Engaging a target with a grenade couldn’t be simpler, you pull the pin and throw it. Yet for some weird reason, perhaps out of fear or fascination, it doesn’t always go so smooth.
U.S. Army weaponeers designed modern grenades like balls to capitalize on soldiers’ experience with sports. Today soldiers typically refer to the small bomb as a “baseball grenade” because of its size and overall feel. The Army even experimented with football shaped anti-tank grenades during the 1960s. Perhaps they foresaw baseball’s decline as America’s past time and the rise of football.
It’s dangerous when you don’t do it right but also entertaining. Regardless, it shouldn’t be as hard as the people in this video make it out to be.
To paraphrase Forrest Gump, military surplus gear is like a box of chocolates — you never know what’s inside until you open it up and look.
For one lucky buyer, Nick Mead, who owns a tank-driving experience business in the United Kingdom, a $38,000 purchase of a Chinese-built Type 69 main battle tank off of eBay was a bargain, since he scored $2,592,010 of gold that had been hidden in the vehicle’s diesel tank! That represents a net profit of over $2.55 million.
Chinese Type 69 tank. (Photo from National Defense University)
According to militaryfactory.com, a battle-ready Type 69 main battle tank is armed with a 100mm gun, a 7.62mm machine gun, and can be equipped with a 12.7mm machine gun. The tank has a crew of four. Over 4,700 of these tanks were produced by China.
But this tank, while produced by China, was exported to Saddam Hussein’s regime. Saddam bought as many as 2,500 Type 59 and Type 69 tanks. While many were destroyed during Operation Desert Storm, this one survived the BRRRRRT!
Marines look over a captured Iraqi Type 69 tank. (DOD photo)
The tank is believed to have also taken part in the original invasion of Kuwait. During the occupation of that country, Iraqi forces looted just about everything that wasn’t blasted apart. That included gold and other valuables.
Mead discovered the gold when checking out the tank after he’d been told by the tank’s previous owner that he’s discovered some machine-gun ammo on board. Mead then discovered the gold hidden in the fuel tank.
Nick Mead holds one of the gold bars he discovered when checking out the Type 69 tank he bought on eBay. (Youtube screenshot)
Currently the five bars of gold, each weighing about 12 pounds, are in police custody as they try to trace the original owners.
During the Wild West, many towns popped up along the trail and eventually went on to become ghost towns. Military bases, though, have sometimes become “ghost bases” – abandoned and left to rot.
Some of these ghost bases are near cities like the Big Apple. Others, like Johnston Atoll, are pretty far off – a nice getaway spot, if not for the history of being used as a storage center for Agent Orange and other interesting stuff.
Barrels of Agent Orange being stored at Johnston Atoll. (U.S. government photo)
The climates can be very different – from the burning sands of Johnston Atoll to the frozen flatlands of North Dakota, where America briefly operated a ballistic-missile defense system known as SAFEGUARD.
One base in Croatia that once was home for almost 50 fighter jets was abandoned during the Yugoslav civil war of 1991 – and the wrecks are mostly used by folks seeking some adventure. That base still gets “official” use for law enforcement training.
A damaged runway at the Zeljava Air Base in Croatia. (Photo from Wikimedia Commons)
You can even check out one abandoned facility that will soon fall into the Pacific. No, not Johnston Atoll (it was a re-claimed coral atoll built over the years long before China did the same thing in the South China Sea), but instead the Devil’s Slide bunker on the California coast. A lack of maintenance and the natural process of erosion will eventually send this coastal-defense bunker tumbling from commanding heights and into the Pacific.
But if you want one “ghost base” that has captured imaginations worldwide, you can go to either the Ukraine or Siberia to see the Duga Radar Array – an early-warning system meant to detect American missiles. Or just pick up the video games “Call of Duty: Black Ops” and “Stalker” to see representations of the array used.
The Duga Radar Array near Chernobyl. (Photo from Wikimedia Commons)
So, take a peek at this video that tells more about these and some other “ghost bases” – and tell us which “ghost base” you would like to know more about.
After years of threatening to cut funding to the A-10 program and funnel the money to the newer F-35 Lightning II, the Air Force seems to have finally faced facts — the A-10 is just too effective to remove from the inventory.
Air Force Materiel Command chief Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski recently told Aviation Week that the depot line that maintains and repairs the Air Force’s 283 A-10 Thunderbolt IIs has been reopened to full capacity.
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.
In this episode, our group of veterans discusses which among the other branches they’d join – or which ones they’d never dream of joining – if they had to do it all over again.
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.
Clifton Hoffler is an Army veteran and alumnus of the Armed Services Arts Partnership (ASAP) Comedy Bootcamp program. ASAP is an organization based in Virginia that builds communities for veterans, servicemembers, and military families through classes, performances, and partnerships in the arts. As part of their mission, ASAP offers a Comedy Bootcamp for veterans to explore and develop their comedic abilities.Clifton is a minister, chef, and Army veteran who served more than twenty years – including multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, with the help of ASAP’s Comedy Bootcamp program, he’s adding standup comedian to his resume. For Clif, getting up on stage is another opportunity to adapt and overcome. It’s an important form of therapy and a way to better his health, and he encourages other veterans to learn to laugh because laughter “is the best medicine that’s out there.”
We Are The Mighty is proud to announce “Max Your Body,” a fitness series exclusively on Verizon’s Go90 platform featuring U.S Army veteran and elite personal trainer Max Philisaire showing how to train for some of the most demanding military missions. In this first episode, Max demonstrates a few exercises that help to steady your rifle to improve stability and aim.
Philisaire was born in Haiti to an Afro-Haitian father and mother. At the tender age of 8, his parents migrated to south Florida. Max is a highly certified fitness expert with over 12 years of body building experience. He is also a U.S. Military combat war veteran. While deployed overseas, he used his bodybuilding training as a survival tool to keep himself and his fellow soldiers motivated.
New episodes of “Max Your Body” will be available only on the Go90 platform. Each Tuesday for the next 10 weeks, We Are The Mighty will present a new episode of “Max Your Body,” a military-inspired workout series where Max demonstrates training methods for some of the most demanding military missions.
Download the Go90 app on your mobile device from the iTunes or Google Play store, or head over to go90.com to access We Are the Mighty’s exclusive Go90 content like “Elite Forces,” “Hurry Up and Watch,” and “Max Your Body” — and stay tuned for even more original WATM content available only on Go90.
In the event World War III broke out between the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Sweden intended to remain neutral.
After all, they’d managed to sit out World Wars I and II.
An underside view of a Swedish Saab 37 Viggen fighter aircraft during Exercise BALTOPS ’85. (US Navy photo)
But there’s also a growing recognition that their neutrality would not be respected. A 2015 New York Times report noted that a Russian submarine sank in Swedish waters in 1916 after colliding with a Swedish vessel. In the 1980s, there were also a number of incidents, the most notorious being “Whiskey on the Rocks.” According to WarHistoryOnline.com, a Soviet Whiskey-class diesel-electric submarine ran aground off the Swedish coast in 1981, prompting a standoff between Swedish and Soviet forces that included scrambling fighters armed with anti-ship missiles.
The Soviets knew Sweden could threaten their northern flank, and the Swedes knew that they may well have to fight the Soviet Union, even though they were neutral. Should a NATO-Warsaw Pact war break out, the Swedes made contingency plans to be able to deploy their Air Force, and keep fighting in the event the Soviets attacked.
The new approach was called “Airbase System 90” or “Bas 90” and featured not only dispersal of the aircraft, but the widening of roads to allow them to be used as runways.
Below is a video produced by the Flygvapnet discussing the new system. While the audio is in Swedish, it has English captions.
Nerd-god Joss Whedon brings us an action movie jam-packed with our favorite superheroes – The Avengers! It’s complete with Norse gods, Robin from “How I Met Your Mother,” alien space worms, and just a dash of Hulk smash. Check out ‘The Avengers’ in under three minutes!
And this is just an early part of the series. Want to watch the new stuff?
WATM now has exclusive content featured on Verizon’s Go90 streaming app! Just download the app, log in, and search for “Hurry Up and Watch” to find more episodes. Each Wednesday, for the next twelve weeks, a new episode will release on Go90 exclusively. You won’t find it anywhere else, so get it there before the rest of your posse does.
Though not technically the first submachine gun deployed in combat, the German army’s Machinenpistole 40, or MP40, is certainly one of the most recognizable.
From 1940’s-era newsreel clips to just about every World War II movie ever made, the iconic MP40 has become synonymous with the Nazi troops that conquered Europe. Loosely derived from the earlier MP18 which was deployed late in World War I as a trench sweeper for the German army, the MP40 fires a 9mm pistol round out of a nearly 10-inch barrel.
That’s a good combo for an accurate, easy to control weapon. Add on a full-length folding stock and the MP40 stands as one of the most devastating submachine guns ever built.
But there’s more to it than that. The MP40 had a very heavy bolt that combined with the weapon’s auto-only operating system to make for a slow rate of fire that allowed the shooter to control muzzle rise and stay on target.
Watch this operator fire an MP40 and see for yourself how this early submachine gun design withstands the test of time.
In 2001, as was the case six decades earlier, the United States got hit by an unprovoked and dastardly attack. The video starts with a quote from Thomas Jefferson about the tree of liberty.
Following that is a clip from the movie “Tora! Tora! Tora!” in which Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto reacts to the news that the United States Navy was hit by surprise at Pearl Harbor, complete with his famous “sleeping giant” comments.
A U.S. Navy (USN) F-14D Tomcat aircraft flies a combat mission in support of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM.
We then get close to ten minutes of action, much of which focuses on the F-14. Aviation historian Joe Baugher noted that the F-14 had its first operational cruise in 1974. Its primary weapon was the AIM-54 Phoenix missile – which had a range of 80 nautical miles, per Designation-Systems.net.
Baugher notes that the U.S. Navy’s Tomcat scored five air-to-air kills – two Su-22 Fitters in 1981, two MiG-23s in 1989, and a Mi-8 during Desert Storm. In a stunning decision, work on F-14D production was inexplicably halted in February, 1991 (the excuse given was that is was an “economy move”).
The F-14 soon found itself being phased out, and in 2006, the Navy retired the plane after 32 years of service. Many of the planes were scrapped to keep components from falling into Iranian hands.
Here’s the video featuring the F-14. Enjoy and give us a shout if you worked with these airframes!
A damaged runway at the Zeljava Air Base in Croatia. (Photo from Wikimedia Commons)
