Midnight at the Live Fire Exercise

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Speaker 1: And we returned to Our American Stories, and up next, to story from one of our regular contributors, Richard Munyez. 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.

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Speaker 2: ABC. This is World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Good evening. The deadline has come and gone.

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Speaker 1: The Iraqis are living on what President Bush calls borrowed time.

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Speaker 2: It is no longer whether the war will start. About when, in 1991, we had a little thing called the Gulf War, and in it we sent armored divisions and infantry divisions into Iraq. And I’ll be honest with you, we clean the 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 had the superior tank. I mean, the M1 tank, fantastic piece of hardware. The other thing we had going for is 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. Now, the first time I ever went out there, it was about 1988. What had happened was, see, I was working military police investigations time. Now, that’s exactly what it sounds like I was doing. I was a detective, you know, put on a suit, but 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 it’s kind of a little bit of a pioneer here. This is the first time an MPI investigator was going to go out with division, out to the National 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. What I wound up doing was investigating 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 those fantastic equipment in the world, and see what happens. Add to that unfamiliar terrain, things like that, and I mean it’s recipe for getting people killed. This is a story about a couple of soldiers that managed to dodge the bullet. And I’ll be honest with you, they came very, very close. Okay. Now, what they 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 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 in an APC.’ And my first one, stays, says, ‘Oh my God, this is not gonna be pretty.’ So I got up and got dressed, and I walked over to the officers’ 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 up in an APC. What else do you know?’ ‘That’s all I know right now.’ We said, we loaded up into their four-by-four, and we started out, and they made a few phone calls like that, so we knew where we were going. And I remember we’re driving through, and it’s pitch black outside. I mean, you have not seen pitch black. And see, you’re in the middle of the Mojave Desert. So we’re driving along, and I wound up falling asleep, and person I woke up, and we’re stopping at what looks like a trailer house, and it’s still the pitch dark outside. And when 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. FIST is a fire support vehicle. This calls in targets. In this case, this was an set up on a little hill there that had 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, were hit! Cease fire!’ And you hear other people screaming, ‘See, you know, 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 had occurred, the sun had already come up. The M1 that was responsible for firing, doing the firing, is still sitting there. Sitting over on a hill, maybe about 500 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 was 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 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, you know, 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 noticed is that there is a red paint transfer on the gun tube. And became very close was happening here. Every time the tank moved back, the gun tube was rubbing up against the gun stake, the safety stake, and they’re filled. The fires for getting wider and wider and wider. Now, I 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. The fires getting progressively wider and wider. Well, eventually, what happened is, they when they roll up, they got maybe two to three seconds to acquire target and fire. Well, they get up there, guess what’s in there? Filled the fire? Now, the FIST they fired at. Now, the weapon they used was what we call a sabot round. Now, sabot rounds kind of an interesting weapon. When this slams into a target, whatever the missile’s made of, the shells made of vaporize is almost instantly. The needle, which looks a little bit like a cone, melts to the armor of whatever it hit and then goes inside. I know to go for. I saw tanks that have been hit by sabot rounds. On the outside, they don’t too bad. Look down the hatch. That’s what that 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, went in between the tracks and into the engine compartment down underneath. If it had hit the APC, see, square on, there have been no survivors on this thing. I mean, they were just boom! As it was, the entire top of the APC itself was melted off, and there was a machine gun, an M6 machine gun, sitting on the machine gun mount. This thing was actually melted, and it was bent down in half. Okay. Now, I had to go back back to base, and we kind of have a division of labor. Now, what the safety officer 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 there in the same room, and these guys were messed up. We had a young Lieutenant that was in charge of it, the Sergeant E6, and a couple of EMs. This is the story I got here. They are—they’re doing their thing, they’re calling it, they’re calling in their fields of fire and stuff like that—and then the round hit. Lieutenant told me when it hit, I mean, it actually rocked the APC, and everything in, everything in the tank almost seemed to catch fire instantly. And he’s screaming, you know, over the radio, ‘You know, cease fire! Cease fire! My God, my God, were 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 of this burning thing and also. 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 that happened. A few moments before the round hit, these guys from what we call MOPP Level 4. That means you’re in a chemical environment, you got protecting masks on, everything else. Well, a couple of minutes for the round hit, they were told to stand down from MOPP Level 4, which you mean to take off your mask, so they took him the masks off. The Sergeant had his mask in his hand and was folding up to put it away in his carrier when the round hit. He said, ‘The mask caught fire instantly.’ So here he is. He’s on fire. ‘What’s he do?’ He panics. He jumps out of the tank, starts running down the hill before he remembered to stop, tuck, and roll. Lieutenant didn’t know this. He went back into the tank, looked for the man before for the heat and smoke fire 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 these men. I’m pretty sure the Lieutenant and possibly the NCO were discharged because they’re injuries, so they probably collect a pension today. I’d say that was too bad, because Lieutenant was an officer was worth something.

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Speaker 1: And a great job, as always, to Monty Montgomery for his work on the piece, and his special thanks again to Richard Munyez, who’s a regular contributor here in 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 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 piece, a 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 died training. It happens particularly in aviation exercises. Richard Munyez has his story, ‘Midnight at the Live Fire Exercise,’ here on Our American Stories.