We were doing the mandatory “live night fire” exercise in basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in July of 1986.

It was my buddy, (Doug Sternberger), Sterny’s birthday, and we joked about what a lousy, yet memorable birthday it would be.

Our objective was to “take the hill” from our Russian enemy, who would be firing over us, possibly complete with live mortars in the area for the full effect.

We were all exhausted from a long, hot day of training and now we had to stay awake and alert for the sun to go down so we could appreciate the sounds and smells of night combat. None of us were up for it. All we wanted was to get back to the barracks for a quick shower and hit the bunk. Even the Drill Sergeants were physically worn out, although they had to maintain their energy level and professionalism for our sake.

When it got dark enough, the “battle” finally started, with live M60 machine gun fire well over our heads… which we knew would be the case. There was also a lot of M16 fire going back and forth, (blanks), and several fake mines were set up for us to trip while going up the hill.

No one was taking it serious, basically just running straight up the hill firing a few random blank rounds every now and then to make it look like we were “attacking”. The Cadre stopped the exercise and put the flood lights on to illuminate the practice battlefield.

After a good scolding, they sent us back down to the bottom of the hill and told us we better low crawl this time, since our entire Platoon was just annihilated! This time we all low crawled and performed our “cover & fire” maneuvers as we were trained to do.

When Sterny and I came up to our first “mine”, he used the butt of his M16 to trip the wire, and it initiated a puny little “pop”, along the lines of a firecracker. We howled in laughter at how lame the mines were.

Now our personal mission was to trip as many mines as we could find. With all the noise and smoke, the Drill Sergeants wouldn’t be able to single us out as the knuckleheads that were purposely tripping mines. We found the next one and Sterny did the same thing as before, hitting the wire with his rifle butt. This time there was a huge explosion and both of us lifted off the ground from the impact. We looked at each other in bewilderment exchanging, “whoa, that one was real” reactions.

Later, we found out that the cadre had in fact fired a live mortar a safe distance away from us for effect, and it just happened to be the moment Sterny tripped our little practice mine.

We immediately had a whole new respect for the exercise!