Charley and I spent the two days familiarizing ourselves with the Lewis guns and the Mills bombs. I had used Mills bombs to good effect when we were attacked by pirates off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. Each grenade had a heavy segmented body that gave it the look of a black pineapple. It had a central striker held by a hand lever that was secured with a pin. While the heavy, segmented body of pineapple-type grenades often resulted in an unpredictable pattern of fragmentation, they had an effective killing range of about thirty yards and could be dangerous up to one hundred yards.
I explained all of this to Charley, who had never seen a grenade before.
He hefted one into his hand. “Sounds damned dangerous to me. How far can you throw one of these things?”
“About fifty feet or so.
