U.S. soldier pulls grenade out of Alabama man’s leg

http://www.washingtonpost.com/us-soldier-pulls-grenade-out-of-alabama-mans-leg/2014/10/16/ba1bb275-910c-4bee-ace1-6aa6f530dfcc_story.html?wprss=rss_national-security

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Driving through the wee hours of the morning, Army Staff Sgt. David Mensink prepared for a daunting assignment: Pulling a grenade from the leg of a man in Alabama who’d accidentally fired it into his thigh.

The soldier was called upon to help by police in Birmingham, Ala., after the man called authorities looking for help. The grenade had somehow activated and fired into his thigh while he was dismantling it, he said. Paramedics had responded, but did not know how dangerous the grenade was.

“From the initial X-ray, it looked like a 40mm grenade,” Mensink, 27, said in an Army news release, referring to an explosive round that could have killed several people had it detonated.

Mensink, an explosive ordnance disposal technician at Fort Benning, Ga., scrambled to make the 190-mile drive northwest from the Army base to Birmingham, leaving from Benning at 4:15 a.m. and arriving at UAB Hospital about two hours later with a group that also included Sgt. Johnny Lowthorpe of Columbus, Ga., Spec. Brandon Fair of Daytona Beach, Fla., and Sgt. 1st Class Tyron Mathews of Royal, Fla. Two paramedics had volunteered to stay with the patient, but they kept him in an ambulance 30 feet away from the hospital, barricaded from the public.

The incident took eight hours, said a news report on AL.com, which did not identify the soldiers involved.

“That was extremely heroic,” Dave Hyche, a Birmingham supervisor with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, told AL.com. “Nobody knew this wasn’t live. Removing it could have easily killed everyone there.”

Mensink, of Seale, Ala., discovered that the grenade was lodged deeply enough in the man’s thigh that it had exposed his femoral artery, the main blood supply to the lower limb. A doctor made an incision in the man’s leg and Mensink removed the grenade, the Army said.

The round turned out to be a 40mm M713 red smoke grenade, which is used to mark locations so pilots can see them from above. It looks like this:

Mensink said it was the most unusual of the 180 bomb technician missions he has been involved in, both at home and in Afghanistan.

“It was definitely a first,” he said.