Have you ever been to a very dense jungle or forest… at midnight?
Ok, now, drop mortar and naval artillery shells all over it.
For weeks, or months.
The holes this creates are commonly used by both sides as cover and concealment.
Also, its often raining, sometimes quite heavily, such that these holes will up with water, and you are thus soaking wet.
Ok, now, add in pillboxes and bunkers, as well as a few spiderwebs of underground tunnel networks, many of which have concealed entrances.
You do not have a phone. GPS does not exist.
You might have a map, which is out of date, and you might have a compass, if you didn’t drop or break it.
A radio is either something stationary, or is the size and weight of approximately, somewhat less than a miniature refrigerator, and one bullet or good piece of shrapnel will take it out of commission.
Ok, now, you and all your buddies are either half starving or actually starving, beyond exhausted, getting maybe an average of 2 to 4 hours of sleep, and you, and the enemy, are covered in dirt, blood and grime.
Also, you and everyone else may or may not have malaria, or some other fun disease, so add shit and vomit to the mix of what everyone is covered in.
Ok! Enjoy your 2 to 8 week long camping trip from hell, in these conditions… also, kill everyone that is trying to kill you, soldier.
Friendly fire incidents are still fairly common even in the modern era…
… ask any Brits deployed to Iraq how they feel about the A-10…
… Pat Tillman was hyped up in the media as an early Iraq War 2 US casualty who died valiantly… when the truth was he was actually killed by friendly fire from his own unit, oh and he actually thought the entire operation in Afghanistan was “fucking illegal”… because Congress is supposed to declare war, not the President…
Even in the RussoUkranian war, right now, in the past few years, there have been tons of incidents of Russians accidentally shooting their own at fairly close range, due to poor coordination, and I’m sure its happened with the Ukranians as well… and thats to say nothing of accidentally drone or arty striking a friendly infantry squad or tank or IFV or what not.
Just go play any modern semi-realistic war game (Squad, Arma 3/Reforger, etc) that doesn’t have a pop up HUD with blue for friend and red for foe, and has friendly fire enabled, and you should be able to see that friendly fire happens all the time with noobs.
…
As for fragging… that term, as it originated in Vietnam, specifically refferred to tossing a fragmentation grenade into an area (often their bunk) where an officer or NCO was.
It was a form of mutiny, essentially, against officers that kept sending men into meat-grinders…
…chewing them out for not maintaining their early M16s which were unreliable as fuck due to being rammed through the production pipeline by McNamara, shoddy quality control from Colt, and everyone just pretending swapping to a new kind of powder in the rounds wouldn’t blow past the designed tolerances of the weapon…
… or just, you know, fuck being drafted into this bullshit war.
In the modern day, ‘frag’ is mostly a gamer term that basically just means ‘killed a guy’, and the origin of that term has been obscured, forgotten.
Have you ever been to a very dense jungle or forest… at midnight?
Ok, now, drop mortar and naval artillery shells all over it.
For weeks, or months.
The holes this creates are commonly used by both sides as cover and concealment.
Also, its often raining, sometimes quite heavily, such that these holes will up with water, and you are thus soaking wet.
Ok, now, add in pillboxes and bunkers, as well as a few spiderwebs of underground tunnel networks, many of which have concealed entrances.
You do not have a phone. GPS does not exist.
You might have a map, which is out of date, and you might have a compass, if you didn’t drop or break it.
A radio is either something stationary, or is the size and weight of approximately, somewhat less than a miniature refrigerator, and one bullet or good piece of shrapnel will take it out of commission.
Ok, now, you and all your buddies are either half starving or actually starving, beyond exhausted, getting maybe an average of 2 to 4 hours of sleep, and you, and the enemy, are covered in dirt, blood and grime.
Also, you and everyone else may or may not have malaria, or some other fun disease, so add shit and vomit to the mix of what everyone is covered in.
Ok! Enjoy your 2 to 8 week long camping trip from hell, in these conditions… also, kill everyone that is trying to kill you, soldier.
It’s weird foot soldiers kept killing each other.
It’s not weird we had ‘frag’ as a verb from the Vietnam war.
Friendly fire incidents are still fairly common even in the modern era…
… ask any Brits deployed to Iraq how they feel about the A-10…
… Pat Tillman was hyped up in the media as an early Iraq War 2 US casualty who died valiantly… when the truth was he was actually killed by friendly fire from his own unit, oh and he actually thought the entire operation in Afghanistan was “fucking illegal”… because Congress is supposed to declare war, not the President…
Even in the RussoUkranian war, right now, in the past few years, there have been tons of incidents of Russians accidentally shooting their own at fairly close range, due to poor coordination, and I’m sure its happened with the Ukranians as well… and thats to say nothing of accidentally drone or arty striking a friendly infantry squad or tank or IFV or what not.
Just go play any modern semi-realistic war game (Squad, Arma 3/Reforger, etc) that doesn’t have a pop up HUD with blue for friend and red for foe, and has friendly fire enabled, and you should be able to see that friendly fire happens all the time with noobs.
…
As for fragging… that term, as it originated in Vietnam, specifically refferred to tossing a fragmentation grenade into an area (often their bunk) where an officer or NCO was.
It was a form of mutiny, essentially, against officers that kept sending men into meat-grinders…
…chewing them out for not maintaining their early M16s which were unreliable as fuck due to being rammed through the production pipeline by McNamara, shoddy quality control from Colt, and everyone just pretending swapping to a new kind of powder in the rounds wouldn’t blow past the designed tolerances of the weapon…
… or just, you know, fuck being drafted into this bullshit war.
In the modern day, ‘frag’ is mostly a gamer term that basically just means ‘killed a guy’, and the origin of that term has been obscured, forgotten.