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Michael Yon Dispatch

Jul-16-2007 » Filed Under: 3/2 SBCT

Yon just published a new dispatch titled Superman. Excerpt:

Back in 2005, when I hardly knew the name “Stryker,” I came into combat with the 1-24th Infantry Regiment. I believe it was SFC Robert Bowman who told me that his soldiers so disliked the idea of the Stryker, that when they finally got Strykers at Fort Lewis, the soldiers tried their best to break the machines in training. SFC Bowman might refute this, and I’m not sure he was the man who told me, but Bowman is certainly the man who told me that all his soldiers were converts even before they finished training.

Those soldiers learned that the human body is not tough enough to break a Stryker without destroying the people inside, too. The Stryker is just too tough, too well-designed and too well-built. Before long, many soldiers began naming their Strykers, though I’ve never heard of anyone naming a Humvee. Even an up-armored Humvee is just a machine, a necessary carapace. But a Stryker gets treated like a member of the platoon. Soldiers take extra care of them.

When a Humvee is badly damaged, it gets turned in to the mechanics with nary a further thought. But when a Stryker gets badly damaged, the soldiers visit it and hang around it and volunteer to help the mechanics and technicians nurse it back to life. I couldn’t make up anything this bizarre.


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