Merry Christmas

Remember those Guys and Gals who go in harms way. Know they would rather be Home at this time but they do their duty. It makes the Homecoming all the better. Blessings on Them and theirs.

Russian F1

No, it's not a race. Russians are good at making Ordy or stuff that goes bang. One of the things they used ta make was the F1 Frag Grenade. These things used to come in a crate packed in sawdust. The Fuses came in a spam can packed with the grenade bodies. Interesting factoid I learned from a Guy named Larry Dring (Nother Time) was two fuses out of every can was a zero time fuse for booby traps. Now when I was in Bosnia we used to do a thing called Harvest. It involved going out into the population and knocking on doors and asking the folks if they had any blow up type stuff they wanted to turn in. Lottsa these showed up along with rifle grenades, mines, Mauser's, and the odd MG42 or Thompson. I never got any bang sticks but lottsa personal Mayhem stuff. The F1 was a fav. The local Home defense council would show up with the local version of a Deuce and a half and kick out crates of ammo, weapons, mines and these. The Yugo's were like the Russians in that they never threw away any weapons. It was a very esoteric mix of stuff. Anyway, Knocking on doors was like a wicked version of The Price is Right. You never knew what you would find. The best was a house where the guy had nine (9) At Mines stacked up out in the garage. We called the local Cops, Evacuated the block and got EOD in for that.

The F1 is a simple piece of kit in which you can spin the Fuse out and separate it quite easily. We put a metal foot locker in the back of the Humvee filled with sand. The grenade bodies would go in the foot locker. I would carry the fuses in a .50 cal ammo can and drop them off at the EOD pit on the way back in to Camp. For some reason the FOB rats got nervous when we brought fun stuff back like this. Can't imagine why, We handled more live ordinance in 7 months then I had in 12 years leading up to this. The military stuff was pretty easy to deal with, the homemade stuff was way more fun.