[Suhiir]

About a year after Desert Storm someone in my chain of command decided my time with the grunts (and training with them prior to the invasion) made me the resident expert on grenades so I got assigned to be Range NCO, the person that actually runs a live fire range, there's an officer of course but they're ONLY the Range Safety Officer, for a grenade range.

The unit I was with at the time wasn't all that large, around 150 people and most of them wouldn't be there as they had other things to do. Ok, I think to myself, couple-three crates of frags, I can do this.

I find out who the Safety Officer is gonna be (he was an OK guy), make sure we have a Corpsman (medic) and Range Control (the guys that actually own the live fire ranges) and EOD know we're gonna be out there. I do not check on the actual grenades themselves, not my job/concern till they actually arrive at the range.

I show up early and walk/inspect the range to familiarize myself with it. Then around 30 people show up to toss grenades. Cool, this should be easy.
And then ... an entire Duce-an-a-half full of crates of grenades shows up ... WTF ... there are at least 1000 of the damn things!!! (I forget the exact number, but I did have to account for each and every one of them)

I don't know about the military in your various nations but in the USMC once you draw live ammo from the dump you NEVER EVER bring it back, it's yours, period!

Needless to say after running thru the proper procedure once, and everyone got to toss their two grenades, I bent every rule almost to the breaking point to get rid of the damn things.

I had a team hauling crates of frags and fuses to an area where another team was screwing in fuses (never heard of ours having issues with going off when the fuse is screwed in) then individual runners hauled a crate of armed grenades to a position just behind each actual throwing pit, no bunker, just a sandbagged hole in the ground with a platform in the middle surrounded by a trench. There they tossed them, already fused, one at a time, to the pit NCO who handed them to whoever was in the pit at the moment to throw one.

Needless to say by the time we were finished everyone had tossed far, far, FAR, more grenades then they ever expected or wanted to,