I remember back in the 90’s I spent a month in South Korea training with the Korean ROK Marines at their Mountain Warfare School. We didn’t have much with us in the way of comfort items, so when we had downtime we improvised ways of having fun.
When we were not out in the field we stayed in these long dome life structures and looked like someone cut a large metal culvert in half and dropped it on the ground. Inside the ground was dirt and military cots lined both sides. Guys did different things during our downtime. Some wrote letters home, some cleaned their weapons, and some took naps (not a good idea around bored Marines).
What we found was that if we took a plastic water bottle, filled it about 1/3 full with water, dropped an MRE heater into the bottle, cap it off, shake it, and run! What ends up happening is the water bottle expands from the heat to the point of bursting or exploding. So back to that guy taking a nap….
A few of us got the idea of making an MRE bomb using one of our used water bottles and an extra MRE heater from one of the many MRE meals laying around. We quietly fill the bottle with water and an MRE heater. Once we capped it off and gave it a good shake, we carefully placed it on the stomach of the guy taking a nap. After about 20 seconds the bottle exploded and the guy was no longer sleeping (good times). Take a look at the following video to get an idea of what I’m talking about.
Do you have any stories of what you did while deployed? We’d like to hear about them.
*featured image courtesy of youtube.com
