Darrell's weblog

I was feeling rather nostalgic this weekend, so I started digging through some of my old Army pictures. I realized that this would be much simpler if only the pictures were in digital format, and in my gallery online. This would make viewing them a bit easier, and (more importantly) would allow me to con unsuspecting bystanders into listening to my war stories. The only problem is, there are about 100 or so pics that I’d like to scan, and I’m far too lazy to scan them all myself. Hmm… Well I’m not that lazy, so I scanned one picture and I’ll even attach a story to it (don’t worry, it’s short).

A couple of days after the ground war was over (early March, 1991), our Scout section (OH-58C Kiowas) started taking people on flights around a few battlefields to take pictures. I suppose the commander thought it would be good for morale or something, since most of us never got to see much of anything. So my friend Paul and I hopped into a Kiowa and off we went. I think I took a whole roll of pictures, mostly of destroyed or abandoned Iraqi vehicles, but we also saw a pair of M1 Abrams tanks. One appeared undamaged, but was nevertheless abandoned (probably mechanical trouble), but we found another that had obviously been hit by something painful and had burned up. Now, if you look back into the data, you’ll find that no M1 Abrams tanks were lost due to enemy fire during Operation Desert Storm, which really makes me wonder what happened to this one:

So anyway, either I’ll get motivated and start scanning pictures, or I’ll see if I can talk Heather into doing …er helping me do it in the near future.