Gaming's Burning Questions!

QUESTION: If a grenade were thrown at your squad, would someone really attempt to pick it up and throw it back at the enemy before it detonated?

ANSWER: Maybe, if their instinct told them to; but Lt. Col. Hank Keirsey, military advisor for the Call of Duty series, suggests that’s not a soldier’s first reaction: “The most basic human instinct is to run like hell and dive in a hole if you can.” Navy SEAL and Rogue Warrior inspiration Richard Marcinko agrees that it’s not something you’re likely to see covered in boot camp. “Throwing the grenade back is a reflexive reaction, not something you would train to do,” he says.

Okay, but let’s say your instinct did tell you to chuck it back. What then? Keirsey does the math: “If your opponent has not ‘cooked off’ the grenade, you have two to four seconds before the fuse goes bang and thousands of zinging, white-hot fragments turn your flesh to hamburger. So if the grenade landed close to your hand, and you were especially nimble, and there was no place to dive — yes, you might grab it and throw it. But I can’t recall a recent account of a guy throwing a grenade back.”

Need more discouragement? Marcinko brings up the complicating variables: “Not all grenades are the same and there are lots of questions: How long is the fusing mechanism on the grenade? What type of grenade is it? Fragmentation? Pressure? Gas? Smoke? Flash-bang? Concussion? Lots of different options.” All of which will likely get you killed.

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