For those who don't know, the painting is being done
after the lifesaving, most likely as a way of giving thanks.
https://twitter.com/UnseenOps/status/1661499544297717762
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Pay no attention to the dumbass "muh warhammer 40k" crap.
At least they got to keep them; all of our plates damaged by rounds had to be turned in & DX'd, no exceptions (unless it belonged to an officer). But I know a couple guys that accepted a statement of charges for keeping theirs after they took hits, "I lost it in the field, honestly".
Not surprising; we did things on that scale in 2003, until the Iraqi drawdown (considering we left everything else in Afghanistan).
Also, some of those vehicle exercise tracks were already built, mostly by the Germans, but also in places like Aberdeen, Ft. Sill, Pueblo, etc. But by 2003 when I went in, everything had been repurposed or grown over. We had one at the kaserne, but half of it was used for driving tests, the other had warehouses built over it by the Army in the 80's.
IIRC
@Pocket Dragoon worked in logistics during his service so I'm sure he'll have some stuff to chime in with.
I was just a lowly mechanic so I worked with logistics, not in logistics.
But I also did recovery (M88 ftw), was responsible for the unit's tooling, moonlighted in the arm's room & rode guntrucks. Between that and going on more TDY than was healthy, I got around a bit more than the average motorpool chud.
Thus I was riding along when we sent our battalion vehicles to the port, some by rail & others OTR, and picked them up in Kuwait. It wasn't WW2 but there was a fucking lot going on back then, and I often wondered what it was like during a really big war, because I could tell that what we were doing was only a small fraction of what was possible, in terms of movement of troops & vehicles. But we spun up pretty quick and by 2005-06 moving multiple BCTs was old hat; looks like this time it took less than a year to relearn things, which isn't bad.