Is it true that a neighborhood of leftists, can't remember the name of it, was carpet-bombed during the invasion killing thousands? I think I read about in a Le Carre novel.
LeCarre's book, The Tailor of Panama, was fiction. Separately, during the actual Panama invasion, the impoverished neighborhood of El Chorrillo, adjacent to the headquarters of the Panamanian Defense Forces, suffered heavy damage in fighting and resulting fires. No clear number of dead and wounded has been established, but among the hundreds to thousands reported Panama-wide by some groups, certainly people in El Chorrillo were among those victims.
When I worked in the Casualty Care Research Center at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, we got reports on US activities, problem and were working to rename "friendly fire" as a problem. The best I saw was "Amicus Frater." And the conversation was about: "While there isn't one perfect Latin phrase, the closest concepts use Fratricidium (brother-killing) or Amicidium (friend-killing), from Latin frater (brother) + caedere (to kill) or amicus (friend) + caedere, describing the act of being killed by one's own side, a common term for "friendly fire". (Google)"
And as I remember, the major problem was with weapons that fired on their own or with little trigger action. From Bethesda it seemed to be a misguided mess.
Many thanks for this. And it is apropos in the case of the Panama invasion. At least 2 of the 23 GI deaths and 19 wounded were "amicus frater." One report from Newsweek at the time said it was much worse: https://www.newsweek.com/accident-prone-army-205806
Is it true that a neighborhood of leftists, can't remember the name of it, was carpet-bombed during the invasion killing thousands? I think I read about in a Le Carre novel.
LeCarre's book, The Tailor of Panama, was fiction. Separately, during the actual Panama invasion, the impoverished neighborhood of El Chorrillo, adjacent to the headquarters of the Panamanian Defense Forces, suffered heavy damage in fighting and resulting fires. No clear number of dead and wounded has been established, but among the hundreds to thousands reported Panama-wide by some groups, certainly people in El Chorrillo were among those victims.
When I worked in the Casualty Care Research Center at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, we got reports on US activities, problem and were working to rename "friendly fire" as a problem. The best I saw was "Amicus Frater." And the conversation was about: "While there isn't one perfect Latin phrase, the closest concepts use Fratricidium (brother-killing) or Amicidium (friend-killing), from Latin frater (brother) + caedere (to kill) or amicus (friend) + caedere, describing the act of being killed by one's own side, a common term for "friendly fire". (Google)"
And as I remember, the major problem was with weapons that fired on their own or with little trigger action. From Bethesda it seemed to be a misguided mess.
Many thanks for this. And it is apropos in the case of the Panama invasion. At least 2 of the 23 GI deaths and 19 wounded were "amicus frater." One report from Newsweek at the time said it was much worse: https://www.newsweek.com/accident-prone-army-205806
You would have done well to interview Kurt Muse while writing this article.
Thanks for your comment. Muse was in a Panamanian jail for setting up covert anti-Noriega radio transmissions in Panama.