Danish Leopard tanks, serving with NATO in Afghanistan, recently engaged Taliban forces in one of the more odd conflicts of modern history.
In war you see odd combinations.
During World War One there was a unit of the Austrian Army that was composed of Ukrainian soldiers led by Austrian officers. Neither spoke the other’s languages so operations were conducted in English as both sides had a passing knowledge of it. The officers had learned it in university and the soldiers had been studying it with an eye towards immigration. This unit fought the Russians in a war that began when a Bosnian terrorist shot an Austrian prince and his Czech wife.
Those men would be amazed by another story of an oddball combination that somehow makes sense. Recently, as part of the Global War on Terrorism, Danish forces engaged Taliban irregulars in Afghanistan. The Danes used German made Leopard tanks in the first combat by a Danish force since the Yugoslav morass of the last decade. These hardy Danes were of course operating under the aegis of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). No one pointed out that the Atlantic Ocean (or any ocean for that matter) is no where near landlocked Afghanistan. Another irony is the fact that those Leopard tanks were designed to destroy the same Soviet tanks that the Taliban grew up fighting against a generation ago.
But then again, the truth is stranger than fiction.
