I was a medic in the Army in the late 70's at Ft. Lewis, Washington. None of the non-combat designated, support units on post were assigned their own medics due to a lack of qualified people.
As a result, my unit's headquarters company TOE, was over staffed with medics. We were a combat heavy, engineer batallion. At any given time we had from a minimum of 11 medics, to a maximum of 17. The reason for this was that whenever a non-combat unit required a medic for a field maneuver, road trip, or yearly weapons qualification, one of us was assigned TOD to that unit for however long was needed.
Sometimes only a day, sometimes weeks. As a result, I never got bored during my 3 year hitch.
Now, to get to the point of the thread.
I was with one of these units at the range for annual M-16 weapons qualification.
Side note*** Army armourors NEVER turned in excess to needs ammo after everyone was finished qualifying. That ammo ALWAYS got shot up, instead of being turned in. ALWAYS! ALWAYS!! ALWAYS!!!!!!!!
So, as a medic, I was usually enlisted at the end of the qualifying to help shoot up the excess ammo.
Usually, the shooter's were spaced apart from one another by at least 2 firing pits. This particular day, there was so much ammo to shoot away, that the range sargeant put all of the shooters next to one another in the pits, so that one of his corporals could retrieve the empty magazines, and bring freshly loaded ones.
The butterball lieutenant next to me elected to disobey the range officer, who had expressly forbidden full auto shooting, and ripped off an entire 20-round magazine of 5.56 ammo in a couple of seconds. Several of the ejected cases, came over into my pit, bounced off my left shoulder and head, but one very friendly, burning hot cartridge case decided that I was lonely, needed companionship, and proceeded to burrow its way right down next to my skin between my T-shirt & my body.
Fortunately, I was between pulling the trigger (no 3-shot burst capability on those old rifles), dropped the rifle on the ground in front of the pit, started screaming, jumping up & down like a maniac, pulling both my blouse & T-shirt out of my pants, trying to get that blazing hot case away from my skin.
The range officer called "Cease Fire", and the range sargeant's ran down to my pit to see "What the **** was going on!!!!!!"
Once I got the case out, and the sargeant's & the officer figured out what was going on, everybody but me had a good laugh, as this had happened to all of them at one time, or another.
The range officer ate the lieutenant a new ***hole for disobeying his orders not to fire full auto, and we finished up the totally hard task of shooting of about 800 rounds per shooter.
And, I learned a VERY important lesson.
ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS button the top button on your blouse when in the pits shooting off ammo next to anybody YOU DON'T KNOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That way a hot cartridge case from the guy in the pit to the left can't go down your blouse, or T-shirt.
