Crack

I convoyed to another FOB the other day to visit soldiers. While I was there, their artillery started launching bullets, one or two every few minutes. Not a serious, rubble-bouncing sustained assault that the artillery is capable of, but more of a desultory spitting of a round downrange.

Inside the CONEX containers they were using as a headquarters, the sound was a very loud "WHAM", which rattled things inside. I walked outside after a little while, and the sound became a sharp CRACK. It had been raining that day, though not at the moment, so we had a low cloud cover. A few after seconds the launch we could hear the CRACK echo off the clouds sounding a bit like thunder. In addition to illuminating the night, and blowing things to smithereens, the
artillery has many uses. One is terrain denial; we land rounds there, and the bad guys don't go there. I suspect we were doing something along those lines. Our artillery is too destructive, and we are too tightly restricted, to just unleash the cannons. In fact, the word is that the only thing killed so far by our artillery was a goat. The artillery Commander hotly denies this, but that
doesn't stop soldiers from calling him "Goat Killer".