I thought long and hard before starting this tale. I was in a class called Bombs, Booby Traps, and Explosives this time around. A lot of it I’m honor bound not to discuss, which isn’t that big of a deal. The problem is that the instructors, besides being hardcore cops who eat motorcycle gang members for breakfast, were a couple of comedians. Yeah, I go for the laughs with these tales, but I couldn’t keep up with the jokes these guys threw when we weren’t expecting them.
As an example, a lot of discussion centered on terrorism and their straw character ‘Johnny Jihad’.
“Think of their motivation for killing you. They expect 73 virgins when they get to heaven. That doesn’t make any sense, and sounds like my idea of Hell. Think about it. If I were going to spend eternity with 73 women, I’d want them to all be hookers, so they’d know what they were doing!”
Besides Johnny Jihad, the other pet character was the criminally stupid redneck. Don, the main instructor would always signify this with a Mortimer Snerd type expression on his face: upper lip rolled back, jaw retracted, and a vacant look in his eyes. We’d howl every time he did it.
The gist of the class is splodey stuff is bad. Don’t even try to defuse a bomb. Booby traps will get you every time. We did a bomb search in a building, and died within 2 minutes. I went home Saturday night with my head swimming.
Around 8:30 PM, I answered a rescue call close to home. An old guy was trying to leave in his pickup, saw the driveway was blocked by his wife’s car, and got out to move it. Only he left the truck in reverse instead of park, so it ran him over and broke his leg. :smack: The call was basic and unremarkable, but the entire time we worked it, all I could see was Don doing his stupid face in my mind. 
Sunday, we had an outdoor exercise with a booby-trapped trail. It was 75 feet long, had nine booby traps on it. We found five, and died 3 times. I think I’ll stick to pulling hose and running ambulances. Bomb Squad ain’t fer me…
The highlight, however, was the explosives demonstrations. They set off various things like black powder, KENI sticks, liquid shots, etc. They all went bang quite appropriately, and we observed from about 100 yards.
“This one is C4. We don’t like it, because we don’t have a need to blow up bridges. We brought it along to get rid of it.” They showed us a block that if they had two of them stacked together, would have been about the size of a construction brick.
The C4 block went downrange to the spot they were using, wired up, and all of the usual “Fire in the Hole!” types of warnings went out.
Don counted down “3, 2, 1…,” and pushed the button on the detonator.
KABOOM
It was the biggest explosion to that point, and apparently, even they underestimated it, because you could see grapefruit sized chunks of mud get thrown up into the air.
“Holey SHIT!” in 30 part harmony, and we went diving to get out of the way of the dirt clods as they rained down on us. The other charges just burned the stubble, but this left an HTG crater. When the instructor went back, he stepped in to a hole as deep as his knees. When we could look for ourselves later, the crater was 18" deep and about four feet cross.
The two instructors were last seen bitching about having to fill the crater back in…
, I’m not driving but thought it would be better if I brought it, so we had two drivers in my car. It’ll pop up at some point, I imagine. I know I have it in the room (I got something else from that wallet last month), it’s just playing hide and seek. So, since I won’t be here on Sunday,
