Yesterday morning, I was startled to learn that two Oregon men were killed during a live fire demonstration aboard a 1944 M18 Tank Destroyer at a BLM firing range in Bend, Oregon on Tuesday. I thought I recognized the particular vehicle in the news video, but I was in a hurry to get to work, and once I hat was only later that I had seen that M18 in person at a WWII airshow almost a year and a half ago. Also, I was shocked to learn that a man my own age had lost his life, somebody I had done events with and had chatted with at the campfire. Steve Preston (51) and Austin Lee (22) were doing a live fire demonstration of the M18's 76mm main gun for the benefit of a film crew. According to one source in the WW2 Reenacting community, they had a hang fire, where the shell failed to fire. Instead of waiting for the round to cook off safely in the chamber, the cannon breech was opened and the shell detonated in the confines of the open top turret. The Oregon and Washington WWII reenacting community is fairly small, somewhere between two to three hundred people clustered along the I-5 corridor, and most of us knew or at least met one or both men. Farewell gentlemen. You went out of this world doing what they loved, retelling history to any audience that would listen.
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