Military officials said thieves in the ranks are a small minority of service members and that - compared to stockpiles - the overall amounts of lost or stolen explosives are minuscule. AP uncovered others that have not been reported publicly, among them the Camp Lejeune thefts and a 2013 case in which 36 sticks of unguarded TNT were stolen during a training exercise at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. Some thefts have drawn attention locally, as happened in 2019, when training rockets were found in residences just off Fort Hood in Texas. Five people pleaded guilty to federal charges. A man was injured by an explosion at his Gulfport, Mississippi, home in 2012 when he tried to open one of 51 AT-4 anti-tank shells taken from the impact area of Shelby’s training range. Metal salvaging thieves have targeted Shelby before, according to federal authorities. Deidre Smith said she knows of no evidence the shell originated there. Mississippi National Guard spokeswoman Lt. Investigating authorities suspect the shells came from Camp Shelby, an Army National Guard base about 40 miles away. The local sheriff’s department said the round was the kind used in a howitzer, a long-range artillery weapon. Two days later, an intact shell was found at the scrap yard. “For no reason at all,” Smith said in an interview. Suddenly he found himself cradling a co-worker who was bleeding profusely from his legs. Chris Smith had been taking a work break from the heat, drinking water and chewing tobacco. In August, an artillery shell exploded at a Mississippi recycling yard. Sometimes, they failed to safeguard explosives in the first place.

Troops falsified records to cover up some thefts, and in other cases didn’t report explosives as missing, investigative files show.

Still more explosives were reported missing and later recovered.

armed forces over the past decade, according to an ongoing Associated Press investigation into the military’s failure to secure all its weapons of war. Hundreds - and possibly thousands - of armor-piercing grenades, hundreds of pounds of plastic explosives, as well as land mines and rockets have been stolen from or lost by the U.S. In that other case, explosives ended up in the hands of some high school kids. His crime might have gone undetected, but authorities caught a lucky break in 2018 as they investigated yet another theft from Lejeune, the massive base on coastal North Carolina.

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