We had Christmas eve dinner with a soldier stationed here that I have been playing music with. He is a nice guy, good musician, and a good cook too.
I avoided drinking his moonshine, though I did taste it. It tasted like alcohol and was not especially harsh. I just didn't feel like going blind.
One thing I learned while waiting to eat was that when depleted uranium shells go through armor into a tank or other vehicle, they also roast everybody inside. I knew they were hard and radioactive, I just never knew that when they hit the air inside the vehicles they incinerate everything.
I have learned that the Army calls the results "crispy critters."
You learn something every day.
1 comment:
Depleted Uranium kinetic energy penetrators are not shells. They do not explode. They also do not incinerate everyone inside the armored vehicle. A number of American soldiers in armored vehicles hit by "friendly fire" in the Gulf War survived with fragments of DU embedded in their bodies. If a DU kinetic energy penetrator hits ammunition or fuel, however, it will ignite and explode the ammunition or fuel and that most certainly will incinerate those nearby. There is an enormous amount of myth and misinformation about DU on the net and I am sure that the writer of this blog does not really want to contribute to that. I became interested in the subject when I saw posts that compared DU to nuclear fallout and I knew from my own education and training that this is not true. I am also a geologist and aware that the uranium-lead decay cycle is used to date rocks and soils; that is because uranium is actually a very common mineral and is found everywhere on Earth. DU is natural uranium less than most fissionable isotopes and is 99.99% pure Uranium 238, the most stable of all the Uranium isotopes. It is extremely hard and dense and penetrates modern tank armor, something that no other material would do when DU kinetic energy penetrator munitions were developed in the 1970's to stop the Soviet Bloc armored horde that was expected to storm across the North German Plain at the beginning of World War III. Of course, that Soviet attack never happened and the first time DU was used was in the Gulf War.
Roger Helbig
concerned veteran opposed to myths and misinformation
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