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,
Good leaders don't get fragged...................
Capitalism at work...
And how many chickens died to provide blood for the VC flags that came back home?
“...he had many issues....”
Chainmail... you owe me a coffee for that one... I just gaffawed my caffeine all over the keyboard... :^)
Great story, brother!!!
Thanks for sharing this story!
By the time the word spread around the ship, who knows how many of the enemy you took out, single-handedly!
Cold war incident, some where in Germany.
Me - Batallion RTO manning the TOC (Tactical Operations Center) for the night radio shift while we were out in the field.
Call comes in over the radio (call signs changed to protect the guilty)
TOC this is S1 (Battalion S1/Intelligence officer),
I need a location check (short hand for I’m lost and need help finding my location)
S1, TOC (me) - please read the nearest sign, highway or road marker
TOC, S1 - I read Colburg (not the real town)
... several min of looking for Colburg on the map
S1, TOC - are you SURE the sign says Colburg?
TOC, S1 - Affirmative
S1, TOC - please head West on any road and travel approximately 20 km. If you see a sign that says Rand or Grenze (German for border) please proceed past that sign and initiate contact with TOC again. DO NOT contact any locals and especially POLIZI (German Police)
TOC, S1 - West, why west?
S1, TOC - Because sir, you are INSIDE East Germany.
You’ve stumbled on an iron law of human nature about rumors and tall tales.
Exactly the same process used by the CIA, FBI and DOJ to convince Washington DC that Trump was “colluding” with the Russians.
LOL - reminds me of the children’s game ‘telephone’
Where you start with one message and each person whispers it to the next... After 20 people it was rarely the same message.
Haha!!!
Great story. Loved it.
These days, to millenials, VC stands for Venture Capitalist.
I still have a couple pins somewhere.
125? That’s a lot of lobbing.
IDF, and a pilot, so my grenade throwing was limited to the three live grenades we threw in our equivalent of basic training. We did not take it terribly seriously, in that, as pilots, we knew that if we were throwing a grenade, we had screwed up rather badly and were probably going to die. (Also, they did not give us grenades, as ejection seats and grenades are a bad combination.)
During said training, a young idiot (not me, but it could have been) screwed around with a practice grenade by attempting to pull out the pin Hollywood style with his teeth.
Pulled his canine tooth clear out.
Usually, it wasn't too bad except when the WM's came through, and the worst of those was when the Reserve Warrant Officers came through. Picture some 50+ year old frail lady, wearing all the gear, and trying to throw a grenade. Had absolutely no idea where those things would go -- backwards, forwards, sideways...or straight up and straight down. Saw it all from up close.
I was quite happy when I was moved to teach the Artillery package instead.
Most POS officers know that they are a POS.that one was certainly aware.
Had a BNE aboard my LST that was assigned as Communications Officer.
His main duties were Comm & Crypto and he ‘allowed’ me (the Senior RM) to do most of the Crypto duties.
He once told me that standing a Bridge watch at sea was like his father telling him to stand on the porch and if the headlights from the road got ‘close’ to wake him and tell him.
This was back in 61 and he was a good officer but when I see the travails of the ‘collisions at sea’, I often wondered if the Bridge Watchstanders had the same thought of a night watch at sea.
As to the ‘grenades dispatching’ VC, reminds me of a friend of mine that was of Jewish descent and also a ‘butterball’ during WWII....they had just finished interrogating a few German ‘POWs’ and he told his Irish Sgt to ‘take care of them’....he meant take them to the rear so Intelligence could ‘talk’ to them.
Sgt left camp and shortly there were a few shots ringing out and the Sgt returned .....
“I meant take them to the rear.....”
That story got a little more embellished each time he related it but insisted it was true....
TTIUWP
We liked to unscrew the fuze and toss them in the weeds for a nice bang. We did not try and remove the fuze from the later baseball grenades. We had heard they has some sort of anti-removal feature to them. We were not trained EOD after all.
Good story!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.