Afghanistan gunbattle voicemail YouTube'd
A recording of a gunbattle between U.S. soldiers and Afghan forces -- recorded onto voicemail when an embattled soldier accidentally pocket dialed his parents in Oregon -- has been uploaded to YouTube by the soldier's brother. The full story is at the BBC, and the YouTube clip is below.
Save for a brief written intro, the three-minute clip contains no images but has been viewed almost 250,000 times in the past 12 hours (I first saw the clip last night, when it had fewer than a 1,000 views). The sound of semi-automatic gunfire, followed by calls for more ammo and exclamations of force positions, is the only sound. The absence of melodramatic added footage makes the clip all the more disturbing -- the viewer is confronted with confusing sounds in an unfamiliar landscape, an experience that, even if only just, is analogous to the American experience in the Middle East. It's an odd sort of wonderful that, of all the visual footage I've seen of our Middle Eastern conflict, a clip with no images conveys the most about our situation there.
Most ominously, the clip ends with a U.S. soldier saying something similar to, "Hey, they're coming" or "Hey, they got me." The soldier who accidentally phoned home survived.
