Oh, yeah, back in the '70's on Guam it was no big deal to burn your lawn trimmings in a 55-gal. drum. So, often during the weekend usually later in the afternoon, you'd have relatives/neighbors burning their leaves and whatnots in these drums in their yards. Well, we liked to put fircrackers in there, then wait for them to go off - BOOM! - get the adults riled up, and run off laughing. After a time, we hit on the idea of using blanks, since you didn't need to light anything, just toss it in - and wait - BOOM! There was a gun store nearby, Kimo's, which had a beatup old warehouse in the back, and we had figured out a way to get in there, though we never seemed able to get into where the guns were - that was very securely locked. Anyway, we were able to score a lot of blanks of all calibers, from .22 to .233 to .30. There were also real bullets there too, and though we took some of those we knew enough not to go tossing real bullets in a roaring fire - well, almost all of us.
So, one day we're all hanging out with the family, relatives just gossiping, passing the time, and a neighbor of ours is cleaning their yard, and burning it. So, we take off to get some of our stash, and see if we can get a few in before we get caught. The operation is a success, and we all just sit back, and wait for the commotion. Sure enough, the blanks start going off. The adults are looking back at the drum, then at us suspiciously, and we're trying hard not to look guilty. Then, there's this big BOOM!!!, and even we look at the drum in surprise. Of course, the adults are getting angry, and asking what did we do, and how many more are in there. We convince them there aren't any, or many, more left, then haul off before somebody gets a whippin'(which were common in my day). The thing is, we're actually pretty pissed too, because somebody in the group went overboard, and tossed in something that almost really got us in trouble. So, we start asking each other what we tossed in there. Nobody seems to have put anything stronger than a .22 long blank, until we come to the last one - a fringe member really. He's younger, and doesn't know much about bullets and guns, so we have to bring him to the stash, and let him show us what he threw in there. Well, he looks around, then picks up a bullet, not a blank, a .223. "This one," he says. We freak out and hammer it into his head that you do not toss in bullets into a fire, much less the 'feared' M-16 bullet that can "go in your shoulder, then come out your butt." On one side of our neighborhood was a massive natural cliff, and on the other, the ocean. I figure that stray .223 went in one of those two directions.
[ 11-06-2001: Message edited by: leonid ]
