The random ordnance memories for this Army brat ...
When I was four or five years old Nick, I found a live `pineapple’ grenade in Germany, 10+ years after the war. Eventually my Mom took it away from me, mothers can be real killjoys.
Less than ten years later, some kids I knew at Benning wandered out on a mortar range. A couple of them learned the hard way that you aren’t supposed to pick up `dud’ rounds. So maybe Mom was right.
Pop brings home a Claymore mine dummy as homework and plays Sousa band music on his Sony reel-to-reel to relax while getting to know Mr. Claymore.
He gets you sharpshooter and marksman qualified in small-bore at age 12.
You show up at your third civilian junior high school and some officious butthole asks you if you’re a `dove’ on the war. Once you figure out what he means, you say, “I support my country and my Dad.” so you sit by yourself at lunch.
Sniff
They had a lot of cool stuff behind glass at the WWII museum at Ft. Benning—MG 42 machine guns, sub guns, `potato mashers’, rifles, Lugers, Nazi flags, and tanks you could climb on and into, etc.
My W-4 brother in law after Viet Nam riverboats, then diving finally went to EOD. His final deployment was on a carrier for Gulf War 1.
After retirement, he did contract work all over the US cleaning up old ordinance. His final job was in Bosnia a couple of years ago training their EOD teams how to keep from getting killed as this stuff was cleaned up. So he eventually stopped getting his hands dirty and worked in a classroom. I called and talked about Camp Croft where he worked for a couple of years cleaning up. They'd take the metal detectors (searched in grids so the whole place was surveyed), find the stuff, dig it up and the reward days was when they got to blow it all up!.
As he tells it, diving (based on the stories I've heard from him) is a much more dangerous profession to go into after service as "guys who used to work for me....."
From a web FAQ that Camp Croft in upstate SC is discussed (it was turned over to the state in 1949 and is now a state park).
"More than one veteran has told me it was very difficult to turn in ammo, so if you didn't expend it during the training session, you dug a hole and buried it or otherwise got rid of it. That certainly accounts for some of the larger finds. There are only two "underground bunkers" I know of. One was a "gun shed" in the 28th ITB area which was used to store 37mm and 57mm antitank weapons. It is still around, but the current owners have no idea if it is empty or not.