I am a US Army vet w/ time in Iraq driving convoys, so I am always interested in how anime treats the US forces. As far as the equipment goes, up-armored 5-tons were spot on as were the multiple variants of the humvee and yes, there is a variant just for the TOW Missile system. My issue is this: How can combat hardened vets of probably of both Afghanistan and Iraq be such piss-poor shots and one girl, Hana can take out soooo many. Case in point: We learned our lesson in Vietnam. For every enemy killed it took almost 1000 rounds to do so. Re-thinking the M-16 weapon system, tactics then training brought that ratio down to a much more reasonable level. Aim, breathe, squeeze. A rifleman ( sorry ladies, you too, we had some fantastic female shooters in my platoon ) in both the US Army and USMC can take out easily, a target from 0 to 300 meters. I don't buy the amount of casualties just Hana wrought on combat hardened vets. Plus the 30mm on the nose of the Apache firing in anger into the building would have ripped her to shreds. If there were any pieces of her left they would have been dripping off of the walls.
Hana's sniper partner, Estella is an amazing shot. Well trained snipers can wreak havoc on the battle field, demoralizing troops. And she was doing just that and doing it well. My issue is the distance she was tasked to fire. The world record for longest distance was set by a Canadian sniper team in the mountains of Afghanistan at a distance of over 1.5 miles ( 2.4 km ) and she was taking out targets at a farther distance with her enemy snipers being concealed by a low wall and some of her targets were inside the building. The glare of the sun on glass window panes would have concealed any of her targets. I don't buy it and I don't say this b/c she or Hana are females. Not realistic.
I like reality based anime and don't mind creative licensing but for me this was just too much plus the creators tried to shove 10 pounds of shit into a 5 pound bag. Too much and not enough space to do it in. Add a couple of more episodes to give us a back story and what is the underlying theme of the story and then go from there. Plus make the battle scenes a little more realistic. So for now, a 5 is all I can give it.
