A straightforward, gripping tale from the Marines that stormed ashore on Guadalcanal in World War II Told with humor and honesty in a no-holds-barred approach that only a Marine who was there could tell Excerpt on firing a rifle grenade: "I jammed the rifle stock tight against my shoulder, raised myself up off the ground to a kneeling position, and squeezed the trigger. The rifle went bang! and the recoil jarred it loose from my grip. The rifle smacked me hard in the jaw. With that, I went down on my face while the little bluebirds started going tweet, tweet, tweet around my head.-'Did I hit it?' I asked.-'Yeah, you hit it,' Flash said. 'The damn thing just didn't work.'-We finally ran into somebody from another unit, a guy who really understood how the new style grenade was supposed to work. We explained our misfortune to him, and he asked us did you pull the firing pin out... The god damn pin!"
