I was in the Army, in Afghanistan, several years ago. I was a mortarman. In one of our mortar teams you'd typically have four people: a Squad Leader that double checks everything and handles comms with FDC, a gunner who does the small corrections to get the mortar aligned with a target and tells the assistant gunner to fire, the assistant gunner who does large corrections (as directed by the gunner), and fires the mortar (as directed by the gunner), and an ammo bearer who prepares the rounds and hands them to the assistant gunner.

Anyone and everyone on the line is expected to call a cease fire if there is something dangerous going on. The responsibility kind of goes down the chain of command, but ideally anyone on the gun line has the power to stop operations if they feel it's unsafe.

I was a gunner at this point in time, and we were doing a Search and Traverse fire mission. Basically we planned on shooting 6 rounds, and we wanted them to hit in a line. Some important folk were being attacked nearby in a convoy, so we were trying to support them. So the proper technique for a Search and Traverse is to get the gun on target, fire a round, correct it once more (because the recoil will throw it off) and then shift the gun over in a certain direction and fire it again. Then you repeat from there, shifting the gun as needed to make the rounds hit in a line.

We were short some people, since my ammo bearer was on leave. That meant I had to do more of the corrections on my own while my assistant gunner prepped rounds, so it was hectic. And without going into much detail, my squad leader was an asshole.

Well, we shoot three rounds out of the six. Things are going well. Throughout these three rounds, the baseplate of the mortar was getting more and more crooked (likely someone was putting some of their weight on one side of it when the gun fired). When we fired the fourth round, the bipod legs kicked out. Likely, the fourth round would be totally fine, and hit relatively on point. But now we had to make all of our corrections again, which was going to take 10-20 seconds. Mortar teams are always pressured, throughout all of your training, to be as fast as humanly possible. We usually had it down to 2-4 seconds between rounds, once we got the gun ready the first time. But, lives are at stake. Hurry, hurry, hurry. The proper thing to do would be to take the time and get it ready again. So, I started getting it ready again. My squad leader, however, grabbed the bipod legs and jammed them roughly back into place (they leave small indents in the ground). He yelled at my assistant gunner to fire. I knew it was wrong, and I knew that I should've said something, but I didn't. He was a higher rank than me, and I knew I'd catch some serious shit afterward if I tried to disobey or call him out or whatever.

So my AG fired, and my squad leader told me to turn the gun for the search and traverse (once more without taking the time to get it back on target), and we fired the sixth shot as well.

Pretty soon we hear over the radio to cease fire. That only happens if something went wrong, and I immediately knew what must've happened. Eventually the convoy that we were protecting comes into our outpost and talks to our sergeants about what happened. Apparently the first four rounds were spot on where they were supposed to be. The fifth round was way off, close to the road, and the sixth round hit right on the road. Two little local girls, roughly 8-years-old, were killed, as they were trying to collect the bullet shells from the firefight, which they sell for money.

An investigation was done, which ended up blaming the way the baseplate settled in the ground. I got demoted from gunner to assistant gunner. Nothing happened to my squad leader. My assistant gunner, I knew, wrestled with it for at least the remaining few months of deployment. Everyone I knew in that convoy confirmed what had happened, and felt fit to regularly remind me of it throughout my remaining two years as active.