When I was undergoing basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo, in 1964, one of the things we had to do was the infiltration course where we had to crawl on our backs with our rifles across our chests, over rocks, around logs, through water puddles, and under barbed wire while machine guns were firing rounds about five feet above us. Scattered around the course were circles of sandbags about three feet high which housed concussion explosions that would detonate at different intervals. We were required to negotiate this course during the day and during the night when the tracers from the machine guns seemed like they were two feet above us rather than five.
On my second time through the course, the chin strap on my helmet came off, and the helmet kept sliding down over my face or off to the side of my head. To alleviate my predicament, I decided to make my way over to one of the sandbag piles so I could sit up with my back against the sand bags and reattach the chin strap to my helmet. Well, of course, right at the time I sat up and had my helmet off for adjustment, the concussion detonation went off with a tremendous KABOOM. I’m not sure if this was just a coincidence of timing or whether one of the course instructors had been watching me and decided to set it off at that particular moment to make an impression upon this young recruit. I tend to believe the latter, and, if so, he definitely succeeded. Unfortunately, all I could hear for the next 15 to 20 minutes was a high-pitched ringing in my ears.
So, I learned that sometimes what seems like a good plan doesn’t always turn out that way. I still chuckle when I think about it all these years later, and, fortunately, my hearing is still fine.