Reply With QuoteWhat is that flushing sound I hear? I think it's Major Pomper's credibility going down the toilet. Next thing you know we'll find out that Reaganomics is a sound economic strategy.The Soviet ****y-trapped toys...
The Soviet Attempt to Build Afghanistan's Military
What is that flushing sound I hear? I think it's Major Pomper's credibility going down the toilet. Next thing you know we'll find out that Reaganomics is a sound economic strategy.The Soviet ****y-trapped toys...
The Soviet-Russian occupation of Afghanistan was quite brutal ...
... as anybody should know.Originally Posted by Son_Of_Suvorov
A good read : http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...35034?v=glance
(The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist's Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan , Borovik )
Ciao,
G.
What's so special about this book? Any fool knows that writing about soviet troops eating babies and performing satanic rituals on pregnant women = best$eller.
That's the point.
There's nothing special about this book. There are enough books detailing Soviet-Russian atrocities in Afghanistan.
It happened. Live with it.
Ciao,
G.
The problem is, almost all of them repeat each other. Just like the ****y-trapped toys story, which by now has clearly become an urban legend. I believe it was first blurted out by either Robert Dole or Charlie Wilson or some other scare-monger scarecrow, then picked up by the CIA (maybe the other way around) and spread as rumors among Pakistanis and Afghan refugees, who then repeated it back to reporters ("oh yeah, I totally know a guy who knows a guy who's 3rd cousin was blown up by a toy bomb"), who decided to embellish the stories a little. Apparently now the Soviets were air-dropping ****y-trapped toys and cigarrete packs over villages (the inhabitants of which, the reporters are quick to remind us, were all bombed to death beforehand - so the question is, who are these toys intended for?) and (I'm not making this **** up) ****y-trapping "shiny objects." Of course, no one ever addressed the question of where Soviet soldiers would get the toys and the free time to ****y trap and hand them out to Afghan children, not to mention anything about what this scheme would achieve, just like no one ever found any evidence of this being true. So you can continue to believe in this crap if you want to, but if you do, I have to warn you that there might be a crocodile in your toilet and AIDS-infected needles in the soda machine's change slot...
The ****y-trapped "toys" is a misinterpretation.
The PFM-1 mine is designed to be scattered by air, and is designed with wings. The idea is that the spinning motion will cause the mines to burrow in the ground.
Detonation occurs when the mine is twisted or crushed, but they are unreliable and sometimes do not explode at first. In other words, they explode at random, but can be kicked, tossed, twisted prior without harm (that's a gamble though, something a curious child might do).
Since they are hard to detonate and look like butterflies, some people started believing they had been designed to kill the curious children who'd find them. Which isn't true, they just happen to look like toys and have unreliable fuze mechanisms. Nothing in their design indicates intent to kill children. If so, they might as well have dropped teddy bears stuffed with TNT.
It's a little like the yellow rations dropped on Afghanistan in 2001. No one expected the Afghans would try to eat the little packs of dessicant agent, but they did. So the Taliban spread the rumor they had been designed to poison the civilian population...Rubbish.
Posting Permissions
