I have a somewhat similar past experience. Not in a war zone. In a munitions testing range: Eglin AFB in Florida.
For a period in the 1970s, after the Vietnam War wound down (I watched the airlift flights bringing in the Vietnamese refugees to Eglin in the spring
of 1975) the airbase was a pretty open place if you had an ID to get on base. As a teenage dependent of an officer I had one.
Since WWII Eglin had been the principal munitions testing ground and lots of munitions dropped on many stretches of the large reservation.
So I liked to go out to the test ranges, and look around. The areas where aerial mines had been dropped during WWII were actually fenced off
completely with barbed wire, but most of the live drop ranges used during the Vietnam War were open.
I knew my munitions really well. At the open houses I grilled the guys showing the "tools of the trade" and got hold of munitions manuals.
Out on the ranges I would collect flechettes, slow dogs, plastic cluster bomb dummies. I did not touch the metal cluster bomb dummies
(identified by the dots painted all over them) since, well, you never know for sure. And every now and then you would run across something that looked
really live. You don't want even an aerial flare to light up while you mess with it. Bomb fins sticking out of the sandy soil, in a cratered field,
were not unknown.
Eventually they locked the base down and access to the ranges disappeared. This had something to do with an incident that occurred at my high school.
Type this into Google and a little item will come up to the top of the search results (you can't actually read the article, it is paywalled, but you
can get the gist):
"choctawhatchee" high school smoke bomb Dec 21, 1976
A couple of kids had recovered a military smoke flare from the range and set it off inside the school, filling the entire building with completely
impenetrable smoke.
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