As Americans, we love to the hear stories and watch the videos of our service members coming home and surprising their families at the most unexpected times, especially during the holiday season.
Whether a troop shocks their son or daughter with a school visit, surprises their family by taking the field a professional sporting event, or simply shows up, unexpected, at a social gathering — the specifics don’t matter so long as we get to watch the joy spread.
We sent our “Vet On The Street” to downtown Hollywood to find out if people could name the highest medal awarded for bravery on the battlefield. U.S. Marine Corps veteran and comic James P. Connolly got answers from locals, tourists, and even Captain America. Check it out:
A new video uploaded on Facebook likely shows German Wehrmacht artillery being used by Syrian rebels in that nation’s current civil war:
The video description doesn’t identify who is operating the weapon, but it is likely the Syrian rebels. They’ve used this tactic before. A video surfaced in May 2015 showing them using Wehrmacht artillery and they’ve also pressed valuable, antique German guns into service. And the artilleryman’s clothing bears some striking differences from government uniforms.
When most ships are decommissioned, they eventually will head to the scrapyard. Mostly, their fate is to become razor blades.
Others become artificial reefs, providing a tourist attraction for divers and a home for fish. But some vessels escape these fates for a more noble end: They are sunk as targets.
And that’s not new.
Back in the early 1920s, the United States used old battleships as targets to test how well air-dropped bombs could sink ships. In fact, since the end of World War II, ships have been sunk as targets – often to test how well current or new weapons work, or to provide crews with training that is quite realistic in using their anti-surface warfare systems.
The 1946 Operation Crossroads was perhaps one of the most dramatic examples. In two tests, the Navy detonated atomic bombs amongst a fleet of obsolete ships, including the Japanese battleship Nagato, the German cruiser Prinz Eugen, and the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga (CV 3). A total of 14 ships sank outright, while the Prinz Eugen sank five months later.
Perhaps the largest ship to be sunk as a target was the aircraft carrier USS America (CV 66). This ship displaced almost 85,000 tons when fully loaded, and had a 31-year career, including service in the Vietnam War, Operation El Dorado Canyon, and Desert Storm.
On May 14, 2005, the America was sunk after the testing by controlled scuttling, which included remote systems monitoring the effects of underwater explosions that took place over four weeks.
The video below shows the sinking of a pair of Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates and a Newport-class landing ship. Often smaller systems will be used before they unleash the really powerful missiles – and last, but not least, the torpedoes.
“You always get enemy snipers,” says Roy Cadman, a WWII veteran of Britain’s No. 3 Commando, talking about fighting the Nazis in Europe. “… And they’re a bloody nuisance.”
Cadman is a 93-year-old Chelsea pensioner, a resident at the Royal Hospital Chelsea, which is a nursing care facility for veterans of the British Army of an advanced age.
In the video below, he explains that you hear the crack of the bullets before the discharge of the sniper’s rifle in the distance. The distance between the two sounds helps determine how far you are from the sniper shooting at you.
“You can work out the distance,” Cadman continues, “but you can’t work out the angle of where he is. You have to look out at that distance from your right. If you were him, where would you go?”
The idea is to find a place where a sniper would hide himself in a European battle, things like bushes, houses or roofs. Cadman explains that it’s a skill the Tommies learned and honed over time, learning exactly where to look.
In other interviews, the old, bold commando also told the Army Museum about his landing at Sword Beach on D-Day, how he joined the British Army at age 17, and how to scale cliffs, build bridges, and span rivers with a simple length of rope.
He notably returned to Normandy in June 2016 to spread the ashes of his departed No. 3 Commando comrade Fred Walker.
The video is one of many from the U.K. National Army Museum’s “The Old and the Bold” series, where veterans of World War II and the Korean War share their stories and experiences from the battlefield.
Got Your 6 Storytellers came to Los Angeles to host a showcase of talent from some our country’s brightest, finest, and most groundbreaking veterans.
The event gave an opportunity to the veterans that are making a change in the military community to share their journey, and for the community to celebrate their success and accomplishments.
WATM hosted groups of veterans to answer several questions about their time in the military. The vets kept it real when responding to topics ranging from relationships to recruiters, to annoying stereotypes.
In this episode, our group of veterans discusses the various military stereotypes they’ve encountered from civilians over the years.
Editor’s note: If you have ideas for questions that you’d like to see a group of veterans answer, please leave a comment below.
After that, an intense arms race erupted to counter this devastating threat to ships.
The Styx is a primitive missile. According to GlobalSecurity.org, it has a range of up to 54 nautical miles, based on the variant, and travels at 90 percent of the speed of sound, or around 600 miles per hour. It is radar-guided. While primitive, it can carry a 1,000-pound warhead, or roughly the same amount of high-explosives in a Mk 84 2,000-pound bomb.
The Styx is perhaps the most common of the early Russian-style anti-ship missiles out there. Versions have been made in China and North Korea.
The Phalanx Close-In Weapons system.
The best way to kill the Styx – or any anti-ship missile – is to kill the platform carrying them before the missiles are launched. Second-best is to use missiles to kill the other missiles far away.
But sometimes, you don’t get to choose one of those options. Sometimes, the missile gets too close to use missiles.
That is where the Mk 15 Phalanx Close-In Weapon System comes in. This is essentially a self-contained package containing the targeting system, ammo, and a M61 Gatling gun – the same gun used on legendary warplanes like the F-4 Phantom, F-15 Eagle, F/A-18 Hornet, and F-16 Fighting Falcon.
A version is also used by the Army to shoot down rockets and mortar rounds.
Soldiers from Battery A, 2nd Battalion, 44th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, 101st Sustainment Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), load ammunition into a Land-Based Phalanx Weapon System during early December, at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. (U.S. Army photo by 1st Lt. Lee-Ann Craig, 2nd Battalion, 44th Air Defense Artillery Regiment)
The Phalanx has a top range of just under three and a half miles, but it is really only effective for just under a mile. In essence, it has six seconds to kill the target.
Fortunately, the M61 can spew out a lot of bullets in a very short period of time — up to 75 a second. Killing the missile will protect a ship from the worst of the impact, but the ship will be hurt.
However, fragment damage beats having a huge hole blown into a ship. And a damaged ship can be fixed and return to the front. Ships that are sunk are lost forever. You can see the Phalanx do its thing in the video below.
Sure, sure, when you’re a fetus the water is balmy and occasionally they play Mozart in the pool. But you can’t knock a fetus’s breath holding record, now can you? What was yours last time you did pool training? Was it 9 months? And at the end of it, did you just bob like a big, doughy man-pontoon buoyantly to the surface or did you, like a fetus, get flushed down the drain hole, slapped till you screamed and then circumcised? So yeah, a fetus is tougher than you when it comes to amphibious operational readiness.
And we cry when they give us baths. We cry when they give us haircuts. We cry when they remove the kitten’s head from our mouths. We turn into babies and babies are wimps.
Water Survival, then, is just an easy way for the military to remind us soft adults how to be hard again. Hard like a fetus. It’s how they take us back to our Original Toughness, like when we did nine month tours of duty guarding the subterranean door to Fort Uterus.
You’ve probably caught the drift of the incontinents here, but Max was Captain of that particular detail. And we’re gonna tell you all about it, as soon as he puts you through some dryland drills designed to get your core up to code. Because this is stage 1 of Operation Fetal Preparedness.
Allow this man a moment to get fetal. (Go90 Max Your Body screenshot)
POWs have done some innovative things over the years to free themselves from captivity and get back into the fight. Here are four of the most daring escapes in military history.
The objective of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was to eliminate the United States Navy’s Pacific Fleet as an effective fighting force. This would enable Japan to take the Dutch East Indies and secure China without effective opposition. As history shows, however, that didn’t work out too well for Japan. But there are effective ways to keep an enemy fleet bottled up.
One of the best methods is to make moving out of a harbor a hazardous venture. There are a few ways to do that – one is by parking subs outside the harbor and firing torpedoes at any ship that comes in. The problem here is that the subs can be sunk or driven away — and the enemy fleet is now out and hunting your ships. There is, however, a much more long-lasting way to keep enemy ships in their harbor that doesn’t risk a sub and its crew.
A B-52 drops Quick Strike mines during a Team Spirit exercise. (DOD photo)
You lay mines. It can be done many ways, but you’re best off using submarine-laid mines or air-dropped mines. The submarine approach is best for when you don’t want the enemy to know what’s in store. Something going boom quickly tells the enemy that this isn’t a bluff. Submarines can carry two mines for every torpedo and can quickly shut down an enemy harbor, even if they can’t carpet the entire area.
Airmen from the 42nd Munitions Maintenance Squadron prepare to load a Mark 60 CAPTOR (encapsulated torpedo) anti-submarine mine onto a 42nd Bombardment Wing B-52G Stratofortress aircraft during Ghost Warrior, a joint Air Force/Navy exercise conducted during the base’s conventional operational readiness inspection. (USAF photo)
The other option is to drop the mines from planes. This is a significantly more conspicuous method but, as Tom Clancy commented his book Submarine, sometimes, all you really need is a press release. Watching mines get dropped into nearby waters is sure to shut down movement. Today, the primary air-dropped mines the United States uses are the Quickstrike series – modified dumb bombs.
Here’s what makes using those mines extra appealing: A B-2A Spirit can carry a few dozen 500-pound bombs in a single sortie, and a Mk 62 Quickstrike mine is little more than an Mk 82 bomb with a different fusing arrangement.
A Douglas A-1 Skyraider with three Mk 25 air-dropped mines. (US Navy photo)
The use of air-dropped mines has a long history and was used prolifically during World War II.
Check out the video below to see some historical, airborne mine deployment.
The wholly irreverent, veteran-fueled, zombie killing adventure ‘Range 15’ hit Los Angeles last week – and We Are The Mighty was invited to the party. WATM host Weston Scott ripped off his sleeves and dove into the fun with the guys of Article 15 and Ranger Up, taking over Ye Rustic Inn before taking over the red carpet at the Vista Theater in Hollywood.
Enjoy this look behind the scenes of “the most decorated movie of all times” (as Ranger Up!’s Nick Palmisciano puts it).
Iraqi armed forces have pushed out Daesh from Tal Afar city while some parts of the district bearing the same name remain under the terrorist group’s control, a senior army official said Aug. 27.
“Joint forces of the army and the Hashd al-Shaabi — a pro-government Shia militia — have liberated two neighborhoods of Al-Askari and the Al-Senaa Al-Shamaliya, as well as the Al-Maaredh area, Tal Afar Gate, and the Al-Rahma village in the eastern part of the city,” Lt. Gen. Abdul-Amir Yarallah, Mosul operation commander, said in a televised statement.
While all parts of the city have been recaptured, fighting for control of some parts of Tal Afar district continues.
Troops on the streets of Tal Afar, Iraq. Photo courtesy of DoD.
Yarallah said only the Al-Ayadieh area and its surrounding villages in the district now remain in Daesh’s grip, adding the armed forces were advancing “towards the last targets in order to liberate them”.
On Aug. 27, the Iraqi government launched a major offensive to retake Tal Afar, involving army troops, federal police units, counter-terrorism forces and armed members of Hashd al-Shaabi — a largely Shia force that was incorporated into the Iraqi army last year.
A member of the Iraqi Security Forces establishes a security perimeter around an HH-60M Black Hawk helicopter. Photo by Capt. Stephen James.
Ministry of Displacement and Migration official Zuhair Talal al-Salem told Anadolu Agency 1,500 people fled the district’s surrounding villages and areas.
“The displaced people were transferred from security checkpoints to Nimrod camp, where they are receiving relief assistance,” Al-Salem said.
Nimrud camp in the southeast of Mosul is said to have a capacity to house 3,000 families.
The ministry transferred some 500 displaced families to the camp after checking their names August 26 in the district of Hamam al-Alil, south of Mosul.
