On CAMPEN in mid-1980 we had a Marine who went out to the grenade range with a buddy (202-A, I think) at around 1 in the morning, drunk as a skunk, and they were wandering around in the impact area. This guy picked up what he later described as a "golden golf ball", and that was the last thing he remembered.
He won't make that mistake again. Cost of the lesson: Right arm up to the elbow, right eye, some teeth, and some neat scarring patterns that you just can't get any other way.
Yep.......stuff like that is why we kept our EOD shop door locked. The door was almost vault like as we always had some gomer who'd try to bring us "something" he found. Just not enough seat cushion on a goobermint chair to sustain the pucker factor when an idgit slams down a 66MM LAW rocket on yer desk and says lookie what I found !!
Is it dangerous ?
We would peek out at all visitors and if they had something in their hand we'd tell em to drop it in a sandbagged area we had across the parking lot for just such occasions.
Lots of trench art, flower pots made from 40 pound 5 inch 38 rounds that had experimental nose fuses in em w/o explosives, 240mm Arty brass Lamps, etc etc .......
40MM HEDP or HE has a nifty little butterfly that will click and buzz just a bit and if your ever lucky enough to tell others what that sound is you have cheated death. Hopefully without injury. Believe it or not we used to pick up and hand carry 40mm HE rounds to a collection point and detonate the pile, some services EOD teams will NOT hand carry em and counter charges each round at great expense of resources. We'd snag em and carefully carry em and set em down very easily and then counter charge the pile and destroy......
I'll see your war story/ sea story, and raise you one: I had a pal at MACV HQ who among other things dealt with casualty report summaries being forwarded back to the Funny House with Five Sides [Pentagon] for *lessons learned* studies. One in which I hope somebody learned something involved two young troops who'd just recently been issued the then-new M67 *baseball* grenade to replace the previously issued M26 *Lemons*.
Actually about the size of a tennis ball, the M67 could be thrown a bit further than the M26 or the old WWII *Mark Two* pineapple frag, still sometimes seen in the hands of US troops who worked with the ARVN and Koreans. But the little baseball frag was so nicely throwable it got a couple of guys in trouble....
Not having used up all their ammo and not yet having visited our PCOD hooch, they grabbed a quick sandwich at our messhall and were hanging around the hulk of an ARVN M41 tank that had its power pack out for replacement, but still made a neat *steel foxhole* with its .50 MG on top. One of the two began bouncing one of his frags against the tank's steel turret, handball-style, with his pal catching it.
It could be that the cast-zinc fuze assembly broke and let the pin and safety lever go, or it could have just been the effect of throwing a metal ball with a #6 blasting cap inside it against a steel wall that did the trick, but in any event, it did.
The report my pal wrote up described the effect, 3 or 4 feet away, as *traumatic decapitation of all extremities,* which was maybe a bit technically inaccurate but got the idea across of what the result was. Funny thing was, after everyone found out what a thorough job the new frag had done on the two guys, everybody wanted to use *the new frags that worked.*
Those who've been in or around the military are invited to guess the rank of the two victims.