The Deer Hunter 
2003 Reader Submission
Pending Acceptance
Ft. Stewart, Georgia, is a mechanized infantry base. This includes big track vehicles that shoot out explosive shells, causing thunder on clear days on a regular basis. Some of these vehicles practice firing on targets they can't see, going simply by co-ordinates. The places they practice are called "ranges" and are surrounded on all sides by warning labels of the most eye-burning colors imaginable, so that they cannot possibly go unnoticed. For safety's sake, the ranges are also buffered by quite a bit of forest. The local animals - deer and such - are chased off before hand by a safety patroll, and tend to stay away once the rounds start exploding. A safety check is performed before the opening of the range, with someone calling our over a loudspeaker "Is there anyone downrange, is there anyone downrange. I see no-one, I hear no-one. This range is now open.".
I was stationed there for a year and a half. One day while getting lunch, I sat next to a group of infantrymen who were laughing hystericaly. When I asked what the fun was about, they explained: they had been running a tank range since before dawn, and as is standard practice they had checked the range after the firing was over for unexploded rounds. Unexploded rounds are detonated in place by range controll for safety reasons. When they checked one crater, they happened across the remains of a human body. At first horrifying, the story became rather amusing as it became clearer.
Aparently the body was that of a local hunter out by the dawn's early light to bag himslef a deer. He decided that the clearing of the tank range would be an excelent place to spot deer coming out for a dawn feed from the buffer zone surrounding the range, and took his position with a rifle and a thermos of coffee in one of the convienent shell craters. To do so he had to sneak onto post (not difficlut), get into a range area (somewhat more risky) and then onto a range (quite illegal).
It's unknown if he was hit by the first shell or just froze untill one of the successive ones did him in. This, like many other events on post, as far as I know never made it to the papers. Submitted on 04/09/2002
Submitted by:
Anonymous
Reference:
none (sorry)
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