One year in the early 90’s my reserve unit set up a recruiting stand down near the beach over the Australia Day long weekend. It consisted of a recruiting tent with all the info about the reserves, an obstacle course for the kids and an M-60 mounted on the back of a truck that the civilians got a chance to fire off a few blanks.
Each night we had one or two guys guarding the area and we would rotate them throughout the night between the stand and the depot about a 10min drive away. One night we had a Private down there, who I’ll call Kowalski, guarding the stand and we decided to F*** with his mind. Part of the obstacle course had a large cam net that you had to crawl under and was fairly large, about 10mX, and at 01:00 a group of us decided to drive down in a min-van to steal it. We parked in a side street across from the rear of the obstacle course and while a Corporal went into the tent where Kowalski was cleaning his gear, the rest of us went over and packed up the cam net and stowed it in the van without Kowalski knowing.
About half an hour after we got back to the depot, we received a call from a worried Kowalski that the cam net had gone missing. The Corporal who had gone into the tent took the call as he was the only one who could keep a straight face, proceeded to chew him out for its loss and then he told him he would be down shortly to fill out a Loss or Damage form.
We drove back to the stand and while the corporal was in the tent making a show of filling out the forms, the rest of us replaced the net, again unnoticed by Kowalski and when the Corporal joined us back at the van, he was pissing himself laughing.
It turned out that while we had been stealing the net, Kowalski had been inside spit polishing his boots for the Australia Day Parade the following day. While he was out searching for the net, a drunk on his way to or from a free concert being held down the road, wandered into the tent and walked off with one of Kowalski’s boots. After walking down the road for a bit the drunk got either bored or tired of his prize and threw it onto the road where a garbage truck drove over it.
Kowalski spent the rest of the night trying to get his boots ready for the parade and cursing us for the whole weekend.

Hahaha, that sucks...Anyway, I wish the NG or Reserves here would let civvies fire blanks...We only get the obstacle course and info tent...

On the obs course the kids got to fire (with the help of a Private steadying the rifle) an FN rifle (Ah the days when soldiers carried real weapons and not these Steyr pop-guns) modified to take a .22 blank.
Of course that was over 10 years ago so with 911 that's probably changed

that's pretty good

Good one!

LOL Nice!!