Why didn’t they just pull the pin and throw it while at the range, why waste other explosives on it?
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Probably because they don’t want to be the stars in the next “EOD Gone Bad” training film.
Seriously, why take a chance? It’s easy to sit here and laugh but the funeral and looking at the man’s children and wife are not funny. I have attended one. It’s not nice to clean up either.
Treat everything the same and you probably go home at the end of a shift. Get careless and you may not. Most grenades are very stable but the old striker fired ones relied on springs that routinely fail (see springs on an all original WWII era Thompson for comparison) and the timed fuze was sometimes a risky proposition even in WWII. Some of them have also been “remanufactured” by people who don’t know what they are doing.
They stopped using live grenades in training for a short time prior to the U.S. entering WWII due to several training deaths where the soldiers pulled the pins and the grenade exploded within a second of being thrown. This led to the creation of the blue capped training grenades.
It’s easy to poke fun when you watch the process but one moment of carelessness can cause lots of hurt to many people. If you don’t care about the cop at least consider what it costs the taxpayers when their bomb tech gets blown up or a bystander gets killed or wounded because they did not set a safe perimeter.
Why take a chance?
What an idiot. They were using live Grenades for training in 1959 when I went though basic. Simple, you pull the pin, throw the damn thing as far as you can and lie down while it is still in the air. Grenade goes boom, has a very small kill radius and you stand up and walk away. Nice to be cautious but this is a grenade we are talking about not a 155 howitzer round that failed to explode.