People don't realize the explosive force in a mortar round. they just hear the boom and a few seconds later go "ooh! ahh!" Light one unconfined by the tube, and there's yer earth-shattering kaboom.

I used to have a free and nearly inexhaustible source of mortar rounds confiscated by law enforcement. We had so much fun with them, stuffing them down rat burrows and blowing them up real good. Good times.

My jerb at the time was guy in charge of a highway maintenance crew near the California/Nevada border. Every day we'd see trucks hauling containers of fireworks from the docks in San Pedro to the mega fireworks emporiums in Nevada. Starting a few weeks before the 4th, we see a bunch of rented vans and box trucks following the same route, but empty going to Nevada, and full of illegal fireworks headed back to southern California. The highway patrol would pick them off like fish in the proverbial barrel. I'd let them store them in a 40 foot shipping container I had on site. After the court cases were adjudicated, the evidence had to be destroyed. And that's when the fun began.

It was a multi-agency free-for-all, I tells ya! Highway patrol, county sheriff's office, state transportation department, county road department, and a guy who was either a BLM or NPS law enforcement ranger, depending on where he wanted to patrol at any given moment in time. Death Valley Adjacent was an excellent place to work, but quite harsh as a place to live.