Click Click The Sound of a Round Being Chambered

After Guard-mount the dog handlers get their dogs in the kennels and take them to the trucks.  The trucks then take them out to their posts and drop them off, one by one.  A canine post is between 100 and 150 yards long and 50 feet wide, right at the fence line.  Every 300 to 500 yards stands a guard tower set back about 150 feet from the fence line along the perimeter road.  During the day the guard towers are manned by cooks, flight line mechanics, administrative staff, etc.  These are the troops that joined the Air Force so that they would not have to carry a gun and were still trying to figure out where their plan went wrong while they stood guard duty. That could have been me if I had become an office clerk.

At night the towers are manned by Air Force Security Police. The day shift tower guards are relieved between 9 and 10 at night, well after dark. All of the K-9 posts had a post marker at the perimeter road and at the fence line.  I was dropped off at my marker, about 100 yards from the closest tower. The truck, now half full of dogs and handlers, rumbled by the tower and dropped the next dog and handler further along the perimeter, while I walked Duke and my gear down to the fence line. Duke was ready for a break, but I thought I should make a sweep of the area first. So we started walking down the fence line and just as I was about in front of the tower, I heard the click click of a round being chambered in the tower. 

That round was being chambered because the scared person in the tower had seen some movement in front of him. I was that shadowy movement he had seen in the darkness. He chambered that round in his M-16 so that he could shoot me. I quickly spoke up. He failed to give me the verbal challenge, used to identify friendlies at night, but did allow me to approach the tower. It must have been my Boston accent that convinced him that I was not the enemy.

When I got to the base of the tower, he could see my dog and me. We started talking. He told me that when he was posted, no one mentioned that dogs would be posted out in front of him after dark. No, he had not noticed the dogs in the the truck that had just passed by a few minutes before.  He cleared his gun and was clearly relieved that he was no longer alone.

Footnote:

The verbal challenge is used at night to identify friendlies after dark, when you could not see them well enough to identify their uniforms. It was usually a two word combination that belonged together, so that it would be easy to remember, but might have several answers, but only one correct one.  For example, the security words for the night could be Snow Flake. The challenger would say SNOW and the correct response would be FLAKE, not ball or man. The security words were changed everyday.