Marine artillery demonstration over Interstate 5 prematurely detonates and rains shrapnel on the Vice President's motorcade route.

It is the 250th birthday of the United States Marine Corps. To celebrate, the Marines staged a live-fire demonstration on Saturday afternoon at Camp Pendleton, in southern California. The Vice President of the United States was in town to deliver remarks. The plan: Marines would fire live artillery shells over Interstate 5, the major coastal freeway, while the Vice President watched from the bluff.

Hon. Live artillery. Over the 5.

The Governor of California asked, in advance, that this not be done. The state Department of Transportation initially said the freeway would have to be closed. Then the schedule changed. Then it changed back. By Saturday morning the freeway was briefly closed, the Marines fired the rounds, and one of the rounds prematurely detonated in the air over the highway.

Shrapnel rained on the freeway. The shrapnel struck two California Highway Patrol vehicles. One of those vehicles was part of the Vice President’s own motorcade detail. The CHP officer was, by the grace of God and the design of the cruiser, not injured. The vehicle was damaged. The whole point of the live-fire demonstration over the freeway was to make a celebratory visual. The visual the country received was the Vice President’s escort getting hit.

I have been a waitress for thirty years. I have served a lot of military men. The good ones, almost without exception, are the ones who tell you the same thing: you do not point the weapon at anything you do not intend to destroy. You do not point it sideways. You do not point it where it might go sideways. You do not, under any circumstances, set up a show in which the trajectory of the round passes over a public freeway and over your own vice president’s vehicles. That is not a celebration. That is a briefing failure.

The Pentagon issued a statement after the fact. The statement said no civilians were injured. The statement is correct. No civilians were injured. The civilians, on Saturday, came one shrapnel-fragment away.

You ever notice how the people who talk loudest about respecting the troops are also the ones who organized the demo where a live round detonated over a freeway with the Vice President’s own car on it.

That ought to concern you. The Marines have been firing live rounds for 250 years. They know how to do it without a misfire. The misfire is what happens when the people in charge of the show push the show over the safety.

The shutdown is in day eighteen. There is no budget. There was, this week, ten million dollars of missiles into the Atlantic and one shrapnel hit on the I-5.