I know the article is old.
Anyone served/serving who can comment on this?
- US Army will no longer require recruits to show adequate hand grenade skills
- Change is being made because many enlistees 'can’t throw it far enough'
- Recruits also won't be required to pass land navigation course to graduate
- Army's redesign of Basic Combat Training is aimed at instilling more discipline
- Many on Twitter used the development to attack influx of female enlistees
- But the US Army denied that the change had anything to do with gender
My father was drafted for the Korean War. His hearing was permanently damaged because some loser next to him sissy-threw a grenade in grenade training and it landed very close to the edge of the trench they were in. (At that time they were training to throw grenades from a trench apparently.)
So of course it goes off right next to the edge of the trench and he ends up with permanent hearing damage, even if the fragments didn’t hit anyone.
If they’re dropping grenade training then they must be getting so many unsuitable people that grenades are too dangerous for too many recruits to handle without killing everyone.
It is probably one of the most dangerous things you do. I wouldn't want to train new recruits in throwing live grenades for all the marbles in the ocean.
You’d think they could at least train them on throwing inert dummy grenades to make sure they can throw stuff.