Overpass Experiences

The Eric Wroolie Blog

  • Facebook
  • Google+
  • Linkedin
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Blog
  • Social Activity
  • Videos
  • Overpass Apps

Powered by Overpass Apps

The Beautiful Sight

March 15, 2006 by wroolie Leave a Comment

One of the most beautiful sites I’ve ever seen was the night range at Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri when I was in basic training. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a tracer round being fired from a rifle in the the pitch black sky, but it is fantastic.

A tracer round is a false bullet that doesn’t pierce anything (I don’t think, but given it’s speed . . .) but just glows orange as it is fired. In our magazines, it was every third round. In the nighttime when you can’t use the black site post, you need to use the tracer rounds to help aim. If you ever see the old Gulf War 1 footage of the orange glowing bullets flying into the sky, these are tracer rounds.

In basic training, they don’t look nearly as threatening as they would in war.

I vividly remember sitting on some old sports bleachers huddled up with fellow soldiers and watching the night range. It was so dark. We sat in the bleachers waiting for our turn to climb into the foxhole and shoot.

Eventually, after about ten minutes or so for the current troops to get ready, a flair would be fired into the air and turn night into day. As the flare was slowly lowered to earth with its tiny parachute, the soldiers start firing.

On the night fire range, the soldiers can’t see the targets until the flair goes up. When they fire, two out of three rounds should hit the target and the third (the tracer) bounces off the target and into the sky. As the flare extinguishes, I remember looking into the air and watching the orange glowing rounds fly into the air as I smelled the discharged gunpowder waft over me.

A beautiful site. I wonder if anyone in war-ravaged Iraq ever thought so.

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Rants

Loading Facebook Comments ...

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

  • Preferring to Be Alone
  • How to Kill Someone’s Dreams
  • Are any Puzzle Pieces Missing?
  • Software Development Skills like Currency – And the value is always falling
  • Delegating and Giving up Control

RSS From the Overpass Blog

  • Since Apple Business Manager, Enterprise Apps Are Difficult September 11, 2019
  • Connecting Students Through School Mobile Apps May 14, 2019
  • Can You Make Money with Business Apps? April 5, 2019
  • Is an iPad App Developer the same as an iPhone Developer? February 21, 2019
  • How Apple IOS Developers need to think differently February 13, 2019
  • The Do’s and Don’ts of Enterprise Mobile App Development February 11, 2019
  • Premier mobile app development company expanding its market reach February 1, 2019
  • Overpass Apps is making waves in iOS and Android designs in the UK January 30, 2019
  • Construction Apps From Top UK Construction Companies June 7, 2018
  • Infographic: Top 5 Apps with 1 Billion Downloads June 5, 2018

Tags

Anti-virus Army Days ASP.Net Automation Baseball Beijing BR China Chinglish coding Cornbury CSS DLI Eric Wroolie Family Gym Holiday HTML5 IE6 Line Break Misc. music MVC Framework Nike+ Overpass PNG PowerShell Redcloth Ruby Runkeeper scam Skype Spotify Superpreview Textile Transparency Webby Web Design Web Standards