The Biggest Baby Boom

How I survived one (comparatively) small explosion and became a Superhero.

The moral is generally relegated to the end of a story. I'm going to resist that temptation and state here upfront, "If something looks too good to be true, beating on it with a blunt object generally won't make it look any better - and could be detrimental to your health."

Our Superhero - that would be me - is a Baby Boomer. But, what I've recently discovered is that many non-Baby Boomers don't really know how we acquired the Baby Boomer moniker. So, before I begin the story of the Biggest Baby Boom, let me clear up a few things germane to the story.

At the end of World War II (that's right, kids - the Big One), all of the young men who fought in the war came home and knocked up their significant others. And then, just for drill, they did it again. Several times, as it happens. It's not that they were trying to knock a hole in the bottom of it or anything. It's just that if you run around Europe and Southeast Asia long enough with a bunch of numbskulls trying to shoot your gazpachos off, you're likely to get a little homesick for that sweet young thing you left behind.

So, the country had this wave of cuddly new arrivals from 1945 to 1965 in the form of one of the largest population booms in modern history. Hence, the Baby Boom. And hence-squared, my membership as a Baby Boomer. But this particular Baby shared in another Boom that was quite large as well.

Kids today tend to play... Well, kids today don't actually 'play' at all, as it turns out. They ‘compute.’ If you said to your 12 year old son, "Let's go out back and play catch," he would likely look at you as though you had a giant snot hanging out of your face and ask, "Catch what?"

But back before the beginning of time, before the iPod, Blackberry, XBox and computer terminal, we played. Outside. Superman was big back then. I distinctly remember many the metaphysical discussion as to whether Green Lantern could actually kick Superman's butt (no way, as it turns out). So, we played various superheroes. We also played war.

Seems strange today to say we played war. But, remember it wasn't that long after World War II and most of our fathers served in the armed forces. So, one beautiful summer Sunday afternoon we were playing war. "Gotcha with my machine gun!" "No, I got you first with a hand grenade!" Life was good - in a macabre sort of way.

On this particular afternoon I was in the front yard with my two younger brothers and a neighbor kid named Dana who lived two doors away. During one particularly heated discussion about who (shooter) had shot whom (shootee) first, and whether or not the shootee was too severely injured to get their own shot off afterward (usually as the shootee fell, grimacing and mortally wounded, onto the grass), Dana interrupts everyone and blurts out, "Hey, I got a bomb!"

The three of us stood there wide eyed, with our mouths open to the last word we were going to say in our heated discussion, looking at Dana in stunned and utter disbelief. A kid doesn't usually step up to the plate with this kind of announcement. It was somehow unreal. My younger brothers looked back and forth from me to Dana. Playing for time to reflect, I wiped my nose on my sleeve and sniffed.

I finally summed up the conventional wisdom on the subject by stating categorically, "Nuh uuhh." To wit, Dana responded, "I do! It's in the garage!"

Whoa! Whoa! Whoa, now! Things were definitely getting interesting. If a kid says, "I got a bomb," that's one thing. But, if he adds, "It's in the garage," that puts a whole new twist of legitimacy on the issue.

On the other hand, we couldn't just make the jump to ready belief on such flimsy evidence. So, I added, "Oh yeah? Well, go get it!" That should have shut him up.

Now, I should point out here that whereas we stood in stupefied disbelief that a 10 year old kid, through some magical quirk of fate, could possibly have a bomb and was running across the neighbor's lawn toward his garage, we didn't really hold out too much hope. My brother Mark finally asked, "You think he really has one?" I thought about it as he disappeared into his garage, and as much as I prayed he did, I said, "No way."

But, there were other factors and exigent circumstances to be considered, as it happened. Dana's father, Mr. Nordine, belonged to a Jeep club. A Jeep club was the pre-cursor to today's off-road 4-wheel-drive clubs. They went in for the same rock-climbing, trail-travelling, mud-busting, beer-belching activities. They just used surplus military Jeeps after the war instead of the now-common 4-wheel drive SUV with A/C, MP3, OnStar, GPS and DVR.

Mr. Nordine and his cronies would travel Southern California and Northern Mexico deserts on weekends. From Mexico, he would bring home some of the most awesome fireworks imaginable - including firecrackers. Powerful ones.

Now, we weren't exactly "certified" for firecrackers - parentally speaking. But, one doesn't let that exacerbate one's playful fun. Stick a No. 2 pencil into an apple and then shove a firecracker into the hole and you've got yourself a "hand grenade" that any 12-year old would be proud to have in his arsenal of military weapons.

Back to the Jeep club. On one fateful trip, it turns out, the Jeep club was travelling through a former military practice bombing range in the desert north of Barstow, CA. After the war, the military had combed the area, looking for unexploded ordnance, before turning it over to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management for public use.

But - and here's where things get interesting - they missed one. Even on the Bureau of Land Management's website it states, "More than 5 million acres of BLM-managed land that is open to public access may contain munitions or explosives of concern." Ouch!

Enjoying about the same amount of common sense as any red-blooded American 4-wheel drive aficionado, Mr. Nordine opted to bring it home and use it as a doorstop in the living room. I mean, what else? Right?

Although I haven't actually read the BLM's handbook, "Unexploded Ordnance: Safety is Your First Priority," I'm fairly certain that "doorstop" is pretty far down on the "suitable uses" list.

It was a real conversation starter. It was about 30 inches tall, dull army-green in color, about 6 inches in diameter at the mid-point, and had three fins encased in a thin metal cylinder. As you can see, it was your standard issue military bomb. The markings were in white stencil and included a serial number, part number and "25 lb Navy Practice Bomb" among other notations.

It also made a superior doorstop since you could stand it on end on the fins. The historical references get a little fuzzy at this point, but that scenario seems to have lasted for about three days until the novelty wore off and Mrs. Nordine said, "Get that ugly thing out of my living room," whereupon it was duly relegated to Mr. Nordine's garage for a number of years.

Back to our superheroes. My two brothers and I were discussing the pros and cons of a tee shirt versus a hand towel tied around, or safety-pinned to, one's neck as a Superman cape, when we looked up and - to our utter disbelief and astonishment - saw Dana dragging a bomb across the grass toward us. He said, "I had trouble getting it off the shelf." No doubt. It was a bomb. A big one. He couldn't lift it. However, being two years older, much wiser, and considerably stronger, I could lift it.

As you can imagine, we were elated! I mean, how often do you suppose a bunch of knucklehead kids who are used to piddly little firecrackers stuck in a Macintosh Apple, get their grubby little hands on a real military bomb? It was almost more than we could fathom! We were giddy with excitement!

Now, I have to make one final sidetrack to the story. My dad worked on Navy bombers during the war. He worked on the electrical systems of the planes. So, you can imagine that he'd seen his fare share of bombs in and around those planes. So, when I led a parade of kids into the house carrying our new prize, you can perhaps imagine the scene.

My dad was sitting at the kitchen table peeling potatoes. (Apparently an expertise he had also picked up in the Navy.) When he looked up, he saw me holding this "apparatus." I will remember to the day I die the look on his face. The wheels were spinning, smoke was coming out of his ears, and the clockworks were just about to come apart at the seams.

He finally said, "Where in the hell did you get that thing!?" I was so proud I could hardly contain myself, "It's Mr. Nordine's! We're playing with it!" He eyed it for another 20 seconds or so before finally saying, "Well, get it out of here before you drop it on the wood floor." With that, we exited stage right.

I don't know for sure, but I would guess he nicked his finger on the next potato while thinking, "It couldn't be real. Could it?"

Back in the yard we propped it up on the fins and took a good long look at our new prize possession. Someone finally said to me, "What should we do with it?" Well, I don’t want to sound smug here, but I was 12 years old. Of course I would know what we should do with it. It's a bomb. You drop it. I mean, duuhh!

I ran into our garage and got a long rope, brought it out and told Dana (he was the smallest and most agile) to climb the tree in the yard and run the rope over the highest big branch. While he was climbing, I tied the other end of the rope to the narrow part of the bomb above the fins. My brothers and I then carried it over to the base of the tree. When Dana came down with the other end of the rope, the four of us hoisted it high up into the tree.

With grins from ear to ear, we shouted "Bombs away!" and let go of the rope. It was a beautiful sight coming down through the branches. Four pairs of eyes watched with satisfaction as it sailed down through the tree limbs and thudded into the yard.

When a 25 pound bomb is dropped from about 40 feet onto a soft surface, it tends to "stick" the landing. That is, it stuck upright by sinking a hole about 4 inches deep into the wet earth under the grass. We thought this was the coolest part of the whole enchilada. Like something you would see in a cartoon. It was exciting and we treated it like your standard issue shampoo instructions: hoist, drop, repeat.

Being slightly smarter than your average domesticated animal, we discovered that if we had Dana climb up the tree and grab the rope at the limb, we could hoist the bomb up much easier while dragging Dana back down to the ground.

This went on for a number of bombing runs until my mom happened to glance out the front window and said, "Daddy, what are those honyoks doing out there?" But, before dad could explain that we were simply engaged in your standard bombing run, mom witnessed an impact and the bomb sticking into the yard; whereupon she yelled out the window, "You kids stop that before I come out there and scald all of you! You're ruining the grass!" Leave it to mom.

Scalding was apparently de rigueur corporal punishment for her parents' generation. And although we were never actually subjected to the treatment, the prospect of it generally gave us pause. Just when you thought that life couldn't get any better, moms will invariably throw a spanner in the works every last time.

We unplugged the bomb from the ground, disengaged the rope, turned it over and balanced it on the fins. After some reflection, someone asked, "What do we do now?"

Well, it was obvious to me, "If we can't drop it... we'll take it apart."

We knelt down around the bomb and gave it a good once-over in order to gauge our options. There didn't seem to be a readily available section that could be disassembled.

The nose at the top, however, was promising. It was a hole about an inch and a half in diameter, with the green sides of the unit coming up and rolling over or folding into this hole. The depth of the hole itself couldn't be ascertained right away as it was compacted tightly with hard sand, right up to the top. I went into the garage to get a tool.

I was 12 years old. The concept of "the right tool for the job" was one in which I would not be enlightened for another quarter century or so. So, I grabbed the first tool I saw on my dad's workbench; a humongous screwdriver with a hard yellow plastic handle. (Note to reader: The hard yellow plastic handle figures importantly into the story at a later date.)

I started digging the packed sand out of the nose cone with the screwdriver. Once in awhile, we would tip the bomb over and dump out the loose sand. We finally uncovered the entire hole down to a depth of about 2 inches. In the bottom of this 2 inch shaft was a little tin cup with quarter inch high sides that fit perfectly into the hole and had a small screw in its center. Now we were getting somewhere - something we could take apart.

However, upon attempting to unscrew the little screw, two things happened. First, the screwdriver was just too large and stripped the top of the screw. And second, we noticed in the process that the little tin cup twisted slightly when we tried the screw. The cup was slightly loose.

I stuck the screwdriver in to the edge of the cup on an angle and tried to pry it up. It came up about an eighth of an inch. Hmm. Not bad. I tried again and it came up another eighth. It was sliding up the shaft and we could hear the grind of sand between the cup and the shaft as it moved. But, we were making significant progress.

I continued this effort until the cup was about three-eighths of an inch from the top. On my next attempt, the cup came up all the way to the top so that the rim of the cup was level with the rim of the shaft - and in do so, it made a loud "Click."

Unbeknownst to the hair-brains operating on said bomb, we had just managed to arm it. Apparently, we were to find out from the Marines much later, a plunger device was used to suck that little tin cup up to the top of the shaft in order to arm the bomb prior to loading it in the plane's bomb bay. This particular specimen missed the arming step, and was dropped in the desert with a noticeable thud, sans explosion. We had simply completed the arming step - somewhat later in the process.

You can imagine our disappointment. As hard as we tried, that tin cup wouldn't budge - up or down. On the other hand, it was a thin piece of tin. How hard could it be to just puncture it and pry it out of there?

You know how little kids will sit on the ground on their bottom with their knees out front and their feet tucked back to the sides? That's how Dana and my brothers were arranged around the bomb. So the top of the bomb, at about 30 inches, was at or above their eye-level. I, on the other hand, was kneeling upright and held the big screwdriver by the hard plastic handle. I was stabbing at the tin cup as hard as I could.

This was no Norman Rockwell painting. Not even a Currier & Ives. But, you could not have produced a more thought-provoking Kodak Moment if you had all of the National Geographic photographers from all time stuffed in a broom closet. We didn't have a copy of "Bomb Disassembly for Dummies." Just four kids huddled around an obvious military bomb with one of them hammering on the nose cone. You couldn’t make this stuff up!

I only hit the cup about once every four stabs. But when I did, the screwdriver did some damage. The tin started to fold and bend inward. I remember thinking at the time that with one or two more well-placed stabs of the screwdriver, either the tin would be punctured or it would fold down into the shaft in a manner that would allow me to pry the cup out. Just one more stab and...

It detonated...

I don't actually remember it exploding. The next thing I remember is opening my eyes, laying on my face looking across the top of the grass sideways and down the street. Thick black smoke would obscure my line of sight now and then. I had this large red "flash" imprinted across my vision that I couldn't seem to see past. And, although I saw people running every which direction, my hearing consisted of nothing but a loud ringing sensation. As I pushed myself up to a sitting position, I heard my oldest brother somewhere in the far distance yell, "Get back! It could blow again!" Well, that's all the information I needed at the time.

I made a dash for the side of the house, through the gate and into the back yard. I remember as I was making my exit, seeing my dad in the driveway grabbing any kid he could get his hands on and checking them for wounds. When I got to the backyard, I fully expected to hear another explosion and see wood two-by-fours come flying over the house. Why 'two-by-fours' I couldn't say. It was the only thing that came to mind at the time. But, I couldn't hold still either. My eyes were stinging badly.

About two cups of sand, and one nasty piece of metal, had hit me squarely in the face. I had been kind of bent over to get the most thrust into my screwdriver stab. So, when the bomb exploded I was - mostly - out of the way.

These practice bombs were designed as a bombardier's visual aid. They were filled mostly with sand but had a spotting charge that could be seen from a very high altitude: a large (red) flash and a huge amount of (black) smoke. “Spotting charge” maybe, but it was a goodly blast nonetheless - even for someone used to firecrackers from Mexico. And latent sand in the top of the bomb had been blown into our faces and eyes. As the top of the bomb came apart, it also provided two other accoutrements.

Aside from the thousands of sand pebbles, a piece of brass shrapnel hit me squarely in the cornea and sank deep into my eye. And the blast ripped the hard yellow plastic handle off the screwdriver - also ripping up the side of my hand and little finger. Back to the backyard.

Both my eyes and my hand were stinging terribly. I danced around for awhile, still waiting for the two-by-fours. In the interim, I shook my hand and rubbed my eyes with both hands. Not realizing my hand was bleeding profusely, I managed to cover most of my clothes and my entire face in blood.

When I finally determined that a secondary blast was somewhat unlikely, I headed around the side of the house, through the gate and into the driveway. My dad was still checking kids and had narrowed his catch and retain down to my two younger brothers, both still crying uncontrollably. Dana had sprinted home to see if he could somehow get out ahead of the parental fire-storm that was likely to be brewing.

When my mom got a look at me coming into the drive, she said, "Oh my gaw..." and phoomp. She dropped like a 50-pound sack of Idaho potatoes. My oldest brother (kind of) caught her, so my dad made a dash over to me, grabbed my shoulders and began with the 20-questions. "What happened!? Where are you hurt!? Are you cut somewhere!? What hurts!?" I said, "My eyes hurt."

My dad threw me in the truck and, while starting it and backing out of the drive, instructed my oldest sister to call ahead to our doctor, tell the answering service it was an emergency and that dad would meet the doctor at his office.

And the doctor was there. On a Sunday afternoon he had actually beaten us to his office. He was not only there, he was pragmatic.

As dad was giving him the 25-cent version of events, the doctor noticed that I was having trouble keeping my eyes open. They felt like they were full of sand and, well, they were in fact full of sand.

The doctor grabbed a towel, wrapped it around my hand and said to my dad, "Frank, he can lose his hand. We can't afford for him to lose his eyesight. Go over to [Dr.] Adrain's office. I'll get a hold of him in the meantime and have him meet you there. We'll worry about his hand later."

As my dad shoved me toward the door, I remember thinking, "He can lose his hand?" I didn’t like the sound of that.

I spent the next untold number of hours with my chin on one of those eye microscopes with Dr. Adrain telling me, "Let me know if you need to blink. I don't want to poke your eye out."

Give me a break. I'm 12 years old, my eyes are impacted with sand, and he wants me to plan my blinks while he picks sand pebbles out of my eyes with a needle. He finally gave up.

"There's just too many. I took out about 200 from each eye but there are thousands of them. I'm going to use a solution that will act like a reverse sandpaper and take the top lining off the eyeballs. That'll get most of them. But, I'm guessing those sand pebbles will be working their way to the surface for the rest of his life. That piece of brass, though, that's too deep. We're going to have to get that one in surgery."

They reverse sandpapered my eyes, patched them over with gauze, sewed up my hand and finger, and sent me packing with instructions to "Duck next time." I didn't see the humor.

As I was getting eye plucked, the Sheriff's Department rolled up to our house and said, "Whoa. Out of our league. Call the Marines."

A bomb squad from El Toro Marine Base came out and said, "Whoa. Where'd you get that?" Mr. Nordine said, "I didn't know it was loaded!" Mrs. Nordine, seeing an opening, said, "He had it in my living room! For three days!" She then eye plucked Mr. Nordine.

I had eye surgery to remove the brass shrapnel, threw up on the night nurse, and went back to school a Superhero the following week.

It's not every kid that can claim to have detonated a real bomb in his own front yard. I got some mileage out of that story. Still do...

Let me know about your "war stories" at syegge@gmail.com