Stardate 20010925.0713 (On Screen): Occasionally I read a news article which seems to be telling a good and important story, and then I spot a detail which suggests that the reporter doesn't have a clue. And I have to wonder what else he might have been confused about. This one is a case in point: it's about the tangled web of friendships and enemy relationships in Afghanistan. Then I stumbled upon this statement:
In the early morning darkness today, he said, he fired two 81mm mortars from his desert base for an hour. The spent shells were still lying next to the guns a few hours later, the dirt stained black from the powder. That's a marvelously poetic image, but it's also nonsense. A mortar round doesn't leave a "spent shell"; the entire munition is launched by the detonation. A
howitzer (an artillery piece) does, but howitzers don't come in an 81 millimeter caliber. The only way I can make sense of this for a mortar is that the 'spent shells" were actually duds, rounds which didn't fire and had to be manually removed from the mortar tube. But there isn't any way they'd look like "spent shells"; they'd look just like unfired ammunition. On the other hand, it may actually have been a howitzer and the reporter somehow got the phrase "81 mm mortar" fixed in his head. But that's a pretty big misunderstanding;
a howitzer looks
nothing at all like
a mortar.
By the way, it's been more than a hundred years since any artillery piece "stained the dirt black from the powder". Everyone in the world switched to smokeless powder (nitrocellulose), which doesn't do that. Anyway, even earlier pieces didn't do that unless they were malfunctioning, in which case they'd probably also kill their crew. (An artillery piece which is leaking gas from the detonation is about one step from catastrophically failing.) So what else did the reporter get wrong in this moving story? How much of it is completely made up? (discussion in progress)
