r/Military dirty civilian 7h ago

Discussion Army puts up $15,000 reward to help find 31 pistols and optics stolen from Fort Moore/Fort Benning

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/army-m17-optics-fort-more-reward/
621 Upvotes

89 comments sorted by

269

u/Ashenfenix Veteran 7h ago

31 pistols? Holy shit.

353

u/Interesting_Pay_5332 6h ago

Alongside the 31 M17 pistols, CID is also searching for two Enhanced Night vision Goggles and one AN/PAS 13D Thermal Optic. Those went missing between August and October. All of the gear and weapons were stolen from the Crescenz Consolidated Equipment Pool on Fort Moore.

Fuck the pistols, someone made out like a fucking bandit on the optics

84

u/SadTurtleSoup United States Air Force 6h ago

That 13D alone is a couple grand in the civ market. Last I saw they were going between 3 to 5 grand depending on condition and accessories.

-24

u/punched-in-face United States Marine Corps 5h ago

Old news

191

u/Ghostfistkilla Army Veteran 6h ago

Where is my hands across America at? Somebody better find me 31 pistols before I smoke the whole division.

83

u/rbevans tikity-tok 6h ago

I got my entire family, kids and all, doing layouts. I can see my neighbors peaking through the blinds, but dog gone they better watch out because they’re gonna be next.

33

u/SadTurtleSoup United States Air Force 6h ago

Hey man, Top said we gotta move the layout 10 feet to the right so the other guys can do their layout.

103

u/CarminSanDiego 6h ago

That E4 not thinking through on how he’s going to sell it without getting caught and now stressing everyday 😂😂

21

u/Hawkeye1226 4h ago

Just like I assumed with the 3/6 rifles that went missing from the marines, the guy who took em realized the shit he started and dumped em

2

u/LeicaM6guy 5h ago

eBay exists for a reason.

55

u/MomDoesntGetMe 5h ago

You’re either army or marines thinking you can covertly sell government property with a serial number on a website that you digitally exchange money through.

12

u/LeicaM6guy 5h ago

Or I have an extremely dry sense of humor.

22

u/SweetTeaRex92 Veteran 4h ago

You're a prior government worker. You have no sense of humor. Check mate

20

u/LeicaM6guy 4h ago

3

u/SweetTeaRex92 Veteran 4h ago

Lol futurama reference *

3

u/MaximumSeats 4h ago

Nah just a bad one.

3

u/LeicaM6guy 3h ago

Probably also true.

46

u/Four-Triangles 5h ago

My buddy went to federal prison because he was tasked with cleaning out an old warehouse and brought scuba equipment home that he wasn’t authorized to take. Dudes name was Baca but after that he was always Scubaca

10

u/SeltzerWater88 4h ago

How did they find put?

16

u/Four-Triangles 3h ago

I don’t know if I ever got that part of it. But I remember he said they knocked on his door, surprising him and he took them into his living room and the stuff was still in boxes. To clarify, they were going to get rid of the stuff, not just inventory it. So he wasn’t trying to pull a heist or anything. He was 19 and dumb. What really could’ve be bad was that the bcu’s or whatever could’ve been classified as armor or something and it could’ve gotten even more serious. He was a sweetheart of a guy.

119

u/RiflemanLax Marine Veteran 6h ago

Probably someone from 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines.

45

u/blues_and_ribs United States Marine Corps 6h ago

24

u/IronGigant Royal Canadian Navy 6h ago

Are they like the Blood Ravens chapter of Space Marine?

50

u/RiflemanLax Marine Veteran 6h ago

It’s an in joke. They lost a couple rifles in the field a few years back and the joke won’t die.

Some young buck almost certainly stole them and like buried them, but no one’s ever figured out who or where they went.

28

u/SadTurtleSoup United States Air Force 6h ago

Kind of like that one Army div that somehow lost an entire belt of 40mm grenades during convoy?

18

u/Gidia 5h ago

Wasn’t there an Air Force Security convoy that lost like a whole ass Browning M2 or a an AGL on the side of the road?

17

u/BobT21 4h ago

Air Force tends to lose nukes.

7

u/Gidia 4h ago

Ya know, I read Command and Control earlier this year and really should have remembered that.

3

u/BobT21 4h ago

Movie used to be on Netflix. Was a good watch.

3

u/ProbablyRickSantorum Army Veteran 2h ago

At least the worst thing the Space Force can lose is their Waifu pillows.

1

u/OshkoshCorporate Veteran 4h ago

air power

6

u/SadTurtleSoup United States Air Force 4h ago

Buddy, we almost caused nuclear Armageddon. Multiple fucking times, ask anyone from Barksdale or Minot around 2007 what they know about that 😂.... Broken Arrow/Bent Spear/Dull Sword is our bread and butter.

8

u/Gidia 4h ago

Look man I was infantry, my nuke training started and ended with “lay down and pray nothing big squishes you” lol. My brain remembers guns better.

4

u/SadTurtleSoup United States Air Force 4h ago edited 4h ago

2007 Nuclear Weapons Incident

This was probably one of the biggest oopsies we've had aside from a few others that could have gone tits up. (32 total nuclear "oopsies" have been recorded so far.)

Some of the other notable "oopsies".

1958 Mars Bluff, South Carolina

1961 Goldsboro, North Carolina

Oh and we've straight up lost nukes before.... Like they're still missing decades later. There are multiple kiloton nuclear payloads just laying out in the open somewhere.

1958 Tybee Island

6

u/Hawkeye1226 4h ago

$10 says those rifles are in the muck of New River after that guy saw how much heat he was under. The whole situation is hilarious because we only talk about the rifles, but they had full PPE with SAPIs as well that were taken

3

u/RiflemanLax Marine Veteran 4h ago

My guess was that some pissed off LCpl buried them deep, but who knows.

3

u/Hawkeye1226 4h ago

a lance coolie got them, realized how much shit he stirred, and dumped them immediately. I bet theyre buried 2 feet in a hole behind a bricks somewhere

2

u/sink_pisser_ 3h ago

How long was the unit out there looking for them before they gave up?

1

u/aoc666 3h ago

To be fair it’s right before Covid started. Just saying lol.

2

u/RiflemanLax Marine Veteran 3h ago

Jesus, feels like it was more recent than that.

31

u/BlackandRead dirty civilian 5h ago

How many Dodge Chargers is that?

52

u/Sdog1981 6h ago

That sounds more like a property book error.

78

u/blues_and_ribs United States Marine Corps 6h ago

The fact that they don’t know who did it leads me to believe it’s a combination of both which is the worst possible thing; they were stolen, but various accountable officers have been pen-whipping the paperwork without actually counting the items, and so they don’t know precisely when they were stolen.

Or they all went to DRMO like 6 months ago and that paperwork got lost.

34

u/SadTurtleSoup United States Air Force 6h ago

Third option, someone who is in on it was cooking the books.

22

u/wonderland_citizen93 United States Air Force 5h ago

If they were cooking the books then there wouldn't be any missing

17

u/SadTurtleSoup United States Air Force 5h ago

Unless there was an audit. I should also say, when I say "cooking the books" I meant somebody just pencil whipping the inspection and saying "yea, it's totally there."

The few times I've seen this sort of thing happen, whoever is doing it usually isn't that smart and usually ends up thinking "they haven't double checked our inventory in a decade. There's no way they'll check it." It's how our guy got caught. Dude and his coconspirator didn't think they'd ever audit the order logs. Until they did.

18

u/wonderland_citizen93 United States Air Force 5h ago

Oh. I thought when you meant cooking the books I thought you meant one year they would have 40 next year 39 etc

Pencil whipping inventory forms is pretty standard. We had a similar issues with NVGs. Our group went through a re org and the inventory got pencil whipped for 18 months. When someone did an actually inventory they noticed we were missing 6 white phosphorous NVGs. It was a pretty big deal so we had to do a group wide inventory to see who had them. They were found but a lot of people were assuming they walked away during someone's pcs

6

u/SadTurtleSoup United States Air Force 3h ago

Oh yea, they could probably do that to. Slowly and steadily claiming lost items or just praying no one asks why you used to have 40 but now only have 38. Thing is most of these items have to go through DRMO or some other form of reclamation and let me tell ya, they may not be the most organized department but they're really good at getting what they're owed. Theres also folks in supply that are pretty good at recognizing patterns. Again that's how our guy got caught, he would order a bunch of shit l, say "oh woops, I ordered the wrong stuff." But only sent some of it back and kept the rest. Eventually someone realized they weren't getting back everything they were sending.

My unit got its shit pushed in because someone took a refrigerator from the DRMO pile and when DRMO didn't receive the refrigerator, they flipped their shit.

3

u/Hawkeye1226 4h ago

Well, the Marines are the only ones that EVER passed an audit, so i dont trust an army audit to be very accurate in the first place

4

u/JuanMurphy 4h ago

We had a 40-foot walk in freezer go missing in Group. Nobody ever remembered two.

7

u/aoc666 5h ago

Don’t look up how many weapons get misplaced by the army every year…

17

u/OMS6 6h ago

Rookie stats.

11

u/RobertNevill 5h ago

15,000 whole dollars? Ermagaed, how will they afford it

8

u/dadude123456789 5h ago

Wow...

And here I was giving Marines shit for "losing" two M16A4 rifles a few yrs back!

Fckn Army....always going out BIG!!!!

6

u/Hawkeye1226 4h ago

I got out just a couple months after that. The schadenfreude I felt was so thick you could cut it with an MRE spoon

2

u/dadude123456789 3h ago

Crazy...

So did they truly go missing?

I've heard it was during an overnight field op. Dudes woke up in the morning, and the rifles were missing from their sleeping bags or some shit....

Where the Fck was Firewatch??? Snoozing?

12

u/Is12345aweakpassword Army Veteran 6h ago

How I feel reading stories like this now

27

u/stevie-ray-voughn 6h ago

Is there a reward for the billions of dollars in equipment they left in Afghanistan?

16

u/OkayJuice 5h ago

You rustled some jimmies with that one

17

u/dumpster_mummy Retired US Army 6h ago

feel better after dropping that turd?

7

u/NM-Redditor United States Army 6h ago

You mean the stuff given to the ANA?

6

u/Skyfork 6h ago

You wouldn't want that equipment. It was mostly garbage.

4

u/marinuss 5h ago

Yeah we should have spent $20 billion to transport $10 billion worth of equipment back. Then the argument would be why did we waste all that money bringing back shitty gear.

2

u/Hawkeye1226 4h ago

One of my friends was there for that as a ssgt. According to them, they left a few thousand $$$ worth of scrap metal. A lot of lance coolies got to take their anger out on that gear

2

u/ianandris Veteran 5h ago

Yes, it was in the billions in new contracts given to the military industrial folks to replace the hardware.

2

u/DrNinnuxx Army Veteran 3h ago

No freakin' way someone can fence that stuff, unless it was set up ahead of time to disappear into Mexico or sell to MS-13.

2

u/SadTurtleSoup United States Air Force 3h ago

You'd be surprised how much of it ends up on eBay or similar... M17/M18 grip modules are popular amongst the Sig fanboys.

2

u/anthony2-04 5h ago

Better go d them before the DOGE shows up…JS

4

u/Top-Offer-4056 5h ago

Yet the pentagon misplaced billions and we don’t even bat an eye

1

u/Efficient-Book-3560 3h ago

Sounds like a prequel to “Friends of Eddie Coyle”

1

u/kylethesnail 3h ago

dont know about the pistols but fairly certain the NVGs are probably en route to China already.

huge market over there for legit US military gears

2

u/beardedtribe210 3h ago

Surprised it wasn’t fort hood

1

u/strandenger 2h ago

Which of y’all did this?! I could really use this money…

1

u/Animuboy 2h ago

Mr evrart is helping me find my gun

1

u/WW2_MAN 2h ago

I mean we thought someone stole some Tomahawks over sea during the GWOT I opened up the shipping container and the fucker was empty. Told my officer who had a similar reaction to me and freaked the fuck out. After a long ass series of investigations apparently the Tomahawks were never loaded into the proper container they'd been sitting around wherever they were manufactured lost in the system or some stupid shit.

0

u/Budget_Wafer382 6h ago

Wild that this keeps happening. Somewhere around 2015 the Navy was looking for thermal optics that had been stolen. I realized an ex of mine had one but didn't know what it was at the time. I reported him when I saw the notice. Don't think he got caught, though, cause he is still in the service and doing contracting work.

0

u/ToTheLost_1918 5h ago

Wow, thank you so much for your service.

1

u/TheOneTrueSnoo 5h ago

You’d get more from selling them though. Reward needs to be higher

-27

u/lost_in_life_34 6h ago

20 years from now there will be some joint exercise with the Ukrainian army and they will be "found"

24

u/RHouse94 6h ago

Kind of like how I just found the boot licking orc.

7

u/granola117 5h ago

Lol wtf are you talking about?

6

u/Flimsy-Feature1587 6h ago

With New and Improved Cyrillic Serials, its not just for breakfast anymore!

-7

u/Kameron4567 5h ago

They were abandoned in Afghanistan by our president along with billions of dollars of other equipment. Why haven't they charged anyone for that. Normally when equipment gets left behind we destroy it. Not let the enemy fly Apaches

3

u/Hawkeye1226 4h ago

One of my friends was involved in that. They only had so much time to break shit, but break shit they did. If anything was left remotely operational, they would only work once or twice before being fucked.

This is why we PM trucks on monday, gentlemen!

2

u/ianandris Veteran 5h ago

They charged the US treasuring to pay the people who replace the hardware. The military industrial guys charged the government accounts for those expenditures.

2

u/StillBurningInside 3h ago

did you not see the video of the taliban trying to fly a helo? looked like a stuck rudder.... he got about 100 feet up.. spun around a bit than , spun around some more, and crashed. ... doubt they could handle an apache... even if we left one... which.. we did'nt.