Gulf War Procedures

The art of Explosive Ordnance Disposal was developed in part by trial and error.  Errors that took the life of many good men.  One can say that render safe procedures, or RSPs, have been written in blood.  Nowadays RSPs are developed by using high technology equipment and a lot of experience.  Sometimes these methods just don’t apply and good old EOD ingenuity kicks in.

In early March 1991, I went into Kuwait City with BM1 Pete Williams and BM1 John Carr, to start the long and arduous task of clearing ordnance from the city.  The oil fires were still ablaze, the signs of war visible everywhere.  Tanks and vehicles blown up in every corner, every building and house hit by enemy shells, and homeless people meandering in the city.  And then there was the ordnance left behind by the Iraqis.  Upon my return to the States, I heard a quote somewhere that the Iraqis had left behind more ordnance in Kuwait City than the Kuwaitis had in the beginning.  I found that very easy to believe.  There was ordnance laying everywhere, in every house, and in every corner, on the beach and in backyards. 

One day, during the morning brief, we were told that for that day there was no job for us, and that we were to stay away from designated sectors of the city because there were still some small pockets of resistance.  So, what are three Navy EOD techs to do in a war torn city and with nothing to do?  You guessed it; we loaded our truck and went sightseeing...to the places we were told not to go!

We started going from building to building, trench to trench, looking for ordnance, and the fact is that we didn’t have to look far to find any.  We soon found a box of grenades, and we decided to dispose of them by throwing them.  At this point in time, Kuwait was under martial law and we were the marshals.  We basically could do whatever we wanted.  The box of grenades was quickly disposed of, and our grenade throwing skills were 100% better.  Close to the beach we found a box containing hand thrown, anti-tank, RKG-3 grenades.  Because we were not sure of the delay and since they were quite bit bigger than the previous grenades we had disposed of, we had to come up with a plan for our disposal operation.  Like good EOD techs it took us about one minute to come up with a well thought of, intelligent plan: an improvised disposal operation.  The plan was to hit the desert road to Baghdad, hang out the window and throw one out, while I timed it from the back seat...hell of a plan.  We expressed our approval to each other and congratulated ourselves for developing such a sound and ingenious plan.

Here is what actually happened: John is driving the Blazer, I am in the backseat, and Pete is hanging out the passenger side window.  Pete tells John: “Let me know when we hit 70 mph, so I can throw this thing!”  John then replies something to the effect of “OK! I got it”.  At that point Pete thinks that John said got it as in got the speed now and out flies a grenade!  The thing detonated close to 15' behind our Blazer.  I yelled and ducked behind John who said that the last thing he saw in the rear view mirror was my eyeballs, as big as basketballs, going by!  We thought for sure that we had fragged the vehicle and there would be hell to pay when we got back to camp.

We pulled off to the side of the road immediately, and much to our relief, the vehicle was intact.  We counted our blessings, threw the box of grenades on the desert sand and high-tailed it out of there.  The decision was made right there, and was unanimous, that we wouldn’t pursue a change in the publications to reflect our new procedure.  We did not laugh for a while...until we really thought about what we had done.... and how stupid it had been.