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The Most Dangerous Moment in My (Peacetime) Marine Corps Service
A comedy of errors, hubris, and pain.
We were doing tactical night maneuvers, and it was a dark and thunderous night.
Not because of rain — as usual in Camp Pendleton in Southern California, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. But we weren’t the only unit spending the night training; off to the left, we could see the hills silhouetted by flashes of artillery fire and impacts, and the rolling booms carried over the loud Diesel engine of my HMMV (aka “humvee.”
I was riding shotgun, since I’d recently been promoted to “gunner” position for our particular TOW unit. That meant that when needed, I would stand up in the roof turret and aim the anti-tank missile in our Tube-launched Optically-tracked Weapon while Ramirez, my A-Gunner, did the driving.
That wasn’t likely to happen on this particular night, since we didn’t even have the weapon mounted. No, tonight we were practicing low-light rough-terrain driving, and Ramirez and I were in the middle of a convoy of about eight other vehicles from our platoon. Sergeant Runci was leading the way, with the reliable Corporal MacGuire bringing up the rear.
The rest of us were lowly privates, PFCs (Private First Class), and lance corporals like me. We were salty about being up…
