Wednesday 13 March 2013

Those Silly Iranians

This week....the topic of Argo....the new factual movie about the six Americans rescued out of Iran during the crisis period came out....in Iran.  Basically, the Iranians are a bit disturbed over the depiction of them as evil characters and they think that the bad Americans rewrote history.  Some Iranian government officials believe it's time that a true movie of the entire event....be made in Iran and tell the Iranian's true story.

Some journalists from Iran talked over this commentary.  They kinda pointed out.....Iran has never produced a single TV show or movie over this period and the way that the Americans were held.  For over thirty years....nothing.  So to them, it's a bit shocking now that the government suddenly wakes up and wants to tell the story.

You can imagine this scene....Mullah George and Ayatollah Larry....meeting up in some five-star decorated government office.  They decide it's time to take the evil American's story and discard it.  They need a big Tehran-style Hollywood producer to make this happen.

So Ali Perkinator comes over.  Ali produced 'Five Jihads to the Wind', and 'Disco Tehran 2005'.

Mullah George starts up....this needs to be a family movie where a typical Iranian wakes up and rejoices because the evil Shah is gone, and the evil Americans are taken prisoner.  Fresh fruit should suddenly appear on the street....at a highly discounted price.  Gas prices drop overnight.  Kids rejoice with new and fresh schoolbooks available....with Islamic themes in math and science.

Ayatollah Larry jumps up....suggesting that almost overnight, the terrible British and American TV shows stopped, and live Islamic prayers were telecast around the clock.  Then he talked about the friendly nature of everyone to him from that first day on.  And finally, he talked up the clean streets and freshly painted offices of the government that he toured.

Ali sits there quietly.  You can sense his mind at work.

Finally, Ali asks....to make this authentic....he will need some Americans.  Would Ayatollah Larry and Mullah George mind if he hired Lindsay Lohan, Martin Sheen, and half the cast of Amish Mafia.  He wants this to be a combination of Islamic themes, action adventure, soap opera romance, frustrated Americans who drink and gamble greatly, and nicely tied up ending where the Iranians knew for days where the Americans were....but decided to just let the Canadians and CIA sneak them out of the country.

Mullah George and Ayatollah Larry sit and analyze the idea.  Well....if you could get that Clint Eastwood guy....say Mullah George....to be the Ayatollah Khomeini...then this would all work out fine.

Ali leaves the meeting and sits in his luxury BMW....how the heck could he talk Clint Eastwood into being the Ayatollah?  Then he envisions the real Ayatollah having four pistols under his robe and being fierce and confrontational.  It all makes perfect sense.  

A Bullet Here or There

I spent twenty-two years in the Air Force.  From basic training, until the very end....you had to maintain a proficiency in firearms.  For the Air Force, this typically meant you spent three hours in a class, then practiced with fifty rounds, and then shot around forty to fifty to 'qualify'.  You did that every two years generally.  So I fired around 1,100 total rounds in my Air Force career.

A Marine today....getting ready for his deployment to Afghanistan or some distant land....will fire at least a thousand rounds.  Some, with the heavy duty machine guns (M2HB) might fire a couple thousand rounds easily.  If they stuck around for twenty years....they might fire twenty-five thousand easily, as a minimum.

I was sitting there and discussing this new directive from the Marines to their young men and ladies....to save on ammo as much as possible.  My co-worker, an Army guy for twenty-odd years, will often tease me on Air Force short-comings.  I usually take it in stride.

The truth is that some folks just won't ever be on the frontline operations....like ninety-eight percent of Air Force folks.  That hundred-odd rounds we fired....were enough.

The other truth here is that if I was a Marine....I'd probably ask to fire three hundred rounds a week for at least six weeks before I deployed anywhere....to ensure I felt up to the task.

But there's a historical point of curiosity   If you went back to 1860....you signed up with a Confederate unit or a Union unit.  You might have spent two weeks in camp and going through some practice....mostly marching and forming up in columns.  Total rounds fired over that two weeks?  Maybe  twenty to fifty shots.  After that, you were considered proficient, and probably met the enemy within a few days.  You lived or died, based on how quickly you could reload or your ability to stay in the back of the column.

We've changed a great deal in a hundred years.