Now and then some little thing happens that reminds me that I’m living in a whole different kind of world than the one I grew up in. This can go either way, good or bad. Hey, no segregation, but mass disparate incarceration enriching a privatized prison system. Hey, no weekly air raid tests and no drop and cover, but terrorism.
So I never think that the way things were was better, only different. I ask how it got different and what does it mean.
The latest little thing was the discovery of what I guess was a pineapple hand grenade in SeaTac at a construction site. The FBI was called in, and a bomb squad blew it up. It had no explosives in it. It was a dummy.
Immediately upon reading about this my head filled with memories of growing up as an army dependent. Just about every other army brat I knew had access to dummy hand grenades. There was only the one in my house, and I was told never treat it as a toy and never assume it’s a dummy.
Don’t pull the pin, because it might be live after all. On the other hand, go ahead and by all means feel free to run around and play war with it. Short of pulling the pin.
My friends were often much better equipped.
I knew a couple of guys who had access to cardboard boxes full of dummy grenades, and they weren’t warned against pulling the pins, so the pins tended to all be lost. I used to think how lucrative it must be to be the company that supplies the army with dummy hand grenades. Given that so many go missing all the time and land in the hands of 10-year-olds.
Grenades weren’t the only swag. I had a dummy rocket for a rocket launcher. There were working weapons, too. A Luger, a WWII Japanese sniper rifle. Unloaded, of course. I took those apart and put them back together all the time.
There was other gear, such as helmets, ammunition belts, regular army belts, bayonets, mess kits, army-issued backpacks, boxes of insignia and uniform patches.
Some kids had gas masks. We could take turns being the ones on the receiving end of chemical warfare.
As a reader, one of my favorite treasures was a couple of wheelbarrow loads of army manuals and officers’ training books.
My absolute top favorite of these was a guide to directing troops in the field during a tactical nuclear attack. Full of fun information like how long and hard you can expect to work personnel after they’ve been exposed to radiation.
Of course, there are army brats today, and I’m sure they have a lot of the same stuff, plus all sorts of newer gadgetry. But the article about the grenade found in SeaTac makes me think that this is all pretty alien to the general public.
It wasn’t so in the 1950s. Back then, just about everyone who had not been in the military had plenty of friends and relatives who had.
I had an uncle who was of draft age in 1942 and wasn’t drafted. Everyone thought he did something drastic to get out of it, like shot himself in the foot. That was the way it was.
Looking for the difference, the main difference I find is the volunteer army.
The good: no draft. The bad: Everything about the military becomes alien to the general public.
It’s not only going to be a shock to come across a grenade at an abandoned home.
It’s going to be a shock to find ex-military people having difficulty getting civilian jobs. Who knows what’s entailed except the people who go through it, and who are they?
If you and your neighbors have been well off and not motivated to enlist, those who do are no longer your family, no longer your neighbors’ grown children.
If you’re looking for explosives, look at these divisions.