December 12, 2025 • 10 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, at Fort Irwin, where military training exercises push soldiers to the edge of real combat, the line between routine drills and genuine danger can blur without warning. Our American Stories regular contributor Richard Muniz remembers a night when that line vanished. A single misjudged moment during a live-fire military exercise sent a round into the wrong vehicle and forced a small crew to fight for their lives in the dark. His story is a look at how even the best-trained teams face risks that no plan can fully erase.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
And we returned to our American stories, and up next
to story from one of our regular contributors, Richard Munyez.
Rich is a listener out in Colorado and his story
today is entitled Midnight at the Live Fire Exercise. Here's
Rich with a story.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
ADC. This is World News Tonight with Peter Jenning. Good Evening.
The deadline has come and gone.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
The Iraqis are living on what President Bush calls borrowed time.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
It is no longer whether the war will start. About
when in nineteen ninety one we had a little thing
called the Gulf War, and in it we sent armored
divisions and infantry divisions into Iraq. And I'll be honest
with you, we clean the clock. I mean it looked
a little bit like War of the World's only we
were the martians. Now, one of the things that happened
(00:58):
here is we definitely had had the superior tank, I
mean the in one tank, fantastic piece of hardware. The
other thing we had going for is we had better training. Now,
granted they had some actual combat experience, but we had
trained to a razor's edge. Where did we do this
training At a little place called National Training Center at
Fort Irwin, California, out in the middle of nowhere in
(01:19):
the Mohave Desert. Now, the first time I ever went
out there, it was about nineteen eighty eight. What had
happened was, see, I was working military police investigations time.
Now that's exactly what it sounds like I was doing.
I was a detective, you know, put on a suit
but on a tie, and I went out there and
I played detective. Well, in the FM manuals, there's always
(01:42):
need for an MPI investigator to go out with division. Well,
no one ever had, so it's kind of a little
bit of a pioneer here. This is the first time
an MPI investigator was going to go out with division
out to the National Training Center. Now here's the problem.
No one knew exactly what my job was, so my
mission kind of wound up being a catch off. What
(02:06):
I wound up doing was investigt an awful lot of accidents.
And if you want to see some horrific accidents, do
it where you got high explosive rounds going off being
shot from some of those fantastic equipment in the world,
and see what happens. Add to that unfamiliar terrain, things
like that and I mean it's recipe for getting people killed.
This is a story about a couple of soldiers that
(02:27):
managed to dodge the bullet. And I'll be honest with you,
they came very very close. Okay. Now, what they did
with me was I wound up having to stay behind
at the Provost Marshal's office and I got to sleep
in a jail cell for the twenty nine days were deployed. Well,
one night I'm in there, I'm sound asleep, and the
dispatcher comes back and wakes me up and says, Rich,
(02:51):
there's been a terrible accident out on one of the ranges.
What happened? A tank fired up in APC And my
first one stays, says, oh my god, this is not
gonna be pretty. So I got up and got dressed
and I walked over to the officer's baq, that's where
the division safety officers were staying, and I said, guys,
(03:14):
we've had a bad accident on the range. We've had
a n M one fire up in ABC. What else
do you know? That's all I know right now. We said,
we loaded up into their four by four and we
started out and they made a few phone calls like that,
so we knew where we were going. And I remember
we're driving through and it's pitch black outside. I mean,
you have not seen pitch black. And see you're in
the middle of the Mohave Desert. So we're driving along
(03:36):
and I wound up falling asleep, and person I woke
up and we're stopping and we're stopping at what looks
like a trailerhouse and it's still the pitch dark outside.
And when the officers got out and he went in,
he comes out and he's got a cassette tape and
he said, you guys have got to hear this. They
plugged it in and you hear them talking and stuff
like that, and this is routine stuff. You're hearing what
(03:58):
we call a fist. Fist is a fire support vehicle.
This calls in targets. In this case, this was an
set up on a little hill there that had small
crew and they were calling in targets and all of
a sudden, you hear a scream cease fire, Cease fire,
(04:18):
My god, my god, were hit. Cease fire. And you
hear other people screaming, see you know, cease fire, sees fire,
cease fire, shut it down, Shut it down then it
goes dead. By the time we got to where this
accident had occurred, the sun had already come up. D
M one that was responsible for firing doing the firing
(04:39):
is still sitting there, setting over on a heel, maybe
about five hundred yards away. Is the fist. Now, the
first thing we got to determine is what happened here.
And we're talking to a major who was in charge
of all this, and he's telling us what had happened
was they were doing a live fire. Now, the way
they did this was this is a response to an
attack or simulated attack by enemy armor. The way they
(05:03):
would handle this is one tank would roll up and
it would fire, it'd roll back to reload. Another one
would roll up, fire, and they're just alternating back and forth.
Only this is you know, dozens of tanks doing this,
and they had these range safety stakes, big long posts
pounded into the ground. They do this for safety reasons. Well,
(05:24):
I get out and I'm looking at the tank there
and the first thing I noticed is that there is
a red paint transfer on the gun turb and became
very close was happening here. Every time the tank moved back,
the gun tube was rubbing up against the gun stake,
the safety steak, and they're filled. The fires for getting
wider and wider and wider. Now I wonder. I check
(05:45):
some of the other stakes and they were in very,
very firm, but not this one. This one was loose.
I mean I could sit there and shake it with
my hand. Like I said, it's filled. The fires getting
progressively wider and wider. Well, eventually, what happened is they
when they roll up, they got maybe two to three
seconds to acquire target and fire. Well, they get up there,
guess what's in there? Filled the fire? Now the fist
(06:05):
they fired at. Now, the weapon they used was what
we call a sable round. Now, sable rounds kind of
an interesting weapon. When this lambs into a target, whatever
the missile's made of, the shells made of vaporize is
almost instantly the needle, which looks a little bit like
a cone, melts to the armor of whatever it hit
(06:25):
and then goes inside. I know to go for. I
saw tanks that have been hit by sable rounds on
the outside. They don't too bad. Look down the hatch,
that's what that hit this tank with a little APC
and the APC is I mean, it's nothing like a tank.
It's a very lightly armored vehicle. So we went through
all that. You know, we know what's going on here now.
(06:47):
Now we went over and checked out the APC. It
surprised me at the amount of damage to it. The
round had come in low by that what I mean,
went in between the tracks and into the engine compartment
down underneath. If it had hit the APC see square on.
There have been no survivors on this thing. I mean
they were just boom as it was. The entire top
of the APC itself was melted off, and there was
(07:10):
a machine gun, an M six machine gun sitting on
the machine gun mount. This thing was actually melted and
it was both down in half. Okay, Now I had
to go back back to base, and we kind of
have a division of labor. Now what the safety officer
would do they would go talk to the crew and
the commanders and everybody else that was associated with this.
(07:31):
I would go to the hospital and talk to the
crew of the APC. And this is where I got
the rest of the story. Now, when I went in
there and I told them what I was there for,
they were nice enough to put the crew in there
in the same room, and these guys were messed up.
We had a young lieutenant that was in charge of it,
the sergeant E six, and a couple of ems. This
(07:52):
is the story I got here. They are, they're doing
their thing, they're calling it, they're calling in their fields
of fire and stuff like that, and then the round hit.
Lieutenant told me when it hit, I mean it actually
rocked the APC and everything in everything in the tank
almost seemed to catch fire instantly. And he's screaming, you
know over the radio, you know, cease fire, cease fire,
(08:14):
My god, my god, were hit, cease fire. And he's
trying to get everybody out of there. He's getting his
EM's out there, and they're pibling out of this burning
thing and allsoing. He looks around and realizes he's missing
a man. He didn't know where his sergeant was. He
goes back into this burning tank trying to find his sergeant. Okay,
here's what that happened. A few moments before the round hit.
(08:37):
These guys from what we call MOP level four. That
means you're in a chemical environment, you got protecting mask
on everything else. Well, a couple of minutes for the
round hit. They were told to stand down from mop
level four, which you mean to take off your mask,
so they took him the masks off. The sergeant had
his mask in his hand and was folding up to
put it away in his carrier when the round hit.
(08:58):
He said, the mask caught fire instantly. So here he is.
He's on fire. What's he do? He panices, He jumps
out of the tank, starts running down the hill before
he remembered to stop tucking roll. Lieutenant didn't know this.
He went back into the tank, looked for the man
before for the heat and smoke fire forced him out
of there. It's a miracle from God. These guys even
(09:18):
managed to survive. These are the kind of accidents you
see happen out there sometimes. I mean, this is terrible.
I don't know what happened these men. I'm pretty sure
the lieutenant and possibly the NCO were discharged because they're injuries,
so they probably have to click in a pension today.
Out say that was too bad because lt. Was an
(09:39):
officer was worth something.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
And a great job is always to Monty Montgomery for
his work on the piece and his special thanks again
to Richard Muniez, who's a regular contributor here in Our
American Stories, and his story, well, it took place in
the Mahabi Desert. As he put it, it was a
miracle from God that these guys somehow they were discharged
(10:02):
on account of their injuries and are collecting pensions. And
it's a fascinating look at training, which has its own dangers.
And as we were talking after the piece, a lot
less actual death and military exercises thanks to lasers and
more sophisticated approaches to simulation, but still some of our
(10:23):
men and women in uniform died training. It happens particularly
in aviation exercises. Richard Mune has his story Midnight at
the Live Fire Exercise here on Our American Story
And we returned to our American stories, and up next
to story from one of our regular contributors, Richard Munyez.
Rich is a listener out in Colorado and his story
today is entitled Midnight at the Live Fire Exercise. Here's
Rich with a story.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
ADC. This is World News Tonight with Peter Jenning. Good Evening.
The deadline has come and gone.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
The Iraqis are living on what President Bush calls borrowed time.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
It is no longer whether the war will start. About
when in nineteen ninety one we had a little thing
called the Gulf War, and in it we sent armored
divisions and infantry divisions into Iraq. And I'll be honest
with you, we clean the clock. I mean it looked
a little bit like War of the World's only we
were the martians. Now, one of the things that happened
(00:58):
here is we definitely had had the superior tank, I
mean the in one tank, fantastic piece of hardware. The
other thing we had going for is we had better training. Now,
granted they had some actual combat experience, but we had
trained to a razor's edge. Where did we do this
training At a little place called National Training Center at
Fort Irwin, California, out in the middle of nowhere in
(01:19):
the Mohave Desert. Now, the first time I ever went
out there, it was about nineteen eighty eight. What had
happened was, see, I was working military police investigations time.
Now that's exactly what it sounds like I was doing.
I was a detective, you know, put on a suit
but on a tie, and I went out there and
I played detective. Well, in the FM manuals, there's always
(01:42):
need for an MPI investigator to go out with division. Well,
no one ever had, so it's kind of a little
bit of a pioneer here. This is the first time
an MPI investigator was going to go out with division
out to the National Training Center. Now here's the problem.
No one knew exactly what my job was, so my
mission kind of wound up being a catch off. What
(02:06):
I wound up doing was investigt an awful lot of accidents.
And if you want to see some horrific accidents, do
it where you got high explosive rounds going off being
shot from some of those fantastic equipment in the world,
and see what happens. Add to that unfamiliar terrain, things
like that and I mean it's recipe for getting people killed.
This is a story about a couple of soldiers that
(02:27):
managed to dodge the bullet. And I'll be honest with you,
they came very very close. Okay. Now, what they did
with me was I wound up having to stay behind
at the Provost Marshal's office and I got to sleep
in a jail cell for the twenty nine days were deployed. Well,
one night I'm in there, I'm sound asleep, and the
dispatcher comes back and wakes me up and says, Rich,
(02:51):
there's been a terrible accident out on one of the ranges.
What happened? A tank fired up in APC And my
first one stays, says, oh my god, this is not
gonna be pretty. So I got up and got dressed
and I walked over to the officer's baq, that's where
the division safety officers were staying, and I said, guys,
(03:14):
we've had a bad accident on the range. We've had
a n M one fire up in ABC. What else
do you know? That's all I know right now. We said,
we loaded up into their four by four and we
started out and they made a few phone calls like that,
so we knew where we were going. And I remember
we're driving through and it's pitch black outside. I mean,
you have not seen pitch black. And see you're in
the middle of the Mohave Desert. So we're driving along
(03:36):
and I wound up falling asleep, and person I woke
up and we're stopping and we're stopping at what looks
like a trailerhouse and it's still the pitch dark outside.
And when the officers got out and he went in,
he comes out and he's got a cassette tape and
he said, you guys have got to hear this. They
plugged it in and you hear them talking and stuff
like that, and this is routine stuff. You're hearing what
(03:58):
we call a fist. Fist is a fire support vehicle.
This calls in targets. In this case, this was an
set up on a little hill there that had small
crew and they were calling in targets and all of
a sudden, you hear a scream cease fire, Cease fire,
(04:18):
My god, my god, were hit. Cease fire. And you
hear other people screaming, see you know, cease fire, sees fire,
cease fire, shut it down, Shut it down then it
goes dead. By the time we got to where this
accident had occurred, the sun had already come up. D
M one that was responsible for firing doing the firing
(04:39):
is still sitting there, setting over on a heel, maybe
about five hundred yards away. Is the fist. Now, the
first thing we got to determine is what happened here.
And we're talking to a major who was in charge
of all this, and he's telling us what had happened
was they were doing a live fire. Now, the way
they did this was this is a response to an
attack or simulated attack by enemy armor. The way they
(05:03):
would handle this is one tank would roll up and
it would fire, it'd roll back to reload. Another one
would roll up, fire, and they're just alternating back and forth.
Only this is you know, dozens of tanks doing this,
and they had these range safety stakes, big long posts
pounded into the ground. They do this for safety reasons. Well,
(05:24):
I get out and I'm looking at the tank there
and the first thing I noticed is that there is
a red paint transfer on the gun turb and became
very close was happening here. Every time the tank moved back,
the gun tube was rubbing up against the gun stake,
the safety steak, and they're filled. The fires for getting
wider and wider and wider. Now I wonder. I check
(05:45):
some of the other stakes and they were in very,
very firm, but not this one. This one was loose.
I mean I could sit there and shake it with
my hand. Like I said, it's filled. The fires getting
progressively wider and wider. Well, eventually, what happened is they
when they roll up, they got maybe two to three
seconds to acquire target and fire. Well, they get up there,
guess what's in there? Filled the fire? Now the fist
(06:05):
they fired at. Now, the weapon they used was what
we call a sable round. Now, sable rounds kind of
an interesting weapon. When this lambs into a target, whatever
the missile's made of, the shells made of vaporize is
almost instantly the needle, which looks a little bit like
a cone, melts to the armor of whatever it hit
(06:25):
and then goes inside. I know to go for. I
saw tanks that have been hit by sable rounds on
the outside. They don't too bad. Look down the hatch,
that's what that hit this tank with a little APC
and the APC is I mean, it's nothing like a tank.
It's a very lightly armored vehicle. So we went through
all that. You know, we know what's going on here now.
(06:47):
Now we went over and checked out the APC. It
surprised me at the amount of damage to it. The
round had come in low by that what I mean,
went in between the tracks and into the engine compartment
down underneath. If it had hit the APC see square on.
There have been no survivors on this thing. I mean
they were just boom as it was. The entire top
of the APC itself was melted off, and there was
(07:10):
a machine gun, an M six machine gun sitting on
the machine gun mount. This thing was actually melted and
it was both down in half. Okay, Now I had
to go back back to base, and we kind of
have a division of labor. Now what the safety officer
would do they would go talk to the crew and
the commanders and everybody else that was associated with this.
(07:31):
I would go to the hospital and talk to the
crew of the APC. And this is where I got
the rest of the story. Now, when I went in
there and I told them what I was there for,
they were nice enough to put the crew in there
in the same room, and these guys were messed up.
We had a young lieutenant that was in charge of it,
the sergeant E six, and a couple of ems. This
(07:52):
is the story I got here. They are, they're doing
their thing, they're calling it, they're calling in their fields
of fire and stuff like that, and then the round hit.
Lieutenant told me when it hit, I mean it actually
rocked the APC and everything in everything in the tank
almost seemed to catch fire instantly. And he's screaming, you
know over the radio, you know, cease fire, cease fire,
(08:14):
My god, my god, were hit, cease fire. And he's
trying to get everybody out of there. He's getting his
EM's out there, and they're pibling out of this burning
thing and allsoing. He looks around and realizes he's missing
a man. He didn't know where his sergeant was. He
goes back into this burning tank trying to find his sergeant. Okay,
here's what that happened. A few moments before the round hit.
(08:37):
These guys from what we call MOP level four. That
means you're in a chemical environment, you got protecting mask
on everything else. Well, a couple of minutes for the
round hit. They were told to stand down from mop
level four, which you mean to take off your mask,
so they took him the masks off. The sergeant had
his mask in his hand and was folding up to
put it away in his carrier when the round hit.
(08:58):
He said, the mask caught fire instantly. So here he is.
He's on fire. What's he do? He panices, He jumps
out of the tank, starts running down the hill before
he remembered to stop tucking roll. Lieutenant didn't know this.
He went back into the tank, looked for the man
before for the heat and smoke fire forced him out
of there. It's a miracle from God. These guys even
(09:18):
managed to survive. These are the kind of accidents you
see happen out there sometimes. I mean, this is terrible.
I don't know what happened these men. I'm pretty sure
the lieutenant and possibly the NCO were discharged because they're injuries,
so they probably have to click in a pension today.
Out say that was too bad because lt. Was an
(09:39):
officer was worth something.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
And a great job is always to Monty Montgomery for
his work on the piece and his special thanks again
to Richard Muniez, who's a regular contributor here in Our
American Stories, and his story, well, it took place in
the Mahabi Desert. As he put it, it was a
miracle from God that these guys somehow they were discharged
(10:02):
on account of their injuries and are collecting pensions. And
it's a fascinating look at training, which has its own dangers.
And as we were talking after the piece, a lot
less actual death and military exercises thanks to lasers and
more sophisticated approaches to simulation, but still some of our
(10:23):
men and women in uniform died training. It happens particularly
in aviation exercises. Richard Mune has his story Midnight at
the Live Fire Exercise here on Our American Story
Host
Lee Habeeb
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