Egypt sandbag HMG pit with NVG circa 1957

[Griefbringer]

When I was doing my military service, we usually had quite a good access to tracer rounds of various calibers. Being in the air defense artillery might have had something to do with that - tracers were good for observing and correcting your fire, and we did not mind the fly-boys knowing that somebody was trying to gun them down.

Once we ended up spending part of a day visiting a defensive ground combat range on another garrison. This consisted of a large area of ground filled with rocks, holes in the ground and undergrowth of various types, with the actual firing positions placed on trenches slightly higher up. On some of those holes there were placed radio controlled pop-up targets, that would pop up on radio command and then go down when hit (though some of them ended up failing and staying up regardless of multiple hits). We ended up getting around 20 tracer rounds each, and then lined up on the trenches and started gunning down the targets as they went up. Sometimes the bullet would hit a rock and the tracer would end up flying high into the air from the point of impact. Afterwards when cleaning up the range we found that several of the radio antennas had also become casualties due to stray rounds hitting them - at least the radios survived intact, due to being placed in the holes in the ground.

There was also another similar range with an old wrecked vehicle on it, for practicing with anti-tank weapons. We all ended up shooting a practice round with a LAW. Cannot recall what that target vehicle was.