"Энди Макнаб. Немедленная операция (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автораIt was the Bible.
I'd turned up with big wide eyes. One of the first things I had to do was familiarize myself with the various weapons. Over the water at that time they were using the Heckler & Koch family and the LMG-the old Bren gun, converted to 7.62-as well as GPMGS. Pistols were 9MM Brownings and the Walther PPK, known as the disco gun because it was nice and small and therefore easy to conceal. If I didn't want to carry my Browning when I was out and about but not working, I could slip the disco gun into my belt. Most people would have an M16 or 203, an HK53 5.56 men or MPS, so that whatever job we were doing we could take the relevant weapon-whatever gave the right balance between concealment and firepower. I was talking to Tiny in the armory. Every day the weapons had to be checked, and Tiny, the armorer for that day, was showing me the ropes. ' "What's the score on this shoot-to-kill policy I keep on hearing about?" I said, half expecting him to say, "Hose the lot down." "Is there fuck such a thing?" he said. "If there was, we wouldn't still be here. We'd be back home and they'd be dead. We know where they all are. If someone was giving the green light, we'd just go in and take-them out." "Very clear-cut," I said. "And totally counterproductive. It's little things like that that bring down governments. Of course at the same time there can't be a shoot-to-wound policy either." Tiny went on. "It would take a laser gun that was self-guiding to the shoulder to do that shit. People's perceptions of what statements, there were all these questions coming up, commentators on the TV saying, 'Why didn't they just shoot him in the leg?" How the fuck can you shoot to wound somebody? It's impossible. You can't say, if somebody's a hundred meters away, 'Right, I'm going to shoot him in the legs." You just see a mass of body, and if he's shooting at you, you're going to shoot back at him. It, s not a shoot-tokill policy; it's just reacting to the threat. The problem is, the people who make these sort of comments have never had a gun pointed at them." I knew that if I was staring down a barrel, I wasn't going to be firing at their legs. If thiqy ended up just wounded, they'd be lucky. That wasn't a shoot-to-kill policy; that was reacting to a perceived threat and saving your own life and the lives of those around you that you had a responsibility for. My roommate Steve, also an embassy and Falklands veteran, was originally from the airborne Ordnance Corps, heavy drop, which were based in Aldershot. Married with a couple of kids, he was a local lad from Gloucester; the first words I'd hear every morning were, "All roight, boy?" Steve was slightly shorter than I was but much stockier, and he played rugby for the army; as a result, all his front teeth were false. He was one of the original bone shirt people, one of the four drug smugglers who'd come back with us on the British Caledonian flight from Hong Kong. He shared the passion of most of the troop for watching Blockbusters, but had one annoying |
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