Bombs Away!

I have been totally MIA this week. Work is crazy and I'm going to the beach on Thursday, so I have been super duper busy. Sorry to all--promise I will try to catch up on reading blogs soon. I tried to put up some accompanying photos to this post, but Blogger won't let me post pics right now.

I told this story to MJ this past weekend, and realized it would make a great blog post. Just like I told her, this story is so weird that I will not be surprised if you don't believe me. But I swear to God this happened.

When I was around 8 years old, I was coming home from the grocery store with The Czarina and my siblings. At the time, we were living in the middle of nowhere in rural Virginia. It was an old farmhouse, complete with big porch, livestock fields and a barn.

When we turned into our long driveway, we realized the National Guard had paid us a visit. There were NG people all over our property. They had their uniforms and machinery and big trucks. There were NG people running around and talking.

Of course, Czarina was thinking, "Great, what did WLF do now?"

All of us kids were shouting, "Cool!"

So why were we invaded? Get this: While we were at the store, WLF and our neighbor, One Leg*, were behind the barn, clearing out some weeds and underbrush. I guess WLF wanted to use that area for something. As they are clearing away the area, One Leg shouts out, "Man, I think this is a bomb! Why do you have this in your yard?"

So WLF goes over there. How about there are 4 friggin BOMBS in our backyard!!! They had been buried a few inches into the ground and then the weeds and stuff had grown over them, so we never knew they were there. My dad looks at the bombs and recognized them. "Hey! I know what these are! These are the kind of bombs they dropped off of planes in WWII!" (In addition to being a taxidermy enthusiast, my father was also a WWII buff.)

Then they are freaking out because--duh--they could get blown to smithereens. So the jump out of there and call the National Guard. They laugh at my dad. WLF insists there are bombs buried behind his house. They laugh some more, but send a guy over to check it out. The guy nearly craps his pants because my dad is not joking. He calls for backup. They all come over, thinking that these are just old shells and they should just get them out of there and throw them away properly. Right after that is when we got home. WLF filled Mom in on the story. She sent us to the house, much to our dismay.

As the National Guard is looking at them and loading them onto their trucks, they realize the bombs are live. Czarina about lost it. We played back behind the barn sometimes. And we could have been blown to pieces all these years. And the NG people had just been tossing the bombs into the backs of the trucks. Holy. Freaking. Cow.

So what's the story? We don't really know. All we can figure is that someone stole them from a nearby military base after WWII, perhaps as a souvenir. They thought they had old empty shells, then realized they had stolen real bombs, freaked out, and buried them in the backyard. They had probably been there for like 40 years. (This was WLF's theory.)

This is the story we were going with. We never did find out why there were bombs buried behind our house. Crazy, huh?

*Yes, he really did have one wooden leg. Farming accident.