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Monday, May 26, 2008

Most surreal moment of my life...

But first, a few pictures of the country side...





So, today, I was up in a helicopter getting a look at a few check points and doing some practice air to ground gunnery. Mostly this involves flying low over random Afghan villages and shooting up derelict russian tanks that are rusting out in the desert. I land from this, walk into the squadron building. What do I hear? I hear some gunfire and explosions on the TV. Hey! the electricity is on! I go into the room to see what they are watching...

Guess...!

Fucking Rambo 3!

I am not even making that up.

I was watching Rambo 3, in the alert room in Afghanistan, with a Squadron of guys flying russian helicopters, just after flying russian helicopters, low over Afghanistan, shooting up derelict tanks. It was like looking into a mirror, of a mirror.

The weirdest part was that the movie was dubbed over in Dari... but there was only one unemotional monotone voice for all the characters. It nearly short circuited my brain.

2 comments:

amateur.sophist said...

Did they comprehend the absurdity of the situation, or were they too confused by the notion of using explosions and gun powder to fix punctured kidneys to absorb the larger paradox?

Notorious said...

Well, for one thing, they thought it was a bad call to uses a helicopter and a tank to play chicken. They all agreed that Rambo was a very good soldier. The fact that he used gunpowder to cauterize a kidney wound wasn't that absurd to them.

Effectively it broke down into a story telling session about when they fought for/against the Russians, various Mujahadin factions, and the Taliban. They all seemed to have fought on various sides for the last 20 years. One guy told a story of how he knocked over a guy who was going to shoot him with an RPG and broke the guys wrist by hitting him with the helicopter. Another guy told a story about how in one particular valley he shot down 8 Russian helicopters in one month.

The real truth is that that is actually not an absurd movie here. About like Gross Point Blank for Detroit.