Posted on 11/29/2008 11:17:52 AM PST by Leisler
It is the photograph that has dominated the world's front pages, casting an astonishing light on the fresh-faced killers who brought terror to the heart of India's most vibrant city. Now it can be revealed how the astonishing picture came to be taken by a newspaper photographer who hid inside a train carriage as gunfire erupted all around him.
Sebastian D'Souza, a picture editor at the Mumbai Mirror, whose offices are just opposite the city's Chhatrapati Shivaji station, heard the gunfire erupt and ran towards the terminus. "I ran into the first carriage of one of the trains on the platform to try and get a shot but couldn't get a good angle, so I moved to the second carriage and waited for the gunmen to walk by," he said. "They were shooting from waist height and fired at anything that moved. I briefly had time to take a couple of frames using a telephoto lens. I think they saw me taking photographs but theydidn't seem to care."
The gunmen were terrifyingly professional, making sure at least one of them was able to fire their rifle while the other reloaded. By the time he managed to capture the killer on camera, Mr D'Souza had already seen two gunmen calmly stroll across the station concourse shooting both civilians and policemen, many of whom, he said, were armed but did not fire back. "I first saw the gunmen outside the station," Mr D'Souza said. "With their rucksacks and Western clothes they looked like backpackers, not terrorists, but they were very heavily armed and clearly knew how to use their rifles.
"Towards the station entrance, there are a number of bookshops and one of the bookstore owners was trying to close his shop," he recalled. "The gunmen opened fire and the shopkeeper fell down."
But what angered Mr D'Souza almost as much were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. "There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything," he said. "At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, 'Shoot them, they're sitting ducks!' but they just didn't shoot back."
As the gunmen fired at policemen taking cover across the street, Mr D'Souza realised a train was pulling into the station unaware of the horror within. "I couldn't believe it. We rushed to the platform and told everyone to head towards the back of the station. Those who were older and couldn't run, we told them to stay put."
The militants returned inside the station and headed towards a rear exit towards Chowpatty Beach. Mr D'Souza added: "I told some policemen the gunmen had moved towards the rear of the station but they refused to follow them. What is the point if having policemen with guns if they refuse to use them? I only wish I had a gun rather than a camera."
People who have facts, relish a debate.
You know one of the missions of SF was for an A-Team to take people out of the bush and make a fair light infantry battalion.
Something you would know nothing about.
A good leader, something else you would know, would be curious as to why a unit failed, in some case dropped their guns and ran. Almost uniformly it was found in the officer leadership.
So, same men, different leaders, different behaviour. No change of ‘heart’ or any other organs.
Fact.
The word some in your statement is very operative. We should not assume that all Islamic Terrorists in the future will never be wearing body armor. We should also not assume that their religion will universally forbid its use. The west eventually lost the Crusades. One of the reasons was that high end Islamic forces actually had better armor then the west. The Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitalier definitely had weaker armor then their Islamic counterparts. Then of course the Pope tried to forbid the use of the crossbow because it gave a simple peasant the ability to possibly kill a Noble Knight.
ROFL! Actually, there was a thread around here earlier today that said that when he went to the hospital with a bullet to the hand he begged the docs to give him saline case he didn't want to die.
By the time he had the bullet pulled and the police had "interrogated" him, he was begging the docs to kill him. he didn't want to live anymore.
LOL. Really cool ;)
I’m not a big fans of animals analogies in military affairs. The weapons, even in the hands of the incompetent are too destructive.
I rather like the Prussian, mathematics, physical approach.
They, and the Army have a really good program in ever so old, and true infantry skills.
I was reading about MOH winner Gunny Basilone on Iwo Jima and his directing the taking out of a pillbox. Pure weapon symphony. Using a .30 to close the shutter doors, and having a satchel man walk up beside the gun stream, and blow open the door, then repeating the opening with the mg and a flame thrower, then bring up the mg to gun the japs fleeing the flame thrower.
bingo.
I prefer the Army’s approach to the Siegfrid line: Line up the pillbox in gun bore of a 175 and fire for effect. The Siegfrid was next to worthless because it was badly under gunned, not enough heavy artillery.
OR they reply with “those are not true Muslims!”
Thing is, there is no better Muslim than the one who lives out every line of the Qur’ an and lives by nothing else. Most people who call themselves Muslim are the same as most Americans who call themselves Christian. They believe in Allah or God but they know almost nothing about their religion.
Yes.
For example, in these luxury hotels the water is not potable. You can not drink it. You are supplied with bottled water.
So, you have a muncipality that can not supply potable water. How uber basic is that? How hard is it to purify water? Bleach and time.
So, seeing how the municipality, can not deliver drinking water to its most prestigious addresses, you can imagine the quality, or lack of, at the police level.
Another clue is that it wasn’t the city police SWAT teams but the national, Indian military force that dealt with the terrorists.
By and large, I think New York could handle, by its self ten terrorists at multiple locations with out, if it had to, any assistance.
.........
I don’t think a good looking Argentine, taken away from his hot, steak serving hottie Argentine girl friend gave a fig about dying on some sheep filled rock pile. I read that they were miserable, and had been out in the weather for weeks, with poor to no supply, or visits from higher ups. Not much motivation to wait for a bunch of frozen, wet miserable Brit paratroopers to come out of the dark at you. Other than the miserableness, for the Brits, it was sand lot, basic stuff, of which they were going to exploit any weakness, and make you pay.
I’m not aware of the then Argentine Army officer corps being good for much more than parades, dinners, or rounding up leftist.
There’s no doubt that is a big part of it. There is also no doubt that today’s training, vs. yesterday’s, is a big part of it.
Yes.
Marshall has, sort of, been well hammered. But you have to give him credit for, for that time, going down to the units and in a very primitive and narrative way, getting some quantitative idea of what was going on.
He just didn’t have the education, which even then in manufacturing was only just getting a hold.
Now a days, of course, the military is always sending Ph.D’s around to get , as much as possible, grip on what is going on.
.
I remember talking to a Delta guy and he said he, with others, was made to talk to so many eggheads it was making him think there was something wrong with him.
A lot of this stuff is touchy feely and makes the more rigid uncomfortable, but it goes back in disguise, and ‘common sense’, as far as recorded history.
Every leader is interested in getting his expensive troops to expend maximum effort. Soldiers, and cops, are human, and have all the foibles and faults of their culture and our species
You left out perhaps the most important language in India: English.
It is worth noting that it is not quite the same English as we speak, but it can be understood. The fact that I survived three key Engineering school classes taught by a triumvirate of Indian profs proves it (though far from all did).
I carry a gun because a cop is too heavy.
There was always the discussion whether the English was better with the profs facing the board or facing the class.
Plus you get to eat the donuts yourself.
Hey, I just found out about those things a few weeks ago. Turns out there is a tree at the range parking lot that drops these strange looking, green spheres...
Now thats what I MEAN! I would expect a large percentage of even small town cops to fight back.And no to few civilians if they had the chance.This is what still separates us from the rest of the world.
In a squad of 10 men, on average fewer than three ever fired their weapons in combat. Day in, day out — it did not matter how long they had been soldiers, how many months of combat they had seen, or even that the enemy was about to overrun their position. This was what the highly regarded Brigadier General Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall, better known as S.L.A. Marshall, or ‘Slam,’ concluded in a series of military journal articles and in his book, Men Against Fire, about America’s World War II soldiers. Marshall had been assigned as a military analyst for the U.S. Army in both the Pacific and Europe. The American, he concluded, comes ‘from a civilization in which aggression, connected with the taking of life, is prohibited and unacceptable….The fear of aggression has been expressed to him so strongly and absorbed by him so deeply and pervadingly — practically with his mother’s milk — that it is part of the normal man’s emotional make-up. This is his great handicap when he enters combat. It stays his trigger finger even though he is hardly conscious that it is a restraint upon him.’
Marshall’s claims did not go unchallenged, but despite the disagreements they were widely accepted as truth both within the nation’s military and by those writing about the war and its American fighting force. Marshall continued in his role as analyst and self-proclaimed military historian before, during and after the Korean War, authoring many more books and frequently appearing as a guest lecturer at Fort Leavenworth and other installations around the United States. It is not an exaggeration to say that he was more or less a living legend by the mid-1960s. Largely due to his influence, noncommissioned officers and officers sent to Vietnam at the beginning of the American buildup were concerned that their soldiers and Marines would not fire at the enemy.
The American fighting man made sure that these concerns were short-lived. He showed little hesitation to use a rifle, pistol, shotgun, machine gun, grenade launcher or whatever other weapon he carried. Marshall himself visited Vietnam to conduct studies similar to those done during World War II and later emulated in Korea. He concluded that much had changed since those earlier conflicts and that it was not unusual for close to 100 percent of American infantrymen to engage the adversary during firefights in Vietnam. It seemed that all was well. Marshall had seemingly found that the Americans’ hesitation to fire was all but gone.
Some 20 years later, the validity of Marshall’s analysis was called into doubt. Respected researchers interviewed those who had accompanied him in World War II and also pored over his personal notes during the mid-1980s. Convincing evidence pointed to his having fabricated his World War II ratio-of-fire values, still so widely accepted at the time. The question seemed inevitable: Had there been a problem with Americans’ willingness to engage the enemy in World War II? If so, had it actually been rectified during the Vietnam War as Marshall claimed, or was the research done there just as flawed as had been the case a quarter of a century before?
The concern was fundamental to the nation’s military readiness. Americans would die needlessly and wars would be much extended if U.S. troops failed to perform the essential act of firing on the enemy. Compelled to determine whether a problem existed, I conducted a survey of 258 1st Cavalry Division Vietnam veterans in 1987. My motivation had nothing to do with determining Americans’ willingness to use their weapons in World War II; any results from Vietnam would not apply to a war fought decades before. The question was whether there might be an existing problem in the U.S. armed forces. Despite Marshall’s fall from grace, there were those who had agreed with him. The issue was important enough to investigate rigorously. Since Vietnam was the most recent U.S. war, its veterans were the men who could provide answers to critical questions addressing willingness to fire. Ultimately it was their responses that formed the basis for a detailed study of this issue and the influence of training, the 12-month rotation and the six-month command tour on the American fighting man’s combat performance. The results of that study were published in 2000 in the book Reading Athena’s Dance Card: Men Against Fire in Vietnam. This article summarizes those findings relating to whether men fired their weapons and what factors influenced their willingness to do so.
Exactly so. I would not expect to see educated Islamic troops or armies to eschew armor. And certainly, not all sects believe the same thing. That said, the “village meathead” type of terr who’s been brainwashed in a madrassa since birth and has never been to the West is not likely to purchase or request armor, preferring to place trust in “in’sh’Allah.”
You are wrong about the armor issue, though. With the introduction of heavy plate armor, crossbows became obsolete against heavy Western cavalry. Plate armor was *tested* and “proofed” using crossbows with AP quarrels at point blank range.
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