Hot answers tagged zero-dark-thirty
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Director Kathryn Bigelow explains the significance of the title:
It’s a military term for 30 minutes after midnight, and it refers also to the darkness and secrecy that cloaked the entire decade long mission.
And this review reveals:
...the raid that has Navy SEALs striking Bin Laden's Pakistan compound [happens] at half past midnight (the coded ...
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Close but not exactly Simon.
Being in the Military I have rarely heard "Zero Dark Thirty" it is almost always pronounced as "Oh Dark Thirty," "Oh Dark Hundred" or mainly "Oh Dark Stupid". It refers to simply the 0 before the time in 24 hour time. Example:
0100, 0230, 0450 would all be pronounced in the above fashion and NOT by "One Dark Hundred" or "Two ...
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It's humourous military slang for the small hours of the night, when you'd rather be asleep than on duty.
In addition to zero dark thirty, another term is zero dark hundred, or more commonly oh dark hundred, which, according to a qualified paratrooper (Army, Airborne) and former soldier (MI, Armor, Engineer):
In military (US) slang that period [between ...
4
Turns out it's answered in the trivia section of the IMDb entry:
"0 dark 30" is a term commonly used by the military to refer to a non-specific time when it is dark outside, either very late or very early. However, the prevailing pronunciation is "oh dark thirty".
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I've been in both mech and light infantry (11B and 11H) as well as a 13D and never did we use that term (CONSUS or downrange). We NEVER used "oh" in place of "zero" as in "zero-one-thirty hrs" for 0130 hrs. When you conduct any sort of briefing or when issuing an OPORDER or a WARNO, never have I used the term nor seen or heard the term used. When you have ...
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