Laser Accidents in the Military

This article is a year old but I stumbled upon and was pretty shocked...
I'm going into the Military in the next month or two, and this makes me nervous! Why would they not train our soilders properly with these lasers! I hope I don't get blinded by some jack***...



Soldiers Blinded, Hospitalized by Laser ‘Friendly Fire’ (Updated) | Danger Room | Wired.com

Three soldiers required medical evacuation out of Iraq and one soldier is now blind in one eye

Read More Soldiers Blinded, Hospitalized by Laser ‘Friendly Fire’ (Updated) | Danger Room | Wired.com
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"DANGER: Big Scary Laser. Do NOT Look Into Beam With Remaining Eye."

Incidents are rare, but when they happen, the media will hype them to get views/sales. If I were going into an active warzone, the last thing I'd be worried about is the lasers, when there are explosives and bullets (f)lying around.

I don't rate the chances of the photographer's camera taking many nice shots after that CCD abuse!

At least you are going into the military with vision, (pardon the pun). You will at least be able to educate the ones close to you how NOT to use any laser equipment you are issued with. I'd still be tempted to take my laser goggles anyway!

Good luck on the front line.

M

Morgan said:

I don't rate the chances of the photographer's camera taking many nice shots after that CCD abuse!

At least you are going into the military with vision, (pardon the pun). You will at least be able to educate the ones close to you how NOT to use any laser equipment you are issued with. I'd still be tempted to take my laser goggles anyway!

Good luck on the front line.

M

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Thank You! :gun:

Thank you for your service. Be careful out there!

Steve

DiRollin said:

This article is a year old but I stumbled upon and was pretty shocked...
I'm going into the Military in the next month or two, and this makes me nervous! Why would they not train our soilders properly with these lasers! I hope I don't get blinded by some jack***

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If you choose for an army carreer, i suppose these are much more issues to worry about, such as actually getting shot with proper munitions.

As it is, lasers in the battelfield are mostly used for rangefinding or perhaps temporarely blinding adversaries, but not as lethal weapons. Using lasers to affect permanent eye injury is even prohibited by several conventions, so that should be of limited concern.

As I see it, the damage to your eyes is the least concern when someone points a weapon mounted laser at your head. In such scenario you'd be lucky to live with either eye intact, and even more so with the area in between still functional ;p

Hmm an observation. It's claiming a single unit, in 4-5 months experienced 12 incidents involving 14 soldiers.... that many incidents in a single unit. from november 2008 to march 2009? lets see that's an average of 3 incidents a month....

1. The members of said unit are changed rapidly with a constant influx of new people who didn't hear about the unit member blinded the previous week....

or

2. The members of said unit all rode the short bus to school. They were grouped together because when given an I.Q. test they all got the same thing on it! Drool.

or

3. There was a single initial accident. Someone lost the sight in one eye, and so got a free ticket out of Iraq. The other unit members then said. Hey! I've got an idea! we can ALL go home now!!!!!!!


All things considered, accidents with friendly fire from a m-4 are a little more serious and frequent still. And people DO get heavily trained on those. I don't think it's a lack of training that is responsible for these kind of accidents...

I don't think you'll have problems look at this video, they're usually used for this purpose

YouTube - Cool! Military Lasers Used For Air Strikes