The Year Was 1974

I was just a kid, maybe 11 or so, and my friend Stephan and I were walking in the woods behind his house. His older brother was kind of with us also, but off somewhere else. Stephan and I came up on what looked like a kid rocket stuck in the dirt in the forest. It had fins on it and it was just stuck nose down in the dirt. We thought it was cool, maybe some rocket experiment, we were all into model rockets back then (the Estes kind).

We pulled the cool looking rocket out of the ground, and the first thing we noticed was this thing was HEAVY! It was about 18" long and weight about 20lbs, far heaver than anything we ever launched. I shoved it in Stephan's backpack and we went about our business. Not long afterwards, Stephan started complaining our find was sticking him in the back. He wanted to toss it, but I thought it was cool so I agreed to carry it for a while. We headed home.

When we got back to Stephan's house his oldest brother was there. He was in the Air National Guard. So we showed him our find. He immediately FREAKED OUT!! What we'd found was an errant unexploded practice bomb which had been dropped accidentally off of an Air Guard fighter on a training mission. These weren't serious bombs, but they were designed to explode on a target run...easily enough to kill several people in the area.

In a few minutes there were fire engines and police cars everywhere. They evacuated our street. My mom freaked out (they wouldn't let her down the street). Even the news showed up. They eventually hauled the bomb/rocket off. Later they detonated it, and gave the remnants of it back to Stephan's older brother. It still looked like a bomb, but it was half concrete, blown open on the top, about 4" thick.

They said a T-33 lost a training weapon some months before on an exercise.

And here we were just hauling this thing around in our backpacks because it was "cool".

How I ever survived my younger years I'll never know.

Wish I still had that thing. It really was kinda cool.

And then there was the time me and Ward lit the whole street on fire...but that's a whole other thread. (Well, Ward did it, not me so much)

It really is.

Just be home by 10, Son....

the 70's rocked

a reply to: Montana

That's pretty much how it was!

Show up, and there was just an inspection, no anger, it was just a decision tree of whether you needed to go to tub, the shower or you could just go to bed. (usually the shower for me).

Yes indeed ,it sure was an interesting era.
I remember getting pamphlets in school concerning
how to build and stock a fallout shelter in case of
nuclear war.

Seems I remember seeing public safety commercials on
TV too ,warning kids about the dangers of blasting caps.
They didn't pull any punches back then.
They just told it like it was:
"Pay attention in school kid. It's a matter of life and death."

Ah the fond memories of youth...

Sorry buddy but on reading the title my mind couldn’t help continue on with “and the “bushes” are out of this world!!!” Lol
Yeah sometimes playing with stuff that you don’t know can bite you or really get the pucker factor up there!

Reading your account reminds me of 5 years before at Ton-Sa-Nuit AB RVN in what is now Ho Chi Minh City. The young airman found a Russian 122mm rocket that had a 7 lb warhead full of TNT. He rocked it back and forth and pulled it out of the road. Walking into a barracks dorm he announced, "Looky what I found"? The arming propeller was bent over the warhead and the detonator pin was bent inside but we didn't stick around to look beyond that. We were gone.

After his arrest and detention he was asked why he did it? His answer was simple because he wanted out of the Air Force and out of Vietnam. He got his wish along with an undesirable discharge at Travis AFB in CA. Thanks for a good chuckle and we all sometimes wonder how we made it into adulthood. My best

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Set my bed on fire while wiring up an old lamp

Trying to beat out the fire on bed spread before mom found out - left scorch mark

1976 the Air Force was flying around Western Pennsylvania. I found it interesting because the F-15 was still pretty new, so every time I heard one I would watch it fly by. One day one came across and something fell off of it landing on a hill about a half mile from where I was. A few hours later an Air Force truck came down the street. I heard them say something about a part falling off of a plane, so I told them what I saw and where it landed. It turned out to be a live Sparrow missile. It stuck in the hillside like a lawn dart. The couldn't move it safely so they blew it up in place.