Had an intesting conversation with a man I have known for about 5 months. He delivers to my store, handles alot of cash and is a "straight up" kind of guy. I like him, and I am sure his employer does as well. A steady Eddie man, the kind that makes the country run.
We somehow got talking about the ME, and he mentioned he had been to Egypt, and really did not care for any of it. I asked him how it was that he found himself in the ME and he said he was in the service of the military.
Naturally I wanted to know in what type of service he was in. Well, he was drafted into 'Nam, and did twentyfour years, and tanks were his thing. He started out in a tank designation I did not know of. I know a little about M1A1' and wanted to know some things about them, and the man was very evidently the real deal, no swagger, no he man stories etc. He is who he claims.
After some talk of tactics, guns, how to disable an M1A1, exploding armor, all of which he had the knolwedge of a solider who had spent many years with this type of equipment. He was pretty high up in the system.
Then I asked him about DU. Well turns out he was one of the men on the ground testing it at Aburdeen Proving grounds, shooting various things, like mounds of earth, then digging into it to estimate the ballistics, etc.
Did this many time, and my friend related that one time a DU projectile fragmented into the mound of earth. They were to go dig all the pieces of the remenents out. As he tells me, there was a hole that one of the fragments had made, and as they were poking around, a field mouse was scared up and scampered into that hole made by a fragment.
He just sat back and waited for it to come out-; it didn't. After a few minutes, he saw that it was dead.
He went and got the General of the testing operation, and showed him what he had discovered. The General and his men looked at the situation and told all the testers to go away. For three weeks the site was closed, except to the investigators.
Three weeks later, the investigation was complete. The report said the mouse died of "starvation". My friend looked at me, eye to eye, and laughed. "That mouse damn sure didn't die of starvation", he said emphatically.
He said when the DU rounds hit a tank, he could "see a mushroom cloud", formed (Note, alot of high intensity heat will form a mushroom cloud event).
He said "if you take a giger counter into one of the tanks with DU munitions it will beep like crazy". He said that the explosiom of a DU round into steel was" basically a miniature explosion of a nuclear bomb".
He said they would put goats in the test tanks, and around them. He stated that " for twentyfive meters around the tank, hit by a DU round, all the goats would be dead, ten meters, mangled, turned inside out".
He believed DU dust to be alot more dangerous than the military was allowing.
This man is much more creadible, to me, much more, than the talking hairdoo's reading spin points from the Pentagon.
Draw your own conclusions, this is what I heard today, from a man with incontrovertable creadibility with me. He was there.