son Tay, the intelligence and overwatch elements just weren’t in place and US experience in particulars of desert operations was rudimentary.
Stranger
The sentence makes it sound like Carter forced them to use rubber bullets, thus the mission failed, and Vance quit in disgust of Carter’s military ineptitude.
First, even in Carter had insisted on rubber bullets, they had real bullets on the mission. Second, the failure of the mission wasn’t exactly Carter’s fault. Third, Vance submitted his resignation before the rescue attempt because he was upset that Carter attempted to use force instead of negotiation.
Given these two things,
I’m sure that the forces tasked with the mission were given “live” ammo. And someone who was thinking about it realized that if those metropolis dwellers had found out about the rescue having a “less than lethal” response option would be a really good idea.
Casualties among the armed hostage takers would have only pissed off those already pissed at “The Great Satan”. Casualties among unarmed Iranian civilians, that’s a whole 'nother story.
CMC fnord!