When Soldiers Faced Children In Combat (r/AskReddit)

soldiers have readied who have faced child soldiers in combat what has been your or your comrades experience or experiences any unique challenges you or others have faced my buddy said that kids would often run up to the convoy trucks in Iraq and some of the guys would give them candy even though they weren't supposed to on one such occasion a kid tossed two live grenades into the truck one of the grenades was quickly tossed away to explode without issue the other was not as easy to get rid of and ended up amongst the group of kids the guys giving out candy were put on cleanup duty no idea what the approximate age of the children was and not many other details it was pretty rare to get him drunk enough and in a mood to talk about any of it there was a kid sitting on an overpass in Iraq dropping Molotov cocktails trying to make it into the Gunners hatch of all them raps in our convoy 50 calorie gonna saw him and cut him in half he was probably 10 years old or so my platoon sergeant was on his third tour when he joined our unit heading to the sandbox I'll probably never forget the time he just dropped in casual conversation in a joking manner you can take home a lot of things from your time in service that I'd rather not have been the first guy in my neighborhood with three confirmed kills and he just kept talking from there like he didn't want to give anyone else a chance to question what he just said it worked I never asked end of our tour nothing really happened the whole time he was got comfortable enough with us to tell some stories from his past tours one of them involved meeting a 13 year old Iraqi boy awkwardly trying to carry an RPG in the suburbs of Baghdad and the sergeant just up and running at the kid screaming at the top of his lungs firing his weapon as fast as he could in the air scaring the kid enough for him to drop the RPG and run I never saw his file to see if he had a bronze or silver star but I think he earned something that day kid was likely just being used as a mule to bring gear and ammo to insurgents so he wasn't likely a threat himself but he could have been shot for carrying a weapon by someone too quick on the trigger sergeant intervened but chasing someone through the streets is likely to get you isolated and short so he had no idea what happened to the kid my ex was British Royal Marines and fought child soldiers this was ten plus years before I met him but he had horrible nightmares and on a couple of occasions broke down crying while drunk he never told me everything in a coherent start-to-finish way but from what I've pieced together he killed one or more child soldiers protecting his unit it catapulted him into self-loathing he got awarded a medal for it refused to accept it but was forced to attend the ceremony with members of the royal family only got through it by drinking himself into a stupor and then spent the next four to five years with a serious coke habit before being able to transition into more moderate alcoholism CGA I can't speak for others and thankfully I never had to pull the trigger but I always gave them a lot more time in the Crushers vs an adult there were several times they ran up unexpectedly waved a gun in our direction or just generally acted like they were going to attack us I'd put them in my sights and beg God please don't make me do this thankfully every time they'd stop what they were doing if it were an adult aiming a weapon at us they'd get zero thought I remember the ones I didn't pull the trigger on so much more than the ones that I did I'm sure a lot of soldiers would disagree with me but I sleep just fine at night not me but a fraternity brother and close friend who passed away told me a story once about his second deployment in the Middle East he was an Army Ranger Army Special Ops and was a breacher slash first one in during all breaches because he had balls of steel and insane reflexes he told me that he killed a kid once who couldn't have been more than 14 years old he said the action wasn't what haunted him he said it was how it happened he was leading the team through an alleyway to a door that led to a suspected illegal weapons cache and he held his breaching shotgun up to the door and gave count and as soon as he was about to breach the door swung open and a kid leaned out through the with an ak-47 pointed outward so he blasted the kid in the face with the breacher shotgun and he said the look of surprise on the kid's face was what bothered him a mix of surprise and inevitability of his doing there's no running from a [ __ ] shotgun blast to the face I was with the sad speck in Angola my platoon and I had few brushes with them plan we mostly met poorly trained militias armed with old Soviet gear but I remember on one occasion we were entering a village where we were supposed to get water the village if we can even call it that at around 10 to 15 actual house and of those at least half were abandoned I remember that our spotter yelled out to us telling us to get prepared our leftenant saw something that visibly shocked him and called out our sergeant we received the order to issue warning shots south of our position that's when we all saw it around 30 to 40 kids with guns bigger than them with a few adults who seemed to be their coerce our sergeant ordered us to target the officers and we did even after all six of their adults we're car the kids still continued to shoot with no control of their fire after maybe five minutes the order came fire at will I don't remember if the entire platoon opened fire I remember I did in the moment I didn't quite think about who I was shooting I don't think anyone did all we saw was an enemy eager to send us home in body bags we saw enemy uniforms nothing else nobody said anything afterwards my comrades probably all willingly forgot this or justified it by saying something like us or them it's very easy to analyze the situation if you weren't there but when you're in the moment you forget that the ones on the other side are just like you so to sum it all up I open fire without thinking too hard about it don't know if I regret it I just know I don't like remembering spent a lot of time with my friend's brother when he would come back from his tours he confided in me that he had taken a kid's life because in his mind that could be them or it could be me on a previous till he witnessed a child with a bomb strapped to him hug a fellow soldier and blow the a lot of his stories were very hard to listen to and it was clear to me that he did not return as the same person that I knew growing up didn't actually pull the trigger on the kid but was ready to convoy through a village in the kid reaches into a pocket and pulls out what looks like a grenade and tries to throw it I hesitated the grenade slipped out of his hand behind him it was damn rock I was ready to kill a kid over a [ __ ] rock if it was a grenade and he managed to throw it my hesitation could have meant my buddy's lives I'm glad it was rock I knew a guy who served and we got drunk one night and I was the idiot who asked what's the worst thing you saw while serving over there he got quite and got this faraway look in his eyes and then he told me this story I was in an armored convoy and we were in the middle of a patrol but it had been a pretty normal day the school buses that were used were pretty much just minivans so the only way to identify it was a school bus was usually the sticker they placed on the side anyways the area we were in was known for placing copper on top of their bombs because when a bomb ignites the copper liquefies and basically goes through anything even our tanks can't block that [ __ ] so we are on patrol and a bomb goes off about ten feet to our right and I figured I was a dead man right then a school bus drove by and provided cover from the blast so only one of our soldiers was hurt but not seriously however that school bus was blown to hell most of the kids died but the worst part was the driver of the school bus survived who was a middle-aged woman but her legs and arms had been blown away from the blast so we had to drive her to the nearest hospital I'll never forget her screams especially because she had to sit under my legs since we had no room she screamed and screamed but mostly I won't forget the arms and legs of the children that had been destroyed from that blast it will haunt me forever if you've never been in combat it's hard to explain to people how frenetic and chaotic combat can be you don't get a red pip that highlights where the enemy is you don't have a radar you don't get a notification that your shot hit its target you hear bullets wh h RR t past you smack into something near you ground slash wall / tree slash vehicle / et Cie and you get behind cover you then start yelling to your squad mutts about where you collectively think the incoming fire is coming form sometimes it's obvious but usually it's not your even more [ __ ] if you're in an urban / semi urban setting where there are non competent civilians running around worst still when you simply can't tell the difference between the two you're tying to not die you're trying to leave cover acquire a target shoot that target and then get back behind cover before someone sees you and shoots you this does not leave a whole lot of time for pondering how old your target is what their motivations are or how long they've been a soldier mix this in with the kids who would run around trying to pick up brass in the middle of a firefight and it's just a hot chaotic mess I didn't want to die so I shot back most people who have been in combat will tell you something similar I wouldn't say it was unique because every day and itself was always something new and the child may not have been a soldier I was the medic riding in the back right seat of a Humvee back in 0-9 I saw a child about 10 plus / - 2 years of age from the backseat of his parents Merced's which was at my 3 o'clock point and 9 millimeters at my gunner whose fire sector was to my 9 o'clock I immediately opened my window and a Mayan 4 and let the convoy know what I'm seeing Gunners turn and a shot came from the Humvee in front of me and hits the car no one was hurt the reason I didn't fire is because I could see that he didn't have the instinct to pull the trigger had he been several years older and carried himself more like he knew what he was doing then I'm positive I would have been the one to fire and it wouldn't have been the car that whould have been hit I was deployed in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010 and again in 2012 with the US Army due to the nature of my deployments the first one was much more kinetic and that's where most of my personal encounters with the enemy happened a lot of the people we fought with in ages probably from 16 to 19 years old so some of them were children by the US definition but over there people grow up a lot faster everyone I dealt with was trying to kill me so I don't feel any remorse about shooting back at them or dropping mortar rounds on them I never had to deal with younger kids being a threat or anything like that thankfully and honestly myself and everyone I knew generally really liked the little kids over there they were usually sweet and nice and always asked for candy and gum and stuff like that and even when those little shits would throw rocks at our trucks it was hard to blame them not much else to do for fun around there not a soldier but my stepdad was a paratrooper in the Special Forces it took me several years to get him to tell me anything about the combat he had seen during the Gulf War his first kill was a child around the age of 8 stepdad was in the back of the convoy holding rear position they stopped for some reason I never asked and the child came running at them from behind he was naked except a thick vest and had a grenade in his hand stepdad told him to stop over 10 times the boy's father was watching from a nearby building still messes him up and he goes to therapy three times a week war is hell my brother was in Iraq during early / mid-2000s when things were really whack said he was on gate duty one night and a kid walked up with an MRE trying to get to him and his buddies to come up to the gate obviously none of them got up because they had MREs of their own but long story short that could blow up from an ie D they had put in the MRE bag the kid was holding he had a couple other stories but the [ __ ] he saw was enough to make a hardcore atheist find Jesus so idk we don't talk much now but if you're reading this em I Love You Man not really the same thing but this question reminded me of something I read in stars and stripes while I was deployed some army unit was doing daily patrols through some [ __ ] town I can't remember the name of they did this patrol every day and the locals got to know them pretty well and didn't seem to mind and the kids in town would run alongside the convoy and beg for candy a bunch of soldiers started tossing them stuff from them res it was a hearts and minds type thing I guess anyway one day while on this routine patrol and I IDI ripped through the convoy while it was stopped and a bunch of kids were gathered around I can't remember the exact numbers but I think like maybe four soldiers were either killed or wounded in something like 20 or more kids were killed I know it was a pretty high number and the first thing I thought was got him this village just lost like 20% of the kids that live there I wasn't on this confluent I don't know anyone who was but I had been on the same sort of mission dozens of times and could easily place myself there I saw kids get killed by insurgents and allies that I never saw a mass casualty situation involving little kids like this we had a kid maybe eight to ten years old walk by one of our vehicles with a woman as soon as he was alongside of the truck he took out a grenade and tried to throw it on top of the truck mind you these trucks are about nine foot tall grenade bounced off the armor and back at the kid killed him and the woman I wanted to feel sorry for him but I really can't I'm sure an adult told him to do it but that could have killed me or one of my brothers [Music]

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Keywords: soldiers, children, soldiers facing children, soldiers children, in combat, combat, reddit, askreddit, askreddit funny, top posts, top posts of r/, r/, r/askreddit, reddit top posts, reddit cringe, comedy, reddit compilation, top posts of all time, askreddit question, askreddit top posts, ask reddit, askreddit reading, subreddit, reddit stories, best of r/askreddit, funny reddit, best reddit posts, best of reddit, Updoot Reddit, TZ Reddit, soldier, army

Id: 0327T-h0-6c

Length: 14min 40sec (880 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 14 2019