I Built a Bomb and it Exploded in my Face (I know how it feels to be blind) Sight returned to 20/20

I joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1962 and was stationed in Baden-Soellingen, Germany with the 444 Squadron.

I was young, foolish and unafraid. That turned out to be a bad combination. I was also stationed in a country where young people could drink and where their main highway, the Autobahn, had no speed limit. Getting the picture?

I witnessed spontaneous combustion when the food services sergeant walked by me with some cleaning products in an 80 ounce can with cleaning products in it. It burst into flames right beside me and my mind when to work. After asking him what he had put in the can, I knew I had to take it to the next level.

After shift, I found the two ingredients in the cleaning supply room and I scooped up some of each to conduct my experiment. I started small with a tablespoon of each and put it in a vanilla bottle, screwed the lid on tight and dropped it in a galvanized steel bucket of water. Luckily I did this in a small wooded area close by.

It blew the 3-gallon bucket to shreds and I was pumped. I got a bunch of the two materials, gathered some of the thick glass beer bottles the Germans are famous for, picked up the other two musketeers and headed for the famous Rhine River. Did I forget to tell you that the beer bottles were full of beer? Of course, we had to empty them to make our grenades.

We got good at bomb-making and were soon blowing stumps along the river. It did not take long for us to become bolder and we were soon throwing the bottles like grenades at passing cruise ships. Before you have me arrested, I must say we did not even get close but it was exciting.

We had bought larger containers and eventually we worked up to a four gallon gas can with a screw-on lid. I poured in the white powder and added the creosote-type material. I was not sure what caused the material to ignite or become explosive but I soon found out.

As I was screwing on the lid, I cross threaded it but I was suitably afraid of the time to detonation and left it and ran. Seconds later it blew the top high into the air, followed by a huge cloud of toxic smoke. The wind was blowing down-river and we saw that there were a bunch of people on the shore. As soon as they got a whiff of the smoke, they went off on the run.

When the gas can stopped smoking, we found the lid and I decided to add some of the white powder, hopefully to start the process over. I set the powder down and looked in the spout to see if anything was going on. That was when it exploded, hitting me full in the face. It ejected through the narrow opening with speed and force. I glimpsed a fireball but didn't get my eyes closed quickly enough.

I knew it was bad and I knew I had to flush my eyes with river water. I started scooping up water with my hands and yelling at my friends to help me. They ran over and immediately saw that the acid was eating up my clothing and burning my face badly. They panicked and dragged me to the car and headed for the base to get me to the hospital.

I made a mistake then that almost blinded me for life. I was afraid to go to the hospital for fear of being charged with self-inflicting injury but thankfully my friends could literally see my clothes and skin being burned so they raced to the hospital.

Fast acting emergency staff and doctors were on-site and got to me quickly. I lay there in soaking wet gauze for days, totally unable to see more than shadows. On the fourth day when a nurse opened the curtains, I could see the light and movement and by the end of that day, I had 30% of my vision back.

The doctor told me that day, that in a minute or two the acid would have burned through the protective coating on my eyes. If my friends had not overridden my bad choice, I would be blind today. My skin eventually healed but my face was one huge, painful scab and later an itchy mess.

One of my biggest regrets of that day was that I had lobbied for weeks to get permission to fly the 104 Starfighter simulator. I would have been the only non-pilot to get that privilege. Needless to say, it did not happen.

I wrote this to entertain you. I hope it did.
See you again soon.
I am privileged to write these posts. I would be thrilled if you did enjoy reading them.

Norman J Ball
Global Rescue Alliance