Author: Neil Hollenbeck

Submitted by Major Neil Hollenbeck:

I was wounded by an insurgent hand grenade while leading an infantry platoon in Mosul, Iraq, in 2005.  At a U.S. military hospital in Germany, an Air Force officer asked me how I was injured.  When I responded, “by a hand grenade,” he flinched and asked, incredulously “A hand grenade?  People still use hand grenades?”  “Our enemy uses them and so do we,” I said plainly.  But his reaction had surprised me.  Here was an officer, thinking warfare had advanced beyond fighting with weapons as primitive as hand grenades at exactly the same time I was engaged in just that type of combat.  How was his mental model of contemporary warfare so different from what we were doing at that time?