Whoops, I shipped home an arsenal

An Air Force officer made an "honest mistake" in shipping home from Iraq enough foreign-made automatic weapons for an Army platoon, along with hundreds of other illegal war souvenirs, his lawyers argued at his court-martial Wednesday.

They said Maj. Gregory McMillion and many other troops, including his commanding officer, misunderstood a standing order against personal use of captured or abandoned property in 2003. . .

[Prosecutor] Lengel cited the sheer volume of the booty stacked in the courtroom including 29 Romanian, East German, Hungarian and Iraqi automatic rifles, a Chinese machine gun, four antique rifles, six rocket-propelled grenade launchers and dozens of magazines, scopes and sights. There also were several dummy land mines and grenades, 1,183 Iraqi army berets, more than 600 pairs of socks and eight full uniforms. Other items included a statue looted from an Iraqi museum, 253 bayonets, two anti-aircraft gun seats, several empty artillery shells, an Iraqi helmet, a ledger with Arabic writing, a pistol and a flare gun. . .

McMillion admitted to investigators that he had most of the items shipped to Eglin in crates of equipment being returned to the base a couple months before his unit, the 728th Air Control Squadron, returned from its deployment to Baghdad International Airport.

He consistently has denied being responsible, however, for shipping receivers for the automatic weapons, which were taken apart and shipped in pieces. Such guns are illegal under any circumstances, but without the receivers they are not considered weapons under federal law, Schmidly said.

Posted by David on May 25, 2005 8:30 PM