Our British Cousins In Iraq Having Some Fun

[bird1]

Is This The Way To Armadillo? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN1mIerM1BQ

[Piggybank Cop]

Spent some time with them in the Oman; they are crazy.

[Roses]

Cute!

[Trojan 42]

There's another one like that knocking around. Done by the Navy using Bohemian Rhapsody.

[Pedro56]

You know whats funny, is they are over there in all that sun and they are still pasty white.

[Trojan 42]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pHsZqqZ2XE

Bohemian Rhapsody, I particularly like the Hel Pilots Headbanging.

[Trojan 42]

The best song ever written, in my not too humble opinion.

[Motorwaycop]

You know whats funny, is they are over there in all that sun and they are still pasty white.

It's genetic you know.

We are specially bred under grey skies!

[countybear]

The brit's legendary sense of humor strikes again.

Hilarious.

[Willowdared]

Ha! I've seen Amarillo before, but not the other one!

Sweet!

Here's another favorite of mine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0dNob5mVz0

[Virginian]

What's the Brit obsession with that song? There's like 15 versions on Youtube all done by Brits lol.

[Virginian]

The Dutch in Afghanistan did the same thing!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGjFvSzaNIo

[bird1]

The Royal Dragoons Guards did it better. when i was stationed in Germany we were on a British post with the 39th Royal Artillery ( Dempsey Barracks ). Munster, Germany wasn't far from us and i met alot of guys from the Dragoons. most of those guys were nice to us yanks

[Doc_au]

I liked the Bohemian Rhapsody vid. Two things I did notice was there were NO enlisted men or women in the click, only grunters and there were grunters playing uckers, NEVER seen that ever happen.

[Trojan 42]

Article from one of our Newspapers, that may be of interest.


March 09, 2007

IT’S been 16 years since SAS hero and Sun Security Advisor Andy McNab was captured behind enemy lines in Iraq after a Scud-hunting mission went wrong.

For this special dispatch, he agreed to go back on to the war-torn nation’s mean streets to join up with his old regular infantry unit – the 2nd Battalion, the Rifles.

Here, he reveals the truth about what life is really like for Our Boys on the ever-more dangerous front line that is Basra today.

RIFLEMAN Steve Turner pokes his head round a gap in a wall, knowing full well it could be taken off by a 7.62mm round any second.

It’s B Company’s third visit in as many weeks to check on Al Asher police station in the heart of Basra’s rebel stronghold. On both previous occasions, a lone sniper put a bullet into one of their soldiers. It was odds on that he would strike again.

Sticking your head out to cover open and hostile ground to look out for your mates takes guts. And this lad from Liverpool is only 20 years old.

For Steve, though, it was nothing special.

With a shrug he told me: “It’s me job, Andy. If I didn’t do it, who else would be looking out for the lads?”

I spent eight years with the Rifles before I passed SAS selection and went down to Hereford. Back then, they were known as the Royal Green Jackets, and had a strong reputation for being a tough and highly professional unit.

These days, though, all you ever hear in the UK is doom and gloom for troops in southern Iraq.

The TV news makes it sound like they’re about to top themselves with misery and are begging to come home.

Oh really? Well, that’s not the infantry I knew and loved. The more I thought about it, the more the suggestion of it p***ed me off.

Rather than hearing from the dozens of armchair generals, I wanted to come out and see it for myself. Living and taking fire with the guys for seven days, it became clear that the cr*p I thought the talking heads were spewing was just that.

I saw with my own eyes just how up for the fight these young men really are.

That’s no bad thing — because they’ve got one big fight on their hands all right.

Bush hats, smiles and giving out sweets to kids is history. Instead, it’s helmets, bullets and only heavily armoured fighting vehicles on the streets now. The battalion is half-way through the bloodiest six-month tour of duty in the city since the 2003 liberation.

Sick of taking hit after hit from the Shia extremists, commanders have told troops to take the fight back to them.

For B Company alone, that has meant brassing up the fanatics with an incredible 15,000 rounds already — and they’ve still got three months to go.

As one warrant officer from Yorkshire put it to me: “First we tried softly softly, but that didn’t work. Then we did hearts and minds, and that didn’t work either.
“Now we’re giving them a f***ing slapping. They’ll listen to that all right.”

Going after the bad guys means strike operations — tracking the insurgents down, kicking their doors in and nicking them. To date, troops have launched a total of 55 different strike ops in the last five months. When I was in, that sort of highly skilled work was the preserve of the Special Forces, but the Rifles proved themselves more than capable of it.

In turn, when they are attacked, they turn the battle round and kill them.

Rifleman Paul Livingstone, 20, from Somerset, is a fantastic example.

He has only fired six rounds from his SA80 assault rifle so far, but has killed three enemy fighters.

That means an extraordinary coolness under fire, professionalism and guts.

Then there was selfless Kingsman Michael Hargreaves’s story.

Serving with a company from the 2nd Battalion, the Duke of Lancaster’s on attachment to the Rifles’ battle group, the men’s task is to hold a small outpost bang in the middle of the city.

Nobody can decide whether to nickname it the Alamo or Rorke’s Drift, after 325 different attacks on it since they arrived on November 15 last year.

Kingsman Hargreaves was shot in the chest three weeks ago while manning the same sangar (sandbagged positions on the roof of a compound) where a friend, Kingsman Jamie Hancock, was shot dead two months earlier.

The bullet shattered on his body armour and peppered his neck and face with shrapnel.

Medivacked home for treatment, he could have spent the rest of his tour with his feet up in an English hospital bed.

But the 22-year-old father of two from Manchester begged nurses to send him back to Iraq early — and yesterday he was back up in that same sangar on guard duty, taking fire again.

On asking him why, he told me: “I just wanted to get back with the lads.”

That made me feel very humble.

Success has a cost and, in turn, the enemy have fought back harder too.

If only the ever more accurate sniper fire — which killed two soldiers and wounded four more in the last week alone in Basra — was the only threat Rifleman Turner and his rifle company have to face.

On the way back to and from their tasks, they also have to contend with shaped-charge roadside bombs, RPG shoots and heavy automatic gunfire.

Then, when they’re back at their base — Saddam’s former palace in the city — they get on average three rocket and mortar bombardments a day. I learned that the hard way on my first morning there on the way to the cookhouse for breakfast.

Just after 7.30am, six mortar rounds piled into the complex and we hit the dirt.

“Bet that wasn’t in the travel brochure, eh Andy?” one gobby young rifleman said as I dusted myself down.

Attacks on the 7,000 troops in southern Iraq have rocketed to more than 100 a week from less than 40 a week before the start of the offensive.

A total of 15 servicemen and one woman have been killed and 74 troops have also been wounded in action, 27 seriously.

For the four months previous to that, the casualty figure was just 14. Yet still that hasn’t put them off. I even met three mates — Chris, Joe and Shane — on their second consecutive tour in Basra.

They liked the work and the money so much they had volunteered to transfer to 2 Rifles from a previous battalion so they could stay out here.

And all this from today’s iPod and PlayStation generation, derided by the old and bold as a bunch of soft sh*tes.

What the Rifles’ CO, Lt Col Justin Maciejewski, told me summed it all up.

The colonel said: “You know, never before have I been less interested in what the media are saying back in Britain about this place.

“All the hand-wringing is all well and good, but it’s just simply wrong.

“We’re not victims, and we are actually making a difference here. We’ve taken the fight to them and we’re winning it.”

What I witnessed here was the most professional, motivated and well-armed generation of soldiers our country might have ever seen.

Yes, they are under constant 24-hour threat, they’re knackered, run ragged and some are even losing mates.

But the truth is most of these guys are also having the time of their lives.

They are closing in on the enemy, killing them, and they’re loving it — it’s what they’re paid to do and it’s why they joined the infantry.

I’m not saying everybody has to like it. Just understand it.

Then the liberal hand wringers might just realise these soldiers don’t want their sympathy after all.

Interview by TOM NEWTON DUNN

[Virginian]

Andy McNab wrote some kickass books.

[KaiGywer]

Stupid firewall blocks YouTube