Bomb Scare

One Saturday, during my first year at Ft. Myer, I was rudely disturbed by pounding on my barracks room door. A Military Police officer informed me that I had to leave, as they were evacuating the building. Once reaching the rally point in the parking lot across the street, it didn’t take long for the rumor to spread that someone had found a suspicious package leaning against the back wall of the barracks. The large response by the MPs and fire department lent weight to the story. I called my editor to tell him what I’d heard. After telling me off for not having a camera with me on my day off, he told me to go get a camera and then try to talk to someone in charge and find out what they’d tell me. Since my office was about a 3-minute walk from the barracks, it didn’t take me long to find out that someone had called the MPs after noticing a black duffle bag behind the barracks.

Our photographer, Paul, and I had snuck past the MP cordon and found a vantage point behind a dumpster a block away, but with a line of sight to the duffle.

Soon, the Explosive Ordinance Disposal team arrived, as did our photographer and another of our staff writers. After x-raying the bag with inconclusive results, EOD decided to remotely open the bag. This high tech approach involved tying a thin rope to the zipper, running the line out past the corner of the building and pulling hard.

Paul deciding he wanted to keep shooting photos as EOD opened the bag, in case it detonated. I decided I wanted to keep living if the bag detonated and decided to stay behind the dumpster. Thankfully when EOD pulled the line, there wasn’t an explosion. After a few minutes. An EOD tech went over to the bag and discovered that it was full of women’s clothing.

Once everything was determined safe, we were allowed back in the barracks. It didn’t take the MP investigators long to find out what had happened. A soldier, who lived in a room above where the bag was found, had his girlfriend secretly living in his barracks room. They had gotten in a fight, and he’d decided to kick her out. In all his brilliance, he thought it was a good idea to gather all her clothes in a bag and drop it out the window before leaving the base for the afternoon. He returned later in the day to find himself in trouble for causing the bomb scare as well as having a female living in his barracks room.