>А что такого удивительного?
>Кстати Хамвики их тоже были не новые, а побитые и полученные из других подразделений. Ну и что?
Они там по мелочам модернизировали эти машинки, за свой счёт. Кажется, ничего странного, но например приёмники GPS в оригинале, нормативно, надо было высовывать в открытые окна "хамви", в поисках сигналов спутников. В общем, вот что делали:
Gunny Wynn and I suspected that the company would deny any unconventional requests to modify the Humvees. "Wouldn't make us look good," I said, mocking my CO's oft-repeated criterion for whether or not we should do something.
So we opted to beg forgiveness rather than ask permission. I knew from Afghanistan that the rules would change when the first shot was fired. By then it would be too late. Using their Afghan experience, Colbert and Sergeant Larry Shawn Patrick opened Second Platoon's chop shop. Patrick, known as "Pappy" because of his grandfatherly thirty years, led Team Two. He was an unflappable North Carolinian, tall and thin, who had started his recon career in Somalia ten years before.
The platoon labored for weeks in the motor pool, often working late into the night. We strung lights so that we could see in the dark, and everyone contributed money, tools, and supplies. Colbert's Humvee had light armor, but the other four were open, like dune buggies. We mottled the beigecolored exteriors with brown and gray to break up the vehicles' outlines and reduce their visibility at dawn and dusk. Camouflage netting, rolled and hung from the roofs, was rigged to release quickly with the pull of a single strap. Each Humvee, when stationary, could be made to look like a bush within seconds.
The heavy machine guns would be mounted atop three-foot-high metal posts in the Humvee beds. Gunners would stand behind them, with the firing handles at chest level. Sergeant Steve Lovell bolted racks over each wheel well to hold extra cans of ammunition near the gunners who would need it.
Lovell, leader of Team Three, was new to recon. He had grown up on a Pennsylvania dairy farm and served in the infantry as a sniper. "One thing I learned as a sniper," he told me while riveting an ammo rack to a Humvee, "is that nothing in the world's as useless as ammo just out of reach."
Corporal Josh Person, another Afghanistan vet now serving as the driver in Colbert's team, mounted civilian CB antennas to the rearview mirrors, running cables inside to the radios. After some trial-and-error tuning, their static-free transmissions became the envy of the other platoons. Colbert bought Garmin GPS antennas at RadioShack, allowing the teams to mount their GPS receivers against the windshield rather than holding them outside open windows to pick up satellites.