Night drills are always a difficult endeavor. Especially when it is necessary to coordinate vehicles and soldiers from different departments, who use real ammunition in the dark. But one mistake of the genre he had not remembered for decades. Because on Wednesday night a Centaur armored car fired at least one cannon shot in a completely wrong direction. And he hit a chicken farm in full, killing birds. A scene that seems to come out of the comic films on the times of the draft, those named after Colonel Rambaldo Buttiglione invented by Mario Marenco and brought to the cinema by Castellano and Pipolo.
Unfortunately, the real episode took place in the Cellina Meduna shooting range, a historic installation in the province of Pordenone. There, after sunset, the maneuvers of the mechanized brigade Pozzuolo del Friuli began. There were the lagoons, the amphibious assault troops of the Army. And there was a platoon of four Centauro of the Genoa Cavalleria: they are armored vehicles with eight driving wheels, weighing 27 tons. Literally, a workhorse of our armed forces that for thirty years has accompanied missions everywhere, from Somalia to Iraq. An instrument in the process of being replaced but still formidable, especially for the turret with a 105 mm gun identical to that of the Leopard tanks.
And just one of these weapons fired and missed the target dramatically. One bullet – or even two according to unconfirmed versions – hit the building full of thousands of chickens. The warhead, however, does not seem to have exploded, because those used in the exercises generally do not have explosives: it penetrated the wall and then continued its run on the other side, causing the collapse of a wall. About fifty animals died under the rubble or from the blast of the impact.
To make the situation more paradoxical is that none of the military has noticed the mistake. At the end of the drill, they all returned to the base as if nothing had happened. But when the owner of the farm Edoardo Da Re went to work in the morning, he found himself facing the slaughter of chickens. The damage seemed inexplicable and he called the carabinieri of the Spilinbergo company. The noises of the nocturnal maneuver in fact had not made the guardians suspicious, accustomed to living with the polygon which is just over two hundred meters away. It was the carabinieri, who were aware of the maneuvers, who noticed the cannonball holes and resolved the yellow: the chickens killed were the “collateral damage” of the wargame, to use the euphemism introduced during the last conflicts.
The carabinieri informed the prosecutor of Pordenone and the four armored cars involved were seized: the investigations will establish who is responsible for the clumsy fire. A serious and dangerous mistake: the shooting range has strict rules on the orientation of the shots and the respect of safety distances. The guns must always be aimed in the opposite direction to that of the inhabited center, on the outskirts of which the farm is located, in order not to run the risk of threatening the residents. And in over half a century of activity in Cellina Meduna there had never been a similar accident.
The Army has also opened an internal investigation. Explaining with a press release that “the regularly scheduled activity was preceded by the planned communications regarding the evacuation of the area. The armed force, in addition to the investigation opened by the prosecutor of Pordenone, promptly launched an internal investigation to accurately determine the dynamics of the facts and ensure maximum collaboration and transparency to the investigating bodies “.
Many officers are surprised by the first reconstruction of the facts. The Centaur would have aimed at a completely different area than the permitted one. In the photos, then, you can see two entry holes close together, which would even suggest a volley of blows. In short, mistakes too serious to go unnoticed in the eyes of expert crews such as those of the Genoa Cavalleria, which were deployed in Afghanistan a few months ago. And it does not detract from the fact that everything happened in the dark, given that the vehicle has night vision equipment: the exercise was dedicated to dealing with combat in the dark.
While waiting for the investigations to clarify what happened, hilarity was unleashed in the barracks and outside. The web has begun to be populated with memes. From the fake Wikipedia page with the
“Battle of the Cellina” between the deployment of the Army, commanded by Colonel Alessio Bacco, and the poultry led by the hen Rosita: an “Italian strategic victory” costing the
chickens the loss of “12 hens to a wall”. Up to the promotional video of the new Centauro busway model, with the writings in English that enhance the power of the cannon, which ends with the image of a chicken on the flames of the rotisserie.