Weapons Man

If these patches are authentic, something we can’t judge, there’s a lot of collector interest. One of them appears to be an original RT Habu patch. Patches like this were not worn in the field, where team members were “sterile,” but on “party shirts” back on base.

That really happened to Richard Tuite of Kingston, NH. He left his pistol in a dresser drawer. A middle school student — whose identity and relationship to Tuite, if any, have been closely held by authorities — stole the pistol and brought it to school to show his friends. One of the other students ratted him out, and a search of his backpack — it wasn’t clear whether this was by school administrators of police — turned up the firearm, producing a pretty good case of HP. (Note: this case is different from either of the two cases of NH seacoast school HP in that story. It’s another one, saints preserve us).

Sean Carmeli, a Texan who emigrated to Israel and died serving in the Golani Brigade.

These scenes aren’t from Chernobyl, although they have the same air of haunted abandonment. And they’re not from Detroit, although the site makers are reminiscent of the urban ruins explorers of the Motor City. They’re from various abandoned and forgotten military bases in the former Soviet Far East.

Last week, Colonel Viet Xuan Luong made his first star. COL Luong became the first Vietnamese-American to reach general or flag officer rank. He’s a USC grad (in bio, of all things) and a career infantryman who has excelled in command at all levels from platoon through brigade, and has avoided blotting his copybook in a series of critical staff assignments.

This guy will raise his right hand for that.

MARSOC (er, Raider) Special Operations Officer 0370 candidates in training. USMC Photo by Cpl. Donovan Lee.

Technically, this isn’t exactly a US machine gun. Although it’s true that this French-made light machine gun, commonly called the Chauchat, was issued to the American Expeditionary Force when it arrived in France. It was probably the first machine gun ever designed to be manufactured cheaply and rapidly using stampings, sheet metal and steel tube, and simple screw machines with the barest minimum of time, and set-ups, executed on traditional lathes, shapers and milling machines. Many of the automotive industry techniques that were applied to the Sten and the M3 grease gun were not yet available in 1915, so the manufacturing technology that went into this gun is even more remarkable.

It is with sadness that we heard tonight that actor and comedian Robin Williams has passed away from an apparent suicide. We weren’t hugely on board for his over-the-top comedy act, but we really liked him in some roles. And in 2002, friends of ours were brought together with him by duty, while he was making his first trip to entertain the Joes in Afghanistan.

We confess no love of the amorphous and shrill instrument; instrument of music or of torture, the decision is in the ear of the bepiped-upon. But it’s a free country, it says here. (Sometimes we wonder).

So here’s this guy in Washington state, and he’s trying to explain to the rozzers why he ran over four people with his F-350, killing one, and then blew a .23 (just under treble the .08 limit) on Officer Friendly’s Breathalyzer before taking the ride downtown.

In all history, about 99% of these have accomplished nothing but blind destruction, unrelated to war aims. Guernica myths notwithstanding.

A few days ago, Stag introduced a series of 9mm carbines that have some similarities to the Colt workhorse of DOE and police fame, and have a few new features. The Model 9 is available in right or left-handed, and in Tactical or (we guess, to steal from David Ogilvy, “diffident about tactical”) regular trim. This is a regular, RH-oriented Stag Model 9:

This has been one of those weeks. Eyes hurt, nose hurts, strange fluids come out, brain is sluggish.

No, haven’t been near West Africa, thanks for asking.

We owe one post from last week (the weekly wrapup, That Was the Week that Was), and need to resume the series on Collecting US WWII arms, and continue our research on early SMGs. We also pulled another vintage 1983 or so gun mag out of the gun room for a The Past is Another Country feature. And we watched a lot of Aspen Institute foreign policy wonks chinwag over Iraq and ISIL and the pinprick, symbolic (shambolic) airstrikes. We hope to have some hard truth on that circa 1100 Monday, after a gun story first thing (new 9mm AR carbine, and some thoughts on where 9mm long guns fit, and don’t).

Inchon is one of those movies like Ishtar, Heaven’s Gate, or Waterworld. Many more people have heard of how dreadful it is than have actually seen it. We haven’t ever seen Heaven’s Gate or Ishtar, but when we finally got around to seeing Waterworld, we discovered that its reputation hid a pretty decent B actioner, poisoned by too large a budget and too much hype. (We’ve argued before that constraints, like tight budgets or rigid formats, often have a salutary effect on artists). Inchon was a war movie about one of the most dramatic reversals in all of military history: a battle that was full of interesting characters, remarkable events, and human striving in its most elemental. Surely someone could make a great movie out of that. Furthermore, no review of Inchon fails to note that its impresario was Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church; we wondered if maybe there was a little bias happening there. (We certainly see that in reviewers’ treatment...

The latest grim statistic comes from a Liverpool, England suburb, where some guy who was doubtless warned long ago that “smoking will be the death of you” fulfilled the prophecy, by trying to juggle a shorted-out e-cigarette and an oxygen concentrator at the same time.

Apparently we got out ahead of our knowledge recently when we said that the conventional Army maintained cold range practices, and only some ARSOF were using hot range practices.

We often comment on the hazards of the mentally ill, but medical professionals who treat the mentally ill come face to face with those hazards daily. Recently, Philadelphia psychiatrist Dr Lee Silverman cured what was ailing a violent patient, one Richard Plotts, with a couple of 65-grain pills delivered interthoracically — at high velocity. Plotts, armed with a .32 revolver, had already killed his caseworker, Theresa Hunt; he meant to kill his psychiatrist, too. Instead, he is expected to recover from his wounds to stand trial for multiple offenses, including poor Hunt’s murder; and Dr Silverman, and everyone else threatened by Plotts, survived.

No, not Chris Kyle. The other guy. Dude in Kirkwall, Scotland is selling a complete Predator suit for £4,800. We know some of you retired frogs working PSD have the money for the ultimate party suit.