By: David French
April 3, 2011
Imagine—if you can—the following scene:
It’s midnight, and the desert sky glows orange from the flames of the burning Humvee. Your best friend is still in there, trapped. Or at least you think he is. You can’t be sure because the burning vehicle is behind you. All of your attention is focused ahead, 200 meters to the north, where six figures crouch in an irrigation ditch. Are they hostile? Why would six people be hiding in an irrigation ditch at midnight? Are they waiting to shoot down the medevac chopper that’s on its way to—you hope, you pray—save your friend’s life?
You see movement, and you call for permission to fire.
Thirty kilometers away, the scene is very different. In a busy tactical operations center, all eyes are fixed on a grainy, flickering, black-and-white image. The UAV feed keeps fading—it’s hardly as clear as the images you saw on the news before your deployment—but you can see the Humvee aflame, the frantic efforts to free the trapped soldier (Who is it? Do you know him?), and you can also see—when the camera pans north—six ghostly figures lying down in an irrigation ditch, in a perfect position to ambush the medevac helicopter.
But you don’t see any weapons. At least not clearly. The screen flickers again. You can’t be sure. (more…)
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