The Right Coast

January 16, 2006
 
Those darn facts
By Tom Smith

NYT looks stupid, again. A former student of mine who was a Navy ordinance disposal team leader told me these 155 mm shells are as common as dirt in Iraq, there being literally millions of the them around. So if you don't know what they look like, you don't know thing one about objects that explode in the region. They are the munition of choice in IED's. We supplied them to Iraq in fantastic numbers during the Iran-Iraq war.

Irrelevantly, my father commanded a 155 howitzer battery as a 1st lt. in the Battle of Okinawa. At some point, I plan to blog about his experiences there.