I think experience with real grenades in SAF is too inadequate.
We are very familiar with all our other weapons except the hand
grenade. Once we threw a smoke grenade while assaulting up a small
hill but the thing hit a branch and rolled back down to smoke us
out. This shows how little experience we have with hand-thrown
ordnance. Imagine if it was a real frag.
I've thrown a lot of thunder flashes but these are too far from the
real thing.
For FIBUA we used a grenade simulator that was very realistic. It
looked, weigh and worked exactly like a grenade. It's basically a
iron ball with holes in in. You screw on a new "head" (for lack of
a better word) every time.
This "head" is like that on a real grenade with the lever, safety
clip, safety pin and a fuse. Basically after pulling out the pin
and throwing it, the lever flies off, the fuse burns and then
explode with a bang that's louder than a thunderflash.
After using, the "head" is unscrewed, the expended fuse is replaced
with a new one and the head screwed back on.
Great for FIBUA where you can easily retrieve this but now for
other ops in the field where once thrown cannot be found.
ST should really look into producing expendable exploding blank
grenades.
Either that or we should go to the grenade range once every
year.
