A generation of military first-person shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield may have millions of kids thinking they know modern warfare, but they don’t. As these videos are about to show.
YouTube channel FUNKER530 exists as a repository for veterans to post videos they’ve captured of live, raw combat footage, and some of the stuff that’s been uploaded there in recent weeks is insane.
In addition to things like live firefights captured on helmet-mounted cameras, which we’ve seen before, there are videos showing things like bombing runs, minigun attacks, artillery bombardments and even footage of what an AC-130 gunship – you know, the Modern Warfare one – strike looks like from the ground.
What I found most interesting, once my admiration for the guts on display in many of these wears off, is the attitude of the soldiers. Most of them are kids, and in a perverse reunion with the tone of games like Call of Duty, their casually excited reactions to things like airstrikes aren’t much different to what you’d hear over a headset on Xbox Live.
In the first video above, a US soldier attempts to assault a Taliban position in Afghanistan while his squad is under heavy fire. He ends up being hit four times, including once on the helmet (though no rounds penetrated his body armour). You can see other videos in the gallery above.
There are a lot more of these eye-opening videos, all of them trying to document what live combat is actually like, over on FUNKER530.
Raw Combat Footage Documentation [YouTube]
Two 4000-pound bombs are dropped on Taliban compounds.
A US Special Forces unit armed with heavy weapons engages the Taliban, eventually calling in an air strike.
A Taliban sniper hiding in a minaret tower is attacked by M-1 tanks.
Soldiers capture an AC-130 gunship air strike, assisting US troops in action against the Taliban.
Marine snipers attack Taliban forces in the village below.
US infantry in a frantic firefight against the Taliban in a village.
US M777 howitzers obliterate a mountainside target, which had previously been firing on American troops.
Slow-motion footage of an A-10’s famous rotary cannon firing on Taliban positions.
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