When I was at Bad Tolz in the mid 70s we worked out of a tent city named Camp Worden.  We ran something called "Platoon Confidence with SF" when a leg platoon would come down and we would run them thru a month long course of water tng, mtn tng, patrolling, map reading E&E, POW Camp, etc.  One one night mission someone had thrown one of those big artillery simulators and it failed to go off.  I picked it up and brought back to our orderly room and set it on top of the company safe, where it sat for a couple of weeks.  One day I was in the orderly room and decided that I had better do something with it and picked it up.  The Det Commander told me to put it down as he would take care of it.  A few minutes later I was doing something in one of the tents when I saw a big flash and heard someone scream.  The CO, who will remain nameless since he was a pretty good guy, had cut the simulator open poured out all the powder and stood over it with his Bic lighter and lit it.  He found out why it was called flash powder.  His face looked as if it had been made out of wax and gotten hot and started to melt.  The only skin he had left on his face was in the wrinkles where he had shut his eyes.  I called in a medevac and we got him out of there in record time and apparently he suffered no ill effects from it.  Ironically he had gotten the Soldiers medal for saving another soldier from a fire.

John Blevins