Yeah, minus the hat and uniform, that was my dad. Kind of took the ‘fun’ out of it - which was his point looking back. “Emphasis for clarity” comes to mind.
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Removing the mystery removes the romance, and reduces the fascination. These things are, in the end, just tools. They should be used and treated with respected just like a chainsaw. I’m working to do the same with my kiddos.
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Yup.
Never put much thought into this - it’s just how it was - but, changing it from something ‘fascinating’ to something ‘important’ perhaps instills a sense of trust in a kid (yeah, this all seems obvious) - “Mom/Dad trust me with this/that”.
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This story sparked a memory.
It would have been 2005, late summer, in Kosovo. Our KFOR ISR unit regularly drove to the hills into an old open quarry to run shooting drills with live ammunition.
We were finished with our drills for the day and my roommate, who was also our platoon leader, was sitting down in the dirt, having a smoke and some water in the baking heat.
I sat down next to him for a chat, on this little dirt ridge.
A sentence or two into our idle chat, we both start wondering aloud what the crater-like hole were sitting on top of is. We then spotted something sticking up from the sand close to the bottom of the crater.
Neither of us were mortar guys and both our brains clicked into slightly late realisation at the same time, about the unexploded mortar shell 2 of 3 meters from where we were sitting.
We gingerly got up, pulled everyone behind our APCs and called EOD, and stayed until they showed up so no other unit would rock up and be less lucky.
Our best guess was that some locals were getting rid of wartime gear (a common occurrence) and either didn’t know about the concrete rings outside our bases you could leave anything in without questions, or thought it was more fun to get rid of mortar rounds by throwing them off the high side of the open quarry. Clearly some of them blew up but some didn’t.
UXOs were common in Bosnia but less so in Kosovo by the time I rotated in, so this felt like a close encounter…and our complete ignorance of the mystery cause of the convenient crater to sit at did feel a little Darwinian after 
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Since we moved to the farm there have been a few incidents, the time I instinctively grabbed a trailer that unhitched from the tractor to prevent it crashing down a slope, or the time I nearly tried to crush myself whilst using a Bo-mag road roller.
However the one that still makes my blood go cold was 35 years ago when I was with a friend on a boating holiday. We stayed on the south coast of Devon, in an estuary on an old converted WW2 torpedo launch. During the day one of us hadn’t secured one of the small dinghy’s properly so we had to go looking for it.
We knew the tide would have pushed it up the estuary so headed in that direction. Around 1/2 a mile away we spotted it nestled on the shoreline. Several attempts to take the motor boat in failed as we could feel it grounding. I decided to take the spare dinghy we’d brought along and row in to retrieve it.
I quickly secured the dinghy and tried to row back to the motor boat. Unfortunately it was a lee-shore and trying to row against the tide and the wind towing the other dinghy wasn’t working and I was not built for rowing.
Enter our Darwinian.
I decided it would be much easier for me to wade out dragging the boats deep enough for my friend to catch the tow rope I was holding. Like me he thought this was a genius idea, so I waded out to about chest deep.
First attempt, he gently chugged in and drifted past me but my throw was poor.
The second attempt he started his approach and decided to chance coming a bit closer. Success, he caught the rope, but in doing so let go of the outboard throttle and was now heading to the shore. Quick as a flash, I leaned into the boat, pulled the outboard tiller towards me to turn the boat and gunned the throttle.
The outboard roared and the boat shot forward turning away. Somehow, and I still can’t work out how, I narrowly avoided being eviscerated by the prop. I can still feel the prop wash to this day in my midriff. I still can’t believe how stupid it was and how very lucky I am to be here.
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