Woah, now that’s some friendly fire. The video above was posted yesterday on Funker530.com, a site that bills itself as the place for military videos and photos “provided for and by veterans.” According to the site, the incident occurred last year at a U.S. outpost in Afghanistan’s Paktika Province.
The exact details surrounding the footage remains unclear, but the story told in the video is enough to make you want to hide under your desk. The U.S. soldiers at the outpost appear to be preparing for an airstrike that they believed would target a group of enemy soldiers along a distant ridgeline. Instead, the Americans watched—and one soldier filmed—as the massive bomb came hurtling in their direction, striking dangerously close to where they were hunkered down. It was apparently only luck and the quick thinking of their sergeant that prevented the friendly fire from claiming any U.S. lives.
“About a half second before impact you could hear the bomb screaming in like I hadn’t ever heard before, and I definitely knew at that point something was off,” the unidentified solider who filmed the errant airstrike told Funker530. He added: “If it hadn’t been for the decision of the First Sergeant to bring everyone to ‘stand to,’ three of our guys would have died in that wood building.”
Or, as one of the Americans can be heard more eloquently summing things up shortly after the blast rocked their outpost: “We almost fucking died.”
