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Rich is a listener out in Colorado and his story today is entitled Midnight at the Live Fire Exercise. Here's Rich. with a story. ABC, this is World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Good evening.
The deadline has come and gone. The Iraqis are living in what President Bush calls borrowed time. It is no longer whether the war will start, but when. In 1991, We had a little thing called the Gulf War, and in it, we sent armored divisions and infantry divisions into Iraq. I'll be honest with you, we cleaned their clock.
I mean, it looked a little bit like War of the Worlds, only we were the Martians.
Now one of the things that happened here is we definitely had the superior tank. I mean the M1 tank, fantastic piece of hardware. The other thing we had going for us we had better training.
Now granted, they had some actual combat experience, but we had trained to a razor's edge. Where did we do this training? At a little place called National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, out in the middle of nowhere in the Mojave Desert. Yeah. Now, the first time I ever went out there, it was about 1988.
What had happened was: see, I was working military police investigations at the time.
Now, that's exactly what it sounds like I was doing. I was a detective. You know, I put on a suit, put on a tie, and I went out there and I played detective.
Well, in the FM manuals, there's always need for an MPI investigator to go out with Division.
Well, no one ever had.
So that's kind of a little bit of a pioneer here. This is the first time an MTI investigator was going to go out with. Division out to the International Training Center.
Now, here's the problem. No one knew exactly what my job was.
So, my mission kind of wound up being a catch-all. Ting jump jump. What I wound up doing was investigate an awful lot of accidents. And if you want to see some horrific accidents, do it. Where you got high explosive rounds going off, being shot from some of the most fantastic equipment in the world.
And see what happens. Add to that unfamiliar terrain, things like that, and I mean recipes for getting people killed. This is a story about A couple soldiers that managed to dodge the bullet. And I'll be honest with you, they came very, very close.
Okay, now what it did with me was I wound up having to stay behind at the Provost Marshal's office. and I got to sleep in a jail cell. For the 29 days we were deployed.
Well, one night I'm in there, I'm sound asleep, and the dispatcher comes back and wakes me up. and says, Rich, there's been a terrible accident out on one of the ranges. What happened? A tank fired up an APC and my first instance was, oh my god. This is not going to be pretty.
So I got up and got dressed and I walked over to the officers at BAQ. That's where the division safety officers were staying. And I said, guys, we've had a bad accident on the range. We've had an M1 fire from APC. What else do you know?
That's all I know right now. We loaded up into their 4x4 and we started out. And they made a few phone calls, stuff like that, so we knew where we were going. And I remember we're driving through and it's pitch black outside. You have not seen pitch black until you're in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
So we're driving along and I wound up falling asleep. And Prussian I woke up And we're stopping, and we're stopping at what looks like a trailer house, and it's still pitch dark outside. And one of the officers got out, and he went in, he comes out and he's got a cassette tape. And he said, you guys have got to hear this. They plugged it in.
and you hear them talking and stuff like that and this is routine stuff you're hearing what we call a fist A FIST is a fire support vehicle. This calls in targets. In this case, this was an M113 set up on a little hill there, had a small crew, and they were calling in targets. And all of a sudden you hear a scream. Cease fire, cease fire, my God, my God.
We're hit, cease fire. And you hear other people screaming: cease fire, cease fire, cease fire, shut it down, shut it down. Then it goes dead. By the time we got to where this accident occurred.
Son had already come up. The M1 that was responsible for doing the firing is still sitting there. Sitting over on a hill, maybe about five hundred yards away, is the fist.
Now the first thing we got to determine is what happened here. And we're talking to a major who's in charge of all this. And he's telling us what had happened. was They were doing a live fire.
Now, the way they did this was this is a response to an attack or a simulated attack by enemy armor. The way they would handle this is One tank would roll up and it would fire. It'd roll back to reload, another one would roll up, fire, and they're just alternating back and forth. Only this is dozens of tanks doing this. And they had these range safety stakes, big long posts pounded into the ground.
They do this for safety reasons.
Well, I get out and I'm looking at the tank there and the first thing I notice is that there is a red paint transfer on the gun turquoise. And it became very clear what was happening here. Every time. The tank moved back. The gun tube was rubbing up against the gun stake, the safety stake.
Uh And their filter fire got to get wider and wider and wider.
Now, I went over and checked some of the other stakes, and they were in very, very firm. But not this one. This one was loose. I mean, I could sit there and shake it with my hand. Like I said, it's filled with fire is getting progressively wider and wider.
Well, eventually, what happened is when they roll up, they got maybe two to three seconds to acquire a target and fire.
Well, they get up there. Guess what's in there, fill the fire now. The fist. They fired at it. Mm.
Now, the weapon they used was what we call a sable round.
Now, sable round is kind of an interesting weapon. When this lands into a target, whatever the missile is made of, the shell's made of, vaporizes almost instantly. The needle, which looks a little bit like a cone, melts through the armor of whatever it hit, and then goes inside. I know in the Gulf War I saw tanks that have been hit by uh sable rounds. On the outside, they didn't look too bad.
Look down the hatch. That's what they'd hit this tank with, a little APC. And the APC is, I mean, it's nothing like a tank, it's a very lightly armored vehicle.
So we went through all that, you know, we know what's going on here now.
Now we went over and checked out the APC. It surprised me at the amount of damage to it. The round had come in low. By that what I mean it went in between the tracks and into the engine compartment down underneath. If it had hit the APC square on, there had been no survivors on this thing.
I mean, it was just spoon. As it was, the entire top of the APC itself was melted off. and there was a machine gun An M60 machine gun sitting on the machine gun mount. This thing was actually melted and it was bowed down in half.
Okay, now I had to go back to base, and we kind of have a division of labor now. What the safety officers would do, they would go talk to the crew and the commanders and everybody else that was associated with this. I would go to the hospital and talk to the crew of the APC. And this is where I got the rest of the story.
Now when I went in there and I told them what I was there for They were nice enough to put the crew in the same room. And these guys were messed up. We had a young lieutenant that was in charge of it, a Sergeant E6. uh and a couple of EMs. This is the story I got.
Here they are. They're Doing their thing, they're calling in their fields of fire and stuff like that, and then the round hip. Lieutenant told me when it hit, I mean, it actually rocked the APC and everything in the tank almost seemed to catch fire instantly. And he's screaming over the radio, you know, cease fire, cease fire, my God, my God, we're hit, cease fire. And he's trying to get everybody out of there.
He's getting his EMs out there and they're piling out this burning thing. And all of a sudden, he looks around and realizes he's missing a man. He didn't know where his sergeant was. He goes back into this burning tank, trying to find his sergeant.
Okay, here's what had happened. A few moments before the round hit, These guys from what we call mop level 4. That means you're in a chemical environment. You've got the protective mask on, everything else.
Well, a couple of minutes before the round hit, they were told to stand down for mop level 4, which means take off your mask.
So, they're taking the masks off. The sergeant had his mask in his hand and was folding up to put it away in his uh carrier when the round hit. He said the mask caught fire instantly.
So here he is, he's on fire. What does he do? He panics. He jumps out of the tank, starts running down the hill before he remembers to stop, tuck, and roll. Lieutenant didn't know this.
He went back into the tank. looking for the man before the heat and smoke finally forced him out of there. It's a miracle from God these guys even managed to survive. These are the kind of accidents you see happen out there sometimes. I mean, this is terrible.
I don't know what happened to these men. I'm pretty sure the lieutenant and possibly the NCO were discharged because of their injuries.
So they're probably out there collecting a pension today. I like to say I was too bad 'cause that L T. Was an officer was worth something. And a great job as always to Monty Montgomery for his work on the piece. And a special thanks again to Richard Munez, who's a regular contributor here on Our American Stories.
And his story Well, it took place in the Mojave Desert. As he put it, it was a miracle from God that these guys somehow survived. They were discharged. on account of their injuries and are collecting pensions And it's a fascinating look at training, which has its own dangers. And as we were talking after the peace.
Lot less actual death and military exercises thanks to lasers and more sophisticated approaches to simulation. But still, some of our men and women in uniform die training. It happens, particularly in aviation exercises. Richard Mun has his story midnight at the live fire exercise here. on our American story.
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So keep it wonderful by keeping yourself wonderful with a crisp, cold Coca-Cola. Hmm. Pause for a fizzy joy. Look out for yourself and then look out for everyone else. And together, we'll make this season as wonderful as it's meant to be.
Enjoy a Coca-Cola. Refresh your holidays.
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Mm-hmm.
