• The Rhino Runner: Earning its ‘Stripes’ The Rhino Runner: Earning its ‘Stripes’ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 28 2005 In “the Movie “Stripes,” a 1981 Ivan Reitman comedy, two goofball soldiers (Bill Murray and Washington University’s own Harold Ramis) borrow”
• The Rhino Runner: Earning its ‘Stripes’
The Rhino Runner: Earning its ‘Stripes’
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 28 2005
In “the Movie “Stripes,” a 1981 Ivan Reitman comedy, two goofball soldiers (Bill Murray and Washington University’s own Harold Ramis) borrow” a top-secret “Urban Assault Vehicle” called the EM-50, which looks very much like a Winnebago, to take a couple of attractive military police women out on a date.
Today in Iraq, life is imitating art to save lives. A Weston, Fla., company called Labock Technologies Inc., has rolled out a vehicle it calls the “Rhino Runner.” The Rhino Runner, custom-built from the chassis up to resist armor-piercing bullets and considerable amounts of high explosives, looks very much like the fictional EM-50, or a Winnebago with a desert tan paint job. As they say in “Stripes,” that’s a fact, Jack.
Labock boasts that Saddam Hussein is ferried to and from court appearances in a Rhino Runner. When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited the Abu Ghraib prison in May 2004, he rode in a Rhino Runner. Last December, the company says, a suicide bomber in a BMW packed with an estimated 1,000 pounds of explosives detonated his vehicle “point blank” against two Rhino Runners. The blast produced a huge crater, but none of the 34 people inside the EM-50s … er, Rhino Runners … was injured.
One key difference between the EM-50 and Rhino Runner: the Rhino Runner is a private-enterprise deal. The New York Times reports that Labock refused to allow Pentagon testing experts to blow up one of its $250,000 babies, so it couldn’t be certified by the procurement process. Instead, Labock sells the vehicles to private security firms. Thus, when the Defense Department wanted to protect Mr. Rumsfeld on his visit to Iraq, it opted for a Rhino Runner, owned by the Halliburton Co., that the Defense Department had declined to certify. In the movies, they call this “irony.”
A Rhino Runner costs about $100,000 more than an up-armored Humvee, but seats 17, as compared with six (and in air-conditioned comfort), and even the strongest Humvees don’t appear to offer the same level of protection. What’s good enough for Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfeld is good enough for G.I. Joe and Jane. And that’s a fact, Jack.
