[SA762]

http://www.armytimes.com/story/mili...ive-ammo-fort-irwin-training-mishap/84507270/

This seems suspicious, but stuff dose happen. Luckily no one was wounded or killed.

 

[smleenfield]

I had an incident when I was working as armorer and RSNCO at Camp San Louis Obispo. I was setting up the range for a live fire training class on the M60 machine gun. While I was off loading the ammunition sent to us I noticed that one of the crates I pulled off of the truck seemed to light. When I checked it out it was full of belted blanks. It turned out we had 7 crates of blanks in the shipment. I immediately headed for the ammo bunker with the blanks. When I arrived the personnel there were loading a truck for Camp Roberts with crates of belted blank ammo. We checked the truck and found several crates of live belted ball had been loaded on the truck already. I hate to think of what could have happened if some of that ammunition had been loaded into the guns at night in a field exercise under blackout conditions.

 

[M14E2]

The lack of that big yellow or orange or red blank adaptor might give a clue.

 

[smoothy8500]

We were taking the DL portion of the RSO class at MCB Pendleton and they were referring to a similar incident occurring several years back that lead to critical injuries and a Marine losing his life.

 

[cmshoot]

Least he didn't drop a Hummer........

 

[nicholst55]

Then there's the time one of our gunners fired a supposedly inert TOW missile at a target.... Nope, THAT one wasn't inert! Of course, it was the gunner's fault. None of the dozen(s) of other people that handled that ordnance before it got to him were responsible.

 

[M14E2]

Yellow stripe/lettering = live explosive

Lt. Blue stripe/lettering = inert

Least that's how the Navy does it.


As for claiming he thought he was shooting blanks , BS!

Any idiot should be able to tell the diff between live ammo with real bullets and crimped blanks.

Blanks don't cycle without BFA.

Live ammo doesn't work with a BFA.

 

[nicholst55]

Yellow stripe/lettering = live explosive

Lt. Blue stripe/lettering = inert

Least that's how the Navy does it.

That's pretty much the way the rest of the Army does it, too. The problem here at Yuma Proving Ground is that we don't necessarily follow Army protocol/regs regarding things like that. Our ammo plant likes to remove the explosives from live rounds to make them inert, and they don't bother to remark them. Since a great deal of what we do here involves nonstandard weapons and ammo, they have been able to get away with it. In the instance I cited above, the ammo plant had to pull two inert and one live TOW missile from their stocks, list them on the manifest, and ship them. They were received by the ammo section who was supposed to verify that they got what they ordered, then issued to the program engineer who is also supposed to verify that he received what he ordered.

When this transpired, I asked how many other shipments had contained the wrong ammo, and nobody had anything to say. Being the new guy, I decided not to push the issue. The powers that be made the gunners and everyone else who is authorized to handle ammo (on our end, anyway) take remedial training on ammo ID, and called it good.

 

[M1A's r BEST]

During a field exercise at Ft. A.P. Hill in 78 or 79 a big dummy from PA loaded a belt of live ammo into an M60 - with the blank adaptor clamped to the front sight - and test fired it right above our heads from the top of the APC.

I happened to be looking towards the tree, with 4 or 5 guys sitting under it, at the edge of the woods when the bark started falling all over them. My mind went into the, "Wow, look at all that bark falling on those guys and how they're twisting, rolling around on the ground," mode.

My buddy cussed, pushed me out of the way (to get around the back of the APC), got up there and grabbed the M60 from the big dummy and smacked the stuff out of him.

The flash suppressor was twisted sideways and hanging off the barrel and the threaded portion of the blank adaptor that fits into the flash suppressor was missing. The clamp part was still on the front sight.

It happens. Whose fault was it? Armorer and gunner both at fault. Gunner was a big dummy and should have known the difference between blanks and live ammo. The armorer knew we were doing aggressor detail that day and should never have given the big dummy live ammo when he issued him the M60 with the blank adaptor on it.

Big dummy? Yeah, 6'6" tall and 255 lbs. Looked like a refrigerator in fatigues.

 

[howardhuges]

Least he didn't drop a Hummer........
Times 3 hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe