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Night Watch at the Munitions Depot: What Was Out There in the Dark?

It was during AIT at Fort Leonard Wood. I was assigned to drive guard mount at an old munitions depot—one of those places that already feels wrong before anything even happens.

The structures were aging, the surroundings empty, and that night the wind had picked up just enough to make everything worse. Loose metal, distant creaks, shifting shadows—every sound felt amplified in the silence.

I wasn’t alone. I had another soldier with me, a National Guardsman who had prior service in the Air Force. At first, it was just routine conversation to pass the time.

Then he started telling me something that didn’t feel like a joke.

He said he had seen the alien bodies from Roswell.

At Wright-Patterson.

And he didn’t just say it casually—he went into detail. Too much detail. The kind that makes you stop laughing and start wondering if something’s not right.

Sitting there in the middle of nowhere, with a radio that barely worked and the wind howling through an empty depot, I started thinking I might be stuck out there with someone completely unhinged.

I quietly reached behind the truck seat, trying to eject the magazine from his M-16 without making it obvious.

We each only had three rounds.

That thought didn’t help.

A while later, a female lieutenant showed up to check on us. She tried to act composed, professional—but you could see it. The tension. Even the NCO with her didn’t want to linger.

They left quicker than expected.

And the night somehow felt even quieter after they were gone.

The next night, I was riding up front with an NCO. We were tasked with heading out to a remote post to pick up two guards and drop off their replacements.

When we got there, the post was empty.

No sign of them.

The NCO was already getting irritated when we heard something.

Voices.

We looked around, trying to locate where it was coming from.

Then we looked up.

They were in a tree.

High up. Clinging to the branches.

We asked them what the hell they were doing up there.

They said a pack of wolves had chased them.

The NCO didn’t believe them. Not at first.

We got them down, dropped off the replacements, and started heading back.

That’s when we heard it.

Howling.

Not one. Multiple.

Echoing through the darkness around the depot.

The kind of sound that makes you instinctively check your surroundings, even when you know you can’t see anything out there.

As we drove away, I looked back.

The two new sentries were standing in the glow of the tail lights.

Their eyes wide.

Frozen.

Like they already knew what was waiting for them in the dark.

Some nights, the real threat isn’t what you’re guarding.

It’s what’s already out there… watching you.

— Shared by Anonymous