Did I just have the extreme bad luck to encounter a game-stopper bug in the first mission of gameplay or is the bug that I'm about to describe below a common problem?

The very first mission of the game consists of Miller's escape from a Japanese POW camp. Everything was going smoothly until the end of the mission where I was ordered by my commanding officer to stab a gas barrel in the back of a truck. I did what I was told but nothing happened. After 30+ minutes of running around the truck like a chicken with my head cut off I decided to restart the mission. As it turns out, the guy who was supposed to toss his lighter at the rolling truck got killed in my first bugged mission, but I managed to keep the guy alive this round so the mission worked flawlessly.

Besides that initial game-stopper bug I did not encounter any other serious problems; as a matter of fact, I hardly encountered any problems at all. The game's controls are very basic; the left trigger aims you down the sight, the right trigger shoots, left button is used for smoke grenades while the right button tosses the fragmentation grenades. Movement is conducted through the left analogue stick while camera movement is achieved with the right analogue stick. The controls are very smooth and even someone like me who used to think that a shooter should only be played on a PC with keyboard and mouse got a lot of enjoyment out of this game. There are 4 difficulty levels in COD - World at War, with the easiest difficulty mostly consisting of the AI being borderline retarded. As you up the difficulty the game does get smarter, but even then it seems that the enemy AI has it in for you to the point that they will stop shooting at their current target and start shooting at you the second you are within range. One major problem with the game (at least in my opinion) was the tank mission. I absolutely hated it. When you're in the tank the game considers the tank you, therefore every time you (the tank) takes damage that damage can be mysteriously repaired by simply moving out of combat for a few seconds. Personally, I whish that the tank would have been treated as a piece of machinery where if too much damage is accumulated the tank would get destroyed. I just find a self-healing tank really stupid and cheesy, but at least the tank is present in only one mission. Besides the tank thing and the weird bug at the very beginning of the game I did not encounter anything else bad worth mentioning. Everything else is done superbly. COD - World at War is definitely a keeper in my book.