If you love the strange anecdotes of military history, these real stories will leave you open-mouthed: deceptions, giant dummies, fake sounds… and creative people working as if they were film artists, but with very serious objectives.

The “Ghost Army” really existed.

There was an Allied unit dedicated to acting: they inflated giant tanks, set up fake camps and put speakers with engine noises to fake the presence of entire divisions. It was theater of war, but with practical effects that confused the enemy. 

Vietnam (Operation Popeye)

In Vietnam there was an operation so crazy it sounds like a movie: the Americans tried to make it rain at will over the Ho Chi Minh Trail to bog down the roads and slow the enemy convoys — they called it Operation Popeye and it consisted of seeding clouds from small planes to extend the monsoon season; imagine the scene: pilots and meteorologists mounted in a kind of military “rain dance” to turn roads into quagmires. 

Second World War (Operation Mincemeat) 

In 1943 the British prepared one of the most ingenious deceptions: they found a corpse, dressed it as an officer with fake papers that “revealed” invasion plans and left it adrift for the Nazis to find; the plan worked so well that the Germans redeployed troops thinking the landing would be elsewhere — it’s the classic espionage story that sounds like an Ian Fleming novel.

Afghanistan (after 9/11)

In Afghanistan, after 2001, soldiers often relied on absurd stories to cope with the day’s harshness: veterans say that, after very tense moments, the anecdote of “a guy looked for goat shepherds and stared at them as if to ask them out until they agreed” became a recurring joke at the bases, a way to unload tension with a goat joke that ended up turning into a legend among patrols. I think they made a film or a joke in an apeli about this goat thing. 

Iraq (after 9/11)

During the 2003 invasion there was a character who went down in history: Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, nicknamed “Baghdad Bob,” denied the obvious live on air (he said there were no U.S. troops in Baghdad while columns of smoke and tanks were seen just a short distance away), and his press conferences ended up being almost surreal moments that people remember with a mix of astonishment and mockery.