You Don't Know Jack

This story was told to me by an old friend of mine from high school that was a tank gunner in Desert Storm:

It was February of 1991. The war had been on for about three weeks and my unit had just been mobilized. We were told that this would be the largest tank battle since World War II, and we were scared as hell. All the whooping and hollering and Who Rahs had been replaced with an eerie kind of silence. These weren’t war games – we were going into combat. Our guns had a range of about a mile and a half, and we had night vision capabilities. The Iraqis had Soviet made tanks with a range of about three quarters of a mile, and they couldn’t see at night. About 40 minutes after dusk we got our orders and moved into position. We closed to about a mile, out of their range but well within ours. Not that it mattered much because they couldn’t see us anyway. We painted them, locked in the coordinates, and opened up. I was the gunner – I pressed the button. I’d like to say we fought them, but we just slaughtered them. They had no defenses and wouldn’t even have known they were under attack until they were hit. At dawn we did recon patrol. Hundreds of charred bodies in destroyed tanks. A few of them were empty – I guess they’d seen enough and fled into the desert. I hope they made it. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about the hundreds of men I killed. I think about their families and their children who probably aren’t much different than my own. I wonder how I’m going to answer for that when the bill comes due.

Today Jack drives a truck for a living.

Deathpool Dave
DPDave.com