A Bedtime Story

Let me tell you a bedtime story. Completely fictional, of course. One dark and boring night people were guarding a base from an angry enemy. At their gate, people drove in and out a lot at night. This was pretty normal. On one particular night the people who were guarding the gate noticed that a bunch of scouts who were going to come in (people on their own side) were taking a particular bit of attention to a field right in front of the gate. This did not make the guards weary at all. The people could have been “looking around like they always do”, one guard said.

At a little building that the guards called “the command post” there were a few more guards. They watched over everything and made sure that everybody was safe and doing what they were supposed to do. The command post noticed that their bosses above them were paying attention to the field like the scouts who just came in. This struck the command post guards as “odd, since there was only a fence post out there”. After 20 minutes of observation, fire spontaneously rained down from the sky. The field in front of the gate erupted into fire and flying dirt.

After a few minutes, the guards realized that the fire that rained down 300 meters in front of them was coming from behind them. The people that were on the same team were shooting mortars out dangerously close to them. After a bunch of screaming and yelling, the fire subsided. A force of vehicles came out to analyze the area. The guards asked them why they had almost been hit by mortar fire. “There was a fence post that looked like a mortar tube.” There was some nervous chuckling and then the vehicles went back into the base.

The guards turned their dangerous encounter into humor. The thing that gave them the most ammunition for their humorous endeavors was that the mortar strike was intended to destroy a fence post… And the fence post was still standing.

Now go to sleep. Don’t worry; we’ll be guarding you.