A Basic Day - Hand Grenades

Most of us have shot off fire crackers and have pretended to throw hand grenades when we "played" army as a kid.  I was particularly good at both, at least in my mind and I guess successful because I never blew off any fingers like my aunts and grandmother kept telling me I would do some day.

We were sitting in bleachers listening to the instructor as to how a hand grenade worked.  I am not sure of the details now but I do remember that you could not pull out the safety ring with your teeth like John Wayne use to do.

We were lined up.  Told to do nothing unless we were told to.  The first man in line was given what looked like a short squat pringles can, told to hold it by his throwing hand and place said hand against his chest and when told to "move out" he was to run to a man sitting behind a concrete bunker.  That man would take the grenade out of the container, place it in our hand properly, help us assume the throwing position (you did not throw it like a base ball but a rounded arching motion) and when he felt we were comfortable tell us to throw in the direction we had our non throwing hand pointed (he made sure the non throwing hand was pointed towards the impact area.)  After we threw it we were to drop to our knees and look out a thick glass window and watch the explosion.  One thing was made perfectly clear to us.  If for some reason we were to drop a live grenade we were not to try to retrieve it our selves but to let the instructor do it.  If the instructor thought we were trying to do his job after we had dropped it, he was bailing out of the bunker and let us deal with it.

Grenades are loud.  The first one that went off made us all jump up from the bleachers and none of us waiting were overly eager to toss a grenade about no matter how easy it seemed.  It was my turn
-  Canister in right hand against my chest, order to move out, on my knees behind the bunker, grenade taken from canister and placed in my right hand, now the non throwing hand takes the ring, pulls the pin, aims ring and non throwing hand down range, order given to throw grenade -  I threw that thing has hard as I could, just like a would a base ball, I dropped to my knees and have no recollection of where it landed nor did I see an explosion.

The good thing is I only had to throw one and for some reason feel like I  could do it now without any qualms and most of all I did not lose any fingers during the process.