Throwback Thursday Pictures and Videos!

Greetings and Salutations!
Well last night was a “Fallout London” sort of night. I needed to do some killin’ so Virtually being the only socially acceptable version I could participate in (for now) I went all in.

A pretty good body count for the night. Lots of Feral Ghouls.

A night killing ghouls is a plus.

It was -that- sort of work day that drove me to mass slaughter. Some days and some of the Glorious Tractor Factory Clients I have to deal with just proves to be without any doubt that we are in the ‘Decline of Empire’ days… the only saving grace we have is OUR “Nero” a.k.a. The FORMER Pretender to the Glorious and Harmonious P&PBUH (Plus 10%) Orifice of The (p)Resident, The Ex-Dementor-in-Chief, Emperor Poopypants the First, Post-Chief Executive of the Kidsmeller Pursuivant, Good Ole Slo Xi-Den did NOT get to utilize his fiddle, and possibly our OrangeCaesar may eventually cross the Rubicon, and get shit straightened out.

Anyways… this’s a bit of a “Throwback Thursday”
I recently while cleaning up the Museum Area, I found a set of cabling that I bought years ago that allows one to check old hard drives by hooking up a power supply and a i/o cable that allows you to then plug it into your PC via USB, and see what exactly what you have on said-aforementioned drive.

Now I don’t know about you, but I never throw away a Hard Drive until I go back and make sure I’ve pulled everything off of it that I can. A very handy tool to have. Only after that do I then do a full T/S Level Demil, to include drilling, degaussing, and finally a sledgehammer to the drive to get rid of it for good.

To go with this, I recently found a stack of forgotten HDDs that have been laying around. One labeled mine, another labeled (in the X’s handwriting) backup and storage, and a few smaller laptop HHDs. Now the laptop ones are problematic in that I lost the power coupler for those that goes with the cabling set.

So for now, I still have to wait to see what’s on them. The other full size ATA drives? One of them is an 80 gig drive, and dated from the early 2000s… so that means at the time that was a HUGE storage device. It reminded me of one of my first USB memory stick drives I bought in Baghdad in 2004. 256 megabytes and I paid some stupidly large amount for it… like almost $200 as I recall. The X’s storage drive is a terabyte, so I think she got that while I was still overseas.

Either way, I cracked open the ones I could, and pulled what I wanted.

TBH it was really fucking depressing.
It was hard.
It Hurt truth be told.

ALL the pictures of the Spawn when they were littles… TONS of pics of ALL the holidays I missed… The X was and may still be a prolific photographer. I let her buy any camera equipment she wanted back then… and the very few holidays or whatever when I -was- home, damned few pictures of me.

Tons of the other members of the fam… the In Laws in particular. Her family… even when -I- was home on the rare visit. <Sigh>

However, ONE drive was kind of cool. Lost pictures of mine from Iraq and of all places, pics from Guantanamo Bay… like all of a handful but still… the reason for such a paucity of the pics in Gitmo was the damned near absolute ban on taking pictures didn’t make one want to take pictures. After Abu Ghraib and all the shit that went on there, unauthorized photography was a one-way ticket to either unemployment or a cell depending on the circumstances.

In fact the ban was so strict that IF you were leaving Gitmo, even for a short period of time, ALL your electronics, and I mean ALL of them… laptop, thumb drives, CDs… ALL of it had to be turned in to be scanned and/or censored like they used to censor the mail in WW2. That meant dropping yer shit off two weeks in advance and hope to Hell it was ready to go home with you by the time you were supposed to leave.

I got around that by NOT taking any electronic items home with me. I rawdogged it so to speak without a Laptop during the trip. I mean I had one at home so it worked out. The pics I did take made it past the censor board, so hey, at least I have a few pics.

Here’s one of me waiting for the Bus to take me to work:

….and one of me on a day off from work:

Gitmo: Where one attempts to erase one’s liver.

Then another Iraq Photo set I had features the Late Great Toby Keith on a USO tour… This was taken behind 1st Cav HQ on Liberty in 2005:

The bald old man in from of me is (God Rest him) my bro Skip who died of Cancer about 6 years after he got home… he was a good dude but wouldn’t get the fuck out of my picture framing LOL. Here’s another maybe better? one:

TK was a cool showman I have to give him that…

I personally wonder if the stomach cancer he got was because he spent so much time over there with us… I mean he seemed to always be in Baghdad every time I turned around…

And the number of US who got cancer?
Sheeeee-it!
Let me tell you now:
Depleted Uranium?
Its going to be the Agent Orange of the GWOT
Just watch.

On the same Hard Drive I also found videos I shot at my house in Iraq, as well as vids of various missions from there, to include some better shots of my rather cool and extensive weapons collection. Let me start off with that:

Now I’ve poasted that one before.
Some of you might remember seeing it.
HOWEVER the copy I had sucked. A picture-of-a-picture.
VERY bad quality.
This One? MUCH BETTER!

So, As you can see, this’s a pretty cool selection of the various toys I had. The problem is I had no idea where the rest of the pictures were. By looking on that drive I found one of them, specifically of one of the rarer pistol? rifle? You can decide:

The AK in the upper left?
A Sterling Silver (plated?) Saddam “Krinkov” so to speak.
My understanding is those were used by his bodyguards.
That particular one was a paperweight as the operating rod was cracked and broken, rendering it useless outside of a pretty wall-hanger.

Then there are a few other cool examples. The .38 at the bottom was a Smith and Wesson Pre-Model 10 Military and Police Revolver marked (on the other side of the barrel) “Property of Iraqi National Police”

And the far right semi-auto is not a Belgian Helwan nor a Beretta M1951. It’s a cheap shitty copy of those, a 9mm made in Iraq called a “Tariq” named after some Muj General from eons past. The silver medallion has his face on it. A total piece of shit that I never fired for fear it’d self-detonate. Didn’t want to lose anything critical so to speak…

Jes’ Sayin’

The others were cool too.
The SVD was a Chinese NDM-86 that had formerly been the property of Uday Hussein himself. I even had paperwork man…

The PPsh-43 was made in 1943 and marked “Stalingrad”.

The FN-MAS was unfired and unfireable, as I didn’t have a proprietary mag that’d fit it.

The FN-FAL was neat.

The folder AK was a Chinese Type 56.

The AK with the Blonde Furniture was an of all things made by a company called “American Eagle” but was select fire with full auto ability. Someone told me thast that was a CIA-sponsored and manufactured weapon…

I have no real idea.
My MP-5 folder is in there too, well worn, and I also found this pic of me w/my MP-5K:

Good Lord I make that thing look like a cap gun…
And I still have that particular helmet:

A little more worse for the wear, 20 years later
(OMG!!!! It’s LITERALLY BEEN 20 YEARS since that first pic was taken!!!! OLD OLD I GOT OLD!!!!)

So yeah… kind of cool.
I had a literal metric shit-pot more of them, but the majority of them were just ‘normal’… nothing that stood out per se. I mean like who cares about 23 more AK-47s right? I for real, I had AKs to burn back then…

And then we come to the videos.
Now keep in mind the following are digital video(s) shot in 2005… the quality isn’t the best, despite me having the ‘latest and greatest’ gear that WASN’T $4k or better… I wanted good equipment, but I wasn’t going to go nuts… sooooo…

Here’s some videos of some “Iraqi things” namely a video tour of part of the Palace Complex of Victory Base in Baghdad:

And then, there’s a Convoy I rode shotgun on to get to Abu G and our entry in:

And lastly, a shot of the Ziggurat at Ur:

Man I’ve been to some pretty cool places and seen some pretty cool stuff Aye? Watching these, I realized that I lived history man… Kind of wild TBH…

Now I’m HOPING those uploaded
If not
Well dammit. I let this thing sit for a LOOOOONG minute to get everything done ‘right’. And in the end, I ended up uploading it to my Yewtoob Channel and embedding them to get them out to you all.

Dammit.
AGAIN

Anyways…
Finding long lost ‘stuff’ like that is pleasing.
I’m going to have to figure out how to crack open the laptop HHDs as I know those are from my Iraq Adventures and who know how much forgotten ‘stuff’ is on them? I’ll keep y’all up to date as I get things done.

So hope you enjoyed Throwback Thursday… Maybe I’ll make it a regular thing? Let me know in the comments

More Later
Big Country