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Grenade Accident: Trainee Saved By Instructor After Explosive Slips From His Hand [Video]

By Dustin Wicksell
Published on: 04:01 PST, Mar 26, 2015

A Chinese military cadet owes his life to an instructor after the trainee was saved from a hand grenade that he had accidentally dropped just feet away from the pair during a live ordinance exercise.

Xiao Zhang is a recent recruit to the Guangzhou Militarized Police Unit, according to the Daily Mail, and video of his unusual ordinance training emerged earlier this week. Taking part in an exercise conducted with a live grenade, during which Xiao would have to throw the explosive while taking cover behind a sandbag wall, the recruit accidentally dropped the grenade, very nearly sealing his fate. Thanks to the quick reflexes of instructor Chen Qihui, who was standing next to Xiao, according to the Guardian, both men survived after Chen pulled the trainee away from the grenade and into a nearby trench.

Xiao admitted that when the grenade dropped next to him, he froze, unable to move in the precious seconds that he had before it exploded.

“The grenade fell here next to me. When I saw it my mind was completely blank,” the trainee recalled.

Luckily, the nearby safety trench was more than a meter deep, providing adequate cover for both Chen and the trainee. The men were not seriously injured by the grenade, which was a specially designed training explosive.

“His body was under mine in the safety trench and after the explosion I discovered that I had sustained an injury to my arm,” Chen related.

Earlier this year, it was reported that the United States Military is developing a new generation of explosive ordinance, dubbed “smart grenades.” As the Inquisitr previously reported, the grenades are expected to double the effectiveness of current models, providing soldiers with the capacity to target opponents who are concealed behind battlefield obstacles. Smart grenades will reportedly operate in one of three modes, either as an air-burst designed to deter concealment, in a directed fashion, which is a default setting, or in a “self-destruct” mode. The third option is designed to reduce the amount of unexploded ordinance left on the battlefield, preventing future accidents with smart grenades.

Though lighter than a standard weapon, the plastic grenade used by trainees still has an effective range of roughly seven meters.

[Image via the Daily Mail]

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