Reading the account of Kerry's grenade brings back a few memories:
When I first got to Vietnam, I was sent to a place called Phu Cat - it was an Island surrounded by the Phu Cat River. It was to becaome a major air base, but it was just jungle when I arrived there. Among the first things we had to do was build guard posts and patrol the river perimeter - talk about shit lousy duty - I hated it!
One of the things newbies (like myself) liked to do was to unscrew the percussion cap from a fragmentation grenade, remove the bags of powder, screw the cap back on, pull the pin and throw the frag into a barrel or just throw it and watch it explode. Even without the powder those suckers were powerful, and every now and then some moron who was standing to close would get hit with a piece of frag; there were never any serious injuries, but there could have been some deadly serious injuries if not for luck.
After a while, we had to account for all of the grenades, so that stuff stopped.
Jesus, as I think back and remember some of the really stupid shit we pulled, it's a wonder the death toll wasn't higher.
Now that I think of it, I should have several Purple Hearts for self inflicted wounds; there was this one time I got falling down drunk.....
