Troops bogged down playing at marines

[Tymi 0]

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/content_objectid=13674265_method=full_sitead=50143_headline=-TROOPS-BOGGED-DOWN-PLAYING-AT-MARINES-name_page.html

TROOPS BOGGED DOWN PLAYING AT MARINES

Nov 29 2003

From Tom Newton Dunn Defence Correspondent, In Basra

 

AN Army bid to outdo their Navy commando rivals has been shelved - after an experiment went disastrously wrong.

Top brass had hoped to equal the Royal Marines' expertise by developing their own amphibious warfare unit.

But troops used in the mock beach landing were more SOS than SBS - Special Boat Service - when they needed rescuing after sinking to their waists in liquid mud.

These pictures - captured by a squaddie filming the hapless operation - show the extent of the flop. It is thought senior officers ordered the trials in southern Iraq after seeing the marines dominate headlines.

Their humiliation was complete when the soldiers - from 40 Regiment, Royal Artillery, based at Topcliffe, North Yorks - collapsed laughing when it went so wrong. They got the giggles as the lifejackets of two men stuck in mud inflated by accident.

In the video, one joking soldier even tries a few crawl strokes to try to get out. The footage was sent across the armed forces by email.

It had the Chumbawumba song Tub Thumping dubbed on as a soundtrack with the words, "I get knocked down, then I get up again," blaring out.

Not surprisingly, those who enjoyed watching it the most were Royal Marines commandos.

One marine sergeant said: "I don't think we've got much to worry about, do you? They really should leave this sort of thing to the experts. I don't think we need we say anymore."

The shambles, blamed on poor beach reconnaissance, took place on the Al Faw peninsula, where the troops have now ended a five-month tour of duty.

Army chiefs have since stopped the trials. An official said: "I don't believe we'll be doing any more."

And the video: http://images.icnetwork.co.uk/docs....000.mpg

Funny stuff

[Badgerboy 0]

Classic!

Watch out Saddam, the mud skippers are coming!

[bn880 5]

not bad at all. Actually LMAO!!

[Winters 1]

OMG thats just freaking hysterical

[hellfish6 7]

I love how they laugh at themselves.

[Consigliere 0]

But troops used in the mock beach landing were more SOS than SBS - Special Boat Service - when they needed rescuing after sinking to their waists in liquid mud.

But the SBS is an entirely different unit than the Royal Marines

Anyway : LOL

[Placebo 29]

Hehehe that was excellent, and yes it was cool they were laughing at themselves, they'd have looked much stupider if they'd tried to act all tough and soldier like

Anyone notice the lil froggy jumping about? Great that the nation's finest can't even scare a lil amphibian

[ran 0]

in france we rarely have cameras around when we try something new , that way when there's a fuck up , it doesn't make the headline and can't be found in senior officers e-mail boxes .......

if you only knew how much of our experiments fucked up in funny ways .....

in Djibouti , we've had the same kind of problem i remember ,e xcept that we had stuck the zodiac boat in the mud along with us , had to take a whole day to take us out along with the zodiac

in Guyana we once tried to make aerial paths using jungle vegetation , our squad leader ended up hung by the feet to some kind of tropical tree

in Bosnia we tried to paint a big white UN sign on a large blue cloth to use as cover for our trucs , the paint faded and we ended up with a blue cloth having a large white stain in the middle as truc cover

we tried to blow a mortar nest with some explosives and the result ..... we had a new LZ ....

etc etc etc .....

hopefully all that didn't make it to the senior officers' ears and to the headlines

[ran 0]

Anyone notice the lil froggy jumping about? Great that the nation's finest can't even scare a lil amphibian

noticed her

GO FROGGY GO ! BITE THEIR FACE

[theavonlady 2]

Anyone notice the lil froggy jumping about?

If you listen carefully, you can hear it croaking "kneedeep, kneedeep".

[OG_Killer 0]

LoL  

They are shooting with mud

OG

[denoir 0]

Hehe, prettty funny but that type of thing happens all the time. It's just that the military doesn't usually allow cameras around.

For instance a recurring SNAFU with my old unit is when a special type of beach landing is trained for the first time. It's called "vĺldsam landstigning" - meaning "violent beach landing" and is the standard way of deploying Kustjägare (costal rangers) into a hotzone.

The basic procedure is that a number of stridsbĺt 90 charge towards the beach head. They smash the place up with 12.7's and mortars mounted on the boats. They then ram the beach head, making a crash-stop a second before they hit ground (SB90 can make a stop fron 30 knots on a distance less than half the lenght of the boat). At the same time they crash-stop, they open up the front and costal rangers rush onto the beach. In theory.

The first time we did this we had seven boats (type H) and about 20 costal rangers in each. The thing is that when the boat makes a crash-stop the front of the boat is already opening up and you're supposed to use the momentum to rush out. When doing this the first time people don't have a clue of how to really position their bodies and to make themselves perpared.

So what happend was that the first person in six of the seven boats tripped and consequently everybody in the line behind him fell over. Within seconds everybody was lying on the ground in big heaps unable to get out due to the shitload of equipment that everybody was carrying.

The seventh boat, in which I was in had another problem. The boat driver chickened out when charging to the beach and made a crash-stop too early. And then he flung full reverse and four of us in the front flew down in the water.

About a year later I saw another batch of kustjägare doing this for the first time. And exactly the same thing happend. Now a vĺldsam landstigning looks damn impressive when everything clicks, but I can tell you that I've never laughed so much in my life as when I saw that failed excersise.

Another thing that was full of funny mistakes was with the combat divers - everything that had some form of teamwork involved was a disaster when we started training. etc etc

[walker 0]

Hi all

Normal process for UK Marine commandos is for the SBS to do a beach survey of all possible landing beaches. They do a complete hydrographic suvrey. An underwater ordimance survey map.

It includes beach composition samples of the Mud/Sand/Pebbles, pentration and core samples, low and high water marks, surf type, riptides and currents, vehicle and person access points including surveys up to and beyond nearest roads, position and type of all enemy beach defences etc. That is only a partial list.

They do these surveys all the time even of alies (in case they get invaded)

This has been the main job of the SBS since WWII the US relied on the UK for all of this until the SEALS were formed in the 1960s. The maps of all the invasion beaches in Normandy were done by this group they are more secret than the SAS and COPPs teams that do it are the most elite of SBS. They rarely get involved in fire fights. They use rebreathers, mini subs, and even semi-submersible and submersible canoes for a stealthy aproach. If the US wanted a team to do the same Job they would do well to look to the Inuit one of the most experienced ocean traveling peoples in the world. (There is a even suposedly a case of an Inuit traveling by canoe from North America to Scotland in the 1930s. I will do a search to try and verify it)

Anyway what I am saying is the whole point of this is that the army are not the best persons to be employed doing initial beach landings the UK have a Royal Marine Commando force to do that. It has the SBS survey teams and is married to the Navy for the pupose.

Kind Regards Walker

[ran 0]

Hehe, prettty funny but that type of thing happens all the time. It's just that the military doesn't usually allow cameras around.

[...]

The first time we did this

[...]

well ... first times are always hard in this kind of exercises which require some basic knowledge on the various procedures to follow , knowledge you don't always have and which comes with personal experience ......

during my conscript service , i remember how me and the 9 other soldier who had to jump out from a slow moving AMX10 fell almost all at once face on the ground because the first to men had stuck their feet in the small part under the actual door , it was on a country path during a rainy March day ....

[bn880 5]

Yes they are not the best for it, but they can pick up and plan/train for it yet. It's funny but nothing really unusual there, I can't figure out exactly why the CO said they would not be trying it again other than for the fun factor. Ok, I agree don't try it right there, if you do better place something to walk on... or do what Denoirs team does, launch yourself like off a catapult.

Either way, nothing to stop a person from popping up with an RPG and firing one off with the slow landing... (they might not get him with the MG's)

[ran 0]

this wouldn't have happened if some desk generals didn't want their boys to do what isn't their job

it's a real shame the camera was here i think but on the other hand it will prevent the people who requested the experiment to actually put this doctrine in place which could lead to some nasty slaughters on beaches assaulted by their forces

[ran 0]

Either way, nothing to stop a person from popping up with an RPG and firing one off with the slow landing... (they might not get him with the MG's)

that's war for you , 50% skills , 50% luck

[bn880 5]

yeah...

edit (50% man, 50% statistic)

[Sharia 0]

I don't think jumping down from that landing boat was really a well thought out idea. The way the soldier to (our) far left is all tangled up in his inflatable vest.

Soldier 1: Hmm, the shore seems to be consuming my legs.

Soldier 2: Oh, I am sorry.

Soldier 1: Oh it's quite all right, I've grown quite tired of living.

Soldier 2: Very well then. Is it raining again?

[Tamme 0]

One of the soldiers looked like he was going to shoot the cameraman.

Good they have a sense of humour. They can laugh at them selves and that's good.

[Munk 0]

PML!

Wouldn't you stop when you saw what happend to the first bloke?

[ran 0]

Wouldn't you stop when you saw what happend to the first bloke?  

i would have joined the fun (well , i would have left my gun and other sensitive gear on the boat though)

i've always loved mud since my basic training

[DracoPaladore 0]

Wouldn't you stop when you saw what happend to the first bloke?  

Don't think they were paying too much attention to the first guy considering that the idea is to get off the boat as fast as you can.

That is, unless your waist deep in mud.

Feel sorry for that poor guy at the end who had to be dragged out by a couple others in that liquid soapy mess.

[ralphwiggum 6]

we tried to blow a mortar nest with some explosives and the result ..... we had a new LZ ....

i don't see a fuck up....

The boat driver chickened out when charging to the beach and made a crash-stop too early. And then he flung full reverse and four of us in the front flew down in the water.

<snip>

Another thing that was full of funny mistakes was with the combat divers - everything that had some form of teamwork involved was a disaster when we started training. etc etc

guess Norway can breate a sigh of releif.

[ran 0]

we tried to blow a mortar nest with some explosives and the result ..... we had a new LZ ....

i don't see a fuck up....  

it was a single fortified serb mortar nest ...... we've completely cleaned the area in a 15 meters radius blasting half a dozen trees including 2 10m high pine trees hopefully when we detonated the charge we were behind some rock formation which formed some kind of small trench 50 meters away .....

that's what happens when you put too much Plastrite and mortar rounds in the same place and you detonate them ......

well , it wasn't really like a LZ .... you don't land choppers in craters i think (apparently , the one who had set the charges up messed up their installation so the crater was bigger than what we hoped , it was about 1.50 meter deep , our explosive "specialist" apparently laid the charges down ) , anyway there was way too much explosives , we've had to justify the lack of 4 full plastrite breads ......