Weapons Man

The Battalion Commander led two companies of the 2/28 Infantry “Black Lions,” 1st Infantry Division, on a combat patrol into area where the battalion had been making contact since three of its companies choppered into the area about a week prior. They were part of Shenendoah II, an operation to investigate reports of Viet Cong presence near Lai Khe northwest of Saigon. But what was there was not a straggling guerrilla band: it was the 271st Regiment of the 9th Division, still bearing the “VC” honorific but a full-time professional People’s Army of Viet Nam unit. In the battle, the two American companies would be ambushed by two battalions of the 271st and thoroughly defeated.

He didn’t want to work with you, you know. He didn’t want to give you a fair shake. He wanted to put you in prison — and that was whether you were an industry executive, a firearms end user, or one of his own agents. Whoever you were, if you came under the scrutiny of the “in crowd” in his agency, Byron T. Jones hated you and wanted to destroy you, quite impersonally. Fortunately, he was as incompetent at that as he was at running the agency.

For years, this short segment of a longer film was unidentified. But painstaking scholarship identified the subject matter as the Woodrow Wilson era US Navy, thanks to a keen eye for weapons: the E-2  class submarine went out in 1915, and the 14-inch shell for American’s dreadnought main armament came in in 1915. Ergo, 1915. And the discoverer, Buckey Grimm, labeled the short segment as part of a lost 1915 documentary on the Navy.  In it, along with the subs that the show begins with and some frightening antics with the 14″ shells, you get to see a bunch of sailors splicing ropes and making fenders. This guy is splicing rope with a marlinspike.

First day home, although taking the early flight yesterday was supposed to get us into Never Washed International in the People’s Republic before 9 Ack Emma, as the British Expeditionary Force used to say, and home by 10:30 or so via bus (these are nice commuter buses, not graffiti-spackled and miserable city-run, or convict-and-addict-packed Greyhound buses). Of course, that was before JetBlue managed to JetBlew up their computer system. Those of us who’d printed our boarding passes at home were all set, but the vast majority of the full-plane of travelers expected to get theirs at the airport. Zug.

This is the look of panic:

The answer was in yesterday’s Palm Beach Post, where a writer named Jorge Millan had to twist, wrestle, and even torture the story to give it The Narrative® spin that he, or his editors, wanted: that a self-defense shooting in Jensen Beach, FL, was a bad shoot. Millan’s helical reasoning is hidden behind the Post’s paywall, but we’ll gist it for you.

(Note: we wrote this and scheduled it, we thought, for the 18th. But many things are going on and so we’re hitting “publish” a couple of days later. Military Times has now published the third installment of its five part story, and is suggesting it will take two weeks or more to finish the two remaning installments — 20 Mar 15. Ed.).

By every measure, Deasia Watkins was a known nut job. Bat-guano crazy. She heard voices and saw demons. She had a history of drug abuse, mental illness, violence, and threats of violence. And so, Great and Good Government did all it could to protect the person she’d most recently and credibly threatened — her own three-month-old baby.

The Fayetteville Observer has an interesting story on a public briefing at UNC-Chapel Hill on new missions for ARSOF. But they’re really not “new” so much as they’re “newly recognized;” under this new doctrine the military will be doing things it did during the Indian wars, the Philippine occupation and in many counter-insurgency operations and advisory deployments for the best part of a century.

We’ll be back in our own digs and on our usual orderly schedule soon enough. In the meantime, here are some things that deserved coverage this week and didn’t get it.

That’s the measured performance of this little beauty:

Those three are the most hated, if not always the most feared, enemy weapons. Much as WWII bomber crews loathed flak more than fighters (their gunners could shoot back at fighters!) the unattended (or command-detonated) explosive device is more loathed than direct fire. Tom Kratman nailed this in his military science-fiction novel, A Desert Called Peace, which we’re still reading.

“Let’s play groper and gropee.” Hemphill (l.) and Leos (r.)

Chuck at GunLab reports on the ongoing VG 1-5 project. Orders have been taken (cards not yet charged) and a list established at Allegheny Arms.

When we were young pups in Group, sharpening knives seemed like a mystical thing. They were gone she could do it, do it unbelievably well, and enjoy doing it. And then there were guys who seem to make their edges worse by their efforts. Can you guess what category your humble blog post fell into?

Anybody who’s been working in the Middle East for the last 30-plus years knows what the valence of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been: strongly negative from its birth in violent revolution to its genocidal ambitions today. No nation has done more to incite, finance, equip and direct terrorism as a matter of national policy. No nation, in a world and a region where individual liberty is a hunted, endangered sprite, has done more to subjugate and enslave its own people. (If you must have this lesson with Hollywood production values, we recommend The Stoning of Soraya M. as an accurate and unflinching look at life in the Islamic Republic, and those areas that have fallen under its malign sway). And no nation is less fit to responsibly safeguard and employ nuclear technology for military purposes.

The Sword is ordinary enough, in its environment. For centuries US Marine officers have worn a Mameluk-styled sword, and this is one example of a Marine regulation sword, something often presented to distinguished graduates of commissioning programs or officers who distinguish themselves in some way.

Bet that post headline grabbed you, didn’t it? Not the typical WeaponsMan fare there.

The word service is a remarkable one.

You can be in the service, get your car serviced, follow a preventive service schedule. Artillery crews learn the Service of the Piece. You can do a small service or a great one, as befits your capabilities and intentions. While we were in the service, we occasionally were called upon to service targets.

Much like a bull is expected to service a cow.

After all, without that you could never “try the veal!”

You can go to services. Many of us will today, or another day as our faith traditions bid us.

And you can try to be of service. That’s what we’re trying to do right now. Expect the level of posting to pick up, and tomorrow we kick off with a guest post by Andrew Branca, featuring one of the most bogus and laughable self-defense claims in the long, grim history of murderers trying to wriggle out of the consequences of their actions. This wriggling commenced with the question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” and it has not let up from that day unto this.

In the Scripture, the question is not accepted as an answer. You might say it was not of service.