Do recruits have to call their teammates 'battle buddy' now?
I remember doing ATI (grenade qual.) during Basic in '84. Your teammate was called 'buddy' and we used a practice grenade with a live fuse. I think we had 20 or 40 rounds of live M193 in two mags for supressing fire from the pillboxes. My buddy was retarded and wouldn't advance even when I was screaming in his ear. After ten seconds or so the pillbox MG would start up again and I put a round in it to silence it, then scream at my buddy to advance. I finally looked at the Drill Sergeant behind me and hollered "Goddamn it, Drill Sgt, do I have to keep shooting if that fat fuck won't advance?!". Drill Sgt laughed and went over and planted a boot in my buddy's ass. Buddy never got the hint. I finally was told to shoot both pillbox targets and advance on my own until I could take out the pillbox with my practice grenade. Drill Sgt told me I earned a practice silver star. He smoked the shit out of my buddy the rest of the cycle. 
Practice grenade has an opening in the bottom, if a training fuse goes if you don't want any part of your body near the opening. Oddly enough, when I was at Custer one summer in the reserves, we had fucking cases of the fuses to go in our inert grenades. They were just laying all over the place, guys in our unit were dicking around all week with them, blowing crap up, playing with them like firecrackers. |
