Sadness of war!

[Martin Wallgren]

This article is a transscription of a tape from the US airforses from March 2003.

The swedish in the beginning just sais that.

http://www.aftonbladet.se/vss/nyheter/s ... 08,00.html

[Magnus]

Ugh, that sucks, but friendly fire is pretty hard to avoid sometimes, especially when you get told there aren't any in the area. I just hope the 2 pilots didn't get reemed too badly, I'd think killing one of your own would be bad enough punishement.

[Robert Vermaat]

Not the first time. The hogs also hit the Brits back in Kuwayt...

[Martin Wallgren]

Non of them where leagaly punished. The article in the Swedish paper where kind of imploring that was strange but that I think is our famous neutrality talking. The oppinion of that paper is that too shoot at Irakies would be just as bad, or at least they should not treat the fighting as something to cheer about. But that´s just stupid in my oppinion. Don´t wanna go into politics though so restrain myself from futher commentarys.

[Primvs Pavlvs]

"It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived."
- General George S. Patton, Jr

[Robert Vermaat]

"It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died."

But then, Patton was also the commander who struck a shell-shocked soldier and accused him of cowardice....

[Primvs Pavlvs]

:wink: Motivational technique.

However I do agree with his statement above. I have known too many real life heros from that generation to not thank God there were men like them. I consider myself lucky to have called several of them friend.

[Optio equitum]

I feel for the families of the victims, as well as the troops who fired. I have seen the after effects of blue on blue, and it is difficult.

[Carlton Bach]

I realise a lot of people will be baying for the blood of the pilots. It is never a good situation, especially when troops of another nationality are involved (and there have been entirely too many cases of Briotish troops killed or wounded by US fire lately to be entirely comfortable). Personally, i don't think that helps at all. The pilots may technically be culpable in terms of some part of their standing rules of engagement, but most of those are CYA documents. Neither do i think, though, that this issue can be left standing. In war, things like thios will happen, just like in hospitals, people will die. That does not excuse the responsible powers from their twin responsibilities of due prevention and transparent accountability. What I am afraid may happen is that someone will rake the pilot or the air controller over the coals, and that makes me sick. Isn't the whole point to the vast hydrops that is military organisation that there are layers of people with different perspectives and stress levels? What I would like to know is

a) Were any mistakes made? I rather doubt that there were, at least of the kind that we wouldn't expect under the circumstances.

b) What was done to prevent this from happening again? It is quite possible that this was simply a tragic accident, but either way there must have been follow-up, if only to come to the conclusion that there was nothing that could have been done.

c) Why did all this open discussion only happen when The Sun got their paws on the tape? I don't know if this is true, but my impression is that someone up the chain of command said 'Let's bury this' and that was done. Which is an incredibly stupid tactic, though it seems to be a widespread one.

I'd love to see some staff offcers and investigators answer questions over this one. After all, they get to sit in airconditioned offices because it's their job to provide dispassionate analysis and careful planning exactly so that frontline troops don't end up in this kind of situation.

[Robert Vermaat]

I realise a lot of people will be baying for the blood of the pilots.

Never.

An incident like this is 'fog of war', it happens, it's very difficult in a fast-moving modern war. Why do you think troops carried all those flags around, or why Romans painted their shields?

No, I just blame the military, who afterwards insisted that no tape of the incident existed, thereby lying to allies and families. :evil: Thát's truly avoidable harm!

[Caius Fabius]

This seems to be straying into modern politics.

[Tarbicus]

A lot of stress in the cockpit, it seems poor recognition training, and not helped by the controller not realising the exact area the pilots were talking about. You could tell how sickened the pilots were when they realised what had happened.

My mate in the British Forces almost got shot a while back by his own during a night op in Iraq, and that was while they were actually talking to each other on their radios. At least he lived to make it into one of the funniest anecdotes you could possibly hear. The brief 'sort of went like this' version:


"Where are they?"

"We'll fire on them."

Incident

"Cease fire! Cease fire! That's us you dickheads!"