In WWII it was "falling out of jeeps." In Iraq it's "humvee accidents."

[Elidor]

What is up with all these vague deaths which hide behind a time-worn phrase of non-accountability?

It's insane how many people are described as dying in "humvee accidents." What the fuck exactly is a "humvee accident?" It sounds like bullshit from the get-go.

This sounds like an unimaginative update of the tired old bit about people who died "falling out of jeeps" in wars past (WWII, Korea, Vietnam). It's a blanket phrase used to describe any number of potentially embarrassing deaths. It's carefully calculated to make people turn away unquestioningly. After all, people die on the highway every day, and like mindless sheep we all go back to eating the grass.

[bluestateguy]

1. No doubt many of them die in accidents under hostile fire

But we either never hear about it, or the results of the official investigation are buried in page B26 of a local newspaper.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

2. Of course it is. They also inflate casualty counts in aircraft

crashes.
I personally had my hands inside the chest of a Marine who died in Cambodia, but his family and the news media were told he died on a routine training helicopter crash near Okinawa.

Go figure.

[Syncronaut Seven]

3. Thats because we weren't supposed

to be in Cambodia, If I remember correctly there were a few people who were quite upset about it too.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

7. Yeah, duh. At least those of us who WERE there were

quite upset about it.

[yardwork]

12. I appreciate that you are here to bear witness.

And thank you - on behalf of that boy's mother and father - for doing what you could for him.

If my child died in a war, I would prefer to know exactly what happened.

War is all hell, as somebody said.

[realisticphish]

4. I wonder

how many of these "accidents" are actually suicides?

:hippie:

[yardwork]

13. Some deaths are accidents that the military doesn't want to report.

Someone who served in Vietnam told me that troops sometimes played around with grenades, etc. If somebody died, the others got yelled at and the officer would say, "Now I have to go write a letter to his mother and make up a story about how he died."

[Xithras]

5. In WWII many people DID fall out of Jeeps!

If they had roads at all, they were rough, and the Jeeps had notoriously bouncy suspensions and no seat belts. My grandfather once told me a story about riding in the back of a Jeep in Germany right after the close of the war when they hit a big bump sending BOTH the driver and front passenger of the Jeep flying out. He looked up and realized that he was now sitting in the BACK seat of a Jeep moving at 30MPH with NOBODY up front. Luckily, he managed to bring the Jeep to a stop, and neither of the thrown passengers was permanently injured.

Hearing him tell that story is almost as entertaining as his story about outrunning the German tank in northern France in a stolen German Kubelwagon only to get fired on by an American tank a mile up the road.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

6. humvee accidents

There was an alarming number of Humvee rollovers in the first few weeks of the Iraq invasion. If you have the lists of casualties, you can see that a large percentage of those who died were killed in these rollovers.

Humvees have, to an extent, the same center of gravity characteristics of SUVs. Since SUVs are well known for their instability, it should come as no surprise that Humvees roll over relatively easily.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

8. especially when buried IED's made of artillery shells go off

underneath them, I imagine.

[HEyHEY]

9. Are you sure?

Hum V's are pretty wide

[Solly Mack]

11. No they don't

They can roll-over to be sure...but they do NOT roll-over easily...or in great numbers.

My husband spends ALL his deployed time in a HMMWV...or what is commonly referred to as a "humvee"

[maggrwaggr]

10. I happen to know for a fact that in the military

there are deaths that occur that the military wants to keep secret, so they give some other cause for the death.

For instance ....

There's a nuclear waste dump near Amarillo Texas where waste is stored in big earthen bunkers in the ground. These have been known to collapse with personnel inside of them. The personnel have been killed. They have to just leave the bodies buried in there and bulldoze the whole thing over, so they make up a story as to how the person died which involves having the body unrecoverable.

This is just one tiny example.