Well, alongside a dirt road...
A trooper friend of mine found a Browning 50 caliber machine gun barrel along a highway. Called National Guard and they said was not theirs.
I helped him sell it to Springfield Armory.
Was that in the LV/Henderson area, in 1987, by chance?
In late '87 I stopped off in LV during a PCS move, and heard about an area out across from Nellis, used by locals as an informal shooting range. Drove a couple of miles from the main drag and found the general zone and shot for a while.
On the way back in, I noticed some familiar looking, small sheets of paper, alongside the road. They were pages from a CEOI, the Army authentication & (manual) encryption publication. Even tho it was a 'training' CEOI, it still had a CONFIDENTIAL security classification.
I got out and found an Army field safe nearby, with more CEOI pads. Someone had taken a sledge hammer to the safe.
I grabbed a handful of pages and drove to the gate at Nellis, and tried to explain it to the SPs...they took me in to their lieutenant, and we ended up making another trip out there to secure what we could.
I called a few days later and the word was a local NVARNG battalion (armor, IIRC) had been burglarized, and the field safe taken.