What the nose of an A10 Warthog should look like.[682x911]

I don't know how much you guys are into stories, but here goes:

Back in 2006 I was stationed at the raging suckhole that is known throughout the army as Fort Polk/JRTC in Lousyanna. A godawful festering boil of a base that will turn even the most honest, upright soldier into a bitter cunt of a man whose greatest struggle becomes the act of getting out of bed in the morning.

Got off on a tangent. Sorry. So one day I was sent to supervise a 50 cal range and provide repairs as necessary. As the M2 is basically grunt-proof, my job mostly entailed sitting around, smoking, adjusting the timing of weapons and adding or removing 10w motor oil to the guns depending on their personality.

This range was on one of the loooooooong firing ranges that was used as an impact zone/range for a variety of things; and as such it had targets such as tanks, trucks, and tons of UXO that liked to explode periodically when triggered by a sympathetic detonation from a Mk19 or whatever. During the course of the day's shooting, we were told via radio that we needed to go cold on the range for a while, as some A-10s were going to be doing a couple passes. "Fine by me" I thought, "I get to do nothing and watch warthogs fly about." There was nothing I didn't like about that sentence.

About 5 minutes army time (30 minutes real world) later, two glorious gray A-10s began circling overhead, high up enough you could tell what it was, but not really make anything else out. They slowly scooted about for a while, loitered, and then left. I was somewhat disappointed, but I hadn't expected much more. Things like this were usually disappointing and never met expectations. So I clamored noisily out of the turret of the hmmwv, and stepped outside to smoke.

No sooner had I lit my cigarette when the sharp shredding roar of jet engines begins growing. The sound just wasn't there and then grew to a organized cacophony in less time than it took to take a drag from my smoke. Over the tree line, a short distance away, an A-10 came roaring past, at what was probably a thousand feet (I don't know for sure) but looked so close I felt like I could've counted the rivets on its wings. I could see air vortices ripping off the wingtips as it approached. I was in awe.

Then it started shooting.

I would've been less impressed if zombie John Browning had risen from the earth I was standing on to give me a lecture on the intricacies and yet the beautiful simplicity of tilting-breechblock handguns. "Fuck of John; trying to watch this." He probably would have watched too, and shed a single tear for the unreal amount of metal being poured out at that moment from a massive 7-barrel bullet hose.

BRRRRRRRRRRT doesn't really begin to describe the noise, the sheer madness of being near one of these when it fires. It's like the fabric of spacetime is being shredded by death's scythe. It's like hearing the earth being torn asunder by an eldritch horror. It is absolutely fuck-off glorious. I could see the thick streams of smoke pouring forth from the gun, I could just barely catch the glints of projectiles zipping through the air, and when I turned my head, I could see the rounds peppering the decrepit hulls of tanks downrange, the "fttttttttttttttap" of repeated chunks of metal slamming into earth and steel reaching my ears seconds after I saw the rounds hit.

I realized something slammed into the ground a distance away from me. For a split second, I thought bits of the target had launched themselves back this way, but it seemed improbable. More things began "piff paff"ing into the sand closer and closer to me. The shell casings. The gigantic 30x173mm steel shell casings were raining down from the sky at a rate of 70 per second right over my head. I watched three of them plunk down only into the dirt a few feet from me, and I heard the loud ringing of links bouncing off the nearby hmmwvs like someone dropping poorly made tuning forks. I decided I would be slightly safer in the hmmwv.

I tried to open the door, but a fellow soldier thought it would be funny to hold the door shut. Hilarious. I shouted endless obscenities and called his mothers sexual decency in to question, but these insults didn't do much in my favor and the door remained shut. Luckily, none of the steel casings landed on me, despite several bouncing off the roof very near me, and I climbed into the back seat of the hmmwv where the door was not held shut just as the second warthog began making its pass.

It was no less glorious than the first, made more interesting the adrenaline now thundering around in my veins. From the experience, I learned two things: 1) aircraft just drop the shell casings from the gun out the bottom as they fire, and 2) your friends are assholes who will probably try to let you get injured if it will make a good story.

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