Canada wins that one though...

Halifax Explosion

Dear Penthouse, please go on...

The only training fatalities I ever saw were vehicle accidents. Five ton full of guys moving at night in the mountains, and it does not take much of a mistake to have dead Marines. All of the live fire stuff, moving through impact areas with duds, even a helicopter crash everybody walked away. Even in Iraq we lost too many guys to vehicle accidents. Humvee upside down in a canal after dark cost us four good Marines.

During CSWQ, I watched a newly minted 1LT tell the BDE S3 "No, Sir, I am the OIC and I will run this range as I see fit."

Fort Riley seems to attract Darwin award winners, or runners up in the case of your story. Something about that post just makes people stupid.

Case in point.

In about 2011 or so, two Soldiers decided to go duck hunting out at Milford Lake. The lake was partially frozen over at the time, big ice chunks mixed with open water.

These two geniuses didn't have a boat or a gun dog, so they improvised. They made a "boat" out of a 55 Gallon drum by cutting it in half and securing some make shift floats to keep it stable.

So, genius #1 shoots a duck which falls out in the middle of the lake. He hops in his "boat" and paddles out into the open water. Mind you, it's winter time....in Kansas...which is pretty fucking brutal.

Of course, the USS Dumbass capsizes out in the middle of the lake and genius #1 goes in the drink. He manages to crawl part way onto a large ice flow while genius #2 calls 911.

I ended up doing my clinicals for EMT with Junction City Fire Dept. a few months later. The guys who responded to the call said that as they pulled up, they saw genius #1 lose consciousness and slide off the ice flow. They recovered to the body some weeks later after the ice melted.


Another one. This one is sad.

A Soldier takes his family out for a day of boating on Milford Lake. They rent a boat from Fort Riley Marina and head out. Father, Wife, and two kids under 6 years old.

Of course, they don't make the kids wear life jackets, because......fucking dumb.

Milford Lake gets HUGE waves when the wind comes from the SE. Like 6 foot breakers. This idiot is going full throttle into the waves, having a blast. Until one of his kids, with no life jacket, gets tossed over board.

So, of course, Mom jumps in to save the kid.......but then so does Dad.......with the throttle still forward......and another kid in the boat.

If I remember right, the kid who went over board and the Dad both drowned. The boat luckily beached itself without hurting the other kid and mom was rescued by other boaters.

The safety briefs we had after both these incidents were epic.

Mid 1990's camp Grayling Michigan.  I was FDC in a sister battery.  Last night in the field and we were burning ammo fast so supply wouldn't have much to turn back in.  I can't remember what charge we were firing but it was 3-4 bag.  Some gun bunny accidently dropped in all seven bags or got a double charge in one shell, gun sergeant didn't catch it.  Bang, bang, bang, bang, BOOM...Check firing, check firing, check firing.

It's kind of earie when an entire military installation shuts down.  All the guns went quiet, all the choppers and A-10's stopped flying.  The radios were quiet and all of the officers disappeared for a couple of hours.  If memory serves, the gun crew got admin. discipline, one NCO got demoted and an officer was relieved of duty.

The folks who were living in the cabin happened to be in town watching Forrest Gump.

When I was in basic training I was doing CQ and got a call from one of the dorm guards telling me to call 911 because one of the dudes in our "sister" flight tried to off himself by diving head first out of the day room window. I got relieved and went up to my dorm before the ambulance arrived and everyone in my flight was staring out the day room window. The guy was laying on the first floor roof with a purple head(appeared unconscious). The T.I's had surrounded him on the roof and were chewing his ass and calling him every name in the book. I never saw a one of them try to check his pulse or help him in any way.

It’s been a few decades but if I recall it was an F-14 RIO returning from active combat mission during GF1 with ejection seat pins still in place (making ejection impossible).  Apparently he wanted to pull his own and did not trust the lowly plane captain to do it.  

Watched a guy get tossed off a flight deck.  He was fine though.  Not too many serious fuckups you can walk away from up there.  

My dad was a LOH door gunner in Nam.  According to him a newer rookie pilot took them on one too many of the same runs through a village the VC had over run.  By that point they were ready for them. My dad said they hosed that LOH down with so many bullets they lost the tail rotor and  took a roll in the trees.  He was lucky to get out of there alive.  Got a Purple Heart and bronze star out of it for his actions on the ground. I’m sure he witnessed worse fuck ups than that though.  Thankfully my service/war time experience  was pretty boring compared to his and my grandfathers (D-day invasion).

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Oh. Okay!
Because I would never own up to being anywhere near when a brand-new experimental piece of heavy equipment was air dropped as a test of a new air drop platform... the BG had a nice long "talk" with the geniuses that failed to do a dummy drop first and burned in the new piece of equipment.

There is a farmer on the outskirts of Fort Riley who has made quite a bit of money from settlements he gets because his land has been shelled so many times over the years. He's right in line with the impact area, so if the gun crews make just a teensy weensy little mistake on elevation or charge, BOOM goes his corn field.

My Unit, ( 1-5 FA, Hamiltons Own!) may have added to his fortune once, allegedly. And we may have have also dropped a 155 HE on the firing line of an unoccupied machine gun range.....allegedly.
allegedly.

Jfc

Humping 19 clicks in the wrong fucking direction was always a fukin treat.

I used to fish downstream from the spillway on Milford.  Awesome fly fishing if you can ignore all the UXO eroding out of the river banks.

That last sentence seems like an odd thing to say.  Would you have expected to see him again?

That's sad.

Saw a. Iddy somehow snapnthebwore on a Dragon. Fucker was headed off to main post in Graf. Fortunately Graf is a massive base so there is no way it made it that far. But it did  somewhere and not go off

Link?

Builds character.

I wish it had been a Penthouse-worthy story, especially since I was 18 at the time. Unfortunately, it didn't turn out that way. She came up over the PA system and said, "Airman CarlosC, is that you!?". At that point, the whole bay went quiet, so quiet you could hear a mouse get a hardon - all eyes turned to me. I replied it was me and she told me to get to her office immediately. Everyone looked at me like I was a dead man walking to my execution. I had visions of being on a bus heading back home and having to register as a sex fiend.
When I walked into her office, she was behind the desk and both side walls were lined with training instructors (TIs), male and female. "Jackie N." proceeded to tell me she heard every word I said, as did the rest of the TIs. I was light headed at that point. Some of the TIs took cheap shots at me, calling me sick, pervert, WTF is wrong with me, etc. Jackie then said I had two choices; I could leave the AF at that point as a perverted failure, or we were in the running for Honor Flight and she needed a volunteer for one of the competition segments. Obviously, I volunteered for the comp segment which was I would be questioned about my knowledge of Air Force history. If I won my segment, I could stay. If I lost, I was going home.
Talk about studying! I spent every second I had reading my basic training book. The day of the comp I reported and proceeded to answer the first 20 questions correctly. They said it would be 20 questions, but I was asked more and very detailed questions after the first 20. Stupidly, I inquired as to why more questions and SSgt Martinez exploded, yelling at me that I was a sick fuck and he'd ask me all the questions he wanted to. He said he wanted me to fail because I was an embarrassment to the AF. I do not believe I answered all the questions correctly after #20.
I thought I was headed home. Jackie N. had me report to her office later that day and informed me I out-answered my opponent, so I got to stay in the AF. However, I was not allowed to go to San Antonio with the rest of the flight. Fine with me. End of story. I'm sure the TIs had a good laugh about it for a long time.

This is true! LOL

A Sergeant in my garrison unit signed out a flatbed truck, saw that the fuel was low so he stopped at the POL and filled it up with MoGas. Then drove it on to the work assignment, picking up myself and some other E4 "labor". Unfortunately he had never driven a truck that size, clipped the corner of a building, and then the diesel engine seized.
He was paying for that for a long time.

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Considering my days with 5th ID nothing would surprise me if the story starts with ... back at Ft. Polk in the 80's.

I saved our squadron some grief when they wanted to practice slinging a 5 ton under a MH-53E.

We were a Helicopter Mine Sweeping Squadron but one of our secondary missions was hauling supplies/un-rep. The Ops Boss came to me wanting to borrow one of our 5 ton trucks to sling load and fly around with to train the new pilots. I immediately envisioned bad things happening to my truck so I convinced them to borrow a large concrete weight used for load testing cranes from Public Works instead (after much arguing). A few flights in, one of the birds developed engine trouble and the pilot had to "pickle" the weight in the bay off of NAS Norfolk. We avoided the loss of a truck, a major HazMat incident (and maybe some careers) that day.

Back in Ft Polk in the 80’s, I watched a stripper pay for her boob job...

One boob at a time.

A couple of Hornets, flying a bit low, and a tad fast over the small town outside of base.

BOOOOM- got a little too close to the sound barrier.

Car dealership they were overhead at the time lost more than a few windows.

Having a fire, F/O or L/O leak while working in DOPR was always pretty high on my "hope this never happens" list. Not many worse places to be when that happens.

I don't know if you mean he was paying as in out of his pay check but is there some sort of cap for what the military can make members pay for out of their own pocket?

You would have to refresh my memory ... Leesville aka Sleezeville strippers.

I have no trouble believing it.

The standard for a dummy drop (I learned) is to load the pallet with the appropriate weight in steel bars and do the drop.
Why these guys, who should have known better, chose to strap on the prized brand new piece of equipment is beyond me. But they got a serious, semi-public dressing down from the General.

Statement of Charges.
I'm sure there must be some practical cap on the amount, but I don't know what it is.

ETA if you want to see someone blanche, regardless of their rank, just mention "Statement of Charges" in relation to their duty. I have seen LTCs sweating bullets looking for equipment that listed on their Property List that was somehow unable to be located. I'm sure they would expect an E1 to pay for a million dollar item, since they would be unlikely to earn that kind of money in their lifetime. But everyone fears the dreaded Statement!

I had the same thought about keys in a Humvee.

We used to have a chain in the M151s to lock up the steering wheel.


I was going to post some stuff in this thread, but I didn't see anything compared to some of these stories.

I almost got run over by a Mike 88 on a tank trail when I caught a ride with our CO in his M151 out into the boonies. We were heading into a deep hole filled with water and the CO was telling his driver how to drive. The driver stalled the jeep. I climbed up on the radio in the back and was just barely out of the water. The driver and the captain were up to their necks because the front end of the jeep was much lower due to the steep angle.

And then a M88 came over the hill, flying. I'm alive so the M88 missed us, but I can't remember how. All I remember is staring at the bottom of the front of the M88 with my eyes and mouth open.

After I got off of active duty I did the tour of the place. They took us out on a buss and you were not allowed to leave while they berated white people for the screw up.  A state rep asked me why I walked away and I told him I served and no one has the right to tell me how things are when they never served anyone but themselves.  The guards just gave me dirty looks the whole time.

The daughter of the CO in charge of the crew who lost their lives read a letter from him, and it basically said these men were not trained to handle explosives.

I had just rotated a 500lb UAV off the runway (not a Shadow) when a Dyncorp fucktard in an MI-8 flew right across my nose. Nobody knew he was coming in and we'd been cleared to take off

My right wing passed within about 20 feet of a guard tower as I dove and yanked my bird away. Bet it was extra stinky in there that night

The cap used to be two months base pay except in the case of damage to a unit in base housing and in that case there was no limit.

One time in graf....

During a winter roation, Had a Company CO decide to ignore guidance that roads were black due to ice. Moved company to next training area in bradleys.

Pv1 driver of my brad locked the breaks going down a hill, went into trench off the side of the road, brad upside down, driver, turret and tow hatches blocked. 7 troops including myself in back. Pv1 saw gunner next to the troop hatch had recently lost (and we found) his nods on a lane. So pv1 next to door hatch had all his shit (nods, saw, each barrel, etc...) All dummy corded to his vest. The tumble somehow tangled him and the fucking troop handle up in the 550 cord like a marionette. He had no knife. Pv2 next to him had no knife. All other soldiers including myself burried in each other and gear with those 2 assholes standing on top. Turret door blocked by cooler wedged against it.

Eventually someone managed to hand up a knife to pv2 to cut pv1 free and open troop hatch.

Then we spent the day getting an upside down bradley out of a 10 foot deep ditch.

Dude, come on. You know he's talking about the keys to the lock.

I know exactly which 5 ton I would've loaned em.  It eventually was turned into a roadster by a bridge while being shipped by rail.

I was never in the military but I did get to be part of a small time Navy fuck-up working for a small town police department years ago.

The town I used to work in was close to several US Navy installations including Bangor and the Bremerton shipyard. Normally, when ships were in port it was not uncommon to have sailors on shore leave in town (even though other bigger cities were closer). 99.75% of the time the sailors were rowdy, but they didn't start fights and were super respectful when asked to tone it down. They were just having a good time and not bothering anyone, so it was live and let live.

There is always that one guy though...

When the Nimitz was in Bremerton, a sailor got super drunk, started several bar fights and broke all kinds of shit in the bar. When we got called to the bar he tried to fight us too, which didn't go how he thought it would. Now sailor guy is up to a couple felonies and a few misdemeanors. He was being super evasive about his address, but I found his Navy ID so I make a few calls to all the installations around (Bangor, Bremerton and Indian Island).

About 30 minutes later I get a call from my dispatch who says they have Bremerton (switchboard/dispatch?) on the line and are going to connect me with someone responsible for the sailor. They put me on hold and a very annoyed voice comes on the line, says their name (which I did not catch as I was still on scene) and asks what they can help me with. I explain I am Officer Digger440 of the Tinyburg police and that we have sailor XXX in custody for assault, malicious mischief, and that he is currently being transported to the county jail.

The voice on the other end of the phone totally changed gears to sounding professional and almost (but not quite) apologetic, instead of annoyed. The guy tells me that someone will retrieve sailor xxx from the jail and someone else will follow up with the court. I tell them thank you for getting back to me and I ask them to repeat their name and rank so I can put it in my report.

It was the fucking Captain, not an XO, the goddamn Captain of the USS Nimitz I was shocked, there are like 5000 people on that ship and I bet at least 2000 outrank this drunken clown. I just said thank you sir and sorry to bug you this late in the evening before hanging up.

I have no idea why or how the ship's Captain got that call, there is literally zero logical explanation for it in my mind. But, I do know that sailor XXX was probably more fucked because his big boss took the call that night. I don't know what eventually happened to him as calls on patrol are fire and forget.

But, I sure as hell can guess

I was retrieving Marines from the airfield at TQ in Iraq.  

A SEAL Chief was on the same flight.

I saw him get his M4 out of his pelican, but didn’t pay much attention, a bit later I saw him loaded up in a Toyota pickup with other bearded dudes and they took off.

After all my people got loaded in trucks I did a walk around and found an M4 leaning on the HESCO.

Different rail and ACOG than ours and all our people had theirs accounted for as they boarded the trucks anyway.  

It was 99.99% that Chief’s rifle.  I turned it over to the airfield arrival dudes and told them it was that SEAL chief’s and washed my hands if it.  

Always wondered if they found him, he came back, or what.

In WW1 they called that reaction "marking your laundry"

I lived in the barracks facing the E-club next to the chapel from 91 to early 94.  Walking/Crawling distance

We used to hang out on the catwalk drinking and watch the shenanigans with drunks, camp guard, and the MPs at closing time.

They used to post a spotter with a radio on the roof of the club to direct apprehensions.

You can be made to reimburse the military for up to 1 months pay for a destroyed item, even if it is a multi-million dollar piece of equipment.
You can be made to forfeit more that a months pay for discipline (IE: Court martial), but that money doesn't go back to the army.

back in 1986-ish I was stationed at a now closed base (Wueschheim A.S.) for Ground Launch Cruise Missile (GLCM) security in West Germany.  We did a dispersal (FTX) to an old nazi munitions depot (and yes, it was still nazi marked). We were there probably a week.  We got to use the old abandoned storage houses, sort of like big garages, to sleep in.  Anyhoo, the last day we were there we got to break everything down and just chill out until we left the following day.  Everyone had to clear their weapons and take their blank adapters off. Some guys started playing spades or hearts in one of the garages.  One guy named Carby and his partner were going for a 10 for 200 (big hand) Carby's partner blew it and they lost.  I'm walking by the garage and all the sudden I hear "YOU MOTHERFUCKER!!!  YOU MOTHERFUCKER!!".....BOOOM!!!   I run up to the garage and Carby's partner is laying on his back, clutching his neck.  I yelled to get the medic and ran for to get some help.  What happened is Carby grabbed someone else's M-16 and pointed it at his partner, thinking it was cleared and pulled the trigger....I guess to show him how pissed he was.  What Carby didn't know is that the gun he took wasn't cleared properly and he fired a blank round at his partner's face from about 4 feet away.  He ended up getting powder burns on his neck and face, and bits of burned powder when under his eye lids.  He was rushed to a german hospital and was fine.  

The guy that was assigned the weapon swore up and down that he cleared it and didn't know how the blank round got in there.  He received an LOR.  Carby took an Art 15, was reduce from E-3 to E-1 and did 30 days in Correctional Custody, or as we liked to call it the "Country Club".  I don't recall what happened to him after that.  I think he stayed in and was still a security policeman.

Reminds me of a guy in Thailand. Shore patrol gets the call, with a  description of a crazy American standing in the middle of the road attacking random passers by with a sword.

Officer stuck with shore patrol duty arrives on scene to find things pretty much as described. Marine in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, with the collar turned up Elvis style. “Possibly” a bit inebriated. Standing in the street with a wooden samurai sword.

As the lieutenant comes up on this scene the Marine recognizes him, proceeds to comes to attention with his wooden sword, and suggests the lieutenant turn up his own collar, and go back to back with him to fend of the “vampires.” After some discussion he decided it was best just to go back to the ship.

Nobody ever figured out why he thought there were vampires around, but the fact that he had not actually hurt anybody and was respectful to the officer went a long way at mast.

Summer of 82. One of the guys in another platoon started complaining about stomach pain, after several trips to sick call they sent him to hospital. Hospital said nothing was wrong with him.
CoC started the usual let's fuck with the slacker guy shit. Guy went AWOL several weeks later. Three days after he went AWOL, he called the company to let them know he was going into emergency surgery for, I think, stomach cancer, and they would be hearing from his family's lawyers and his congressmen. The visitations by the CoC were not fun for our CO.

Winter of 83, Same CO. He took us to the field without sleeping bags. Several guys got bad frostbite. He was chewed out loud enough by Brigade CO you could hear it all throughout the first floor and stairwell.

Couple of weeks later on the Brigade FTX, we are once again in the field without proper cold weather gear. Brigade CO shows up when it's sleeting and asked the guard where his poncho was.

Used it for a hooch, Sir.
Don't you have your shelter half?
No sir, no sleeping bags either.

Yeah, he escorted the BGD CO to the CP, where he put the CO at attention and reamed him another asshole. This time right in front of God and everybody. 15 minutes later we were on Deuces headed to the rear for sleeping bags and shelter halves. A week later CO was finally gone.

In 85, my squad leader and team leader were on advanced party. They met a couple of girls, one thing led to another and they wound up in hot tub with the girls, then the girls apartment.

The girls called the unit looking for them a couple days later, and the CQ helpfully gave one of them the SL's home phone number. Yeah, his wife answered the phone. She was not happy. He was sent back to the unit, busted from E6 to E5, his wife divorced him, and he was transferred out of Berlin.

In Doughboy City there was a bridge. We stretched concertina wire across the bridge for the full length of the bridge. British Tank tried to drive through it. That shit wrapped up around and through the treads like spaghetti. Driver stopped about half way across and crew got out and started cutting it out. I'm not sure what made them madder, having to cut the wire out, or us laughing at them while they did it.

SL in another platoon told his driver to knock over a tree. Tree won, broke one guys arm, messed up SL's shoulder, gave one guy a concussion, broke out a couple of the drivers teeth and ripped the drive sprocket off the track. I was watching them fuck around from atop my track and remember thinking, They ain't going to hit that tree are they, it's huge. Yeah, they did.

We were in Canada, and my buddy was ground guiding his track to park it. The area we were told to park was small so everything had to be parked real close. A buddy of the driver ran up and smacked him on the helmet distracting him. My buddy couldn't get out of the way in time. His leg got pinched between the front of his track and the rear bumper of the track in front. This was the year before I was crippled and they still hadn't released him when I was discharged 13 months later.

Same FTX, a douchebag in another platoon stumbled over something and dug it up. His buddies testimony said the douchebag said Hey this looks like an old mortar round, right before the threw it aside. The buddy was unharmed as the douchebag absorbed the blast. He lived but, IIRC, DB lost his leg at the knee and his arm at shoulder. Whole right side of his body looked like hamburger, and I'm not sure if he lost anything else.
And before anyone gets their panty's in a twist, he was a douchebag way before this, not because if this.

My former Plt Sgt, SFC Tim. He was the type of guy that if he was on fire you wouldn’t piss on him to help out it out. I got out in 95 and learned a year or two later he got busted cheating on a PT test and got booted out of the Army. I looked him up and think he is probably dead now.

Ft Knox to. LOL