Shocking video of a US Army infantry outpost hit the web today, showing an airstrike gone awry. The soldiers are waiting for the strike to take out a group of Taliban soldiers, when a 220kg bomb explodes just metres from their outpost.
Funker530 posted the video along with a brief interview with the soldier who was holding the camera. It all sounds incredibly horrifying:
Honestly we had dropped so many bombs up to that point that the thought never even crossed my mind that this could even happen, especially with all the checks put into place. About a half second before impact you could hear the bomb screaming in like I hadn’t ever heard before, and I definitely knew at that point something was off. After the initial realisation that it had hit behind us, we were so scatter brained trying to figure out what happened. It hit so close to the guys in the tower it actually knocked the fill out of radios.
Of course, friendly fire incidents have been all too common in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s still disturbing to know that our troops are still making mistakes that put their fellow Americans in danger. Like the camera man said, there are so many checks in place, it seems like we’d be beyond this sort of thing by now. Instead, videos like this show us how far we have to go.