Posted on 02/20/2019 9:29:17 AM PST by Chainmail
When I was a Marine 1st Lieutenant in 1975, I was gifted 125 hand grenades by a departing army unit for our battalion's training. Pleased with myself (since everything was hard to get for my Marines those days), I told our battalion commander of our acquisition.
He was horrified, since he detested grenades and harbored a fear that the troops would "frag" him with them (!) (he had many issues..) so he commanded me to destroy all 125 grenades myself at the grenade range and to have another lieutenant count the blasts to make sure that they were all destroyed.
Sheesh.
I threw every one of them myself - right-handed, left-handed, both hands at once and even considered throwing one with my feet but decided against it. At the end of the waste of these grenades, both of my flak jacket pockets were filled with grenade pins.
The next day, we deployed aboard the USS Frederick (LST-1184) and as I boarded, I noticed that I still had all those grenade pins, so in a spirit of naval camaraderie, I handed one of those pins to the first sailor I met and said "here you go, sailor, a genuine grenade pin: they make great key rings". Despite dealing with a Marine officer, the sailor seemed surprised and reasonably grateful, so I kept at it until pretty well every sailor on the Frederick (including the Captain) had his own grenade pin.
As an officer embarked aboard, one of my duties was to visit the mess decks during chow to ensure that my Marines were being fed and no interservice shenanigans were breaking out.
As I stood here, I heard one sailor say to another sailor "look! I got this grenade pin from a Marine who killed a VC with it!"
Semper Fi,
When I was in Vietnam, we always carried a “spare” grenade pin, just in case you found one resting on the spoon but WITHOUT a pin.
Nice little VC trick in those days.
Or, if you pulled the pin, changed your mind about throwing the grenade, but in the meantime, you’d lost the pin.
“Now what, BOZO?”
It happened in CONUS after Vietnam, but this lieutanant’s commander would have certainly been a Vietnam vet. The point was that those grenades had a shady past, a big issue in peacetime.
He was the envy of his friends. He never fired his weapon in combat. He said the Marines were much better at it. He got hurt jumping into a trench on Iwo Jima during a Bedcheck Charlie raid.
In North Africa, they had a servant for their “barracks”. I have a note he sent to my dad apologizing because the base was locked down and he couldn’t come to work. After North Africa, he went to attack bomber school but flunked out.
He spent the war building airfields.
The first warning was a smoke grenade under his bunk, the second a tear gas grenade.
He was transferred to a detachment by the CO. While in that detachment One of the troops threatened to kill him if he didn't stop F@@@ing with them.
He resigned his commission shortly there after, the guy who threatened him was busted for smuggling a hooker on Base Camp.
Absolutely true story.
One of my roommates in college was a Marine Recon. He told me to never look in his footlocker. I think guys liked to sneak stuff out but didn’t know what to do with it after a few years.
Perhaps the skipper was teaching the Lt a good lesson. If he had called the MP’s or the NCIS, the Lt would have been mentioned in the report. It might not have gone well. I would say that he might have been looking out for a good Lieutenant.
You would think he got the message the first time!............................
All of that stuff was burned, buried, or used for other purposes. The only problem was making sure that it didn’t end up in the hands of the enemy. Control of ammunition in combat was a chain of command function and a 24/7 job.
My Great Uncle Blaine Childress told a story of his experience during WW2. He spotted what he believed to be a periscope in a canal moving inland. He alerted the authorities of a possible mini sub. The military found the “periscope” a short while later and it turned out to be an alligator with part of a wooden spear protruding from its back.
True story
A local man fought in the German Army. He was transferred to a unit east of Berlin. The officer told them to give their lives to save the Fatherland from the Bolsheviks. So they shot the officer and headed west to surrender to the Americans.
He later gained American citizenship by fighting in the Korean War. They used German soldiers to relay artillery information, figuring the Chinese wouldn’t have German speakers monitoring the radios since Germany wasn’t included in the UN troops. He was a Forward Artillery Spotter.
He went away in what was called the “RIF”, Reduction in Force. Almost all officers without a college degree were swept up in one of the three RIFs. Those with degrees usually were discovered to be incompetent.
Excellent story. Here’s one, not from theater or combat: on winter exercise in the White Mountains (Vermont / New Hampshire) our small snowshoed squad came across a bunch of hippies at the top of a mountain. They immediately threw their hands up and surrendered... They were all high and carrying marijuana into Canada. We enjoyed their company for a bit and we all went on our way.
Electrical tape and dump it off with the idiot ordnance guys to deal with......
Almost all of them??? All the OCS guys? That's terrible. I didn't know that. What years are we talking about? I was active duty from '67 to '70.
I told him: Never walk in front of your RTO and remember all your people have loaded weapons. I ran across him in the 12th Evac, when we were on our way to Japan. I said, “Sir What happened?”
He said I forgot what you said about walking in front of your RTO.
LOL!..................
What happened to the RTO?
What happened to the guy om front of him?
72-75. Many OCS and direct commission guys were sent to get degrees, through a program called Boot Strap. You used your GI Bill for school and you continued to get full pay and allowances. If you didn’t do this or by some other means, you were very unlikely to evade the RIF, especially if you were an Infantry Aviator.
Bob Howard (MoH, DSC, etc., etc.) was sent to school. He didn’t want to go, but if he hadn’t done it, he probably would have gotten the boot.
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