But the focus here is upon a certain class:
The only thing remarkable about their deployments was the sheer number of artillery rounds they had fired. The United States had made a strategic decision to avoid sending large numbers of ground troops to fight the Islamic State, and instead relied on airstrikes and a handful of powerful artillery batteries to, as one retired general said at the time, “pound the bejesus out of them.” The strategy worked: Islamic State positions were all but eradicated, and hardly any U.S. troops were killed. But it meant that a small number of troops had to fire tens of thousands of high-explosive shells — far more rounds per crew member, experts say, than any U.S. artillery battery had fired at least since the Vietnam War. Military guidelines say that firing all those rounds is safe. What happened to the crews suggests that those guidelines were wrong. The cannon blasts were strong enough to hurl a 100-pound round 15 miles, and each unleashed a shock wave that shot through the crew members’ bodies, vibrating bone, punching lungs and hearts, and whipping at cruise-missile speeds through the most delicate organ of all: the brain.
Back in the 80s when I was tanker, we were doing some shared range time at Grafenwøhr with some German tankers. One of the germans was walking around with a jump about every 3rd step. The guys in his unit said that he was walking between tanks during a stationary night gunnery and had been about 15 feet from a main gun when it went off in the pitch darkness next to him. Shook him up quite a bit.