"Oh! Never Mind. They Just Blew Themselves Up"

Here's a CENTCOM video that I enjoyed watching while having breakfast this morning. This is how CENTCOM describes the action:

U.S. helicopters watch as insurgents blow themselves up. Apache gunships with the 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade, TF Pegasus, observe insurgents in the act of emplacing an Improvised Explosive Device in southern Afghanistan. But before the Apaches move in for the strike, the insurgents' bomb goes off, killing them in the act.

There was a time when videos like this one would have to leak out unofficially, but now the U.S. military is freely providing them to the public, presumably under the heading of Information Operations.

You can find tons of this sort of material on the internet now. There's even a term for it: War Porn. I find most of it uninteresting, just firepower demonstrations without much context or back-story. But this video is different.

What I like about this one is its dramatic structure. It's a 2 minute and 55 second play, with exposition ("it looks like he appears to be covering something in the road"), rising action, suspense and tension ("go away kid, go away kid, go away kid!"), a surprise climax, and falling action. This one deserves to be called War Theater.

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Update on 11/2

Since the CENTCOM website is having some problems playing this video today, here's an embed to the same video on Youtube:



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Update again, on March 8, 2013.

Since I notice people are hitting on this old link, I'm updating the video embed again. I hope this one will stay current for awhile. Enjoy!