Posted: 1/25/2004 1:53:49 PM EDT
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Just watched it on TMC Xtra, and it was pretty decent, but crap it was hard to understand, the soundtrack was awful. The book was a lot better. A couple of questions though, what the hell was the candy they kept eating that they only got the "green ones". And, McNab had a compass on his AR, wouldn't the metal in the rifle upset the reading? Michael |
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Brit rations come with "hard boiled sweets" kind of like jolly ranchers. The compass on a rifle would throw it off a little but not all that much at all. I use to use my lensatic compass while in my HUMVEE and it might have been off like 1-2 degrees. Since terrain association is the best way to land nav, as long as your heading generally in the right direction you will be fine. |
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candy translates into Pick N Mix. Hard candies, jellies, toffees, chocolate's ect.... you have to have been around brits or lived there to get the meaning of their sayings. but, their squad commands are pretty straight forward. great movie, i just bought the DVD, got it yesterday. purchased it from best buy, they have them on back order. only $12 bucks too. hell, it's one of the best foreign war films i've ever seen......apart from wild geese. it's easy to nitpick alot of things in movies.....like we were soldiers once, when mel gibson goes charging off leading all kinds of maneuvers...calling in cas and things go into fast forward and it seems like they get instant cas which is probably a little embellished. i could think of a million more things but B20 was pretty accurate. it would be more fitting to glue his compass to the buttstock, would have been a better platform. |
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That's a story that deserved a big budget film, but it was not bad for a film that certainly looked like it was made on shoestring budget. You are right about the book being better. Did one of the other team members, one of the guys who walked out, also write a book or have a movie made about their end of what happened? |
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Quoted: That's a story that deserved a big budget film, but it was not bad for a film that certainly looked like it was made on shoestring budget. You are right about the book being better. Did one of the other team members, one of the guys who walked out, also write a book or have a movie made about their end of what happened? Chris Ryan wrote "The One That Got Away" and he was the only team member to escape....into Syria. He walked out on his own. The other two went down to hijack a truck at some kind of depot and they got jumped by a squad of iraqi's. B20 was originally a BBC mini series, 2 one hour segments that were shown over the course of 2 days. I really like the compromise, dismounted infantry, hasty defense and counter-attack. It has a great feel of real fire/manuever excercises, such as passing thru, bounding movements, patroling, hand signals, turning corners and they all wore shamagh, headdresses. i couldn't help but laughing at the irony of it all. out of all the cars in the world they could have hijacked they came across a new york taxi cab. the way the iraqi's treated our POW's were just appauling. |
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Maybe I made the mistake of reading the book first, because I thought the movie feel WAY short of what it could have been. This is definitely one of those true stories that deserved a much bigger budget than it was allotted. If you liked the movie, you'll read the book a couple times. I can't wait to read it again. Andy McNab is one hardcore son of a bitch! His other Non-Fiction book Immediate Action, is another great one as well. It's more of a conglomerate telling of his tours w/ the SAS. Also, his Fiction is outstanding as well, if you're the type that doesn't mind reading fiction in 1st person. Bravo Two Zero, the movie, is about 35% of the story in the book, but nonetheless, a story that deserves telling, regardless of the media used to tell it. |
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Gotta call BS on that compass issue- DO NOT have any ferrous metal within a couple feet of your compass, or I guarantee you'll be off. Several feet for large steel objects, like 20 for vehicles. Humvees have aluminum bodies, so they may be a little more forgiving in this case. In my military days we even handed off our rifle for a moment to get an accurate bearing. Another compass will deviate it also. If you like, take a bearing, watch your compass and have a buddy move a rifle around you- you'll probably be suprised and learn something at thew same time. The SAS is an outstanding group of men. They are some of the finest professionals in the business. |
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Quoted: Humvees have aluminum bodies, so they may be a little more forgiving in this case. Hummers or 113s, we used to land nav from the back of them using compasses. The compass would pick up a standard deviation and we would run with that. Stand 20', or so behind the vehicle, sight on a object forward of the vehicle, walk on, reshoot, record deviation, go. Terrain association is nice, and my preference, then the sun goes down and dead reckoning is all you got. We lost the ability to land nav from the vehicle when we trans to the IFV, they got a lot more steel and standing up in the back in contraindicated. Problem with a compass on a rifle is that the needle will always point toward the steel parts, North would always been where the steel parts are. I just did a test with my A2 and my Silva. When I sat the compass on the stock the needle swung 90 degrees to align with the weights in the buffer. A couple of inches away and I didn't see any deviation. A_W, I know, it's the server that's slow, but I was waiting for an Amazon page to load to get the author's name when Scht0nk answered Aimless. |
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There is some controversy about how truthful McNabb's account actually was. I reserve judgement as the sources are all bound up by various levels of secrecy and confidentiality. If things did go the way they did in the book, then McNabb and crew are all some seriously tough MFers who got screwed over by bad commo information. |
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On that note... Ever hear of this book? [url=http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0304365548/ref=pd_sim_b_dp_5/026-3136554-8558001]The Real "Bravo Two Zero": The Truth Behind "Bravo Two Zero"[/url] Synopsis Bravo Two Zero was the code-name of the famous SAS operation: a classic story of bravery in the face of overwhelming odds. Three members of the patrol were killed. One, veteran Sergeant Vince Phillips, was blamed in two books for a succession of mistakes. However, the stories in "Bravo Two Zero" and "The One That Got Away" grew considerably in the telling. Their heroic tales of taking out tanks with their rocket launchers, mowing down hundreds of Iraqi soldiers and the silent stabbing of the occasional sentry, were never mentioned at their post-war debriefings. Michael Asher went to Iraq to find out what really happened. Just one step ahead of the Iraqi police, he retraced the footsteps of the patrol from its landing in the desert to the hunt and pursuit that cost the lives of three men. [red]The story he uncovered is very different to previous accounts[/red] and now, finally, the truth behind Bravo Two Zero can be told. About the Author Michael Asher served in the Parachute Regiment and SAS. A fluent Arab speaker, he has lived for years among the Bedouin peoples. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, his published books include SHOOT TO KILL (1990), THESIGER: A BIOGRAPHY (1994) and an acclaimed biography of Lawrence of Arabia. edit for code |