Gun went off a rootie-toot-toot

Well, Memorial Day has come and gone, and of course we didn't get to enjoy many cookouts or good beer. We did, however, get to enjoy yet another iteration of everyone's favorite class: Counter-IED. It was the same class, with the same powerpoint slides, and even the same videos that we saw in both Kuwait and Texas. It didn't help the fact that we had to have it after work, and it ran a little long and made its way into our sleep time. We got over it, though.
A cool thing happens here every once in a while. They fire off the "Phalanx" weapon. It's essentially a 20mm gatling gun that's used to shoot things out fo the sky. It works in tandem with the AN/TPQ-36 "Firefinder" Radar to detect and intercept incoming objects. It first was used on ships in the Navy, but the Army learned that it has many benefits for land-based air defense, and is now in places all around Iraq and the US. You can read all sorts of good info on it here or here. Anyway, to make it brief, when they use it at sea, they use tungsten penetrators to knock down the projectile. Obviously, when used over an urban environment this isn't a good idea since the penetrators would fall to the ground and possibly hurt people. Instead, they use exploding bullets that detonate after a certain distance, and they don't leave much residue to deal with. This makes for a pretty cool lightshow when they fire it off. Anyway, the benefit of wotking where we do and when we do is that we can see the whole thing go down. I shot off a few pics of the event for you to see:







It's a little fuzzy, only because I had to shut off my flash and the camera can't stabilize itself without the flash on.
Anyway, if anyone happens to stop by Arnold's, tell Brett and Ronda "thank you" for me for sending the nice package. Everyone should be getting either nice hand-written letters or very nice typed and printed letters on some fantastic paper they sent me. Hooray! I also got some nice photo paper, so when I get home and get a nice photo printer I can print off a few of my more favorite pictures from here in a larger format. I'll need to get a few more good ones, first!