In my youth I was very much interested in the 18^th Century, specifically American Colonial history, but I also found some interest in European history as well. Ok, Military History, and some Political History, but none of that philosophical stuff like Voltaire and his contemporaries. I guess I’m more of a “thinking-about action” guy than a “thinking-about-why” guy. My favorite book was “Northwest Passage” by Kenneth Roberts, which I highly recommend for any young fellow to read: lots of action, adventure, love and pretty decent history all rolled into one. This helped set me on my way to studying deeper into such things as the various colonial wars between Britain and France, and the exploration of the North American continent. Not that I wasn’t already interested, but the book helped drive it home.

I was also somewhat interested in my family history, which, with a name like ‘Gordon,’ led me to dig a bit into the history of various Highland revolts (a deep and fascinating subject). Turns out most of my heritage is Border Scots and English rather than Highland, but that’s okay, since the Borderers were even more unruly than the Highlanders, they were just expelled by the English Crown earlier — to the American Frontier for the most part — so didn’t get quite the same press as the Highlanders. Still, interesting stuff.

My dear mother was very supportive of my interestes, and even provided me with a Gordon Plaid kilt and a Scots Bonnet to run around in...which I certainly did. In fact much of my summer as a 12-year-old was spent in said kilt (though I didn’t go fully “native” if you know what I mean). By my sixteenth year I had also managed to acquire the funds to purchase a rather poor quality reproduction of a British flintlock Light Dragoon pistol, an equally poor quality reproduction of a French Charleville musket, and a kit to build an American (a.k.a. “Kentucky”) Long Rifle (which I did in fact build). I was set! Well, except for a few minor things such as a Claymore broadsword and an all-brass Highland pistol, but those came later.

While I was busy assembling this armory, my dear mother also made me a shirt on a so-called “authentic” pattern, and also brought me a cotton-polyester “colonial” shirt from a Williamsburg visit during one of her trips back East to visit family. (BTW I’m a California boy so anything east of Nevada is “Back East” to me.) I had also managed to get some leather from good old Tandy Leather and made myself a set of “buckskins” (of cowhide, of course) so I was pretty well set to go exploring or revolting, whichever was happening at the time.

I had as well managed to get involved in the actual shooting of black powder firearms, and was regularly attending the big twice-yearly “Rendezvous & Black Powder Shoot” at Mountain Ranch, California, which was only about an hour’s drive away from me, so that was definitely helping to scratch that itch of “doing history” with like minded individuals. I was pretty much always “The Kid”, but I was smart enough to not talk too much and be polite, so I was accepted by the “Old Guys” (who were mostly in their 20’s) and granted permission to hang out with them. It was a heady time indeed!

My Brother Wayne was in college at the time, being five years my senior, and had a friend who was very into photography and asked if I would be interested in posing for some photos in my various outfits. I guess I’m a bit of a ham at heart, so I happily agreed to the idea. These photos are the result of our collaboration. Obviously one is of me as a Highland Rebel, awaiting my turn to discharge my weapons in the general direction of the British Army at Culloden (never mind the pistol and musket represent models from the American Revolution some 30 years later), and the other of me ready to either go on an exploration of the Kentucky wilderness or snipe Loyalists at King’s Mountain...I would have been happy at the time to engage in any of these activities, needless to say.

So there you have it, another snippet of my journey through history, trying vainly to live it but at least getting a taste of it along the way.

Speaking of boys and adventures, take a look at one of Raconteur Press’ new adventure books for boys!

When I was a tyke my nick-name was “Chooch.” Dad claimed it was from reading some ancient novel about the frontier in which the Indian companion of our hero referred to him as “Chooch,” which supposedly signified friend in said fellow’s dialect. The fact that my Dad was a model railroad enthusiast — aside from being an avid reader — lead most people to assume “Chooch” also referred to a steam locomotive. Although I was assured that this was not the case, I’m sticking with it.

Of course my dear beloved Mother diminutive-ized my nickname and usually addressed me a “Choochie,” or worse yet “Chootie.” Thank God my father and other relatives and friends kept it at “Chooch.” As was my case, my best friend, Tommy Holmes, also shared the misfortune of having his own mother as a teacher for a time in grade school. She was my teacher briefly, as well. Once she drew a complete blank on my actual name and called me “Chooch” in class. Thankfully most of the boys were my friends and already aware of that moniker, but the girls found it hilarious. Alas, the trials of childhood.

Now that you know the history of my nickname, on to our story.

One of my parents’ favorite pastimes was taking Sunday Drives into the Gold Country of California, as we were conveniently located in nearby Stockton. I hated this for the most part, as the roads we traversed were generally winding, having been cut out during the Gold Rush, following the lay of the land. Sitting in the back seat of the car, and not being able to see out the windshield, I often got carsick. Not to the point of throwing up, but just feeling miserable. But that’s another story.

One fine Sunday when I was somewhere in the four-years-old category of childhood, say circa 1960, we took a drive to Columbia, a state park preserving many of the original Gold Rush era buildings and a good bit of the ambiance. It was a favorite destination for us, as it’s quite charming. One of the attractions, for me at least, was the fact that they had a stage-coach ride which I loved. What’s not to love about traversing the nearby countryside by horse-drawn vehicle? Being me, I always dressed the part, with my red cowboy hat, six guns (loaded with roll-caps of course) and saddle shoes with requisite Argyle socks. My dad, being less than interested in partaking in such an adventure, enthusiastically encouraged my mother to take my brother and me on the short outing. This was my first time riding in a real stage coach (other than at Knott’s Berry Farm in Southern California) and I was quite excited about the prospect.

Dad purchased our tickets, we boarded the stage, and off we went. I don’t recall too much of the first part of the trip, I’m sure it was quite bucolic, the scenery being mainly dead grass and oak trees, which people with a romantic turn like to refer to as “the golden hills of California.” I just think “hot, dry and miserable” myself, but that’s just me.

Shortly after we left my Dad noticed that a pair of cowboys, who had been lounging about the stage office, mounted their horses (tethered nearby, to my great fascination, as we waited for the stage to arrive) and purposefully rode off. They seemed to be about some specific business, which was for the moment a mystery, but not for long.

One of the highlights of riding the Columbia Stage at this time was that “highwaymen” would “rob” the stage of its treasures (a prop ‘bag of money’), which was in fact a not unheard of experience during the 1850’s and ’60’s. The weekend employment of the aforementioned cowboys in this story was to act as said highwaymen. So, with bandanas over their faces and revolvers in hand, these mounted men accosted the stage which dutifully came to a halt.

“Throw down the mail bag!” or words to that effect were shouted, and one of the cowboys leaned menacingly towards the windows of the stage, waving his revolver in our general direction. I have a vivid memory of a fellow in cowboy hat and bandana mask, with a look of astonishment in his eyes, as I, Hero of the Day, drew my own revolver (fully ‘loaded’ with caps, as you may recall) and proceeded to blast the miscreant and his partner with all my might.

Back at the stage office, my dear father soon observed these fellows riding back in some haste. The office manager, obviously in on the racket, emerged from the building and called out “Where’s the mail bag?”

As they dismounted and tied their horses to the rail, one of them replied, “Aw, some damned kid with a cap gun shot me!”

My father did his best to remain unobtrusive, adopting an air of innocent nonchalance.

So there you have it. Romance, Adventure and Heroism...on a small scale, cementing in my mind the idea that one must ALWAYS be armed with sufficient firepower to over-awe your opponents, no matter what the circumstances. I have not deviated from that, I am proud to say, though sadly I have not had the opportunity to test it out since then. But you never know, my trusty cap gun might come in handy one of these days.

Rigel was a very special cat. A pure-bred, long-haired flame-point Persian, he nevertheless fancied himself a farm cat. When he came to live with us on our five acre spread he proceeded to behave as though that was what he was born and bred to be.

Spending his days outdoors his primary recreation seemed to be dragging in all sorts of vegetation and detritus in the form of sticks, leaves and thorn bush twigs. That and overseeing the chickens, which were his special delight. His special mission for several years involved occasionally jumping out of the bushes and scaring the living daylights out of an unsuspecting hen, and then sitting there with a smug look of satisfaction on his face. Over time his main occupation became sitting in my lap while I attempted to read or type.

Rigel was a special little guy, and for whatever reason he chose me to be his person. I consider myself both honored and blessed to have been so. It was for far too short a time though, and I miss him greatly.

Rigel was originally acquired by our friend Bev, who, for whatever reason possessed her, felt compelled to have a pure-bred Persian cat. She always cursed back-yard breeders but nevertheless she got Rigel from one. He was a beautiful little kitten, but his mother passed along a kidney problem that was supposed to take him to an early grave, by which I mean he wasn’t supposed to live past four years old, something that definitely distressed Bev. But he showed us all in the end, living fifteen glorious years, and I am grateful for it.

Bev developed some major health issues which made it difficult for her to care for a giant fluff ball of a cat along with her Doberman show-dog, so we ended up with Rigel before he was three. We were happy to take him. He enjoyed the Great Outdoors (or at least our yard) something he’d been denied due to Bev living in a forest full of predators, making him a purely indoor cat. Coyotes, raccoons and cougars would happily have made short work of him. Our little hobby ranch, while not perfectly immune from all threats, was an order of magnitude safer, so he now had access to the great outdoors, much to his (and our) delight.

Rigel oozed character, as in he was one. He had a LOT of it, and attitude, and everyone was his subject, but for whatever reason he chose me to be his special person. He would meet me in the driveway when I came home from work, and would follow me around until I finally sat down so he could get in my lap for a good snooze. Or, if not that, would stand in front of his bowl and look at me like “Well, aren’t you going to feed me now? I’m right here, after all!” He was always doing something endearing, or annoying, but whatever it was he did it with feeling.

In his younger years (as in up to about 5 years ago) he also enjoyed sleeping in the middle of the gravel road that went past our house. I watched neighbors and delivery drivers slow down to go around him, because they all understood that it was HIS road, and they needed to respect that. He wasn’t mean about anything, just insistent. I remember a UPS driver having to stop his truck, get out, move Rigel off to the side of the road, and them drive on, leaving Rigel with a fairly disgusted look on his face at the impertinence of the fellow.

He would never scratch (unless you tried to trim his locks of mats with electric clippers, which he hated) and never bit either. He was very chill even for a cat, to the point that our retired Army Special Forces neighbor, who doesn’t like cats at all, though that Rigel was pretty cool.

Rigel also brought things home on occasion. One of them, on a cold December afternoon, was a tiny black kitten who must have followed him home after one of his rare forays into the woods. She was scrawny, sickly, and starving. Rigel brought her to the right place, as Neb caught her and fed her. Poor little thing had pneumonia, and the usual ear mites and fleas, and ended up having to suffer a course of antibiotics to the point that she’s still not very comfortable being picked up. But we still had our old Granny Cat at the time, a 26 year old former feral who was on her way out of this vale of tears and slept most of the time. The kitten, soon named Auri, was more than happy to snuggle with Granny Cat all day and all night. Canned food and the three kinds of of oral antibiotics to kept her going. She recovered, and although Granny Cat was only there for Auri for two months, it was a Godsend for both of them to have someone to snuggle with. Rigel was aloof to these things. He had done his duty and saved her life, and that was, in his mind, sufficient. Auri was still grateful though, and always trilled at him when they passed, even though he preferred to keep to himself. But she definitely thought he was pretty cool.

Did I mention that he was a white long-haired Persian? This meant we had to brush him pretty much every day to keep him from getting mats, and to remove the detritus he would collect during his daily travels. As previously mentioned, his previous owner hadn’t had the strength to keep up with things, so he wasn’t really pleased to be brushed/combed when he moved in with us. But eventually he learned to love it, and would gaze expectantly at the comb when sitting in your lap. Good grief, we must have brushed out hundreds of spare “Rigels” in hair alone over the years, and he produced PLENTY of it. Naturally said hair would find its way onto whatever clothing I was wearing, dark clothing being his specialty. After brushing Rigel one would have to then get a clothes brush and brush one’s self as well, then ball up the hair, and figure out what to do with it. We had boxes of it at one time until it was discovered that birds loved using it for nests, so there it went. I’m certain that we’ll be discovering Rigel hair on our clothing and whatever else it doesn’t belong on for years down the road.

Rigel was a wonderful little guy, got along with everyone (other cats, both male and female), and was just so filled with character that he was a joy to behold. I fully admit to having cried when he died, even though I saw it coming for days. I will miss him greatly, and look forward to the day that I can be reunited with him, and all of the creatures great and small who have made a major impact on my life. And Rigel holds the cake for that. I miss the little bugger, cat hair and all.

Love you, Rigel.

One of the things The Wife Unit2 and I have often discussed on this subject is that things don’t have to make sense to the grunts on the ground in order to make sense to the guys calling the shots. Throughout my career as a “Military Specialist” I heard complaints during filming days from my fellow movie troopers/soldiers to the tune of “This isn’t historically accurate!” or “This is dumb! They wouldn’t/didn’t do it this way!” and variations on that theme. It’s almost always true, to be honest, but as my old boss Riley Flynn used to say, “It’s only a movie.” Also true, and more to the point.

Even in historical films where they’re actually trying to “do it right” there are significant differences between the way things work in a real war and what a film requires in order to be at all watchable. Endless shots of well camouflaged soldiers hiding in a forest gets old quickly, since the point of being camouflaged is to not be seen, whereas the point of a film is to show what is happening. These are somewhat mutually exclusive missions, and thus “reality” has to suffer in the name of storytelling. If you want more reality in storytelling, that’s what books are for. Film is more for mythology.

During my film career, 1980s through early 2000s, there were occasions where we not only had to do maneuvers that were tactically impractical, but I had to come up with commands out of whole cloth to implement them. These on-the-fly commands hadn’t existed previously probably because they were improbable and no one in their right mind would ever have used them—however they were needed to make troop movements make sense for the camera.

Going Off Book

The first case in point is the filming of the movie Ride with the Devil.3 In one scene the Union Cavalry4 chases down the Missouri partisan guerrillas who have just raided Lawrence, Kansas.5 I was given command of the whole of our mounted forces. Since we were also portraying the Missouri boys6, we got to “galvanize”7 into our Union uniforms for the scene. We had five “companies” of cavalry. Mine, at 68 troopers, was the biggest, and I was the senior captain so I was given command of the battalion.

What the director wanted was for us to take a column of companies and turn it into a line of battle while making it possible to keep camera focus on the officers/actors in front. This meant we needed to leave the lead company8 in the center, then have the successive companies fan out to the sides. Unfortunately there isn’t an order for such a maneuver in any of the period drill manuals we were using, as they all had following companies spread out to either the right or the left and come up even with the front company: “Column, RIGHT into Line!” or “Column, LEFT into Line!” This is something we had actually practiced because it’s, you know, in the manual.

But orders is orders, and, not one to be daunted by the mere lack of official authorization for this command, something about “adapt, improvise and overcome” began running through my head. So I simply made up a new one: “Column, RIGHT AND LEFT into Line!”

I had, of course, already worked out the details of what we were going to attempt with my fellow company commanders, and, since we weren’t going to be given a chance to practice it before we began filming, we hoped for the best. Surprisingly enough, it worked out perfectly. Amazing!

Needless to say, the actors riding in front of us weren’t involved in any of the discussions, nor in giving the commands, but simply got to ride in front of the column and look like they knew what they were doing. As what amounts to a “background coordinator” during these scenes, it was always my job to make the actors look good and keep them out of harm’s way. In the end, for this scene I ended up center frame in the final cut, the camera focused on me, waving my right arm around like a one armed jumping jack, hollering out the newly minted command at the top of my lungs, and following up by a command to draw pistols. But my bright shiny brass buttons do look pretty cool, and I must admit they tend to attract the eye.

Piece of Cake

My second example is from Mel Gibson’s The Patriot. It was a marvelous film to work on, and definitely the high point of my career. I had a very professional crew. Almost all of us had previously worked together on several films, and after a few months of riding together on this project we were a well oiled team. Although I was “only” a Platoon Leader in this one, rather than a Company Commander, when we (the British “Green Dragoons”) combined our unit with “Martin’s Militia” I became the de facto Commander. I was also the go-to guy for the Director when he needed something complicated to happen, “complicated” meaning movements that the Assistant Directors didn’t have the wattage to orchestrate.

As on Ride with the Devil, we were working with manuals appropriate to the period, but since Cavalry manuals in the late 18^th Century were pretty rare and unusual, I had to make up a lot of stuff based upon the little we had. This was mostly Baron von Steuben’s manual published after the Revolution in the 1790’s. The Infantry on this film used the British 1764 Exercise of Arms. I also dragged some commands and maneuvers from Cooper’s Manual for Militia from the 1830’s into the fray, because it was the earliest I could find. Well, other than one from 1632, but there wasn’t a whole lot of solid ground to work from in that one. Still, we made do. Adapt, Improvise and Overcome were pretty much my watchwords.

“Adapting” and “overcoming” had limits, though. One day I got a call on my radio9 to have my platoon report to the Wardrobe Department to fit us out as…Infantry. I made my feelings on this “request” pretty plain by first protesting that the Armorer was out of muskets already.10 No one hates being Infantry more than Cavalrymen who would have to dismount from their horses and become Knuckledraggers. OUR feet never touch the ground, so, I mean, come on! What were they thinking? My second form of protest was when I accidentally broke my radio by tossing it over my shoulder, then ordering my platoon to form up. Fine, we would go to set, but we’d go there AS CAVALRY.11 We had our issued12 unit flag, carried by my guidon (the guy who carries the flag around), but I also pulled out my “8” flag from our days as “Evil Holnists” on “The Postman” with Kevin Costner a few years before. Once bad guys, always bad guys. Anyway, we marched over to set from our bivouac, in our customary column of twos, covering the last few hundred yards at a gallop.

Oddly enough, we were not subsequently called upon to do anything, although one of the stunt men noted with a grin, “You boys are looking a little militant today.” Well, yeah. We “hid out in plain sight” for the rest of the afternoon, hijacked some sandwiches on their way to the Big Wigs on set, and generally engaged in sloth for the rest of the day. We were not going to put up our horses, spend an hour in hair and wardrobe, then stand around on set for the last few hours of daylight where we wouldn’t be used anyway because there were, as previously noted, no muskets available.

With the above as background, you can imagine that I wasn’t exactly excited about getting a radio call from HQ on the day we were scheduled to film the Big Climactic Battle Scene. For one thing, I had no idea on earth what we were supposed to be doing during the Big Climactic Battle Scene.

We had been positioned on the crest of a hill, along with General Cornwallis and his staff, looking down13 upon the masses of infantry milling about trying to find their places. When my radio squawked I was asked to come down to “Video Village,” the tent in which the Director, Roland Emmerich, presided, along with lots of monitors showing video of what was going on (hence the catchy name). I obviously had to dismount to make my way into the tent, so I commandeered a nearby Militiaman who I’d worked with before and asked him if he would hold my horse (by the lead...).

What the director wanted was for us Dragoons to form up in two ”Columns of Fours”14 and then “meld” into a single column at speed, and come charging down at a good clip into the fray. Okaaay... Well, we’ll work it out, no problem, piece of cake.15 To my surprise, when I left the meeting to search for my horse I discovered that his lead was being held by one of the main actors, Tchéky Karyo, who portrays the French advisor to Mel Gibson’s character. I thanked him for being so kind, and he informed me that my friend had to go, and that he was happy to be a horse-holder since he had nothing better to do at the moment. By the way, he was an excellent rider, and even brought his own proper saddle and tack with him from France to use in the film. Cool guy, and we went riding together a few times after that.

Back to Our Story. I returned to my troops, and explained what we were going to attempt. Yet again, I made up my commands out of whole cloth. One of my Corporals, Scott White, said “No, no, that won’t work!” I assured him it would, since I figured that at that distance the camera wouldn’t be able to see if we started out staggered and then “zippered” into place. We could do it at a good speed, and, since it was a VERY complex scene, I noted that we’d probably have plenty of opportunities to work on it because there were probably going to be multiple takes.

As it turned out, we did it perfectly on the first take and all subsequent ones as well. Like I said, we were a well-oiled machine by then, after working together for several months, six days a week.

Such is the life of a Hollywood Military Specialist! We get to make other people look good, whether or not it’s historically accurate. In fact I have a nice framed print of Banastre Tarleton (the real bad guy who in the film they call “Tavington”) on which Jason Isaacs, who portrayed Tavington, wrote “Thanks for making me look good”.

All in a days work.

There was plenty of reminiscing about Gordon and Taylor’s experiences on various film sets (they originally met on location shooting “Rough Riders” back in 1996), so I thought I’d scare up a few photos to illustrate things a bit.

Here are the pics we waved in front of the web cam:

“The Postman” (1997) was the movie where the costume designer wanted all of the “bad guy” horses to be black. Since 90% of the horses were bay, dun, buckskin, appaloosa, etc., this meant dying them. It’s absolutely true that they discovered that Revlon was the gentlest dye for the horses. Providentially, one of the troopers had a cousin who was a big wig at Revlon and was happy to provide cases and cases of dye for a cool Hollywood project.

For “The Patriot” (2000), Gordon’s horse, Taxi, could be his regular old self again.

The above pic is from the set of “Two for Texas” (1998), which is the setting for the story about the rainy day, the garbled announcement from a 2nd AD1, the polyglot response to it, Gordon brandishing a sword from a tabletop generating a recitation of the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V from another guy, and a subsequent charge that fizzled out due to lack of actual objective.

The above image goes with the anecdote about the trooper in the Portland Rose Parade (ca. early 90s?) wondering “Why does he ride like he has a stick up his @$$?”2 The following image and movie excerpt further illustrate the reason.

Editorial note from Gordon: The two fellows in the above photo are Jim Jones and Terry (darn… I’ll remember eventually!), both of them big wigs in the Civil War reenacting community, Jim being a Confederate Cavalry Brigade commander and Terry being a Union Cavalry Brigade commander. Jim was nominally my superior, and Terry nominally my subordinate, but what the heck. When we increased our numbers for two weeks or so to shoot the below scene, Terry brought around 25 guys to join our company, pretty much doubling it, so he got to command one platoon, and command of the other went to Rob Culbertson3. So I had 68 men in my “company”, and when I was assigned command of the whole battalion (for the below scene) I had over 250 horsemen. It was pretty darned cool, especially when we got to do an unauthorized (meaning authorized by me) “off camera” pistol charge through camp!4

There has been some loose talk of late concerning messages written on projectiles due to the those put on the bullets/cartridges found in the Mauser rifle allegedly used to assassinate Charlie Kirk. I’ve seen comments claiming that this is a new thing, a new acceleration of political violence by “sending messages” against the enemies of the shooter. This is hogwash. This sort of thing has a long and glorious/inglorious history, depending upon how you choose to look at it.

In recent history, just as in World War II, we’ve seen messages chalked upon munitions in the Ukraine conflict just prior to sending them off to blow their intended victims to shreds. WWI it was done as well. There is a scene in “Blackadder Goes Forth” (set in the trenches of WW1) in which the loyal Baldrick is seen scratching something on a bullet. When Cpt. Blackadder asks him what he’s doing, Baldrick replies that he’s writing his own name on it. Under further questioning, Baldrick explains that he’s heard that everyone has a bullet with his name on it, and if said bullet is in his pocket there’s a much lower likelihood of him being killed by it. Blackadder replies “It’s the one marked ‘to whom it may concern’ which worries me.”

This practice of course goes way, way back, much further than merely the 20^th Century. In fact the Romans used lead sling-shot (the shot, you know, what is literally “shot” from a “sling” a la David in the Old Testament) with comments such as “Take That” cast into the shot as the hot lead was poured into the mould.

We can go even further back than the Romans. Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, famously had his eye shot out by an arrow during a battle (which he won). Legend has it that written on the shaft of the arrow was “For Philip’s Right Eye”.

So this sort of thing, writing hurtful comments on hurtful projectiles, is hardly new. Doubtless there has likewise been plenty of “magic” in the form of hexes and curses (or even blessings) placed upon projectiles as well. Hunters on the American Frontier were known to “hex” their bullets to help ensure accurate and effective shots from their long rifles, and I have absolutely no doubt that our distant ancestors did likewise with their own arrows, or even spears.

Whatever the weapon, the idea of adding a little extra “punch” to it by the magical properties of words has a long and colorful history.

This episode originally aired in April of 2017. Somebody was asking me about Glocks last night, so I decided it was time to re-air this.

From the original show notes: “The Glock: it might not be pretty, it might not be a classic, but it’s reliable, safe, and it gets the job done. It’s one of the most popular handguns to come out of the 20th century, and we’re here to talk about it.”

Links:

• Western Front Artillery At The Outbreak of World War 1

• The Glock

• Roth Steyr in a match: Forgotten Weapons

• Full-auto Glock: FPSRussia

My first paid gig in the world of entertainment was a short film entitled “Vampire in the Woodshed”.

This requires some explanation.

My older brother, Wayne, and his friend Brad were avid film buffs and quite good fiction writers when they were in High School. Sadly they abandoned their budding writing careers when they got into college, but it was good while it lasted. By the time I was about eleven years old, they had already made a few sci-fi films, usually dragging me into “starring” in them, as I was cheap and available. And probably a bit of a show-off as well, so that helped.

At some point, I believe I was in 6^th Grade (they were both well into High School by then), Brad came up with the idea of making a vampire movie to enter into the local film festival, organized by their favorite teacher, Mr. Savilla. He wrote a script, pulled out his Super 8mm movie camera, and borrowed his neighbor’s back-yard shed. This is where I came in.

Some years previously my Dear Mother had made up black satin capes for both my brother and me so we could be “Dracula” for Halloween. These were still around, though of course by this time I was more proportioned for Wayne’s cape, so that was immediately pressed into service by the Costume Department (me). I also pulled out a white shirt, black slacks and a black vest that more-or-less fit me and that was that. Brad was the Writer, Producer and Director, and usually Camera Man, though that office was occasionally filled by Wayne, and at one point even by me, when the other members of the production company were busy being in front of the camera,

Brad was also the head of the Makeup Department, and raided his mother’s vanity for supplies to turn your erstwhile correspondent into a proper Vampire. White foundation, red lipstick, etc. all found a home in our production.

The basic plot was, indeed, pretty basic. Local Yokel (Wayne) was tasked with bringing in some firewood from the Woodshed, where he encountered a frightening vampire (me), and thus was arrived the catchy title for the film. My job was to jump out of the woodshed and menace said yokel, who would then run away screaming. I think he tried it twice before coming back with reinforcements (Brad). This is where I got to film, since both Wayne and Brad were on camera. When the two of them got to the woodshed and looked in, there was of course nothing, being that, among other things, I was behind the camera at the time.

Of course, when Wayne comes back to get the firewood after having been roundly chastised and criticized for being foolish, and opens the woodshed door I jump out again and gnaw on his throat with my Halloween Vampire Teeth (tm) resulting in lots of lipstick, er, blood being spilled. Great close-up shot of me snapping said incisors together as I proceed to rip into my brother’s throat. The End, roll credits.

Brad got the film processed1 and edited, and submitted it to the film festival. It was warmly received2 and managed to get an Honorable Mention, which came with a $5.00 award. Brad, being the fine fellow that he is, practiced profit sharing and gave me a dollar of the proceeds. My first real earned dollar! I was pretty stoked, and on my way to an illustrious film career.

One of my students at the Bremerton Navy base school some years back wasn't standard Navy Issue, he was a CB, i.e. Construction Battalion or Seabee as they are colloquially known. One day he came in wearing a Blackwater1 hoodie. Hmm, thinks I, this is an unusual fellow. So I asked "How did you manage to get that?" His response was that he won it for being the best shot in his group going through small-arms training at the Blackwater training facility in Virginia.

My curiosity piqued, I enquired further.

"I'm part of a 3-man team that is sent to wild and wooly places to assess what the cost will be of repairing things that the Marines have broken, and since we're in dangerous places we go armed."

Okay, and they let you go armed in these 3rd and 4th world countries?

"The State Department tells their government that we go armed or not at all. If you want it fixed, they go armed."

Thus the training. (BTW he also made note of the fact that there was another group at the facility at the same time going through intensive training. My student’s group were told "Don't talk to them, don't look at them, they aren't here". Interesting. Makes me smile.

A comment on my article on Military Procurement Problems focusing on the SIG M7 reminded me of the issues the French Army had in changing calibers/weapons in the years leading up to both WWI and WWII.

Having introduced the smokeless powder, small-bore, high-velocity cartridge to the world in 18861, the French politicians were in such a rush to put it into production that rather than adopt a revolutionary rifle to complement the equally revolutionary cartridge, they instead adopted a fairly pedestrian design based on the Kropatchek and Winchester-Hotchkiss rifles of the late 1870’s. While quite serviceable, they still were burdened with an underbarrel tubular magazine (à la Winchester), rather than the newer box magazine invented by James Paris Lee, introduced by Sharps Rifle Company, adopted by the US Navy in 1879 and upgraded in 1885.2

The resulting rifle which the French Army adopted was the Lebel Mle 18863. The Army knew that the design was a stop-gap, but it was better than anything anyone else had at the time and provoked a serious arms race in Europe culminating in WWI. However, French Army Ordnance was working on other designs and adopted a truly revolutionary long arm, a self-loading rifle using a box magazine with a vastly improved cartridge, in 1910. Production had a rough start, but they were starting to issue them to troops in...1914. With a major war in progress, thousands of the older Lebel Mle 1886 rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition already in hand, the project was doomed. There were later developments in the self-loading rifle arena from the French, notably the Mle 1917 and Mle 1918, which did well enough to encourage further testing, but they never became standard issue.

On the other hand, if you tear apart an Mle 1918, which was a gas-operated, en-bloc clip fed semi-automatic infantry rifle, you see the basic outline of the...US M1 Garand, arguably one of the best infantry rifles of WWII. It just needed some R&D to get there.

Having given up on some of their earlier designs, the French Army continued undaunted in their search for a suitable standard issue semi-automatic rifle for their infantrymen. In 1936 they adopted a bolt-action rifle (Mle 1936) meant to be a complementary arm to the self-loader they were working on. With a new 7.5mm cartridge, a HUGE improvement over the old 8mm Lebel round, it promised great things. The one they were still working on, the self-loading rifle, was planned to be issued in...1940. So, when WWII broke out, they issued the bolt-actions meant for second-line troops to the front-line troops, and pulled out the now venerable Mle 1886 Lebels from storage and issued them to whoever else needed a rifle.

The French managed to finally begin production of their 1930s designed rifle in 1949, and it remained in service for another 30 years or so, doing yeoman service in Indochina, Morroco, and other exotic locales where the French Army found itself. They eventually replaced it with a fascinating “bull-pup” style assault rifle in 5.56X45 NATO, which lasted until recently, and is now being replaced with, of all things, a German design: the HK416, also in 5.56 NATO. Funny thing, it’s also been adopted by the USMC (as the M27), the Germans (of course), and several other NATO countries. What is really funny to me is that virtually all NATO weapons are at this point derived in form and function from Eugene Stoner’s AR15, but that’s another story.

If you, Dear Reader, have been paying any attention at all to military goings on of late, you’re probably at least aware of the Army’s latest attempt to replace the much-vaunted and venerable M16/M4 class of rifles currently in the Army’s inventory. The proposed rifle promises to be not only of longer effective range, but more lethal at those ranges and of course because of that, much heavier.

There has been a fair amount of discussion about the XM7, now officially the M7 rifle, designed and manufactured by SIG (Schweitzer Industrie Gesellschaft) SAUER of Germany. Most recently there has been a bit of hullabaloo over an article presented by US Army Captain Braden Trent to the Marine Corps Modern Day Marine event in April. Captain Trent had many cogent arguments against the adoption of the rifle, with the weight of both rifle (complete with optic and suppressor) and ammunition load-out being one of the biggest strikes against it. Furthermore, it introduces a new caliber, the 6.8X51, which, while a hot round, introduces greater wear and tear on the firearm. Additionally this puts a new cartridge into a logistics chain that could be stretched pretty thin in the event of a major conflict. At least it takes magazines that are already in inventory for the M110 in 7.62X51NATO. Sig and Big Army of course had plenty to say in response, but the process of adopting the rifle for general issue goes on.

To me though, the biggest issue is the “Wrong Weapon for Wrong War” syndrome. Henry Chan, a former US Army Ordnance Captain who with a friend has a Youtube channel called “9-Hole Reviews”, has talked about this as well. The complaints about the M4’s lack of range against Afghans, armed with British bolt-action rifles in .303 caliber dating from “lessons learned” in the Boer War of 1900, are absolutely without merit in a peer-on-peer conflict 125 tears later. The war in Ukraine has shown that while you might be able to engage your enemy infantry at 800 yards with your full-caliber rifle (5.56X45NATO is considered an “intermediate cartridge”), the enemy has all sorts of interesting opportunities to return the favor via mortars, missiles and artillery. 300 yards is probably the outside limit for rifleman-on-rifleman engagements, and even then there are plenty of other weapons, such as grenade launchers and medium machine guns which can add flavor to the mix.

To put this all into perspective, there have been a LOT of missteps along the way in the adoption of a standard infantry rifle for general issue over the past century plus. The Krag-Jorgensen rifle, the first smokeless-powder magazine-fed rifle in US service, adopted in 1892, was subject to a plethora of small tweakings over the course of the next decade, and is a good case in point. While a fine rifle in it’s own way, the primary reason it seems to have been adopted over other, probably far better choices was that it was more accurate and easier to operate as a single-shot, as opposed to a magazine-fed, rifle. The criticism of the Army always fighting the last war is pretty valid here, but military organizations are pretty conservative for a good reason: if you try out something new and it doesn’t work the way you expect it to, not only do you kill off a lot of your soldiers, but you might lose your war and kill off most of your civilian population in the process. So they like things to be pretty well settled in prior to general adoption. Try a lot of stuff out, but wait for time to decide which is the better choice.

For the Krag, it lost out to the Mauser action which was proven during the Spanish American War of 1898 when 150 Spaniards using clip-loading magazine-fed Mausers held off 1500 Americans at San Juan Hill for a good length of time. Again, a good rifle using a pretty decent round, but not of the same caliber (literally and figuratively) as the Mauser. Five years later we adopted the Mauser action (and paid a big fine for not paying patent royalties) in the form of the M1903 Springfield rifle. More tweaking on it and it’s cartridge¹ resulted in a rifle that carried us through two world wars. This was often in a minority role as other rifles were more available or more suitable, but still not a bad record.

The much vaunted and praised M1 Garand, adopted in 1936, was beset by its own issues as well. To begin with, it was originally designed to use a 10-round en-bloc clip of .276 caliber rounds, which, in retrospect, would have been wonderful, and we’d probably still be using it as our primary military round. But cost, logistics, and bureaucratic red tape almost killed the project. Douglas MacArthur, then US Army Chief of staff, made the command decision to convert it to .30-06, resulting in a much larger, heavier rifle with only an eight-round magazine. Even so it saved the project and probably a lot of American lives during WWII.

But it had teething issues as well. There was the infamous “7^th Round Stoppage”, brilliantly explained by General Julian Hatcher of the Army Ordnance Department, which had not been present in the shop models of the design but became apparent when production began. An Ordnance Sergeant took it upon himself to figure out what was going on and. He took a shop model and a production model and inspected and measured every single part and aspect of the rifles side by side. What he found was that a small “bump” of steel in the receiver had been milled away in the production model in order to facilitate manufacture, but was present in the shop model. He had a production model made that kept the “bump”, and it shot fine. More tests were done and the milling process was changed to ensure it was kept intact. Problem solved, but it had caused a lot of uproar in the shooting public at the time. There was also a problem with the “Gas Trap” system of operation, which was only solved very early in WWII, with the soon-to-be-standard “long stroke piston” action replacing it. A number of hurdles still needed to be overcome, but what resulted was a fine weapon that served wonderfully in WWII, Korea and even into Vietnam in some cases.

These things highlight what is going on with the XM7. As mentioned above, Henry Chan at “9-Hole Reviews” covers all of this in a whole episode on what he thinks is going on with the XM7.

Captain Chan points out that there may be some interesting bureaucratic smoke and mirrors going on with this rifle. He notes that the Marine Corps has shown no interest in it, having just adopted their Heckler and Koch² M27 in 5.56X45, the standard US military cartridge for almost 60 years. All of their ammunition and magazines in inventory are compatible, the controls the same as on an M16/M4, and virtually all of the accessories are also compatible, even the bayonet (gotta love the Marines!). But what the M27 project started out as was a replacement of the belt-fed light machine gun, the M249, which fires the 5.56mm round as well. There are some issues of reliability with the M249, but it also uses a LOT of ammunition, it’s heavy, and is noticeably different from the other firearms that a Marine squad carries. This makes it a high-value target for an enemy to concentrate fire on, plus the extra burden of belted ammunition which a squad has to carry to keep it fed made the Marine Corps look to other solutions. Hearkening back to Latin American adventures in the 1920’s and 30’s, WWII, and Korea, the Marines resuscitated the idea of the “Automatic Rifle”. In an earlier incarnation, the much-beloved M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle, the BAR, was a mainstay of squad firepower during those conflicts. Attempts in the 1950’s by the Army to replace it led to some pretty dismal affairs, but in the late-1980’s the FN Minimi, adopted as the M249, offered a solution. Subsequent experience suggested something lighter was still in order, thus the M27.

But it didn’t end there. Some time in the past decade the Marine Corps did a bureaucratic end-run and has managed to get the M27 issued to not just the Automatic Riflemen of each squad, but to every grunt in the Fleet. Well, at least they’re in the process of doing so. M16s and M4s are relegated to REMFs, while each company keeps a number of the old M249s in reserve in case they feel the need to lay down some hate the old fashioned way. But by going about it the way that they did, the Marines managed to upgrade their weaponry without all of the hullabaloo that normally accompanies such attempts. See, again, the “XM7”.

Speaking of the XM7, Captain Chan points out that with adopting not just a new rifle but a new machine gun (which no one has any complaints about) in the form of the M250, the adoption of a new cartridge would produce a major strain on our logistics. He further points out that we currently have a LOT of 7.62X51NATO ammunition in stock, and stockpiled throughout the world. Probably in the billions of rounds. But happily, the new SIG product just so happens to be very easy to convert to that cartridge with the simple act of changing out the barrel. Both Captains Chan and Trent point out that the XM7 would make a fine Designated Marksman’s rifle, while the SIG M250 would be a capable, and much lighter replacement for the M240B Medium Machine Gun currently in use, and likewise has easily replaceable barrels. Chan suggests that this may well be the real reason for the adoption: get the rifle on the official inventory list, “give in” on not issuing it out as a general issue rifle, convert it and the M250 to the much more available 7.62NATO cartridge (which as you may suspect also has international implications) and call it good.

Interesting theory. We’ll see how it plays out. In the meantime don’t dump your AR15 and all of your 5.56 (also NATO) ammo quite yet. I doubt that the Military Industrial Complex is quite done with it.

¹ Caliber .30, M1906, i.e. 30-06, still one of the most popular rounds in the US.

² What is it with all of these German companies getting big contracts???

Recruited

Back in my “Military Contracting” days I was hired by a shadowy organization to help rid Afghanistan of the Evil Soviet Occupation. We were to be outfitted in Afghan garb, armed with ancient WWI rifles and ride into combat on horseback against Russians in armored vehicles armed with belt-fed machine guns and AK-47s. It promised to be quite a lark. So we light heartedly set out to meet up with some supposed ex-Special Forces guy with a funny French name like “Rambeaux” or something like that.

That wasn’t his real name of course. He was a muscular Italian guy with an even more unlikely name, and the “shadowy organization” was based in Los Angeles, but what the heck. It was 1988, the heyday of big Hollywood action films, the pay was good enough for us and, again, it would be a lark.

I lived in northern California in those days. One of my co-workers, who was supplying horses for us, called me and asked me if I could check out the area of operations.

“Uh, Karl, that’s 600 miles from where I am right now.”

“Really? It looks close on the map.” Karl lived in Illinois, and “two states away” to him was maybe a two hour drive.

“Yeah, but its a big place. I’m way north of where we’re going. I’ll meet you there.”

“Oh. Well, do you have any advice though for us Midwesterners coming out there?”

“Yeah. It’s January and the Wardrobe people are going to be outfitting us in what amount to cotton bed sheets. Wear some woolies underneath. It gets cold out there in the desert.”

So off we went to work on Rambo III.

Boots on the Ground

We assembled in our assigned area, got ourselves organized into companies for administrative purposes, saddled our horses and rode out to our drill field. For Afghans we were remarkably well versed in mid-19^th Century American cavalry drill, being that most of us were (American) Civil War reenactors. We got ourselves outfitted by the Wardrobe Department in Afghan mufti, and then armed by the Armorer, who issued most of us with US M1917 bolt action rifles. Long, heavy, and assuredly not well suited for mounted use, but there it is. About one out of every ten guys was issued with a semi-automatic AK-47 (variety!) and we were ready for action.

There were about 100 of us “reenactors”1, and another hundred or so mounted stunt men, so we made a respectable showing. It was pretty obvious as to who was who, since when anything big and scary, such as a helicopter, flew over us the stunt mens’ horses exhibited their extreme displeasure, while our horses, being used to cannon fire, musketry, flags, and other amusements of war, simply tensed and went “Hmmm, what fresh hell are these idiots going to subject us to now?” They eventually got over it.

Our first “cavalry charge” was pretty impressive I have to say, even from an insider’s viewpoint. The two hundred of us formed up in two lines charging across a BIG dry wash that had been scraped of what little vegetation had been there in order to even out the various high and low spots. Unfortunately, while the high spots were pretty firm going, the low spots, now filled in with loose sand, were not. Charging across at a pretty good clip was interesting, as we would be cantering along nicely and then hit a soft patch and show down noticeably, then speed up as we hit firmer ground again. Kind of like having something wrong with your car engine, but on a horse and therefore much more close and personal.

We did that for a day or so, but eventually the shooting (of film, that is) moved to where the real action was going to be. The production company had rented a plethora of old Soviet armor (see the header photo at the top), along with various other armored vehicles which had been modified to look like old Soviet armor, and strewn it about the set with glorious abandon. Through this vehicular obstacle course we were supposed to charge at full speed...and they kept moving the armor between takes so we never knew exactly where this stuff might be at any given time. I suppose this is just like real life battle, which gave a certain “je ne sais quoi” to the whole affair. Also, as in real combat, there were unintended consequences for those involved.

Let me mention that the horse I had at the time was a former polo pony who had absolutely no sense of other’s personal space and enjoyed a good collision when it was presented. My own riding skills back then weren’t as honed as I thought they were, so hilarity ensued. In one instance we ran right into the back of an Armored Personnel Carrier (armor plate is hard, let me tell you), and on another we safely rounded said APC only to find my Company Commander and horse stopped dead in their tracks broadside to me. As noted above, my own mount had no compunctions about personal space and there were about a hundred other horses and riders also going at full speed in close proximity to us, somewhat reducing our ability to maneuver, so we T-boned him at full speed. I went flying and did a nice complete somersault, landing smack on my butt. Sadly it was on the very firm ground, rather than the soft stuff, so I broke my tailbone in the process. This went undiagnosed in the moment, but further activities revealed it to me acutely.

My pony decided to continue on his way with the other horses in the scene, leaving me to the inglorious circumstance of having to walk. After “Cut!” was called, a number of my fellows, who had not succumbed to unscripted dismounts, came by leading horses. “Nope, not mine, thanks!”, was repeated several times. Since this went on for a while, I began to feel a bit better about my own situation, in that I was not the only one to be forced into the “ground-pounder” role. I was eventually reunited with my horse, and it was as I mounted up that I discovered my injury. Sitting the saddle wasn’t too bad, but my mount had a very choppy gait, which brought certain things to my attention. I was using a Grimsley, based upon the Asiatic/Eastern European Hussar saddle, with a very high cantle and pommel. That cantle would smack me in the butt at every gait but a walk, so I had mixed feelings about the whole affair. Happy to be mounted, unhappy to be subjected to the rigors of being mounted. Ah, the life of a cavalryman.

Fun with Tanks or How I Lost My Revolver

Part of the amusement of riding through armored vehicles is that, being vehicles, they move. Not only between takes to create static displays (a.k.a. set dressing), but also while you are trying to ride among them during takes. Since the drivers couldn’t see us, we had to be quite mindful of their location at all times. Luckily, neither horse nor man was squished, but it did make one pay attention to one’s surroundings and “be in the moment”.

During our meal breaks, we got to talking with the guys portraying the Soviet soldiers. Turned out that they were all Marines from the local Yuma Marine Air Station. It seemed as though the movie folks, being somewhat ignorant of how various military organizations are actually organized, had assumed that being Marines, they would know how to drive tanks. It never occurred to any of them that this was an AIR STATION. So they had assembled said Marine airplane mechanics who had volunteered for this hazardous duty and asked them a few hopeful questions:

“Okay guys, who here as ever driven a tank?”

Crickets.

“Okay, who has been in a tank before?”

Crickets

“Hmmm... Okay, who has ever SEEN a tank before”

Lots of hands.

“Okay, you guys are now drivers!”

The remainder became infantry, which had it’s own amusements.

So, in our next scene, we lusty young-ish cavalrymen2 were instructed to ride around the various tanks and APCs trying to look like we were actually successfully engaging them. Not being Polish Cavalry, we lacked lances to poke at them with, but we figured that we would come up with something. The guys with AK’s had all of the fun. All went well until the Special Effects crew started setting off gasoline bombs. We were told where they would be, but in the moment you’re not thinking about gasoline bombs when you’re trying to avoid being turned into Alpo by a tank, so we (well, to be exact, I) lost track of exactly where the heck those incendiary things were. I mentioned that our horses were pretty used to a lot of exciting events taking place around them, and that helicopters weren’t that big a deal. However, large balls of fire billowing up in the air to the accompaniment of a very large “BOOM!” was new.

Horses, being prey animals, react to such stimuli by leaving the area in the most efficient way possible, which is often sideways. I, not really expecting to be quite as close as we were to the “exciting new development”, was therefore not ready for this move and ended up, yet again, in the sand. This time I had thoughtfully held on to the reins, though it did result in me making a fairly broad furrow in said sand as my pony continued to try to escape the Horse Eating Fireball. When things settled down (and fortunately the tank we were playing tag with was going a different direction than I was) I stood, dusted off the several pounds of sand which I had acquired, and remounted my trusty steed. It was only a while later and in a new location that I noticed that my holster was empty.

Much against regulations, but pretty standard behavior for me, I was packing my good old Colt’s New Service revolver, caliber .455, that had been purchased by the British during WWI. That it had seen better days was an understatement. It looked like someone had rinsed it off in salt water and put it away for several weeks, then attempted to clean off the rust with a wire brush. The inside was in perfect shape though, and it shot wonderfully so I was quite happy to have found it at a great price, affordable to the starving college student that I had been at the time of acquisition. The holster I had it in was a Bulgarian Luger holster from WWII, which somehow more-or-less fit the big Colt, and in my mind made a perfect sidearm combination for an Afghan. Needless to say it was unloaded, but I had foolishly neglected to use the lanyard which I had actually brought along with me. [Editor’s note: Mr. Frye has henceforth always used lanyards when mounted.]

I had become friendly with one of the Armorers, and after my sorrowful discovery I went to him and mentioned my loss. He, being a fellow gun guy, was understanding and said he would look out for it if someone turned it in. I had given up hope by that evening when my boss, Ray, our actual Contractor, called out my name.

“Gordon Frye! Is this yours??”

“Oh my G@d! You found it!”

“Yeah, one of our guys saw the barrel sticking up out of the sand and grabbed it. Put it in your car and don’t carry it again.”

“Okay, no worries. Thank you!!”

I would henceforth only carry it concealed.

Got it back. Amazing. What is even more amazing is that several years later I was on my way home from the shooting range and stopped for dinner with friends. My Jeep got broken into and that same Colt’s New Service was stolen. I was pretty heartbroken, since it had come back to me once, and now was taken away again. I filed a police report and pretty much put it out of my mind until years later I received a call from the California Highway Patrol asking me if I had such a weapon, serial number such and such. I replied that I had owned one but it had been stolen from me. The Chippie said, “Well, we have it here, picked it up from a felon during a traffic stop and the judge said to return it to its rightful owner. Bring us a copy of the police report and it’s yours.” I was, needless to say, elated. That gun stays with me for the rest of my life. For some reason it likes me! Ugly guns need love too I guess.

John Wayne-ing It

Due to a few more exciting horse mishaps, known colloquially in the movie horse crowd as “playing lawn dart”, I was assigned to a machine gun mounted in the back of a horse-drawn cart. Sweet, I thought, somebody else gets to take care of the horse and drive it around and I get to play with a machine gun all day! I was issued a Browning M1919A4 “Light” Machine Gun (a mere 31 pounds of joy), complete with several belts of 30-06 blank ammunition to drape across my body in true desperado style. I was stoked.

We were assigned a position near the edge of the wash, up on a cliff looking over the set. “Deep Background” I believe is the term for that office. One of my friends from other projects, good old Bunky, a short, stocky (as in muscular) fellow, was on the film as a makeup man (his actual job in real life.) A Viet Nam vet, I think he had been in most of the regiments making up the 11th Airborne Corps, at least it seemed like it, as his truck had decals for the 501^st, 502^nd, 503^rd, and 505^th Parchute Infantry Regiments on the rear window. It turned out that Casting had neglected to supply a door gunner for the helicopter, which looked to me like a French Alouette somehow refigured to pass for a kind-of-sort-of Soviet helicopter, so our boss Ray showed up one day while Bunky was slapping makeup on us and said:

“Bunky! We need you as a door gunner today!”

“But Ray!” he protested, “I haven’t done that in decades!”

“Don’t worry, it’ll come back to you. Get going.”

So, later that day, I’m minding my own business as Deep Background, and here comes this big helicopter flying by, somewhat above us and well above the set stretched out below, and there’s Bunky at the door, waving at me. Cool! So I wave back of course. This is going to be fun, thinks I.

I guess the Director thought that Deep Background ought to be closer, so orders were given that these horse-drawn carts needed to back up to the edge of the cliff. My driver, being a man of discretion and wisdom, refused. I said, “No worries! I’ll dismount and take the MG with me. and stand at the edge and make noise. Piece of cake”, and proceeded to remove said Browning M1919A4 “Light” Machinegun, my belts of ammo, and myself from the cart and mosey over to the edge of the cliff. It then occurred to me that the MG was going to be somewhat awkward to hold, or “John Wayne” it,3 so, since we had been issued with “prayer shawls” to drape over our necks, I figured that I’d engage in a bit of blasphemy and tie either end of the shawl to the barrel and pistol grip of the Browning (yes, they have a pistol grip, with a fully exposed trigger.) “Voila!” thinks I, “this is great!”, and soon we were ready for “action!”

Another friend of mine, Roland, had also been tasked to be a gunner on a horse-cart, but he, being of higher status than I (he was close buddies with Ray), managed to get the cart with a pair of Twin 50’s on it. These being Browning M2 Heavy Machineguns in .50BMG caliber, AKA Ma Deuce. They had been modified by fitting light metal sleeves over the barrels to make them look like Soviet DShK’s, the Soviet answer to our Ma Deuces. His driver, being more certain of his horse’s temperament, backed the cart up pretty close to the edge of the cliff.

Strewn about us were also a number of actual Afghans from the Greater LA Area, who were portraying, unsurprisingly, Afghans. They were on foot, mostly armed with M1903 Springfield rifles. I was disappointed that we weren’t all give British SMLE rifles, but I can understand the desire to keep ammunition compatability at a premium, so at least MOST of the weapons were using .30-06 blanks. I remember seeing one of them pounding the butt of his rifle on the ground so I asked him what was wrong. He said that a cartridge was stuck in the chamber (well, words to that effect) and it wouldn’t come out. I asked for the rifle, closed the bolt and removed the offending, still live, blank cartridge. Oy.

So the scenario was that when we were given the cue to begin our action, we machine gunners would blaze away while the Afghans filtered down the cliff face (wasn’t super steep and just made of firm sand), accompanied by some of our horsemen. We had fired off a few belts of ammo prior to this particular take, and as the Afghans began moving down, one of the barrel sleeves of the twin 50’s managed to work its way loose from the firing and went flying down range with some velocity. An unfortunate Afghan below was struck squarely in the back of the head with the thing, sending him sprawling face down in the sand. Luckily the barrel sleeve didn’t weigh much. The rather astonished Afghan gave Roland a rather offended look as he rose, holding the back of his head. Later, I mentioned to him the cool way Afghans have of cutting a man’s throat by punching a knife through the neck and cutting outward from the spine. He was not amused. Good thing we weren’t actually in Afghanistan.

We had been instructed that when a green flare (as I remember it) went up that would be the signal for “ACTION!” and when a red flare went up, that was the signal for “CUT!”. All well and good. The Green flare was launched, and figures began moving below us. I was ready to start wasting ammunition, and here came Bunky in his helicopter, this time flying level with us, Bunky busily shooting at ME. I returned the favor, and we had a grand old time shooting blanks at one another.

Red flare, “CUT!”

Reset. Back to One.4

Green flare: this time the pilot was flying BELOW us, and Bunky and I resumed shooting at each other.

Red flare, “CUT!”

Except I didn’t. It seemed that my trigger, which, as noted, is exposed on a Browning M1919A4, managed to get itself caught in the folds of my prayer shawl, doubtless as punishment for my blasphemy, and continued to fire despite my letting go of the trigger.

Everyone on set is now looking at me, John Wayne-ing my machine gun, people yelling “CUT!!”

How embarrassing! I gathered my wits and resolved to end this catastrophe, grabbing the ammunition belt with my left hand and twisting it, thus jamming the demonic thing. “Whew!” The situation, and about half a belt of ammo, saved. And lessons learned.

Trench Warfare

They say about small towns that there isn’t much to see, but what you hear makes up for it. This also goes for the film industry. One of the stories that got around on “Rambo III” was that one of the aforementioned Afghans working as infantry background had been issued a fully-automatic AK-47. Whether this was the subject of someone’s prank or due to nefarious actions, he somehow managed to “lose” his AK while on lunch break. I suspect he wasn’t really up to speed on the US legal system and how firearms, ESPECIALLY fully-automatic firearms are dealt with, but the Full Wrath of the ATF was brought down quickly. A VERY thorough search of the entire area was conducted5 and eventually the AK was found stuffed in a creosote bush, much to the relief of the Armorer and Production, and to the dismay of everyone else who was planning on doing their own “thorough search” later. Oh well.

There was another funny story that we got from Ray. Production had ordered some trenches dug, to later be manned by Marines playing Soviet Infantry. As noted previously, the armor had a tendency not only to be moved between takes but to also during takes, which made for interesting experiences for the horse cavalry. During one take, one of our fellows, Richard, was making a bee-line for a gap between one of the tanks and the beginning of the trenches, which sloped down for easy access. The tank driver had other ideas and decided to move the vehicle forward, blocking Richard’s planned route, and his only escape was by way of going INTO the trench. At a gallop. They actually got this on camera, which I would love to see in an outtakes reel. Remember, the trench was filled with Marines, with the sudden added benefit of a horse and rider barreling down it at a pretty good clip. Ray later said that the Keystone Kops performance of the Marines exiting the trench by leaping out of it at top speed as the horse galloped through was quite the comedy moment, and the studio gave Richard a bit of a pay bump that day (so I was told) and many kudos for the stunt.

All in all, the whole project made for some pretty cool adventures, I must say.

About 25 years ago or so a good friend of mine, Randy K, a Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley (your computer uses stuff he has patents on) invited another friend and me to have dinner with him at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco. You know, the Illuminati guys. Turns out that the Bohemian Club's charter states that a certain number of membership slots (I think it's 50 each) go to professors at UC and Stanford to keep a good balance of people in the membership and so he ended up with one. I'll tell a story of my adventure in Bohemian Grove another time...

It was Marine Night and the guest speaker was former Secretary of State George Schultz, who had been a Marine Platoon Leader in the Korean War. My friend John and I were both failed Marine Officer Candidates (we didn't wash out, "other things" came up in the course of our Platoon Leadership Class training to send us in other directions, sad to say) thus the invitation. I guess we were the closest thing to Marines Randy knew. So there we were, walking up the steps to the entrance to the Bohemian Club, and there's a Marine Major General at the door, opening it for us.

Needless to say, we were pretty impressed with ourselves, having a Major General (two-stars) as a doorman, until I glanced just behind us and saw the two Lieutenant Generals (three-stars) coming up behind us. Such rarified air! So much for our egos, but still pretty good for a pair of failed Officer Candidates. Makes me smile.

We spent most of the evening hanging out with the Marine Band which was also in evidence. They were all NCO's, and much more to our level of conversation. When I referred to them as "Musics" they laughed, and said that they hadn't come across that term in a while. Also makes me smile.

Doing some research on tank and counter-tank, drone and counter-drone warfare, I was reminded of the constant play-off of measure/countermeasure that has gone on in warfare over humanity’s multiple millennia. Sword vs. shield, chariot vs. horseback, cavalry vs. pike etc. It seems to almost always be a case of an effective, but rather expensive, weapon or weapons system being countered by a cheaper countermeasure. For example: expensive weapons systems, such as the chariot, which required not only the chariot and multiple equines but a driver, warrior and often a shield bearer as well, being countered by a single man mounted on a single horse. Well disciplined infantry, such as the Greeks raised, could withstand and stop Persian chariot assaults, but couldn’t actually defeat them. However, Steppe horsemen could swarm the charioteers, run them down and annihilate them. Not without cost to themselves of course, but an individual man and horse was much cheaper to field, so an overall savings to the king or tyrant who raised the army.

On the other hand, small numbers of expensive but well employed weapons systems can also work well. The best example of this was the Parthian1 “Cataphracts”, (fully armoured including their horses) mounted archers defeating Roman infantry. Some 800 Cataphracts defeating several thousand Romans, much to the chagrin of Crassus, Julius Caesar’s rival, who led the legions to their doom.

Another example would be the fully armoured2 French knights, armed with lances, of the late Middle Ages, who could be stopped by English archers who aimed for the unarmoured horses. If/when the French were poorly led, this means they could be halted and the battle won. This changed when the French Crown organized professional (read: well trained and disciplined) heavy cavalry in the form of the Compagnies d’Ordonnance with armoured horses, rather than simply raising feudal levies and taking what showed up. Concurrent with this they developed an efficient, mobile train of artillery which could out range the archers, and the English lost the Hundred Years War quickly.

The Swiss pikemen of the late 15^th century offered a fairly good counter to the fully armoured knight and warhorse. Even so, French knights were able to charge through these 4,000-man pike squares with a certain degree if impunity. With the advent of cheap, effective, man-portable firearms requiring little training to use, in the form of first the matchlock arquebus and then the heavier matchlock musket, infantrymen were able to at least keep these land dreadnaughts at a distance for most of an engagement. However, disciplined formations of knights could still defeat poorly disciplined infantry despite the effective countermeasures.

As usual, the opposite is also true. Discipline matters. As it always has been, so it always shall be.

It wasn’t the pike or the musket which finally spelled the end of the armoured knight. The knight was not merely a man in armour, but a tremendously expensive weapons system requiring a single nobleman to bring on campaign not only himself, his armour, and his horse’s armour, but at least three fully trained (read: expensive) stallions for combat. These were not merely intact male horses, but special animals whose aggressive nature is necessary for charging into a pike square of infantry or another unit of cavalry. The horse was very much an active part of the weapons system, not simply a conveyance. Add to this list palfreys (riding horses as opposed to war horses) for himself and his squire, a full entourage of servants to care for the knight and his camp as well the horses, and, being a noble, expecting good recompense in gold or whatever for his time and effort, the costs added up quickly.

The effective counter to this was the mounted pistolier. While armoured himself, he could make due with an unarmoured, if well-trained, gelding3 rather than a stallion, a spare horse ridden by his “boy” (a young man training for war but in the meantime acting as a servant) and a pair or more of wheellock pistols to be carried in holsters on the pommel of the saddle. Up until this development, the armoured cavalrymen could keep just out of range of the infantry, able to close the distance quickly to charge in at the opportune time yet suffer minimal losses from slow-firing infantry weapons. Now, these so-called “Pistoliers”, armed with portable self-igniting firearms capable of piercing all but the finest (read: most expensive) armour at close range, could swarm the otherwise superior armoured lancers and defeat them.4

The armoured pistolier was eventually replaced by the cheaper and easier to equip carabinier5 , who, by the middle of the 17^th century, rather than wearing a 3/4 suit of armour, was merely armed with an open helmet, breastplate, and a buff-coat. Well-led and disciplined cavalry, such as Oliver Cromwell’s “Ironsides”, could defeat infantry already softened up by artillery or other infantry, but their best use was to run down broken formations and slaughter them, as had been the primary function of cavalry for most of history. Their original function, as more-or-less mounted infantrymen carrying lighter arquebuses, was then replaced by actual mounted infantry in the form of Dragoons, who were even cheaper to raise and field. As per tradition, however, once a man climbs onto a horse he is loath to dismount, so Dragoons, too, eventually morphed into cavalry.

Interestingly, the reduction in armour worn by horsemen6 caused an interesting reversion to the sword or lance once again as the primary weapon. They still carried pistols and carbines to defeat anyone who got smart and started using armor again, but...cost.

Cheap and effective, especially if it requires less long-term training, always wins out in the end.

Measure and counter-measure

With the adoption of flintlock infantry weapons, along with the paper cartridge by the end of the 17^th century, came greater firepower and less need for the eighteen foot pikes of the preceding two centuries. When socket bayonets, which fit on the muzzle of every musket, were introduced to turn every musketeer into a pikeman as well, the pike was abolished from European military formations. It was just much simpler to have every infantryman be both musketeer and pikeman. Add to that well disciplined training and drill formations and it’s cheaper in the long run.

The introduction of rifled infantry weapons in the mid-19^th century increased the range and effectiveness of infantry formations, and cavalry had to change from a shock weapon to become primarily a scouting and screening arm. Mass cavalry charges were suicidal. The upgrade to first breech-loading and then magazine rifles accelerated this trend, though it took a while for commanders to figure this out. The Boer War of the dawn of the 20^th century showed that mounted troops were still valid in many ways, but mostly as a means of transporting infantry across vast distances at speed rather than as shock weapons. World War I, with its machine guns and, even more impactful, rapid fire artillery, doomed the horse to a completely auxiliary role in warfare. They were not completely out of the game though, as mounted troops were still used at the beginning of the 21^st century in Afghanistan in the form of US Special Forces utilized as mounted infantry in the first days of the GWOT7. But, after some four thousand years of use, measure and counter-measure finally succeeded in defeating the horse as a weapon of war.

Their replacement as a shock weapon was, of course, the tank. Immediately counter-measures were taken to defeat these mechanical monsters. The Germans in World War I built much-enlarged bolt-action rifles in 13.2mm, while after the war various nations built and issued 20mm anti-tank rifles. Infantry anti-tank guns, actually small artillery pieces, were also developed. While all of this went on, tanks gradually increased in size and armour effectiveness. By World War II, man-portable anti-tank rockets such as the Bazooka were developed, and the trend, both in bigger and heavier tanks and more effective anti-tank weapons continues. Expensive measure, cheaper counter-measure.

Now a new threat to the dominance of armor and other weapons systems as well (e.g. ships, aircraft) has appeared in the form of drones. The war in Ukraine has shown that inexpensive drones, armed with explosives and piloted from afar, can defeat multi-million dollar tanks. Counter-measures by tank crews include cages and nets, counter-explosives (also used against kinetic and explosive direct-fire anti-tank weapons) and other ingenious developments. Now there are counter-measures being formally developed to defeat the drones themselves. Electronic weapons designed to jam the signals from the drone operators have led to the use of wire-guided drones, using miles of fiber-optic cables to defeat the jamming. There are microwave weapons which can confuse the on-board computers, or simply fry all of the electronics in the drone.

Somebody is always going to find a solution. If drone swarms can defeat single-target counter-measures, wide area microwaves can defeat drone swarms. Cheap counter-measures to expensive weapons, expensive counter-counter measures, cheap counter-counter-counter measures... doubtless there shall be both cheap and expensive counter-counter-counter-counter-measures developed as well. Cheap and easy usually, eventually, overcomes expensive though, but military (and political) leaders love their expensive and impressive toys.

For every measure there is a counter-measure, and for every counter-measure there is a counter-counter measure. Cheap eventually trumps expensive, but in the end, it’s the disciplined men on the ground who make it all work...eventually. Although not having good equipment can lose you a war quickly, simply having the biggest and coolest stuff isn’t necessarily what will win you a war.

My Marine Captain friend (of "The Academy") was, as noted, on the Sailing Team. This was in the late '70's and their coach was a Warrant Officer of long standing. I don't think they had WO5's yet, but he would have qualified. This gentleman, with hash marks most of the way up his sleeve, had commanded a wooden sailing vessel, a schooner, during WWII on anti-U-Boat patrols flying Norwegian colours (though I suspect they were Swedish and my friend misremembered, but anyway) someone shore-side got the brilliant idea that if they mounted a 20mm gun on the deck hidden under canvas when a U-Boat surfaced to check them out, they could unleash the 20mm and punch holes in their pressure hull and then it would be an easy target for aircraft to then sink. So thus it came about that they tried it on the first U-Boat they came across.

No one had mentioned, or remembered, that U-Boats had deck guns of significantly greater caliber, and thus range, than a 20mm. They proceeded to discover three interesting things:

1. When you punch holes into the pressure hull of a submarine, the crew becomes very angry with you.

2. The deck-guns of said submarines were armed with shells designed to penetrate steel ship's hulls, and therefore make very nice, round holes in wooden hulls, both going in and going out, without exploding and making a total mess of the vessel, and

3. Given favorable current and wind conditions, a schooner, with every stitch of canvas aloft and a great deal of motivation to the crew, can, just barely, outrun a submarine on the surface.

Needless to say, that motivation was present and much of their efforts were directed at plugging holes (fore and aft) which kept appearing at a very disturbing rate. They must have been quite adept at prayer for a bunch of sailors though, as they did manage to escape with no casualties. The U-Boat was, eventually, subsequently removed from worldly cares by Allied aircraft, but I suspect that all of the schooner crew, after a good paralytic drunk when they returned to port, assumed a clean and Christian life thereafter, thanking God and all of their personal Angels for managing to live through the affair.

The 20mm gun was removed from the deck, by the way, as although it was considered to be a successful experiment, no one was willing to try it again. Makes me smile.

I was chatting yesterday here at “the firearms shop just south of Bremerton” with the local Commodore about Naval History. I call him that even though he's "only" a Captain…in command of a submarine squadron here at Bangor. Historically a US Navy squadron would be commanded by the Senior Captain, and given the title/rank of Commodore since, as a Republic, the idea of having "Admirals" was too Royalist, therefore we didn't even have "Flag Officers" until the Civil War. So that makes him a Commodore in my book.

He's a Ring Knocker, but a good guy anyway, with an Engineering degree (and a commission of course...) He made note of the fact that during a tour of the Pentagon earlier in his career he worked for a couple of Marine Generals. What he thought was interesting was that most of the Navy officers have their university degrees in Engineering, while all of the Marine officers he knew had degrees in History. Being a Historian myself, and all that, it makes perfect sense to me as the Marine Corps is extraordinarily steeped in its history, while the other branches, though knowing something about their past, aren't nearly as focused, or proud of it. It makes me smile.

Speaking of Marines, I spent a few years in the 20-teens as a History Professor at the Navy Base in Bremerton, WA with almost exclusively Navy enlisted as my students. I had a few soldiers, but it was rare. At some point during that career I talked about WWI and how the 2nd US Army Infantry Division was 1/2 USMC. The 2nd Brigade was made up of the 4th Marine Brigade, consisting of the 5th and 6th Marines, and the 6th Machine Gun Battalion. I had inadvertently said “4th Machine Gun Battalion”, whereupon a Corpsman in my class, who had been FMF (Fleet Marine Forces) corrected me with the proper information. Made me smile.

By the way, he got an “A” in the class.

It has often been said that while those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it, those who do study history are doomed to watch others repeat it. Socrates (among others) pointed out that Democracies always collapse into Dictatorships, after a suitable looting of the treasury by those in power. And we stand at a cross-roads. Sow the Wind, Reap the Whirlwind.

Donald J. Trump, 45^th and 47^th President of the United States, has entered office in his second term with a shock and awe Blitzkreig strategy that would put Heinz Guiderian and George Patton to shame, and with a non-stop series of deft attacks has left his opponents reeling. He’s gotten inside their “OODA Loop” as it were [Observe, Orient, Decide, Act]. It’s been breathtaking.

What is at stake is not simply the American State, but the American Empire in all of it’s faded glory. Formed during WWII as a means of passing the baton of Imperial Might from Great Britain, which was clearly on the ropes at that point, to the United States, the US took a different course of Empire that had been previously seen. Discarding the old trappings of the British Empire such as the ownership of India, much of Africa, and political control of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the American version was to be economic control, with over-whelming military might to ensure compliance. With a combination of bribery and threats, local “leaders” in undeveloped countries throughout Africa, Asia and, yes, Europe, the American Empire was, at the end of the 20^th Century, unassailable. Even Communist China converted to a manufacturing colossus, with much of it’s new industrial might coming from companies moving their operations from the US, while the former Soviet Union’s remnant, the Russian Federation, held out it’s hand in friendship, hoping to be welcomed into the fold of “Friends of the United States”.

Sadly it wasn’t to be. Various groups within the ruling factions of the US Government either couldn’t let go of old animosities, or looked to loot a prostrate Russia as they had looted so many other countries before, and set about it’s destruction.

Within the US Government, the various Intelligence organizations (the “Intelligence Community” or IC) was still happily burrowing deeper and deeper into the Body Politic, working in league with various politicians and their owners to supply funds for all sorts of hazy projects for either undermining the governments of other countries, or supplying funds to be used to purchase other politicians, bureaucrats and “Non-Governmental Oganizations”. With money comes power, and not only does power corrupt, it tends to attract those who are imminently corruptible. Thus, as with every Empire preceding it, the United States of America’s Body Politic was becoming more and more infested with parasites.

Sadly for Empires, they tend to end suddenly, rather than fading out gradually (the case of the British Empire morphing into the American Empire, leaving the husk of Great Britain to slowly sink into obscurity is an unusual case), and all empires attract rivals. China, long used to playing the long game, is a case in point. Sucking information and technology from a money-grubbing “elite” in the US, who concern themselves only with the “bottom line” of this quarter, China has grown into a massive economic leviathan. And in response to continued prodding and pushing, the Russian Federation has come to it’s senses and begun responding militarily to the provocations of US proxies. Likewise Iran, with thousands of years of political experience behind it, has cast it’s lot with Russia and China in response to continued US and US-proxy provocations.

With little foresight and a great deal of Hubris, the IC pursued a proxy war with Russia via Ukraine, likewise earlier administrations pursued foolish “Wars of Empire” in the Middle East and South-West Asia for seemingly ethereal reasons. Perhaps all of them have been simply a big grift of money laundering, with war being a good excuse for all of the money spent and sent into the ether, but that remains to be seen. At any rate, they have materially weakened the American Empire’s “soft power” for no good reason, and in some cases actually shown the weaknesses of American’s “hard power” in the form of its military, currently suffering from an over-abundance of expensive equipment and weaponry but a dismal lack of talent and ability in the upper ranks.

Enter Trump. A man scourged by his enemies with attacks on his reputation, his finances, his integrity and finally actual assassination attempts upon his person by incompetent “fin d’empire” elites, he has been hardened in a fire stoked by his enemies. Not one to back down or forgive, he, unlike Julius Ceasar, will not be merciful, and when they failed in their assassination tries, it merely encouraged his wrath. While I doubt seriously that Donald J. Trump will become a dictator, one might wonder about his successors.

Trump and his hand picked attack dogs are, as of this writing, upending everything in the Federal Government, lifting the rotten logs which have for so long protected the bugs and insects which have infested the ground in DC. The body politic is so riddled with parasites a scalpel will be insufficient. Even a meat axe is probably not enough. A chainsaw, or perhaps even a flame-thrower, is needed for a proper cure. The American Republic’s Empire is coming to and end. Perhaps, like Rome, we shall get a second chance and greatness such as after Octavian revenged himself upon his Uncle’s assassins, and we will have a true American Empire, with some of the trappings of a republic and some of the personal rights we now enjoy. Or perhaps it will fade into obscurity much as the Swedish Empire of the 17^th Century. Or maybe, like the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania, dissolve into myriad constituent pieces, all going their own way to be conquered in turn by other, greater empires.

A little bit of foresight on the part of the leadership of the IC, and the political parties which rule Washington DC, could have prophesied this. Perhaps they did, in fact, expecting a morphing of the US into a dictatorship at some point in the near future, with themselves at the helm, of course. But, like the plans of mice and men, the plans of the great and would-be great gang oft agley.

The US is at a turning point, a Fourth Turning1 wherein major societal, political and economic upheavals change everything for better of worse, and only time will tell which direction things will go. But change will occur, like it or not. One is advised to Stay Frosty!

Dead Pays: How Corruption Has Worked for Centuries

Since the topic of dealing with governmental corruption and financial malfeasance is in the news these days, I thought I might pen a few digital lines on the history of the “dead pay”. One of the better known, and often used, practices of fleecing the taxpayer out of his hard-earned income, it’s a great option for government operatives in the furtherance of feathering their nest.

My own research is primarily in the area of the Renaissance forward, so I can’t speak directly to the Roman and other armies of the ancient period, but my bet is that it differed little from the practices of later armies, and since it looks like it continues in one form or another today, it’s probably a safe bet to make.

The issue at hand is a practice which was referred to as a “dead pay”, which means that payment was made to a company commander, or some other functionary, for soldiers who no longer actually existed but were still on the payroll of the crown. As noted I’ve studied Renaissance and later armies in some detail, and this was a very common, and to some degree accepted, practice. There were always a few of these “dead pays” made to a commander for what was in effect a “slush fund” for his company, so that he didn’t have to make purchases for his company out of his own pocket and then try to get reimbursed for it.

For a detailed account of the results of NOT giving military leaders a slush fund, forcing them to apply for reimbursement from their government and deal with the difficulties and resultant frustration thereof, check into the “Revolt of the Cincinnati” after the American Revolution.

Dead Pays, however, were usually far more than just the company commander getting some extra cash to help out his men. Usually they were in fact payments made for men who had either deserted or died, and the money was pocketed by the leader, who generally was given a lump sum based upon his muster rolls. The Spaniards were pretty strict about not allowing this, and had legions of notaries making sure that officers were keeping their accounts properly. The English army, on the other hand, was pretty lax about it. Doubtless the corruption went clear to the top, as Queen Elizabeth was pretty critical of most of her military leaders for their flagrant disregard of her purse strings.

The practice continued well into the 19^th Century, but with the improvements in accounting practices and filing systems, Inspectors General were able to gain some control over the rampant corruptions seen in earlier eras.

Now that you have an idea as to what the practice of Dead Pays entails, let’s look at some of the recent events which cause me to suspect that the practice is alive and well in the United States, and doubtless elsewhere in the world.

The first example I’ll give is New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Remember all of those busses and police cars sitting abandoned in their parking lots during the hurricane? People were accusing the transportation departments and police of abandoning their posts. My bet is that while it’s possible a few did so, for the most part those drivers and police never existed, or if they did they never had to show up for work in the first place. Think of it. What a bonanza for whoever is actually collecting those paychecks: First you get to grab the money, and then you get to skim from the purchase of the vehicles too! Since New Orleans is one of the oldest cities in the US it only goes to reason that it is also one of the most corrupt. They had it figured out until that darned hurricane came in and pulled away the curtain. At least that’s how I read it.

Now for DC at the present time. Elon Musk has estimated that only about 17% of the Federal workforce actually shows up for work on any given day at best, leaving more than 80% either working from home of not bothering to do anything at all. How many of them simply don’t exist, their paychecks going to someone else who is happy to collect the money and enjoy life? How many THOUSANDS of Dead Pays are there in local, state and federal government agencies throughout the country, where in taxpayer funds are used to enrich the corrupt? We know that politicians work the system hard via their legal insider stock trading, so why would this be a big leap for any department heads (or functionaries further down the totem-pole) getting their own piece of the action?

Anyway, food for thought, and my two cents worth.

Several things come to mind with this.

Firstly, we look at both the exuberance of Trump supporters in their victory, and the mental devastation of this detractors reminds me of a comment drilled into my head by Dr. Malcolm Moule, one of my favorite History professors at the University of the Pacific where I matriculated. He stated:

“Revolutions don’t happen when people are starving. They happen when people’s rising expectations are cut short.”

There is a lot of time between now and January 20 for “rising expectations” to be cut short. For that matter, for those on the left, many of THEIR rising expectations have been cut short as well. Plenty of opportunity for mischief all around, and when both sides of a political contest are primed and ready to go at one another, it doesn’t take much of a spark to set of the voluminous supply of tinder.

Another thing comes to mind with the second ascension of Trump. I am reminded that the last time he won the election a Broadway play was staged performing Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”. Set in modern times, the main character was dressed and made up to look like Donald Trump. Much amusement and joy was had by his detractors in this, with the subsequent assassination of Gaius Julius Caesar by the Senators of Rome. What they forget is the next act, where Octavian, Julius’s nephew and adopted son, initiates civil war by hunting down and destroying his patron’s murderers. He then becomes Augustus, the First among Equals, i.e. Emperor in all but name, beginning Rome’s Imperial Age.

The original Caesar made the error of forgiving his enemies, a trait which Mr. Trump seems to share, and it came back to quite literally stab him in the back. Trump’s sons seem to be quite as capable and energetic as their father, unlike other sons of Presidents who have proven to be quite useless without their father’s aid. Likewsie one may expect the same mercies tendered to their enemies by Trump’s sons as Octavian meted out to his.

So not only should Caesar “beware the Ides of March”, but so should his would-be assassins, for should the worst come to pass, the aftermath for the plotters. and probably the country, would be horrible to behold.

I deeply hope and pray that none of this will come to pass, but there is nothing new under the sun. History rhymes, and cornered, panicked people are prone to doing stupid things. Let us pray for new beginnings of peace, not war.

Dear Gordon Frye,

I attended your lecture at the Historical Novel Society Conference in Portland and found it and your knowledge amazing. In the course of writing a novel set in Revolutionary War Bennington, Vermont, I came upon a road block to my understanding. While visiting there, I saw cartridge boxes which held soldiers’ paper wrapped gunpowder and lead balls. Also on display were powder horns. I am clear (I think) on the difference between muskets, smooth barreled, and rifles, rifled or circular grooved barrel, as well as the difference in range, speed of loading etc. BUT what about ammo? I read somewhere that the musket used paper cartridges, and hence a cartridge box, but rifles used cloth wrapped bullets, preceded by a measured amount of gunpowder. Hence, a person carrying a musket might, if preparing ahead, have a cartridge box, but a person carrying a rifle would not. Can you clarify the holes in my understanding?

Thanks,

[author]

My response:

You are absolutely correct in the idea that muskets (in general) used paper-wrapped "cartridges" (a paper tube containing the proper-sized musket ball, usually quite a bit smaller than the actual bore, vz. a .69" ball in a .75" musket barrel, or a .63" ball in a .69" barrel) and gunpowder, usually about 100 grains of somewhat fine-grained gunpowder. (BTW, you can use "gunpowder" interchangeably with, or instead of "black powder" since there was only one type in use at the time). The reason for the much smaller ball than bore diameter was first of all so that there would be plenty of "windage" to account for the powder fouling as shots were fired. The solids remaining after the explosion of black powder are pretty great, and make loading of repeat shots difficult if not taken into account. Also, the paper takes up a bit of room, and also acts a bit like a patch to A) help clean the bore as you ram it down with the rammer, and B) add a bit of diameter to make, perhaps, a more accurate shot. But since soldiers weren't taught to aim, generally, it wasn't much of an issue in the minds of military men. A 100 yard shot from a musket was considered to be at the far end of effective range.

To load, as you probably already know, the soldier removed the cartridge from his cartridge box, bit off the end opposite the ball, and then "primed" the lock with a bit of the powder. He then shut the pan-cover and proceeded to load the rest of the cartridge into the muzzle of the musket. Occasionally poorly trained or very nervous soldiers would load ball first, which pretty much results in a non-functioning weapon until the labourous job of "worming" the ball out with a screw-like attachment fitted to the back end of the rammer is used to remove it.

The rifle was a different animal entirely, and USUALLY didn't have cartridges for it, though nothing would preclude their use for skirmishing. The rifle was loaded by pouring the powder from the horn into a measuring device, usually cut from deer antler or something like that, and poured into the muzzle. Then a small patch of greased cloth was placed on the muzzle, and the ball placed on top of that, where upon either the rammer, or usually a "short starter" or "starting stick" (a small block of wood or antler with a short piece of ramrod fitted to it) was used to push the ball and the patch into the barrel. Since it was a tight fit, if done in a hurry it could break the ramrod, thus the general use of the short starter. This started the ball down a couple of inches into the bore, where upon the rammer was used. The grease helped keep the fouling soft, and thus the rifle could be shot many times before fouling became an issue, but it was obviously a MUCH slower process. And of course, after loading the barrel, the lock needed to be primed. Rifles usually used much smaller locks than muskets in order to get a faster "lock time" (to make the time between the pull of the trigger and the firearm discharging as short as possible, to make aiming more certain), and thus the smaller locks took a finer grain of gunpowder for priming. The rifles, using light round balls of somewhere between .40" and 54" (during the late-18th Century, bores on rifles were gradually getting smaller for efficiency) could achieve muzzle velocities upwards of 1800 feet per second, which is significantly faster than, say, a .44 Magnum pistol round of today. The round shape was inefficient and lost velocity quickly, but it was quite deadly at the closer ranges of the day, say under 200 yards. On the other hand, rifles paid for their accuracy with slow loading, and were thus unpopular with military men for anything other than specialist use.

Oh, btw, I made note of the fact that one COULD use cartridges for rifles. They would have to be made up by the rifleman himself, as each rifle was generally law unto itself regarding the bore diameter and bullet size. Later when the British adopted the Baker Rifle in the early 19th Century, they regularly used cartridges for skirmishing, and loaded with patched balls for more accurate shooting.

I hope this helps!

Sincerely,

Gordon Frye