Boom!

We have been practicing for a week or so, off and on: “Proper grip, thumb to clip, pull the pin, throw that shit!” Hand grenades. Today’s the day to throw live ones at the range, and to qualify with grenades as a weapon. This is the one class where safety is taken the most seriously (though safety is a key element of everything they do). Drill Sergeants are no longer allowed to teach the class. Instead they have designated instructors who do nothing else, week after week. Some of the people who go through BCT are, well, not the best candidates to throw a softball, let alone a live hand grenade. To reduce the risk to students and instructors, training goes trough multiple stages. At first, we have to throw practice grenades, but going through all the motions as if we’re throwing the real deal. If you can’t toss the grenade at least 5 meters (we duck behind a concrete wall!), you get a CW chalked on your Kevlar helmet. CW stands for Chicken Wing, and means that the instructor you throw the live grenade with has to pay extra-special-attention. On the other hand, if you violate any safety rule (such as not ducking behind the wall after throwing the grenade, a slash is chalked on the Kevlar. Slashes are sent to retraining in a separate lane. After that, they are sent back to try again. Another safety violation changes the slash mark into an X, and the student is banned from the range and must return a different day, potentially causing a late graduation. We had two X’s in the company.

Throwing the actual grenade is pretty anti-climatic. I was a bit nervous, but with all the practice beforehand, I knew exactly what to do and went through the motions instinctively. Duck… wait… boom! Get the second grenade… duck… wait… boom! Done.

It was certainly quite an experience to throw live hand grenades, but it’s a skill I will hopefully never need to use.