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Comment by camperman | Hacker News Reader

I've been shelled with 155mm shells. There is (or used to be) a bunker on Salisbury Plain where trainee artillery officers could experience it for themselves. It has very thick concrete, four foot thick windows and so on.

Even with all the protection it's terrifying. They drop the rounds a few yards in front of you. The noise is unbelievable, the shockwaves actually bend the concrete inward a little and the dummy target vehicles you can see get instantly shredded with shrapnel. Delay the fuse a little and the shell penetrates a few yards before exploding, leading to a strange effect where all the dust and stones jump off the ground as the shockwave traverses it. Make the fuse go early and you get an airburst that sprays red hot metal down in a 100 yard radius and rattles those windows with waves of shrapnel.

We were all jumpy for days. It just does that to you.

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I was an artilleryman is the U.S. Army. We get the machine gun fired over us in a trench during basic training (like everyone else), but that sounds like so much more profound of an experience. I kind of wish we did that here.

That said, I was enlisted (NCO), not a commissioned officer. For all I know, they may do something like that for (to?) the officers at Fort Sill.

On that topic, artillery shells flying over you sound strange, like tearing a linen sail or sheet down the middle - no joke.

I was in an infantry exercise at JBLM where they were firing artillery from right next to our position, and I remember every tenth round or so would have a defect that made it go zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzoooooommmm when it came out of the barrel.

Ah yes, the whistling round. On the 105mm Light Gun this was from small gaps in the copper jacket around the shell that whistled when spinning.

120mm rocket artillery incoming near Talil. Felt like an earthquake. Was great fun at the time, now I think back and wow...

Oh to be young and carefree again :)

It does feel like an earthquake. The most powerful subwoofer I've ever heard doesn't come close to the teeth-scraping body-slamming whump of a near miss from large ordinance.

I remember hand grenade day in Army basic training, and at the time what struck me was that the grenades going off looked and sounded like what artillery does in the movies. Spine-jarring explosions, 25-foot-tall clouds of dirt and smoke, etc. Later on (at air defense school, for some reason) we did a claymore mine at one of our live fire events, and it was far, far louder and vicious than the POP and shower of sparks that Hollywood would have given us. I can't even imagine what it would be like to be near a real artillery round landing.

It is really a very big blast, like an artillery blast like you say. I was given three opportunities to throw hand grenades during my conscription training.

First one was in a purpose-built field, where we were hunkered down in a concrete hole and threw the frag-grenade onto gravel.

The second was when were having an exercise of storming a machinegun-nest on top of a small ridge in the forest. So first we move by leapfrog (a combat pair) firing, then climbed a small ridge and threw over a live frag-grenade on to the "machinegun-nest".

Third time was when we were doing a urban combat exercise. In the middle of the forest they had a roofless building with several rooms, again purpose-built for training with live grenades, with dust floors. We were given two grenades each, one which was a chock grenade ( not flash , again doing the exercise as a combat pair. Really big blasts.

I don't think I can even remotely understand what this feels like. Worst thing I've done in my time over here was handling hand grenades (just as 13of40) and throwing/detonating a live one was the closest I got to 'hide behind shelter and feel a big boom' - and already far too scary on my personal scale of things Not To Do Again™.

I suspect quite a few more people in the Western militaries today have seen 155mm go off as IEDs, now. I assume it's roughly comparable to a ground detonation (usually they were buried slightly, either in a culvert or below grade, but only a few feet).

Yes. Some of the footage I've seen of IEDs in Afghanistan look just like hits with a round.

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