As thanks the US military hired this guy’s village to do all kinds of “road repair”. That made sense, since word would spread and maybe provide hope that future lost personnel would be turned over by money motivated people.
A verrrry old trick in Iraq was to bury a dog, then start wailing to US forces about “my poor cousin, who was fatally struck by a humvee, here he is buried, and now I’m so sad and poor...” and they’d run a corpse dog by the grave, and the dog would alert, providing evidence that SOMETHING dead was down there —and this whole scenario was because the locals knew Uncle Sugar was by Iraqi standards pretty generous with financial compensation.
“Why did you bury the body so quickly; we’d have preferred to actually SEE it, the better not to get conned...”
“Ah, this is our ancient Muslim tradition —he only gets 1 virgin if the deceased is not buried before nightfall...!!”
And after enough shady scenarios like this they finally got ambitious enough to dig down and CHECK on things, and presto! They’d dig up a dead DOG, and it was all a scam:
The Middle-East is totally overrun with people like that —it’s normal.
The rescuers of Marcus Luttrell saw a payday, and they got one, and it’s good.
Don’t be swept away by all this elaborate, honky-centric, “Pushtunwani” flim-flam...
They also risked their lives to do it Mr. tough guy.
I was there for two years as a contractor. They are capable of kindness at times but for the most part are liars, beggars and thieves. Of course they smelled a payday - I would expect the same for risking my life and my family’s.