The Grenade Test
Colonel David Hackworth's Advice on How to Test the Subconscious
How do you truly test someone? How do you determine how they will respond when they don’t have time to think? When they react from the visceral, subconscious level?
Why, you throw a grenade at them, of course, and see how they respond!
At least, that’s what Colonel David Hackworth did and it’s something I think about often. It’s so easy for people to say what others want to hear. It’s much harder to determine how they will respond when there’s no time to think.
Let’s look at how Colonel Hackworth weeded out volunteers for his elite Raider platoon:
Crispino, whom I’d made Raider platoon sergeant, sat in on my sessions with these “first cut” candidates, and between the two of us it was usually easy to assess a man's mettle. For the times when it wasn't, Chris had devised a brilliant screening technique that instantly separated the men from the boys.
You’ve got Frederico “Chris” Crispino and Colonel Hackworth starting at the conscious level and asking the volunteer questions. When they couldn’t determine his “mettle,” they had to go to the subconscious level.
He'd taken the powder out of a frag grenade and fired the primer cap separately. Then he'd reassembled the thing, and now, as I interviewed potential Raiders, Chris would sit there playing with this dummy grenade. Near the end of the session, if I still wasn't sure about a man, I'd give Chris a wink and he'd "accidentally" drop the grenade. The safety pin would fall out and we'd jump back-horror and shock on our faces-meanwhile studying the guy's response to this "live" grenade spinning around on the floor.
The grenade is harmless, but the volunteer applicant doesn’t know that. At this point, they don’t have time to think. They are working solely from the subconscious. Will they panic or rise to the occasion?
If the volunteer froze, we knew we didn't want him. If he threw himself on the grenade, we thought he was nuts (or at least suicidal) and we didn't want him either. But if he grabbed the thing and threw it out of the tent, or if he cut a trail out of the place himself, we knew he had good sense-he was a cool hombre, and real Raider material.
I used to work with a guy in the UK who told me how he would do his own grenade test. He’d simply take potential hires to a restaurant or a gas station and see how they treated the workers. If they cared about them, they were in. If they dismissed them, they were out. The job would require deep care for every person. If the potential hire couldn’t even show that at a restaurant, they wouldn’t all of a sudden show it as a new hire.
How can you create your own grenade tests? How can you determine
This story comes from About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior by Colonel David H. Hackworth. This was the 32nd book I read for the Books of Titans reading project and I read it back in 2017. Here is the original podcast episode I recorded covering this book:
I suppose Captain America wouldn’t have passed the test!