"in the street outside, a ship mine stood in a puddle."
Okay. That's just odd.
Good read
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Call me insane, but I think I can guess where that ship mine came from. When I was still in the Nav I recall reading about the provenance of the mines that the Iraqis were sowing in the Straits of Hormuz during the "tanker wars" (1986-1988). Its alternatingly fascinating and ridiculous. The mines were of the simple contact variety (aka: the knobby, cable-anchored cartoon image) manufactured for the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. They passed through numerous hands over the decades. They sat in the armories of Kim Il Sung for a long time and were finally sold off as a job lot to Saddam in the eighties. The fact that these museum pieces still worked and could still wreak such havoc created a great deal of consternation and institutional soul-searching in the U.S. Navy at the time. Particularly the fact that Mr. Lehman's "500 Ship Navy" had given such short shrift to such unglamorous vessels as minesweepers.
Great reply.
I seem to remember how we sent minesweepers to the Gulf.
I did not know that those mines came from NK.
Remember the footage of those sailors standing at the bow with a M-14?