Home Forums Miscellaneous Topics Military Crawling Under Machine Gun Fire?

Scary until you found the path between the guns.

If you are talking about the night live fire course in basic training at Fort Dix NJ in early 1970. I could have stood up and done the Hokey Pokey dance and still be typing this today. I stood in formation waiting for my turn to eat dirt and noticed the M60 mounts and where the tracers were flying.

It wasn't scary at all during basic at Ft Jackson. I looked up at the tracers and they were almost 10 feet above.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, it was much scarier, since those rounds were coming at us instead of all going overhead.

You almost always knew whose rounds were flying, since we use red tracers and they almost always use green tracers where we were fighting

Yes, Fort Knox in winter clothing. My dad had a man actually hit beside him when he did it

Ft Leonard Wood many years ago I was a 1LT with AOD duty one night at the hospital. Had a drill shot through the hip that bled out on the course. Apparently a gun malfunctioned and they unlocked it to clear it and let the bolt slam forward on a live round. I had no idea what I was doing but had to go through the process of an emergent medical retirement to get his widow max benefits prior to them pronouncing him and had to talk to the widow about organ donation. Was pretty pissed they had me doing that in the middle of the night instead of someone trained to do it, but I guess that's the Army.

My father went through it in '45. He was slated for the Invasion of Japan. He was at Fort Sill. He said the guy ahead of him freaked out and stood up in the middle of the exercise. He got cut down.

IF it's any consolation, due to the GWOT they've gotten better at casualty notification and assistance. They now run monthly training and a duty roster for 04s and 05s, along with full time AG folks. I did my last one in 2004 before I retired and they pretty much had the system down, I received quite a bit of help from folks that knew ropes.

Right before I retired we were working to develop a similar system for the army civilian employees as there's no casualty assistance program in place on the civilian side.