Found a couple of interesting things researching today. We'll go with the harpy bad first and end on the positive!
Some annoying harpy named Blythman goes off on how the Royal Marines are recruiting unfairly, men that sign up to join are stupid and without any options - all macho macho and no intellect, they are not heroes, they should do something better with their lives, good on the NUT for kicking recruiting out of the schools, illegal war no one can win... just about any lefty idea you can think of.
Which brings me to this: how can you, harpy, tell these brave men that they should be doing something more brave and heroic when you, harpy, sit at a computer typing utter nonsense? Trying to hurt people's reputations, SOLDIER'S reputations in a time of war? You are a coward of the lowest kind.
A helo from a Royal Marine base in Devon rescued 18 people from a charity walk. The second rescue in two days due to very bad weather. Very cool guys.
Lance Corporal Matt Croucher hurls himself onto Taliban grenade
Absolutely incredible. Hero with a capital H.
Miraculously, Lance Corporal Matt Croucher, a marine reservist from Birmingham, survived the blast with little injury when his rucksack and body armour took the force of the blast. He is expected to receive one of the highest awards for gallantry.
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Walking in the darkness among a group of four men, Croucher stepped into a tripwire that pulled the pin from a boobytrap grenade. His patrol commander, Corporal Adam Lesley, remembered Croucher's shout of: "Grenade!" As others dived for cover, Croucher, 24, did something nobody expected. He lay down on the grenade to smother the blast. Lesley got on the ground, another man got behind a wall, but the last member of the patrol was still standing in the open when the grenade went off.
"My reaction was, 'My God this can't be real'," said Lesley. "Croucher had simply lain back and used his day sack to blunt the force of the explosion. You would expect nine out of 10 people to die in that situation."
Then they waited. "It felt like a lifetime," said Lesley. When the grenade went off it blew Croucher's rucksack more than 30ft and sent a burning radio battery fizzing into the air. As the noise died down, one of the patrol, Marine Scott Easter, was standing "just completely frozen" and untouched. Croucher was in deep shock but, apart from a bloody nose, had few injuries. "He had shrapnel in his helmet, in the plate of his body armour, but he was basically okay," said Lesley. "His day sack had taken the blast."
Croucher told the News of the World: "All I could hear was a loud ringing and the faint sound of people shouting 'are you ok? Are you ok?'
"Then I felt one of the lads giving me a top to toe check. My head was ringing. Blood was streaming from my nose. It took 30 seconds before I realised I was definitely not dead," he added.
The troop commander, Captain Dan Venables, said they decided to exploit the incident. "I made the decision that after the grenade went off, the Taliban would come to see what had happened. So we lay in wait and ambushed them."
Croucher's actions prompted his colleagues to pass a citation to the Commanding Officer of 40 Commando, Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Birrell, to recommend him for the Victoria Cross.
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"It's entirely out of my hands. But if it was to happen it would be a massive honour, not just for me but for the regiment and all my comrades,” he [Croucher] told the News of the World.
Yesterday, fellow marines were reluctant to play up the incident. "Such has been the ferocity of the fight 40 Commando has endured these past few months, this has been one remarkable incident among many," said one senior Royal Marines officer as they prepared to hand over to the Parachute Regiment. Their experience highlights the danger faced every week by many of the 7,700 troops in Afghanistan. Inkerman, an exposed hilltop compound, is a heavily contested position.
DAMN. A must read article for even more bravery from these amazing men -
The garrison's role is to draw enemy fire from Sangin three miles to the south — a job similar to what Sergeant James Liepa, 30, did for his men in January when his patrol was ambushed. Liepa and seven fellow marines were pinned down behind a bank of mud by Taliban fighters they could not spot. Liepa tried to get a bearing on where the gunfire was coming from but as the rounds cracked around him, he realised it was impossible.
"They were literally trying to shoot my hand off," recalled Liepa. "I thought, 'If we stay here more than a couple of minutes we'll be dead'." Liepa told his comrades he was going to stand up and make himself the prime target. "That meant I was going to jump and run so all firing points would shoot at me," he said. The idea was to give everyone else a chance to spot where the Taliban were firing from — and return fire. Liepa, from Barnstaple, Devon, gave his men a 30-second countdown. Then he got up and the bullets flew.
Liepa's bravery turned the battle around. "There are a few people who would do something like that, but not many," said Corporal George Alford, 27, a marine who was there. "The truth is that someone had to do it or we'd have been killed."
Liepa says he had no choice. "For me to tell someone else to stand up and run while everyone shoots at them just felt like sending someone to their death, so I decided to do it myself."
On his second step Liepa fell face first. As he did so, arcs of fire from at least three Taliban machineguns met above his head. "I lay there half a second and thought, 'They know where I am, I'm dead,' but I got up and ran again and the bullets were everywhere, bar me, which was nice." His men drove off the Taliban and all got out alive.
Thank you for your service, every single one.
