Behind The Iron Curtain: Building Bridges

I wrote before about my service in the military installation responsible for the road construction and clearing, bridge building and other engineering support tasks. Unfortunately, I’ve never got to see a pontoon bridge being built in real life; not that we didn’t try, but my comrades where so untrained and slow that no one wanted to wait for us to complete our bridge, especially that a real bridge was nearby. I am sure our commander didn’t look good at the post-exercise briefing with his superiors, and knowing that he was cursing up a storm on the radio, but what do you expect from a bunch of virtually unpaid soldiers who didn’t want to be there in the first place especially waist-deep in the cold water on the first day of April.

Apparently there were troops in the Soviet Army who knew how to build a PMP Floating Bridge and here are a few videos to prove it. Those are quite fun to watch, notice that they start floating the equipment in under 7 minutes (it took us an hour just to drop all the links).

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpD7esUuwDU

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-hCTO00mPI

And now we dance: Russian Army Choir Presents “Not Gonna Get Us” by T.A.T.U.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCZNfeWGTkQ