A good reality check ...
 

Just got through watching Black Hawk Down ... reminds me that even on a bad I've got *nothing* to complain about ...

Absolutely fantastic movie by Scott ... he did such a great job of showing not only the gritty, bloody reality of the street fighting but also a glimpse into the despair of the Somali people and why we all have such a problem with Pirates through that region.

One of my favorite war movies.

yup that is a great movie for sure!

Awesome movie hands down.

Saving Private Ryan also one the greatest films made about war in general.

Great movie.

I have a friend that was in the marines and stationed in Somalia. His group pulled out about a month before the black hawk down stuff happened. This is a guy who has been all over the place and in some pretty shitty countries and he said Somalia is the worst place he has ever seen.

he'd be a fascinating guy to sit 'n enjoy a beer with :thumbsup

Actually just did that tonight. Today was the 20th anniversary of the day he and another friend of mine went into the marines. We ate dinner and talked about a lot of stuff.

In his 4.5 years the marines sent him to:
Honduras
The Philippines
Guatemala
Somalia
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait (he fought in the first gulf war)
South Korea
Japan (Okinawa)
There might be others but I can't remember off the top of my head. He always say, "If it was hot and shitty and people were shooting at each other I seemed to end up there."

the funniest story he has is when he was in Honduras and he and another guy are stationed to stand watch and protect a couple of large pallets of cargo. After a few hours they got curious and lifted up the tarps on the pallets to discover that they were guarding two huge pallet loads of tampons. He said they both agreed that if the shit hit the fan they were falling back. They weren't about to die protecting tampons.

He was in Somalia about 6 months. I have seen a lot of the pictures he took over there and heard a lot of the stories. It is a fucked up part of the world. He said seeing all the starving people disturbed him so much he lost about 40 pounds because he couldn't eat. At that time in his life he was 20 years old, ripped and in top shape so that 40 pounds was mostly muscle. I have seen pictures of what he looked like when he got home and he looked like the walked dead. His girlfriend almost didn't recognize him when she went to pick him up from the bus station when he got back.

It's great that he's up for talking about it Kane ...

Person by person I imagine he's changing the assumptions of the people he comes in touch with. By sharing his experiences I bet he's showing how un-black-n-white the issues are.

For sure. It is interesting to hear how one thing is presented then talk to someone who was there and hear a different story all together. I guess a lot of times when you are in something and actively involved in it you don't have the benefit of seeing it from the outside and sometimes the bigger picture can get lost. As he said time and again the soldiers know their job and for the most party they care a lot less about politics than they do about coming home alive.

Yeah, the Somalian pirates own Somalia, don't they. The pirates control the government.

I have a friend who served in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and he came home and got his college degree while in the reserves. He opened a bar and things were going great until he got papers that his reserve unit was being activated and being sent to Somalia. I didn't realize we still had a presence there.

And regarding the movie, I really liked blackhawk down. Was that the last time Tom Sizemore wasn't in handcuffs?