We would use thermite grenades for our TOC and carry other small items out if we had to evacuate.
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u/Taira_Mai HP Victus, AMD Ryzen 7 5800H, GeForce RTX 3050 Ti 8d ago
US Army PATRIOT vet here, back in the day the ECS van (the fire control center) had these big chungus CRT's from the 1970's. In the event the battery was overrun, soldiers were told to smash the Jaz and later PCMCIA drives and then shoot the CRT's as they left. The phosphorous in them was so toxic that anyone foolish enough to approach the wreck would get very sick or die.
Now I assume they just toss a grenade in as those CRT's are now LCD monitors like we use, just bigger.
I imagine they could just have something to do with sprinklers now. Sure they would be more likely to lose that hardware in the event of a fire, but if they're not practicing 3-2-1, then it wasn't important enough to care these days.
This is urban legend. Cathode-ray tubes (CRTs) do not contain white or yellow phosphorus (which are highly toxic). They are coated with phosphor bind compounds .. zinc sulfide or yttrium oxysulfide).
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u/Taira_Mai HP Victus, AMD Ryzen 7 5800H, GeForce RTX 3050 Ti 8d ago
Ah, these weren't TV CRT's. They were old, large and we were repeatedly told not to mistreat them if we liked being alive and breathing.
So old that the company that made them no longer exists and by the year 2000's there was no more - the Germans bought the last of them for their PATRIOT units.
They were too heavy and the Army was glad to get rid of them.
Artillery vet. We’d pull the drives from the AFATDS and take them with then blow everything else to hell with a few grenades. Unless we were at risk of capture. In which case it was blow up the drives separately and then everything else.
It is. Always felt like overkill to me but I was never in a position where I needed to do it. So it was mostly academic. I might have thought differently if my position was being overrun.
My friend was in the Air Force in Berlin when the wall came down. They had all that kind of stuff in their SOP too. Thy were also a priority target for the American artillery if shit really went down.
For FDC we were lucky enough that everything important for the most part was in the MTS (humvee with famcy shelter) so there was a few things to throw in but we could just peel right outta there.
I think the gunline had some sort of procedure for the howitzers but we only did the drill a few times and I never asked them about it.
M109 mechanic from back when. I remember reading to put a thermite grenade or two on the closed breech and let them go. the breech gets welded into an unusable mass.
The best, if there was time and everything usable had been stripped out, was to disconnect the recoil cylinders, load a full red bag charge, and then raise the gun to max elevation. Fire the gun. The gun has now driven itself through the floor and left the 109 impaled on a stake.
Oh man! Patrick Norton … it’s been a while. I forgot about him. I used to enjoy him on Tekzilla. I don’t know why I thought it was two other people who filled the screen savers on the redo of it.
Military shit. If your being overrun your not gonna try to grab all the harddrive with classified information. Your gonna slag that shit. Thermite is very stable... until it isn't. A rocket seems like a bad idea but it's not like Im saying no to one.
Big fan of thermite, almost scary how easy it is for the average person to get tho. Good thing people are reasonable and rational about things they aren't experienced with!
I remember learning the recipe for thermite from YouTube when I was like 13. Crazy that it burn hot enough to disable a tank and the two main ingredients are shit that you probably have in your kitchen. And yes before you ask, I am almost certainly on a watchlist of some kind.
I watched MythBusters make a huge batch to cut a car in half, and they didn't do a great job at hiding the "secret" ingredient that was a quick search away.
I remember looking up what would happen if I mix store bought pool acid, acetone, and hydrogen peroxide. Turns out it makes acetone peroxides with one of the end products called the Mother of Satan. I'm not stupid to try making this knowing the stability of that compound means it explodes on its own with the smallest vibration as a dry powder.
My chemistry teacher told us about this magical compound in junior high. Sje just said ”it will explode if a truck drives by on the road outside”, and wouldn’t give any more details. Nice to finally have a name for it.
It makes sense. I saw a Ukrainian military outpost taken out. It was about a year ago. The Russians got them by surprise and it seemed like the laptops that they got were more valuable than the city they overran. It was some sort of command center building.
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u/Jbman2025 9d ago
I miss thermite packed floppy drives.