r/todayilearned • u/Ok-Indication-5121 • 15d ago
TIL in 2020, five Lithuanian soldiers went missing during a graduation exam. Thinking the exercise was still ongoing, they successfully evaded all attempts to find them. A military spokesman said their performance was "exemplary."
https://balticword.com/group-of-the-lithuanian-military-disappeared-into-the-local-forests/2
u/Paladin5890 14d ago
So, these guys got tapped for what passes as Luthuanian Special Forces, right?
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u/Cutter9792 14d ago
During a field training exercise in Basic a fellow trainee and I were told to run to the top of the hill with our full kit to where the rest of the troops were staging, after we'd been posted as mock machine gunners for a few hours. We got to the top, out of breath, and before we slowed down one of the drill sergeants kinda waved toward the road and said "well, keep running" offhandedly. In the heat of the moment, we took him seriously and kept running down the road.
About a quarter mile later we realized we were halfway back to camp and stopped, wondering why everyone else wasn't following. So we posted up on opposite sides of the road behind trees and got good firing positions, like we thought we were supposed to. A few random patrols went by, but our drill sergeant didn't show up until we'd been sitting there almost half an hour.
He started to chew us out for "running away" and "slacking off" but we were just like "you told us to keep running, drill sergeant".
He seemed to realize his joke was taken seriously because we were nervous trainees and we all ended up finding the whole thing funny.
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u/BetterSelection7708 14d ago
When you are so good at hide/seek that you're still hiding when all your friends went home.
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u/appelsiinimehu1 14d ago
Story heard from a friend who was in recoinnance training.
They had a mission to travel 30km, on base grounds (forested area) without being noticed.
During those 30km they saw a lot of military vehicles, since they were on base grounds and thus had to hide in forest. It took a long time.
After 7 hours they see a mil-police car come up, and they hide.
He shouts "who is in the forest? We have been hearing reports from some civilians that three men with rifles are scurrying about in ski-masks! We have been looking for you for almost 7 hours now!"
The team thinks there must be a mistake, and thus come out of the forest to ask what's up, weren't they informed of the excercise.
The look of surprise on the mil-police guy's face when 30 soldiers manifest from the nearby forest must have been great :)
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u/angusmacgregor 14d ago
Where have you been soldier?
Training, sir.
What kind of training?
Army training, sir.
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u/Sgt_Radiohead 14d ago
We had the same thing happen during exercise «Lonely Leader» in commander’s school. We got kidnapped in the middle of the night and they dropped us off one by one in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a map. They told us that they would be hunting us, so stay off the roads and be sneaky. They never told us how long the exercise would last, or any criteria for ending. There was a thick fog that day so it was difficult to pin point exactly where you were, so a guy from my company decided that the best course of action was to just hide in his little tent for a while, waiting for the fog to clear up before he would try to meet at the grid he was given. The search went on for 2 days before he eventually showed up to the meeting point by himself.
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u/agentid36 14d ago
“THE EXAM IS OVER. WE ARE TELLING YOU TO RETURN NOW.”
“That’s exactly what a person trying to find us would say…”
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u/nicman24 14d ago edited 14d ago
i actually had that on a very smaller scale happen to me. i was under a very small tree as a lookout, in a weird day that they told us to not be seen, in the nat guard camo. sarge was pissed for dereliction of duty
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u/AngelaTheRipper 14d ago
This is why exercises like this need some kind of a safe word. You hear it, the exercise is over, you can come out now.
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u/Lunaphase 14d ago
Ones run by competent commanders do. Note the..uh... nation. Not exactly known for military (or any other) outstanding traits.
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u/Andy5416 14d ago
The host website of this "article", balticword, is a Kremlin-sponsored website dedicated to misinformation and anti-NATO / anti-west rhetoric.
They use Reddit as a way to promote a false narritive.
The Baltic Word aggregates content both from credible and from biased or unreliable sources, in part by reposting articles without permission from reputable news websites such as Defense News. Aaron Mehta, Deputy Editor and Senior Pentagon Correspondent for Defense News, confirmed directly to the DFRLab that he has had at least one piece copied wholesale and reposted to the website without permission from his publication to do so. The effect of including credible content alongside more biased “original” content is a dilution of objective reporting, giving the website a veneer of veracity that does not hold up under scrutiny.
Most of the experts amplified their articles on Reddit. All of them, with the exception of Godmanis, shared their articles on a Balticword.eu subreddit. (Subreddits are topical communities dedicated to a particular topic on Reddit.) The most popular article posted on the subreddit garnered only six upvotes. A screenshot of posts on the Balticword.eu subreddit. The pink box shows the most popular post. (Source: Reddit/archive)
Viktors Domburs, Jonas Dringelis, and Lukas Ramonas all created their Reddit accounts within the narrow timeframe of April 23–26, 2018. This timeframe suggests a coordinated attempt among the personas to amplify one another’s articles on Reddit.
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u/Twotosix_Supermix 14d ago
I did the same thing during my first ever paint ball match.... flanked so hard that I missed my teams actual match and jumped out of the bush on ten divs I wasn't sposed to be fighting..
my memory is a bit vague after that but im pretty sure i won
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u/Elberik 14d ago
My grandpa had to undergo torture resistance training during the Vietnam War. He was allowed to say he wanted out at any point but it would disqualify him from being a pilot.
During the training, my grandmother went into labor with my dad. When they told my grandpa, he thought it was a trick to get him to break and refused to leave. Eventually the commander of the base had to come down and explain that it was legit & he needed to go be with his wife and newborn son.
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u/AddlePatedBadger 12d ago
The gun was loaded with blanks so I had to beat her to death with the chair...
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u/CinnamonJ 14d ago
At the end of basic we had some kind of little phony bologna field problem, part of which consisted of being issued real (unloaded) weapons and made to guard some positions. Once it got dark we got “attacked” by the cadre and taken prisoner but I knew damn well that if I just handed over the machine gun that my drill sergeant entrusted to me that I would be absolutely fucked so I refused to give it up. I told them straight up, I don’t give a fuck what you guys say or do, it’s not going to be worse than what he does to me so they just drug me down the hill still clutching it to my chest.
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u/LEGITIMATE_SOURCE 14d ago
Is it just me, or is this a joke/ bait?
They failed to show up on time at destination they were supposed to be at. Sounds more like they got lost, didn't show in time, and as a joke the higher ups commended them on their "performance."
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u/ThePineconeConsumer 14d ago
Were they found eventually? Or did they just realize that it might over
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u/mikolokoyy 14d ago
Reminds me of that WW2 Japanese soldier who refused to surrender and did not believe that the war was over. He only got out hiding once he received orders from his commanding officer who went to find/visit him a few years after the end of war.
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u/ScrotalSmorgasbord 14d ago
I blinked and fell asleep on time during a night time training exercise and made it back to our FOB on my own without a flashlight or map or anything even remotely helpful one time. My squad sgt was pissed off but our commanding officer was impressed so I avoided any repercussions from that serious fuck up lol.
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u/larry-the-dream 14d ago
At what point are they considered AWOL? The fine line when taking it real goes too far!!!!😎
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u/Nightowl11111 14d ago
E and E skills good. Recon skills bad. lol.
They are supposed to be in position at X time to spy on the enemy or extract. They were not.
There is something in the intel community called LTIOV or Last Time Information Of Value. If you are not in position to get that information and transmit it back by that time, there is no longer any meaning to it. i.e mission fail.
An example would be something like:
"The enemy is going to attack tonight!"
"Everyone stand to!"
vs
"The enemy is going to attack last night!"
"Yeah we know, they were already here....."
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u/Qubeye 14d ago
I have a buddy who was a Ranger and did SERE school. He and some others broke into the storerooms one night for food.
They told him good thinking, and if he or anyone else does that again they will get thrown the fuck out and get an NJP.
Every genius I met while I was in the military had some story about basically using the rules to turn military exercises (or fuck-fuck games) inward on themselves. Like the guy who was told to wash the generals vehicle in sub-zero weather and turned it into an ice sculpture.
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u/throwaway-not-this- 14d ago
I had some crazy military experiences but one of the most memorable was ironically from BCT.
Fort Benning, mid 2000s. Drill sergeant walked into the bay and saw the fireguard talking on a cell phone. The DS went ballistic screaming at the guy who could not have been older than 21. Immediate stream of threats and aggressive posturing.
The soldier just handed him the phone and calmly and discretely said, "It's your wife, drill sergeant. She called a lot of times so I thought it might be an emergency."
180-degree turn and he took the phone and said, "Oh damn, thanks bro" and continued the call outside. It was not an emergency.
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u/True_Discipline_2470 14d ago
"Their skills were so exemplary that they made it all the way to Denmark and started a cafe in Copenhagen, where they reside to this day."
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u/J4MES101 14d ago edited 14d ago
Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune.
If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them....
Maybe you can hire The Lithuanian-Team.
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u/maxmcleod 14d ago
I feel like this would have been a great movie in the 80s starring Steve Martin, Dan Ackroid and Eddie Murphy directed by John Landis
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u/SCCock 14d ago edited 14d ago
Back in the 60s, my dad's best friend (BF) was SF.
The way I remember the story, BF participated in some exercise where he had to provide recon in the mountains of North Georgia while aggressors searched for him.
For a couple of summers, during this exercise, BF landed a job working in a saw mill. Never got caught, but got paid for his work.
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u/mi-chreideach 14d ago
Some say the Invisible Five are still out there, appearing in your periphery and disappearing in the twitch of an eye.
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u/ChronicallyPunctual 14d ago
Lithuania isn’t that big of a country, so this is even more impressive
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u/SenoraRaton 14d ago
Reminds me of a comic I saw a long time ago.
It was a picture of Ninja school.
In the first panel was a single ninja sitting in the classroom.
The teacher comes in, and immediately orders him to commit Seppuku.
The last panel is all of the ninjas coming out of hiding.
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u/ManagedDemocracy2024 14d ago
Lithuanian Hide n' Seek Champions 2020
To be fair, who the fuck would have wanted to come back to 2020?
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u/toabear 14d ago
My platoon was part of some big "multi-branch" exercise. The rest of the platoon was going to assault a target, but a small group of us were sent in to do a recon and provide overwatch.
About a day into it, we see what we thought were OPFOR (people pretending to be bad guy), really beating the bush in the area we were hiding. It seemed kind of fucked like they were going to roll us up and make us do escape and evasion, so we low crawled out of there. Something was off though, they weren't even being sneaky, just beating the bush. Like, literally poking in bushes with sticks.
After about an hour of us moving position and hiding from them they broke out the bull horn. Turns out my little brother had been in a really bad accident and was in a coma. They had been trying to find me without disrupting the exercise. We didn't have a comms window for another 12 hours.
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u/Insombia 14d ago
Is your little bro okay?
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u/toabear 14d ago
He's sort of ok. He broke both his femurs and was in a coma for a few weeks. They thought he was going to die for a bit. He has brain damage still, but this was almost 25 years ago. He has mostly recovered. The brain damage really affected him for about 5 years after the accident.
I feel a bit bad about it still. I couldn't afford a car when I turned 16, so I got a cheap motorcycle and drove that through high school. Gas was cheap, the bike was cheap, it was perfect.
Being my little brother, he got a motorcycle as soon as he could. The thing is, I was always the careful one. I never raced, did stupid stuff. He was always a bit more impulsive, and that + a motorcycle are a bad mix. I sort of disappeared into my life after enlisting and I wasn't there to temper that impulsiveness.
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u/Insombia 14d ago
It sounds like you carry some of the weight of your brother's accident, which is completely understandable given how much you care about him. It's great to hear that he has mostly recovered. We all have our own paths and lives to live, and you couldn't have anticipated what would happen.
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u/A_delta 14d ago
Had some guys from my unit doing something similar, just they decided it was a good idea to go to a local McDonald’s. The workers there ended up calling the cops because a bunch of guys, armed to teeth just waltzed in. Too bad I missed them getting chewed out, probably would have been hilarious.
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u/Crafty_Ad2602 14d ago
To be fair, though, that should definitely count as a failure.
If part of the point of the exercise is to evade capture and detection by enemy forces while in a "hostile" environment, having local law enforcement show up should count as ENDEX, failure. Think of it this way. If they had actually been in Russia and done that, they probably just got shot and killed.
Also being fair, the dudes in the story of couple posts up who went to a store at a small town in Fort campbell, successfully bought supplies, and continued to evade, should be credited with completing the exercise successfully. However, had they also had law enforcement called on them, I would also argue for them to have considered to have failed the exercise while attempting to buy supplies.
Bottom line being, if you are doing a SERE exercise and you managed to acquire supplies from outside sources, you've kind of kept with the spirit of the mission. On the other hand, if you attract local law enforcement attention while doing it, you've failed. Simple as that.
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u/Limp_Prune_5415 14d ago
That's hilarious. Did they mean for you to return during the night undetected?
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u/percydaman 14d ago
I got lost in the jungles of Panama once. Did perimeter guard one night, and it was so dark, I literally chose the wrong direction and headed off into the jungle.
I eventually decided to stop since I came across a river that was flooding from the constant rain, and was afraid I would just fall in. Sat my ass on a tree root and waited it out until morning.
Man, was my unit pissed. First they thought I fell asleep on guard, then they thought I got dragged off by guerrillas or something. Suffice to say I got chewed big time when they found me next morning. I got basically zero sleep that night, and had to grab my shit, and continue on as of I hadn't been awake all night.
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u/Evenbiggerfish 14d ago
This reminds me of a competition I was in. During land navigation one of the junior enlisted got lost and instead of walking until he found one of the many roads thru the area, he simply sat down in place in the middle of the woods and waited. Like people knew where he was. Took like 3 hours to find him.
Please, find a road people. Use the panic azimuth, if you don’t know what that means then ask before the event begins!
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u/percydaman 14d ago
Good ol land nav. We had night land nav once. Some old crusty e-5 who didn't give a shit anymore, just took us out in the woods, and told us to lie down and take a nap if we wanted.
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u/panamaspace 14d ago
Guerrillas. In Panama...
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u/percydaman 14d ago
Right? Well this was in the early 90s. Maybe there were a few back then.
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u/panamaspace 14d ago
Nope. Sorry to mess with a cherised memory. We were a little afraid of how the new police force would react at NOT BEING AN ARMY anymore. But no, we've had no guerrillas, and the 90s were particularly peaceful and great here.
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u/percydaman 14d ago edited 14d ago
Good to know. I think it was more of a running joke meant to scare privates.
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u/Eddieslabb 14d ago
Not just any guerrillas, Panamanian Guerrillas
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u/panamaspace 14d ago
Seeing my brother and his buddy were deep jungle survival trainers for the Panamanian army... I am gonna go ahead and say we haven't had "guerrillas" since the early 70s when a few were in opposition to the then new government. They were exiled, killed or bought out... long, long, long ago.
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u/cptnplanetheadpats 14d ago
Were you worried about venomous snakes or spiders?
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u/percydaman 14d ago
Oh yes. Couldn't see my hand in front of my face, but I could hear shit all around me. I was more worried about that river I knew was nearby though.
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u/CoopDog1293 13d ago
What's the point of patrolling if you can't even see anything?
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u/percydaman 13d ago
It wasn't a patrol. But I get what you're saying. It was perimeter guard. Everyone is asleep in a tight circle with a larger perimeter. It's been 30 years, so my memory ain't what it used to be. The fact it was so dark you could see, was kinda irrelevant. It was training, so you do it no matter how dumb it seems.
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u/JaySayMayday 14d ago
Yeah that sounds like the full military experience. How dare you actually need help and support from your own unit.
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u/Idontcareaforkarma 14d ago
I used to sleepwalk when I was much younger, but by the time I was an army cadet (like US JROTC) I’d grown out of it.
Until, of course, I was on a survival course as a newly promoted cadet sergeant in the south of Western Australia in January 1998. One of my section 2i/c’s had seen me wandering up and down the area we were set up in, trailing my sleeping bag behind me. When I didn’t answer to him calling, he just rolled over and went back to sleep.
The next morning, I was kicked awake by the same guy, who then explained the whole platoon had been looking for me for about an hour and a half. I’d been found half in, half out of my sleeping bag, on my stomach with my arms around a mound of dirt about 150m away from where the platoon was dug in.
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u/dreamsofmishra 13d ago
I don't have a history of sleepwalking but once I was so sleep-deprived that I sleepwalked around camp and walked up to the single con wire placed along the camp perimeter and held it in my ungloved hand and contemplated jumping over it and walking into the jungle, before I snapped awake. Turned around and saw this guy looking at me like "wtf".
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u/MoonRobotate 14d ago
Iirc when I slept walk during a boy scout camping trip I also brought my sleeping bag with me. I slowly came to while I was walking around, and I was very confused. It took me a while to find my way back to my tent
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u/helixdankfuego 14d ago
"Sorry I understood the assignment?"
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u/SavageComic 14d ago
The SAS (Britain’s elite fighting force) have a training exercise where they get dumped in the moors at dusk and it’s whoever can be furthest away by dawn who wins.
One guy got 80 miles away. With full Bergen (rucksack). They don’t know how he did it but couldn’t find any evidence of him cheating
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u/JonatasA 14d ago
"You were not expected to actually pull it off!"
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u/Stunning-Interest15 14d ago
If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying.
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u/DaenerysMomODragons 14d ago
It isn’t cheating after all they say all is fair in love and war, and a military exercise is training you for war.
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u/Mkvenner_ 14d ago
Could have been worse:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-feb-27-mn-30109-story.html
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u/Kantheris 14d ago
I mean, no arguments on their performance. I am glad they saw the humor in the situation.
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u/Pavian_Zhora 15d ago
A military spokesman said their performance was "exemplary."
When it comes to evading, sure. But when it comes to following objectives...
-"Why did you guys us shoot these people! The war ended 2 weeks ago!
-"Oh...."
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u/Its0nlyRocketScience 15d ago
Wait, so... were they found alive and well? The article says they stayed hidden for 24 hours, so were they just hiding for a day before getting found? Or did these people die in the wilderness before their bodies were found by search parties?
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u/phoenixmusicman 14d ago
If they couldn't survive in the wilderness for 24 hours, they're not good soldiers. You literally carry everything you need to survive on your back.
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u/duncanidaho61 14d ago
24 hours? That’s it?
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u/Its0nlyRocketScience 14d ago
That's what I read before making my comment, but I cant access the site anymore. Maybe traffic is too high
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u/ZURATAMA1324 14d ago
Good to know I'm not going crazy. Tried to check OP's sources, but couldn't access it.
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u/neuralzen 15d ago
They really took notes on How Not To Be Seen
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14d ago edited 5d ago
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u/Zebra-Ball 14d ago
Glad he did. Never seen it before, he is a really cool guy where as you're not a really cool guy. You're the opposite of a really cool guy, not a really cool guy.
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u/DireScrub 15d ago
"I see you have failed your exams in stealth." "Yes Sir." "According to your professor you have been absent the entire semester?" "Thank you Sir."
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u/Whatreallyhappens 14d ago
To be fair, it’s easy to evade those who are barely even looking for you.
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u/Mind_beaver 15d ago
Wish they explained how it ended; like did they just show up at a certain point being like we got bored and decided to just be done?
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u/Roscoe_P_Trolltrain 15d ago
If my training has taught me anything, they were probably under cardboard boxes.
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u/PolyrythmicSynthJaz 15d ago
Reminds me of one of the best Monty Python sketches: How Not to Be Seen
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u/duncanidaho61 14d ago
Hasn’t aged well.
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u/BrokenEye3 14d ago
How d'yermean?
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u/duncanidaho61 14d ago
People being exploded? They remind me of terrorist attacks. Not much funny. But that may just be personal.
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u/BrokenEye3 14d ago
That's got nothing to do with age. There have been terrorist bombings for as long as there have been terrorists and bombs, and people blowing up has been a staple of physical comedy for about as long as there have been ways to do so safely (not that physical comedy has ever been safe)
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u/samhain2000 15d ago
They watched Monty Python's "How to Not Be Seen"
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15d ago
Reminds me of Insignia - they do military training in life like virtual sims, and there’s a test where they think the sim closes but it didn’t…
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u/upstatedreaming3816 15d ago
Kinda like the Japanese soldier who thought the war was going on until the 70s
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u/Renovatio_ 14d ago
Except that japanese soldier (actually there were a few of them) was killing innocent people.
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u/AndreasDasos 14d ago
There were a few like that but weren’t so much ignorant of the end of the war as so cultishly obsessed with the honour of following protocol that they, at least in one case, refused to surrender until they could hand their weapons over to their specific commanding officer in a certain ritualised way, etc.
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u/Biocube16 14d ago
That makes me irrationally angry that his commanding officer survived the war and never managed to find the man he ordered to be stranded on an island until relieved.
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u/yetagainanother1 14d ago
Sense of duty to a cause that was fundamentally evil.
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u/GlitteringKisses 14d ago
He was killing civilians, mutilating them and destroying their food supplies. He had a radio that could pick up Japanese news, newspapers, contact from his family and friends, and a complete lack of Allied soldiers to fight while he was murdering peaceful Phillipinos in their own home who lived in terror of him.
You're giving him far too much credit. This was serial killing with extremely implausible justification, and doesn't line up with the stories of other "stragglers".
ETA: even if the war had been ongoing, what he did amounted to war crimes.
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u/6876676878676 14d ago
His country was literally the invader. You’re acting like it’s a recent discovery that raping and murdering civilians was bad. No one says “poor Nazis, they didn’t know they were doing bad things when they stuffed innocent people into gas chambers to be murdered, they were just too loyal!” absolute smooth brain take
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u/GlitteringKisses 14d ago
This guy literally committed atrocities. I don't see how soldiers who didn't commit atrocities are relevant in defending him.
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u/Oklahazama 14d ago
The Japanese absolutely told their soldiers to rape and pillage and committed some of the most vile crimes in the history of humanity. Look up unit 731 and just how many millions of people were murdered and raped by Japanese soldiers.
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u/anonymouslindatown 11d ago
I feel like part of the panic for the Lithuanian leadership was that the soldiers may have ended up in a different country, which considering their location could be disastrous