Some recent July 4 adventures with fireworks reminded me that the explosives we celebrate with are nothing like the exhilarating explosives experience offered by the Army. Take the simple grenade. When you pull that pin, and you’re holding down the safety lever, the “spoon,” you know if you slip and let go, the fuse is cooking. If you drop the thing or throw it badly so the grenade bounces back toward you, you’re dead. The danger is so real we used to wrap tape around our grenades to hold the spoon down in case the pin was accidentally pulled.
This practice caused trouble for Spc. Grundle, my old nemesis in the war in Afghanistan. In earlier columns, I’ve told you about Grundle’s belief in his soldierly superiority and cartoonlike obsession with a promotion he believed had been stolen by his team leader Sgt. Beck. And longtime readers will remember that one of my favorite pastimes was driving Grundle crazy.
Grundle relentlessly quizzed junior enlisted men. “What’s the maximum effective range of the .50 caliber machine gun?”
“Give it a rest, Grundle,” I said.
“We’re taking this deployment seriously, Reedy,” he said. “This stuff is important.”
“Cpl. Reedy, I’m sure you meant to say. And it’s not important. How far does it shoot?”
“1,829 meters.”
“How far can you see?” I asked. “Basically, if the enemy’s close enough to be a threat to us, that machine gun can hit them.”
Grundle loved boasting about his weapons knowledge. It made our Afghan desert grenade training range even more fun. We practiced by having two soldiers each throw a grenade down into a deep dry wadi where they’d safely explode.
Grundle and Pfc. Carson each pulled the pin and lobbed their grenades, Carson about two seconds before Grundle. They crouched and waited. Only one explosion.
A dud or delayed fuse was unlikely. We waited a long time before approaching. Finally, someone spotted the second grenade in the dirt with its spoon still taped on. Carson had thrown first and a few meters away from the taped grenade. His grenade had exploded.
Grundle’s unexploded grenade was a serious problem. Someone would have to climb down and then carry it back up for a rethrow. It had been down there near the explosion and might be unstable. The tape could have been damaged, and if it finally let the spoon go, the grenade would explode.
Beck thought he remembered, from his practice with training grenades, that pins, once pulled, could be reinserted so long as the spoon had not been released. But small-pop training grenades were very different from deadly live grenades. He climbed down to the grenade with its spoon held only by the tape. The pin wouldn’t reinsert until he pushed the spoon to the right position. Beck put the grenade on the ground and stepped back, waiting for an explosion. When none came, he carried the grenade up to an angry Grundle.
“This yours?” Beck had the best dry, sarcastic humor. “What you need to do is keep holding that spoon down while you pull off the tape. Then, with the tape off, pull the pin again. Then throw.”
For an infantryman like Grundle, who constantly boasted of his weapons knowledge, this grenade instruction was like being told how to wipe his butt. And the lesson came from Beck, the only soldier Grundle hated more than me.
“Hey, Spc. Grundle,” I shouted.
“What, Reedy?”
“Cpl. Reedy, I’m sure you meant to say. I just want to remind you, despite your incredible military experience, that you actually need to remove that tape before you pull the pin and throw that grenade.”
He glared, perhaps wishing he could throw the grenade at me. Instead, he threw it into the wadi, where it safely exploded. Our training day was over, but teasing Grundle for his silly grenade mistake had only just begun.
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Trent Reedy, the author of several books, including Enduring Freedom, served as a combat engineer in the Iowa National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan.
*Some names and call signs in this story may have been changed due to operational security or privacy concerns.