Egregoros

@lebronjames75 i almost bit the bullet twice just in boot camp and combat school
In boot camp, we were at the grenade range. First you practice with 10 dummy grenades and you get into a throwing position and get told when to throw. Afterwards you go to the live grenade range where you just get told when to throw and you duck. At the live grenade range it’s 4 people at a time, 2 on either side. I threw my grenade and ducked. The person to my right took out the safeties and stayed in the throwing position, waiting to be told to throw. However he also wasn’t holding the safety lever. Luckily a drill instructor was right behind him and yelled at him to fucking throw it and the instruction pushed him down after. His grenade popped right past the barrier and hot shrapnel fall on us.
The second time was in combat school when we were firing M203 grenade launchers. When using the M203 you have another attachment for the front sight. We were firing at some destroyed tanks in the distance. The guy to my right was using his sights wrong and wasn’t paying attention to where his barrel was pointing and had it pointed straight down in front of us. Thankfully a combat instructor was walking behind us before he fired and told him how to use it

@Lars

we had 2 "risque" firing exercises

one wasnt directly infront of the firing line: it was a duo partner exercise, where over a 100m, there would be pieces of cover, and one starts in cover, one a bit away further than 100m, and youd leap frog and simultaneously reload, from cover to cover while the other blasted a mag at the targets as you'd switch cover, then swap the tasks. it was called something like "battlebuddy tactical shooting exercise". that was probably my favourite training towards the end of my military police training

the other one exercise, was on a squad of 10 soldiers level. there the full squad would advance while alternating fire with the battle buddy, while the MG stayed behind and shot at specific targets hung on the very top of the tree lines. Considering that the MG was only shooting past ~20 meters to the right from me, and i had run ~200m forward, it was quite spooky noise of the bullets. And of course, as the MG is shooting, we are shooting between each other, with ~10 meter distances of ourselves left and right, sprinting in 10 meter lunges and dropping back on the ground.

that second livefire exercise ended with reaching a ditch, and the top edges of the ditch had been wired with ~fifty 20kg explosive satchels (VERY BIG BOOM). that were detonated one at a time by the instructor far away, once we were all in the ditch. Quite a show and emotion! The point of the exercise was a simulation of an attempted ditch rush, but it was pre-drone warfare techniques (~10 years ago).

The idea was, you rush it from cover to cover while your own arty/mortars bomb the enemy's ditch, then radio the fire to stop as you enter, and then generally within ~5 minutes or less of reaching the ditch, the enemy will likely counter battery and counter barrage the same spot once its lost.