Many of you will know I spent a couple of years in the Australian Army Reserve. To my shame, I entered the University Regiment as a cynical financial arrangement. At the time a couple of weeks service would buy a car, and after one camp, I did! I had as good a time as I could possibly have and with the least amount of effort on my part.
I should have done better. Whereas I gave the Army as little as I could, it gave me one of the most terrifyingly thrilling moments of my life. I threw several dummy grenades and I threw two real, military grade, designed to kill people, grenades. Firing what everyone seems to call an assault rifle, is a lot of fun. I shot dozens of Musaurian* shaped targets with all sorts of go bang sticks, a couple of the machine guns were the historic Bren Gun, and the Thompson (Tommy) Gun from WWII and the preferred gun of Rambo, the GPMG.
Firing a gun is not a frightening experience. Even watching mortars fire, is interesting, but not scary. For real fear, you need a grenade. We were given a lecture on this handful of death with drawings and technical specs. In breach of a number of federal regulations, I will tell you a couple of those points about the grenade.
They look quite different to the chunky pineapples that are seen in the movies. They are smooth and lemon shaped, with the clip and pin where you would expect them to be. They are painted, like everything else Army, green. When you think of the damage these may cause, outside of the stun and destruction of the blast, you think of bits of the casing flying at speed into a body. Any surgeon would be able to find these chunks quite easily. However this grenade design has an extra deadly feature. Inside the case with the explosive is 100m of wire, crimped at regular intervals. The surgeons job after this gets inside a body is much harder. I expect that even with x-rays, finding a number of bits of shiny wire inside a shiny blood wet body would be a challenge.
We were marched out to the range where we first saw the gun pit. This is a hole in the ground about a head short of an average soldiers height. It was in an L shape lined with very battered bricks. Every solder that saw the damage to the bricks thought about what must have happened to smash those bricks, some soldiers drop their grenade in panic. They told us that the bricks were 'second grade', but that fooled no one. We began to get concerned. A sergeant and a corporal demonstrated what would happen if a soldier dropped one in the pit. The unfortunate corporal was hurriedly shoved unceremoniously around the corner of the L. The practice grenade went bang, and to us watching it seemed that at least three of their feet would be seriously hurt. Deep breath.
In the movies the pulling of the pin begins the fusing process, but this is not the case. The pin merely holds the clip on the side against a spring, when the grenade is thrown, the spring flies off and the eight second fuse begins its progress down to zero.
The authorised process of throwing a grenade, is as follows:
1. Take grenade in the left hand and place finger through the ring.
2. Pull the pin.
3. Inspect the pin, to check for damage and completeness.
4. Look carefully through the hole where the pin was, make sure it is clear of obstruction.
5. Discard the pin and transfer to right hand.
6. You hold this little handful of death, against your chest. Right next to your heart.
7. The instructor, points out the target, a half buried car tyre and you confirm that you identify it.
8. He grabs you by the collar behind your neck and yells "Peg the bastard!"
9. You throw. The clip makes a distinctive 'ding' sound and flies off somewhere unknown. Both my grenades hit the ground just before the tyre and rolled up to touch it.
10. The moment it stopped rolling, I thought "That's it for me" and ducked. I was dragged up by the collar to watch it for another three interminable seconds.
11. At five seconds I was dragged down to the bottom of the pit, face to face with some of the more damaged, bricks.
12. Boom.
A grenade explosion is a loud bang, not deafening, but loud enough. In the movies they can cause destruction on wildly varying scales from destroying a house, to smashing down a door. The latter is closer to the truth. From the moment I pulled the pin, I was terrified. I thought I'd drop it, I thought it would explode anyway even though I held that clip so tight, there was a red mark on my hand for the next hour. But just like Churchill who said words to the effect that, 'There is little so exhilarating as being unsuccessfully shot at', I was grinning for the next couple of hours. They had a couple left over and I was fortunate enough to be chosen to throw one of them. I was just as scared although I didn't duck as quickly this time, maybe I was just that bit better a soldier. And that is not such a bad thing.
*I don't know if this is still the case, but the Australian Army trains to fight a fictional country called Musauria. Musauria is about the same size as Indonesia, on an island in Asia about the same place as Indonesia, they use the same weapons, have the same training and use the same tactics as Indonesia. It isn't Indonesia of course, that would be rude.
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