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To: Darksheare
Strange you would have more than one round out of safe. At Sill, when you go out on a shoot (at least back in the '60s and '70s), the safety officer computes the safety diagram, where you can shoot and where you can't. That's in the FDC, and when coordinates come in that are out of safe, you can't fire them. Moreover, you would also have parameters for your sights, deflection and elevation out of which you could not shoot. One round out of safe, and that part of the range shuts down until the situation is dealt with. We had a number of out of safe incidents when I was at Sill, the worst was a NG battalion that was over on the East Range. They fired a battalion two (supposedly surveyed in, no adjusting fire) 3200 mils out of safe (yeah, 180 degrees). Thank God the rounds landed in the West Range after overflying the Post. The battalion commander was relieved, as were at least half a dozen other officers, including the shoot safety officer and the East Range safety officer for the day.
829 posted on 07/22/2003 12:53:27 PM PDT by CatoRenasci (Ceterum Censeo [Gallia][Germania][Arabia] Esse Delendam --- Select One or More as needed)
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To: CatoRenasci
They shut us down, checked our numbers, brought us back up, shut us down, checked our numbers, brought us back up.
FINALLY, they got the brilliant idea that the data wasn't bad on our end.

What often happened in FDC, if they weren't doing charts and darts, they were taking the data they received at face value.
After that, the young guys in FDC decided to do charts and darts just as a manual backup.
Sometimes the older ways were better.

We set up once in the middle of the night, 0130, during our captain's brainy 24 hour continuous operations on day two.
For some reason, all of our howitzers were nowhere near the aiming circle.
Couldn't even see it to find it.

The OC's shut us down until morning, the cap still wouldn't let us implement a sleep plan. Yes, he was a real winner.
Come morning light and stand to... all five guns were 1200 mils out.
Seems somewhere along the line someone screwed the pooch and gave the advance party guys the wrong numbers and no-one caught it from being fogheaded from lack of sleep.

I still remember having our safety T's completely screwed up once too.
EVERY number was wrong. We fired two rounds, each gun.
FDC called for a runner to send down all the safety T's. (we had them printed on acrylic cards)
We were then told, by an OC, that our safety T's were wrong!
He relieved our instant tension by telling us that were were in safe, and had hit the target.

I, being RTO, yelled down top FDC to get a new eye doctor.

I also remember firing from Battalion FDC, our FDC relaying to us the data, and THEY screwed up somewhere along the line. Seems they sent us firing data for Charlie Battery instead of our firing data. Charts and Darts caught that one.

We spent one whole day in checkfire once due to a wholly unrelated unit firing on bad data. But the range didn't shutdown, as evidenced by two other batteries firing at the same time.
Seems the unit that fired on bad data was next door to us and they wanted to make sure we hadn't fired it ourselves.

March of 2001, an artillery unit fired on bad data and killed a few infantry soldiers. I have the article somewhere, but basically it sounded like they were sent bad data from Battalion FDC. (I've heard tell of a few units doing away with charts and darts completely, like my unit had for awhile. Charts and darts will catch some screwups sometimes.)

Even with those screwups, they were few and far between, things were great.
Once we got to actually fire, we were slamming.
Usually, we sat in our firebase and baked while our cap had a urination contest with HQ and other stupid games.
My last AT, our cap wanted us to turn in rounds.
He left for a meeting, and the XO walks out and asks us what we thought of that garbage.
We all said the obvious thought, and he went back to FDC and called for some firemissions. We expended ALL ammo, even the blanks for our personal weapons.

The cap comes back from his meeting and claps his hands, then says: "Let's get ready to turn in all this ammo!"
We all look at him and say: "What ammo?"
He got red in the face and wandered all over the area looking for any rounds to turn in.

I guess it was mean to laugh at him for it.
834 posted on 07/22/2003 1:14:24 PM PDT by Darksheare ("I didn't say it wouldn't burn, I said it wouldn't hurt.")
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To: CatoRenasci
Fort Drum.
I probably should have specified that one.
It currently has only one huge impact zone.
But an old map shows that it had three impact zones at one point.
Made for some interesting compass work in the places that used to be impact zones.

That's where we were shut down and 'kick started' repeatedly.
That's also where they had an artillery accident back in March 2001.
I'm still trying to figure out exactly what happened in that one.
I wasn't there personally for that one, but it doesn't make sense from what I saw happen to us.
836 posted on 07/22/2003 1:28:54 PM PDT by Darksheare ("I didn't say it wouldn't burn, I said it wouldn't hurt.")
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