I can’t find this on snopes.com, but I was at a party in SF this weekend and heard this guy telling a story about how he was in some recent war (okay, I was fairly toasted and cannot recall which) in which he mistakenly called out a air strike on some cows, thinking they were people.
While I’m sure this could happen, his particular story did not have the ring of truth…in fact, the story sounds familiar. Anyone else heard this one? UL or fact (or both)?
Did he menion anything about tight bombing patterns?
I know of “a person” who served in Kuwait, long after the Gulf War. They and some others were just out cruising around in the desert, trying to see how close they could get to Iraq when they observed Iraqi warning shots being fired near them. They quickly got the H out of Dodge.
While this isn’t like your story, it does make me think that quite a bit happens in war time/places that never gets reported…
Sweet Basil
I am NOT a hacker!
My father was the Communications Officer on CLG-5 USS Oklahoma City. He said that while cruising off the coast of Vietnam, somone sighted a water buffalo on the beach. He said they shot about $250,000 worth of ammunition at it (I think they had 8" guns), only to see the poor animal run away.
He claimed this happened while he was there, but I’ve heard similar stories from other people. So. Either bored sailors/soldiers will shoot at anything to relieve the boredom, or it’s an urban legend.
Another story. I heard from a FOAF (if I know him, does that make him a “friend” for the purposes of story telling?) that when he was in Germany in the 70s or 80s, some men he knew dropped acid and “erected” (yes, that’s the term) a tactical nuclear missile just to watch the lights. They hed no intention of firing it, but the friend/FOAF claimed the action was an act of war. The men manning the missile were all court-martialed.
Finally, my squadron commander in the Civil Air Patrol (USAF Auxilliary) claimed that the prohibition of CAP personnel carrying firearms came about when he was leading a ground unit on a search for a missing aircraft. The unit came to a locked fence out in the forest and he shot the lock off. While he was enough of a bonehead to do something like that, I have no idea when the prohibition of carrying firearms (CAP is out looking to save people, fer chrissakes!) came about.
Oh yeah. The CAP was credited with damaging and possibly sinking a German U-boat off of the Atlantic coast in WWII by dropping a couple of bombs from the 1930s/1940s version of a Cessna.
OK, this thread is at best loosely on topic, so I’ll share a couple of military tales. First one’s off the 'net, so some of y’all have seen it. The story goes that the Aussies were concerned that kangaroos would be frightened by, and thus reveal, the presence of combat helicopters. So, they wanted to train their chopper pilots to avoid kangaroos. They gave the task of including kangaroos in their virtual flight training environment to the programmers, who took the already available bipedal infantry objects and dressed’em up as kangaroos. Sure enough, when the choppers popped up over a bunch of “'roos”, they scattered into the brush. And as soon as they choppers passed over, the “'roos” reappeared and commenced firing Stinger missiles at them. Funny tale, probably too good to be true.
Second one comes from a friend who was a crewman on a B-52 (last warplane with a tailgunner, I think - didn’t those Russian Tupelovs have tail gunners, also?). According to him (I have no way of knowing if this is true, although it sounds possible) there was a large white circle painted on the tarmac in the middle of which they parked the airplane. Outside of this circle, you could smoke. The '52 he flew on had some kind of heat sensitive auto-aiming aid for the tail guns. Anyway (and I recognize our handfull of Air Force vets may soon be telling me I heard one of the oldest ya-ya tales from that service) he said one night he was standing outside of the circle and lit a cigarette and heard the whir-r-r of the servos as the tail guns auto trained on him.
The kangaroo story is almost true. Yes, the programmers re-used the infantry code rather than write new code for kangaroos. Yes, the kangaroos shot at the helicopters. But! They didn’t have Stingers. Instead, they fired the “default weapon” – Beachballs!
The story says that the new simulator was being demonstrated in front of U.S. military representatives. This is false. I wish I could remember where I found the cite!
I don’t know about the B-52s, but I do know that smoking on the ramp is restricted to designated smoking areas. The reason for this is to reduce the risk of fire (lots of fumes, spilled fuel, etc. around) and to reduce FOD – “Foreign Object Damage”. Jet engines often react poorly to the ingestion of things that don’t belong in them. A butt might not cause a lot of damage, but when you have a turbine spinning at thousands of RPM I don’t know. I’m pretty sure the tail-guns have been removed from the active B-52 fleet.
Dad saw a demonstration of one of the first-generation Sidewinder heat-seaking air-to-air missiles. It was at one end of a room (or hangar deck), and a man with a lit cigarette was at the other end. The man moved the cigarette around and the missile’s maneuvering surfaces reacted.
Johnny, I recapped that from memory, but now that you mention it, I think I have seen the mention of beachballs, as well as the review in front of US military folks being a falsehood.
Yes, I think that happened in the early '80’s; my friend’s service would have been about thirty years ago.
I just e-mailed the Science and Technology person at the Australian Ministry of Defence, asking her if she had any more information on the armed kangaroos.
I’ll post it when/if I get a reply.
Or you can read about it here: http://www.snopes.com/spoons/faxlore/kangaroo.htm
Another funny bored-military-people story. I don’t remember where I got this one. I copied and pasted it from some site and threw it in a text file a while back. Not sure how true it is, but it’s funny.
"A Mexican newspaper reports that bored Royal Air Force pilots stationed on the Falkland Islands have devised what they consider a marvelous new game. Noting that the local penguins are fascinated by airplanes, the pilots search out a beach where the birds are gathered and fly slowly along it at the water’s edge. Perhaps ten thousand penguins turn their heads in unison watching the planes go by, and when the pilots turn around and fly back, the birds turn their heads in the opposite direction, like spectators at a slow-motion tennis match. Then, the paper reports, “The pilots fly out to sea and directly to the penguin colony and overfly it. Heads go up, up, up, and ten thousand penguins fall over gently onto their backs.”
I am the user formerly known as puffington.
“You can be smart or pleasant. For years I was smart.
I recommend pleasant.”
Elwood P. Dowd
neutron star wrote:
It’s one of the items in ‘fortune’. It’s also an urban legend:
Andrew Warinner
This penguins falling over story was written by Berke Breathed for his Bloom County comic strip. I don’t have my collection with me, but it was in a Sunday strip, narrated and acted by Opus. I suppose Breathed could have been recounting a story he heard, but I suspect he wrote it himself.
None of the following has anything to do with the bombing of cows.
Sure, I’m all for moderation – as long as it’s not excessive.
Well, crap, I really wanted to expose this guy as the big fat liar he is. Nobody has heard about cow-bombing? Love the kangaroo and penguin stories though.
Well eden-
You may not be able to prove he’s a liar. But you can prove he is incompetent at the least, or Just out and out stupid.
Cows were people?? What an idiot!
-Frankie
I’m a wholesale dealin papa, but I retail on the side.-Brownie McGhee
JSexton wrote:
Do you recall when this strip was first run?
I remember the story appearing in System V UNIX’s fortune (circa 1987). And Britain only stationed aircraft on the Falklands after the war, which would mean that Harrier/Falklands version (I’ve seen variations) was written after 1982.
I’d always assumed that the fortune version predated the Bloom County mention.
Curious,
Andrew Warinner
There are lots of ULs about the military. One of my favorites goes something like this: A USN F4 Phantom crew spotted a ‘bad guy’ tooling down a trail on a bicycle. The pilot was a pretty Sierra Hotel jet driver, so he let down the tail hook and used it to knock the ‘bad guy’ off the bike. Another tale involves a legendary figure known as “Black Bart”. This guy would crawl out of the crew door of a Huey in flight (with an M-60 strap attached to a harness around his waist) and peek over the top of the windscreen at the flight crew. Probably the most enduring and widespread UL in the aviation arm of the USN has to do with “The Phantom Shttr”. On aircraft carriers, aircraft are moved around by short, squat tractors that have two seats and are painted yellow. The story goes that some mornings, the operators of these tractors find uh, well, ah, piles of human excrement on the seats. I don’t remember how many times I have heard this particular story.
One of my Dad’s friends served in the Pacific during WWII. He tells the story of some panicky soldiers who saw some movement on the beach at night and tried to call in a strike on what turned out to be ghost crabs.
I believe it totally…if it were at night .I t would be hard to distinguish a group of cows from a group of people…This is how our own soldiers get killed by their own people