CLICK, CLICK,BOOM?
In Vietnam, death could come from the most unlikely places. One day, an infantry lieutenant lent me an M-3 sub-machine gun he had obtained during an ambush. Since I had never fired one, I decided to take it to Tây Ninh Base Camp and do a little target shooting at the dump. Another lieutenant joined me, along with one of his platoon sergeants. We set up bottles and cans on top of a berm and, from around thirty feet away, we blasted away at our makeshift targets. This went on for about twenty minutes until we ran out of ammo. Afterwards, we walked up to examine our targets, and I noticed something odd sticking out of the ground. It turned out to be the fuse from a 155mm round, still attached to the projectile! The kill radius of a 155mm round is one hundred and fifty feet, and if we had been unlucky enough to set it off, all anyone would have found would have been small body parts. We could even see where our bullets had ricocheted off the fuse. I had the round blown in place.
We celebrated our luck with beers, lucky to be alive.