Wounded by our own Bloody Grenade!

We were living in tunnels. We had finally adopted some of the good sense exercised by the Chinese. They didn’t use bunkers like we did. A bunker basically was a hole dug in the side of the hill and the front wall happened to be built up with sandbags and then you put beams of wood, steel if you had them but that was very rare. And then you put sandbags and whatnot and then you built a roof then you put broken rocks on the top of the roof so that if a mortar came in it would explode, hit into the rocks rather than go through and kill you inside. During the August monsoon period all of these bunkers were washed out. Well the Chinese lived in tunnels. Of course when our aircraft went over and bombed them, all they could feel was a little thump way up there. We lived in tunnels on The Hook position. And I did most of my work as a sniper during the daylight but it was a night time war but you couldn’t go out and expose yourself in daylight, you’d be killed. So it was night time. This was one of the reasons why this particular painting was chosen to commemorate the 65th Anniversary because if there was one thing the Canadian soldier did in Korea, it was patrol. Every night we had patrols out, killing patrols, snatching patrols to keep the prisoners, just intelligence patrols, all kinds of them.

I was sleeping in the tunnel that night and a couple of reinforcements had been sent up, five or six fellows in the last few days and one of them killed themselves with priming a hand grenade down in Charlie Company’s area. A hand grenade, it would come in a box with the grenades but a separate tin can with the fuses and you’d take a base plug off, a big bolt, take it out of the bottom, put in the fuse and load the spring. And the handle, people are aware it’s on a hand grenade is attached to this spring loaded striker. Anyway you put the base plug back in, put the pin in and the grenade is primed. And when you throw the grenade you take the pin out but hold that handle. And when you throw it, the handle flies off, the striker goes down and there’s a three or four second fuse before the explosion. So this fellow had been sent in, in my case that night to prime a box of grenades. So he came in and the little tunnels, they were only about three or four feet high and then we’d have a bit of an open pod where maybe four or five guys could sleep.