So I was reading one of my David Drake books today, and one of the short stories centers on a guy burning C-4. The sory itself is kind of weird - at the end, the guy end up getting transported to France in the middle ages and the witch who called him ends up where he was in Viet Nam. Very strange story.
Anyway. The story says that C-4 will just burn if you light it with a lighter and that it takes concussion to make it explode.
Is that correct?
Also, that story (and a couple of others) gice the impression that C-4 was pretty common and easy to come buy for the soldiers. True?
I know. The stories are fiction, and really squirrely fiction at that. Several of the stories are like reading a mixture between a war story and a horror movie. Still, Drake was in Viet Nam so that I think at least possible that he could accurately represent things. Not that I don’t think he (or any other author) is beyond changing things just to make the story work.