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Originally Posted by GH85Carrera
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You have not lived until you have witnessed a Patriot battery fire on automatic, in anger, against an inbound missile. The sight and sound is incredible. I witnessed it, by surprise, from 200 yards away on the first night of Desert Storm. I had no idea the battery was there until it went off and launched about 20 Patriots into the night sky. The last one out of the launchers made an immediate turn from near-vertical to horizontal, sped off across the desert at about 200 feet, and then, about a mile away, it swept upward into a vertical trajectory and hit the inbound SCUD at about 5,000 feet. It was like the biggest July 4th firework you've ever seen and the boom knocked me on my ass. The Patriot guys came into the chow hall the next day and we gave them a standing ovation. One of them sat with us and explained how the system worked and said they had hit the "stop" button just as that last missile left the launcher. They needed to keep some ready in case another SCUD was on the way. Luckily, that night, it was just the one.
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