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Originally Posted by Dave
the army has mountains of that shit. If he didnt have any he failed for not asking
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From the article Pauldun posted:
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As one Army source put it to me, "The paratroopers sent to Wanat knew they were in big trouble. Although the battalion HQ was only 7km away, these guys lacked class 4 [construction and fortification materials], ran out of water and had little material to build up their defensive positions."
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Could barely get water, much less concertina.
The army (and the military in general) has mountains of lots of things that don't make it to the warfighter on the ground. For instance, there are thousands of airmen who never leave their FOB running around with PAC-4's, CCO's, and every other piece of fluff known to man strapped to their M-4's, while grunts running daily missions that include CQB are pimping M-16's with iron sights.
In our case, when we were going to a similar COP all we wanted were NVG's and chem lights (two things the army also has mountains of, especially chem lights). After begging and pleading and sucking the right dicks we finally got NVG's, from a captain who had no resposibility to supply us whatsoever. When we got back, we found out why we couldn't find chem lights. They were all being used at Trance Night.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Papa_Complex
I wonder if there might have been a more obvious failure there, like not properly posting sentries or something along those lines? I agree that such a forward base is a tough thing to defend, as they repeated found in Vietnam, but are we getting the whole story?
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I can guarantee you two things from personal experience:
1) When you're at a COP like that, you
don't fail to post sentries. It just won't happen.
2) If they somehow had failed to post sentries, the senior officers looking to cover their own asses by throwing this captain under the bus right now would be screaming that shit from the rooftops.