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Grenade landed on his shoulder
Into the alley
It was April 2014, five months into the deployment, and the platoon was leaving the town of Zaranj after six hours of fighting. A drone crew flagged military-age men near the exit route, so a seven-man fire team crept down an alleyway toward a six-foot wall to look over it.
Voices came from the other side, close enough that any sound would give the team away. The team leader, who later went to SEAL Team Six, signaled in silence that they had to engage. He knelt, a teammate stood on his leg and fired over the wall, and at least two fighters there already had grenades with the pins pulled.
The blast
A strobe from a drone overhead lit the scene in flashes on night vision. The grenade hit his shoulder and dropped, and his first thought was that there would be no open casket for his mother. As it fell he hoped his face might survive, and when it landed, that he might only lose his legs. Two grenades went off, and it felt like a handful of rocks thrown at his backside.
He lost his hearing, then his sight, and lay thinking about his obituary and his wife. A SEAL medic named Kyle appeared out of nowhere, put tourniquets on his legs, and told him it was all good, calm while rounds flew. The rest of the team then carried the wounded about a mile to a helicopter.
How does night vision work in darkness?
Night vision goggles gather faint light, including starlight and near-infrared, and amplify it many thousands of times inside an image intensifier tube. The amplified electrons strike a phosphor screen that glows green, a color the human eye distinguishes in more shades than most others. An infrared strobe on a drone is invisible to the naked eye but appears as flashes through the goggles. That lets friendly forces mark positions at night without lighting themselves up.
Why do grenades explode seconds after release?
A hand grenade's fuze is a delay element that ignites when the spoon flies off after the pin is pulled. On the US M67 the delay runs four to five seconds. The steel body fragments when the explosive detonates, and the M67's fragments are lethal to about five meters, with injuries possible out to roughly fifteen.
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