2F  NO VENISON TONIGHT

We were having our weekly officers’ meeting in the mess hall when I heard a bunker line machine gun open fire; at once the adjacent bunkers started shooting and before long the whole northern perimeter was firing their M-60 machine guns. This caused the mountain to go to full alert status and it always put a chill down my back as I didn’t know if it was a full-blown enemy attack. As I was running towards the machine gun fire, someone stopped me and said that it was just an animal inside our outer perimeter. A small deer had somehow infiltrated the inner and outer concertina wire and spooked one of the perimeter guards. Three bunkers opened fire with their machine guns, but the small deer had miraculously outrun the bullets. It was an unbelievable sight; the deer was running and jumping in about a fifty-foot area, with hundreds of bullets ripping up the ground around it and nobody could hit it. After the men wasted around 500 rounds of 308 ammo, I called a cease fire and in a few minutes the deer found his way back through the wire. What really bothered me was not the wasted ammo but not knowing how the deer had gotten inside the ten-foot-high perimeter wire in the first place. We checked the perimeter wiring but we never figured out how it had infiltrated it. With the sharpness of the razor wire the deer should have received multiple slashes if it ran through it but we never saw any blood trails. The next day, we added another row of concertina wire and doubled the tangle foot. (The deer incident was one of the reasons why I designed the bunker alarm system. With the enemy owning 95% of the mountain, we didn’t need any additional stress from false alarms.)