"you cannot imagine", but sounds like you can!!!!" Ten years with the guns replaces imagination with experince. Some of the events could have been funny, but deaths in training rather sober things up. A lot of us got good enough to do emergency solutions with the book & a 1;50000 map but it was not anything you wanted to bet your bars on let alone lives. The safety order the US Army & Marines used then was literally a inch thick. God save the Marine artillery officer who got caught non compliant with the slightest phrase of it. One of my battery commanders was imeadiatly relived of command because an inspector discovered the battery officer safety certifications had been filed late with the firing range OIC office.

Carl The command "Fall in to the rear of the piece" as the Battery Gunny comes charging towards the howitzer can be a very sobering experiance, especially when he is screaming to "Do not touch that F#@king handwheel!!!!" Usually indicates someone has shot "out of the box"!!!!!! Let the witch hunt begin.

I taught at Firing Btry Branch, Weapons Dept. FAOBC/FACBOC. We taught a familiarization on the Soviet D-30 122mm HOW. Seems I recalled that Soviet fire direction was based upon 6000 mils, not 6200 mils. Don't know, though. Damn Carl, our battery FDCs would run races on the Met Data Correction Form. Somebody always messed up copying the Met Data Message. I would think that there would be little validity to that message for MLRS. Neutralizer's comments there seem spot on. Also was range control officer at Sill for one year. Under Carl's scenario, it would have been a 1Lt (me) shutting down the firing point. III Corps Arty CoS wanted a call from me on each violating unit, personally. Bad stuff. Director of DPT wanted same for any school controlled shoots. Btry cdrs. and X.Os ran afoul all the time. Safety computation was, btw, maybe as tough as any class in OBC to include over in the Gunnery Dept. More washouts/re-treads from that class than any in our dept., for sure. Shot on a number of Nat'l Guard controlled ranges. Carl, I gotta say- pretty fast and loose once safety certs were posted with the local range control office.

Seems to me that an Artillery Officer must be one of the most technically demanding MOS in the Army and Marines, on a par with the aviation field I would suspect.

Thought you may enjoy this- sill- P3570.1C2.pdf Firing point safety officer regulation requirements were about what we were required. We needed a copy of AR 385-63 and TM 43-0001-28 in there somewhere. I've mentioned (I'm sure) the story of pulling onto a mortar firing point for the weapons company of 4-31 Inf. (that regiment was waxed on the Chosun east shore, btw). Heavy rain and a 4.2" dud partially buried nose down in the mud some 70 meters in front of the gun pits. No overhead cover for their ammo, dud marked off with some muddy engineer tape, and the boys playing football in the mud IN FRONT OF THE MORTAR POS between the dud. Amazing! Never saw that Lt. again on a firing point.

Reminds me how I shot "live" once, on a dry-fire mission. 48 hours awake, data fit the safety "T", so I cut loose. Whole battalion heard us fire, and a sh!tstorm ensued. I was at the Bn. FDC twenty minutes later with a MAJOR reaming. Firing point was hot, and data was good, otherwise my promotion to 1Lt two days before may have been toast. Fun stuff.

Don't know who said, but I lived under the impression that it was the second toughest to Aviation. When I entered, all army aviators still were required another branch certification, many from the F.A. A.E., I was a lost ball in high weeds when I entered. Like many, I struggled to make it through, braindumping the last class for the next one. Took two FADAC tests in FAOBC-had the lowest culmulative Army score. Two marines had lower. I didn't learn my craft until it was beaten into me at Weapons Dept. and with my first line unit. When I finally understood what I was doing, I loved it. Oddly, without understanding "why" you perform the actions you do, you never really get the "what". It has no context otherwise.

FADAC- "Freddy FADAC" Field Artillery Digital Automatic Computer. 1950s era tube technology. That was "automated" fire direction before TACFIRE and BCS came along. TI-59 calculator was rewired to produce firing solutions also. Then things changed fast.

We still had two FADAC in 1983 in 2/12. The TI-59 were in the FDC desk but seldom came out. Chats & darts were the real deal then. BCS was the first really worthwhile computer I saw. TAC Fire was a mythical Army thing.

Actually I think FADAC only appeared in the mid to late 1960s. One clue is that the STANAG computer met msg was first agreed in 1966. When sharing a gun position in SVN with a USFA bty they were using FADAC but doing a full manual prediction in parallel! Of course this was the theatre SOP that demanded 2 full predictions for all fire missions.