The V40 mini-grenade may not look like much, but it was a mainstay for special operations soldiers fighting in the jungle and clearing enemy camps and buildings during the Vietnam War.
It’s use in tight quarters earned it the nickname as the “hooch popper.” Troops also called it a “golf ball grenade,” for its size at just 4.8-ounce, and 4 centimeters across.
“I must say, if you’re planning on doing an entry into a hooch with nothing but bad guys in it, it’d be nice to roll one of those things in there as kind of a wake-up call,” said Rick Woolard, a retired Navy captain and Vietnam War veteran.
Woolard’s first deployment to Vietnam was in 1968 when the V40 mini-grenade was considered new to the military. Navy SEALs and MACV-SOG — a classified, multi-service special operations unit that conducted covert operations — primarily used the grenade. He said there were certain circumstances where a V40 mini-grenade was handy, though they were used sparingly.
The two standard grenades available to Vietnam War-era service members were the MK2 “pineapple” grenade and, later, the MK26. The V-40 mini-grenade was about half the size of those.
The V40 had a time delay fuse of four seconds and a lethal range of up to 5 meters in a radius, while the MK2 had a four-to-six-second time delay fuse and a lethal reach ranging from 5-to-10 meters. It was considered dangerous to handle because of its small size, even more so with gloves.
While the MK2 weighed 1 pound, 5 ounces, the V40 weighed just 4.8 ounces.
“Light is right,” said Woolard, who now serves as the chairman of the Navy SEAL Museum Board of Directors “It’s always better to have lightweight stuff, but we didn’t carry a bunch of grenades in my seven-man patrol. We might have had maybe four grenades, sometimes only two grenades. We just didn’t plan on getting close enough to the enemy that we hadn’t shot already where we had to use a grenade on them.”
Woolard said he often carried the V40 mini grenade on his belt, but that’s where it typically stayed. It’s explosive power wasn’t enough to be useful outside of the close quarters of rooms and buildings. He recalled once trying to destroy a small bridge with one. During a night mission, Woolard placed a V40 mini grenade under the bridge, hoping it would destroy an anchor on one end and ruin the structure. It went off and “didn’t do a hell of a lot,” Woolard said.
Though the light weight of the grenade made it possible to throw it farther than the heavier alternatives, the thick jungle canopy and foliage often got in the way. While novel, the V40 mini-grenade didn’t make a strong enough difference to remain in service past the war.
“I can’t think of a situation where I’d say, ‘Oh shit, I really wish I had one of those little ones instead of this pineapple grenade. I didn’t like grenades because I knew how dangerous they were,” Woolard said. “The idea of little pieces of metal flying around uncontrolled could hit you anywhere.”
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