What's your internet "white whale", something you've been searching for years to find with no luck?

This is a tough one and I know this is gonna get buried as I am late to the show, but here it goes. My son was stationed at COB Speicher near Tikrit and FOB Warrior outside of Kirkuk, Iraq from July 2007 to Nov. 2008. My son worked as a 35 Romeo, avionics system repairer and always remained on the FOB so I wasn't too concerned about his safety. My son and I used to converse every few days via Yahoo messenger and he assured me his days pretty much consisted sitting in his van repairing NVG's and various electronic components.

Around late Feb. 2008, I received a message at work from the secretary that my son had tried to call me. The call never reached me and I logged on at work to Yahoo messenger, but was still unable to contact my son. A few days later when we finally connected, I had asked him what was going on and he replied "nothing" and don't worry about it.

I used to visit the 1st Infantry Division's website looking for information on my son's unit as well as videos from Youtube and LiveLeak. Onetime I found pictures of solders standing inside a Containerized Housing Unit (CHU) that had been hit by a 57mm rocket. The rocket had entered one wall, passed through a locker, exited another wall and buried itself into a Hesco barrier without exploding. I remember thinking that these guys were lucky as hell that the rocket didn't detonate.

When we found out that my son was returning from Iraq in Nov. 2008, even though he informed us that he would be home in a couple of weeks and not to bother showing up at Ft. Riley, we decided at he last minute that we would fly back to Kansas City, Mo and drive to Ft. Riley to welcome him home in spite of his reguest. After surprising him at his arrival we went out to dinner and got a couple rooms at the local motel. We stayed up late and had a few drinks before finally retiring for the night.

The next morning my son told me he had something to show me and took out his laptop and showed me pictures of where a rocket had struck his CHU, destroyed his locker, exited out the other side and buried itself in a Hesco barrier. EOD showed up and used a fire hose to wash the sand out of the Hesco barrier in order to remove the unexploded rocket.

After regaining my composure I asked if there was any way that people had posed in his CHU in front of the damage. I told him that I had seen these pictures of this incident months ago. He told me that a few soldiers had wandered in and taken "selfies" in his CHU.

I spent a couple of days looking for the pictures I had seen of his fellow soldiers posing in front of the holes in his CHU, but had never found anything. My son suggested that they may have been ordered to remove the pictures due to security reasons.

/r/AskReddit Thread