Iraqis don't read Czechoslovakian

In life we often find ourselves in places we don't like. Iraq was one of those. One of the constant threats over there was incoming rocket and mortar fire. The bright side was (and trust me we needed a bright side) was about half of the ordnance failed to explode.

One Sunday morning I was shaving at the water buffalo you see here, (I always shaved and cleaned my M-16 for church services)  when over the sound of generators I heard several  muffled booms in the distance, it is amazing how keen your sense of hearing can be over all that noise, I waited and listened for a second or two and heard several rockets streak just a few feet over my head and saw plumes of dust as they landed in the berm you see behind the water buffalo (water tank on wheels)
 11 Czechoslovakian made rockets had impacted just a few yards from my location and failed to explode.
There was was always several reasons this would happen the first one being Iraqis don't read Czechoslovakian. You see all the writing on the rockets was Czechoslovakian and therefore they could not understand the directions on how to arm the rockets. 
Shown here are one of the rockets dug out of the ground, believe me they can make a big boom, you notice there was no reason to wear blast suits when removing these because........well it was kind of pointless. I guess the Good Lord was watching over me.
 Another threat was mortar rounds, these also had a high rate of failure thus the second reason, Al-Qaeda got their mortar training from the Wiley Coyote, Road Runner cartoons. A lot of the time they did not have guns to fire the mortars so they would devise other methods to fire them. I have seen a few of these setups and they look like cartoon contraptions.

Being trained on mortars I know they have to rotate very quickly several times  as they leave the "tube" to be armed and makeshift firing mechanisms did not always do this. 
Below is a picture I took of a un-exploded mortar round near our showers.
Of course the down side is half the time they would explode and reek all kinds destruction but I will save some of those stories for another day.