Back in the early 1960's, I was enrolled in the high school Army JROTC (junior reserve officer's training corps).  Our staff were active-duty Army soldiers that attended to the teaching of the cadets.  One of our instructors was Staff Sergeant Charles "Chuck" Turner.  Sgt. Turner was a bull of a man and had served in the Korean War.  He had a lot of respect from all the cadets.  Today's class was on Hand and Rifle Grenades.  Everyone knew what a hand and rifle grenades were -- everyone had seen Audie Murphy in "To Hell and Back."  Sgt. Turner showed us an army training film that described the various types of Army offensive and defensive grenades: fragmentation, smoke, anti-tank, concussion, chemical, training, and practice.  He also had a very nice training aid on the corner of his desk: a Mk 2 fragmentation or "pineapple"-type grenade.  After the movie was over, Sgt. Turner proceeded to tell us more about the types of grenades, what the color code meant (the yellow band indicated high explosive filler), and then picked up the Mk 2 frag to demonstrate the functions to us:

(1) grip the grenade firmly with the throwing hand;

(2) pull the safety pin;

(3) hold the safety lever down to keep the grenade from arming;

(4) opps -- drop the grenade. 

 

The safety lever went flying and everyone knew we had three to five seconds before the damn thing went off.  There was a scramble by the cadets to get as far away from the grenade as possible.  It then occurred to everyone that Sgt. Turner was laughing at the chaos and there had been no explosion.  We'd been tricked!  Then everybody started to laugh, especially those who'd been the closest and couldn't make up their minds whether to run to try to scoop it up and throw it away.

 

After the grenade class, another memorable class was the bayonet and bayonet fighting.  Again we got to view army training films from World War 2 where the bad guys were dispatched by the good guys after some good (simulated) hand-to-hand combat.  After the lights came on, Sgt. Turner made a rather interesting observation: "Gentlemen, if you are ever in combat and someone passes the word down the line to 'fix bayonets' you will know one thing for certain . . ."  (long pause) ". . . someone has f***ed-up.  By that time you're running low or are out of ammo and that's all there's left."  All the cadets thought this was a wise observation.  It certainly stuck with me and it's forty-four years later.