"BANG!" The mental picture alone kills me...

This is a REAL piece of British news, which ACTUALLY went out in the papers. No offense to our overseas brothers and sisters with bad oral hygiene, but this is a Bush-sized blunder, for sure.

The story goes like this:

Someone in the UK miscalculated the number of blanks the British army would need to train its Iraq-bound troops. When the "whoops" was discovered, everyone was troublingly out of solutions... until one particularly smart chap must have suggested that the soldiers just yell "BANG" when they'd otherwise shoot in a training exercise. Of course, this didn't go over well with the army, but apparently no one else really gives a shit. (Just picturing it now, with the accents and the bloody hell's and all caused me to stop typing for a moment and wipe my teary eyes after a fit of giggles. It's like something out of Austin Powers... here I go again!)

Check this out (and click the title link for the whole story, which I found on BoingBoing):


A senior British army officer said:

"There is nothing more dispiriting than soldiers having to go on exercise and shout 'bang, bang' because there is not enough blank ammunition. Any benefit from the exercise will be lost because soldiers just won't take it seriously. Why should soldiers who are being sent to Iraq, where their lives will be endangered, be forced to shout 'bang' in training because someone in the Ministry of defense can't do basic arithmetic? It's a disgrace."