Grenades

The tran­si­tion from ITR to AIT is fog­gy to me now but I think it must have hap­pened after we had returned from Christmas leave, which amount­ed to about ten days.  I’m not sure why I didn’t head home with Don and J.T. but I found myself alone on the train car­ry­ing me back to Kentucky for the hol­i­day.  The train made one stop, in Ashland, where I had a short lay­over before the final leg to Winchester.

My great­est feat in com­ing home was that I would loose some of the salty lan­guage I had acquired in front of my moth­er, like “Pass the f*****g salt.”

Leaves are always too short but the return trip was a bit more pleas­ant.  J.T. want­ed to dri­ve back so Don and I agreed to share costs with him.  As trainees we were not allowed to have vehi­cles on base so J.T. had to find stor­age for the car off base some­where.  I don’t know where.

We were also now out of the hat­ed Quonset huts and into wood framed, sin­gle-storey bar­racks in which com­fort was more read­i­ly available.

As before the show­ers and “head” were locat­ed in a sep­a­rate build­ing so show­er­ing dur­ing win­ter months and trav­el­ing between build­ings could be uncom­fort­able at times.

Early in the new year, 1959, we were back in train­ing, in the field near­ly every day, becom­ing famil­iar with weapons that were not avail­able to us at Parris Island.

We were taught to throw grenades: hold the spoon in the web of the palm between the thumb and fin­gers, pull the pin, find your tar­get and throw.  The spoon flies away from the grenade dur­ing flight, pro­pelled by a spring.  Pretty sim­ple.  No acci­dents dur­ing that peri­od of train­ing.  We did learn that the fuse on the stan­dard grenade has about a sev­en sec­ond burn time, a valu­able piece of infor­ma­tion if one wants it to explode very short­ly after reach­ing its tar­get.  It weighed about one pound, five ounces and could be tossed between forty and six­ty yards.  When throw­ing the grenade into a room, throw it with force so that it bounces around and deters any­one inside from pick­ing it up and toss­ing it back. 

Once, dur­ing train­ing for com­bat in a built-up area, one of our mates tossed a dum­my grenade (a full-sized grenade with a small explo­sive load and a cork filler in the bot­tom so that it only goes “pop”) into a room and fol­lowed imme­di­ate­ly after it.  Not a good prac­tice but a very valu­able train­ing les­son.  On anoth­er occa­sion I was try­ing to throw a prac­tice grenade through a win­dow.  It fell short, bounced on the ground and into the win­dow!  Close works for horse­shoes and grenades.

We got to fire the M1919 Browning machine gun, a high­ly prized weapon that served through­out World War II and Korea.

This machine gun is a crew-served weapon, requir­ing two men to oper­ate properly.

During the weeks until our six-month train­ing would come to an end, we would learn how to pre­pare explo­sive charges using C4 explo­sive, a kind of plas­tic a lot like Silly Putty (except it doesn’t come in col­ors) that is very sta­ble.  It can only be set off using an elec­tri­cal charge.  The only dan­ger to the user was with the blast­ing cap which had to be insert­ed into the explo­sive; it could go off if not han­dled prop­er­ly.  We learned to insert the det­o­na­tor into the plas­tic by hold­ing it down against the side of our thigh so that if the det­o­na­tor did go off it wouldn’t be right in our face.  We incurred no injuries dur­ing this train­ing either.

Three oth­er weapons with which we would become famil­iar were the bazooka (offi­cial­ly, the 3.5‑inch rock­et launch­er), the 75 mm recoil­less rifle, and the flame thrower.

I think it’s safe to say that most of us, still in our teens, were excit­ed about all these weapons and try­ing them out.  I know I was, except for one, which I will explain in the next segment.