Neighboring Coryell County is home to a training range for Fort Hood, the largest armored Army post in the nation, and what sounds like thunder is often the shudder of ordnance exploding across the plains.
This is where, depending on the wind, the roar of ordnance skips across the drifting sloops like a stone, and lands right around Peter La Scala's Victorian doorstep, where it cracks his windows.
With the fighting that began in late 2006, Somalia and especially Mogadishu have seen the prevalence of a new and especially deadly scourge - unexploded ordnance - across many parts of the city, including residential areas.
"We just know it's big". Land mines, booby traps and unexploded ordnance are sown across tens of thousands of acres — much of it off-limits because the fighting is still going on and because of obstructions raised by officials.
Unexploded ordnance is still found across Europe, with communities in the UK, France, Germany and beyond occasionally facing evacuation when bombs are discovered.
Mr. Dillard, a deer hunter in his boyhood and a teacher and principal for 30 years, concedes that, with the mass of ordnance now routinely available across the nation, aberrant students cannot be fully foiled from schemes of mass murder.
Access to much of the area is restricted and the risk of coming across unexploded ordnance helps keep visitors to the public footpaths (details can be downloaded from bit.ly/greyplain).ly/greyplain
When VICE News journalist Ben Anderson visited the area in early 2014 he found cluster bomb casings bearing US imprints and heard reports of ongoing civilian casualties, as children and farmers stumbled across the unexploded ordnance.
The group for decades has cleared unexploded ordnance and land mines that are spread across Somalia from countless wars.
These war games, which occur every other year, include ships, aircraft, ordnance, and the widespread use of sonar across more than 42,000 square nautical miles of the marine environment of the Gulf of Alaska.
