Camp Pendleton Marines go boom, Vance detail shelled

You can’t say America doesn’t know how to celebrate a birthday. For the Marine Corps’ 250th anniversary down at Camp Pendleton, they decided to party the old-fashioned way — with artillery.

A 155-millimeter shell was fired in salute. It didn’t quite wait for the finale. Somewhere between ignition and impact, it skipped the schedule and dropped shrapnel on the California Highway Patrol detail guarding Vice President JD Vance.

No one was hurt, which already puts this in the “success” column for a government event. The fragments landed politely — a pebble here, a dent there — on vehicles parked along a closed stretch of Interstate 5.

That freeway had been shut down by Governor Gavin Newsom, who, in one of those rare moments when politicians prove useful, said maybe shooting live explosives over a freeway wasn’t the best use of a Saturday.

The Marines thought it was safe. The Governor thought it was nuts. Guess who’s feeling vindicated tonight?

Newsom, never one to miss an exit ramp to the moral high ground, released a statement: “We love our Marines and owe a debt of gratitude to Camp Pendleton, but next time, the vice president and the White House shouldn’t be so reckless with people’s lives for their vanity projects.”

In California politics, that’s as close to “I told you so” as it gets without a surfboard and a TV camera.

The Marines — experts at turning bad days into official investigations — said they’re looking into the cause of the “airborne detonation.” That’s military for something went wrong but we’re not saying what.

Colonel Lindsay Pirek promised a full review: “We are committed to determining the incident’s root cause.” Translation: there’s a committee, and coffee.

Vance office shuts up for once

The vice president’s office, perhaps wisely, declined to comment. When you’re running for reelection, the last thing you want to be associated with is friendly fire from the home team.

Turns out the round was fired from White’s Beach, just south of Las Pulgas Road — which, if you’ve ever driven the I-5 between Los Angeles and San Diego, is one of those exits you pass at 70 miles an hour while wondering what “Las Pulgas” means. (Spoiler: “The Fleas.”)

Thirty-four minutes after the detonation, the freeway was reopened. Traffic returned to normal — a slow crawl punctuated by drivers telling each other about the shell that almost wasn’t.

The demonstration, attended by Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, had planned to fire about sixty shells. After the first one misbehaved, that number dropped to zero. Even the Marines know when the joke’s gone too far.

Two Marines who actually work with artillery called the decision to fire live howitzers over a major freeway “unusual,” which in Marine-speak falls somewhere between “inadvisable” and “don’t ever do that again.”

A CHP division chief agreed, calling it “highly uncommon for live-fire training to occur near an active freeway.” You think?

One veteran artillery officer suggested the fuze malfunctioned — the little device that tells the shell when to explode. A tiny mechanical miscue, a big PR blast.

They’d even done a rehearsal the night before without incident. Maybe the shell just got stage fright once the press showed up.

Before the event, the Marines assured everyone that all “air, surface, and ground movements are scripted and rehearsed in accordance with standard operating procedures.”

And they were.

Just not the ending.

Mort Sahl would’ve loved this one — a little government overconfidence, a little official denial, and a freeway full of metaphor.