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Gryphonadmin
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Apr-13-17, 03:57 PM (EDT)
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"Field Expedient"
 
   LAST EDITED ON Apr-13-17 AT 04:14 PM (EDT)
 
My father told me this story the other day, while we were working on a project that will be featured later.

In the early 1960s, when Dad was just a kid, his parents bought the first of the several houses they would have in the tiny woods community of Oxbow. When they moved in, the house didn't have running water, which was not all that unusual in Aroostook County in those days. A lot of people had wells. Annoyingly, though, the well in this case was on the other side of a road. As you can imagine, shlepping over there for water got old pretty quick.

Eventually my grandfather decided, well, the hell with this, it's time to plumb the house. Getting a new well dug would have cost a lot of money, though, so instead, he decided to tap the existing one. To do that, he needed to dig a trench across the road to lay some pipe connecting the well to the basement. No big deal, he was a company-grade infantry officer, digging trenches was one of his core competencies. However, in order to keep from blocking the road for too long, he needed a quick way of making the required hole in the foundation wall. He didn't have access to a jackhammer, and making a hole in an eight-inch concrete wall with a hammer and chisel would take way too long.

Still! Necessity is the mother of invention, right? He had another set of tools that he reckoned would do the job, lickety-split:

1) One United States Rifle, Caliber .30, M1903A3;


Fig. 1 M1903A3 rifle (stock photo—Wikimedia)

2) A supply of Cartridge, Armor Piercing, Caliber .30, M2.


Fig. 2 Box of M2 AP cartridges (author's personal collection)

And it worked! Firing from a sandbagged prone position at the other end of the trench, Gramp was able to drill a serviceable hole through the basement wall with only a few rounds. Admittedly, the one that finally broke through the wall did go on to make a casualty of the furnace, but hey—that's what AP ammunition is for, penetrating armor and killing whatever's behind it.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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  Subject     Author     Message Date     ID  
  RE: Field Expedient McFortner Apr-13-17 1
  RE: Field Expedient Mercutio Apr-14-17 2
     RE: Field Expedient Gryphonadmin Apr-14-17 3
     RE: Field Expedient JFerio Apr-14-17 5
         RE: Field Expedient Pasha Apr-17-17 6
             RE: Field Expedient Gryphonadmin Apr-17-17 7
  RE: Field Expedient Kendra Kirai Apr-14-17 4

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McFortner
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Apr-13-17, 07:09 PM (EDT)
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1. "RE: Field Expedient"
In response to message #0
 
   I bet that furnace never menaced society again! :D

Michael C. Fortner
"Maxim 37: There is no such thing as "overkill".
There is only "open fire" and "I need to reload".


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Mercutio
Member since May-26-13
823 posts
Apr-14-17, 11:45 AM (EDT)
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2. "RE: Field Expedient"
In response to message #0
 
   >And it worked! Firing from a sandbagged prone position at the other
>end of the trench, Gramp was able to drill a serviceable hole through
>the basement wall with only a few rounds. Admittedly, the one that
>finally broke through the wall did go on to make a casualty of the
>furnace, but hey—that's what AP ammunition is for, penetrating armor
>and killing whatever's behind it.

You know, it seems like "be sure of your target and what's beyond it" is actually one of the hardest gun safety rules to follow effectively.

Like, I'm not talking about gun brahs, the kind of guys you see posting selfies selfies to facebook of themselves and their AR-toting buddies half-drunk and pointing obviously-loaded weapons every which way while exercising what can only be described as a negative amount of trigger discipline. Nobody expects much from those dudes.

I'm talking about people who are would otherwise be seen as, and usually are, responsible gun owners.

My great-grandfather grew up in a time and place where hunting was both an immensely popular social and leisure activity and, occasionally, actually necessary to put food on the table. And he had all manner of stories about the kind of fuckery that would happen because folks just didn't think, at all, about what was behind what they were shooting at. People pegging rounds into houses, windows, cars, livestock, other people. Many of the stories were hilarious; some were tragic. But what stood out was their commonality, the fact that it was essentially happening all the time among folks who you'd think would know better.

My grandfather, his son-in-law, wasn't a gun guy himself; after he got out of the service he swore up and down he'd never, ever pick up a firearm ever again.* But he lived in the same sort of general milieu, and more to the point almost all of his peer group were... veterans. Some of Korea, some of WWII. These were guys who had actually had professional training by a top-class military organization into how to properly and safely use their weapons. Some of them were lifelong NRA members back when membership didn't come with a free oil drum to start burying assault rifles in your backyard with.

And grandpa had the exact same stories. Oh, some of the details were different; accidentally shooting a horse was a lot harder in 1955 than it was in 1925. But still. His buddies and the fine outdoorsmen of Ontario County in general just apparently didn't have much ability to consider what was behind what they were shooting at. One of them once set up a makeshift range in his disused stable, because he wanted to be able to fire off a few regardless of the weather and it was a nice sheltered place to store equipment and suchly.

He closed up one of the entrances, because he wasn't a complete fool, and set the targets up along the short wall thus created so that he could get some proper distance by shooting lengthwise down the stable.

The entrance he closed up was the one furthest from the house, so he'd have less distance to walk... and was also the one facing the road, because it used to be the main entrance. Which meant that he was basically shooting at the road, with only a thin wall of pine boards in the way. Had no idea. Hadn't occurred to him to even think about it until someone else pointed it out. That wall might as well have been an invincible barrier for all he'd thought about what might happen if a round struck it.

So I'm not sure this can be chalked up to individual acts of idiocy; psychologically, this seems like a very, very hard rule to follow even if you ought to know better. There's gotta be a reason for it.

(*Ordinarily you wouldn't question someone who got out of the armed forces and didn't want to have anything to do with firearms ever again. You'd just be like "that guy saw some shit" and respect that fact. But my grandfather was 1) in the Navy, and 2) served his tour of duty in the Korean War at Guantanamo Bay in the early fifties, where the most serious action you were likely to encounter was a scrum over weekend passes to Havana. Something must have happened there. But I'm not sure what it could have been. I kind of wish I'd asked.)

-Merc
Keep Rat


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Gryphonadmin
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Apr-14-17, 01:12 PM (EDT)
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3. "RE: Field Expedient"
In response to message #2
 
   >You know, it seems like "be sure of your target and what's beyond it"
>is actually one of the hardest gun safety rules to follow effectively.

He did know what was beyond it! The opposite the basement and then the hill the house was buried in. Duly considered and perfectly safe; no chance of overpenetration leading to someone getting hit on the other side of town or anything like that.

He just didn't sufficiently account for all the contents of the basement. :)

>(*Ordinarily you wouldn't question someone who got out of the armed
>forces and didn't want to have anything to do with firearms ever
>again. You'd just be like "that guy saw some shit" and respect that
>fact. But my grandfather was 1) in the Navy, and 2) served his tour of
>duty in the Korean War at Guantanamo Bay in the early fifties, where
>the most serious action you were likely to encounter was a scrum over
>weekend passes to Havana. Something must have happened there.
>But I'm not sure what it could have been. I kind of wish I'd asked.)

(shrug) Maybe he just didn't cotton to it...

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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JFerio
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Apr-14-17, 08:53 PM (EDT)
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5. "RE: Field Expedient"
In response to message #2
 
   >(*Ordinarily you wouldn't question someone who got out of the armed
>forces and didn't want to have anything to do with firearms ever
>again. You'd just be like "that guy saw some shit" and respect that
>fact. But my grandfather was 1) in the Navy, and 2) served his tour of
>duty in the Korean War at Guantanamo Bay in the early fifties, where
>the most serious action you were likely to encounter was a scrum over
>weekend passes to Havana. Something must have happened there.
>But I'm not sure what it could have been. I kind of wish I'd asked.)

My expectation of the truth: A knowledge of his own mental faculties, so to speak, combined with having actually seen the way one can screw up with a firearm while in training/at sea in spite of knowing better. In fact, having been in a place like he was, it's quite possible he was witness to the worst type of stupidity to combine with firearms: Bored Stupid.





Jeffrey 'JFerio' Crouch
'It'll be all right... I think.' - Nene Romanova



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Pasha
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Apr-17-17, 04:48 PM (EDT)
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6. "RE: Field Expedient"
In response to message #5
 
  
>was witness to the worst type of stupidity to combine with firearms:
>Bored Stupid.

Elder Days Story Time:

This is a story I heard during my Grandfather's Wake from his little brother. It is also literally the only thing I know about his experience in war. That, and whatever can be inferred by the fact that he never even drove a Japanese car.

So, grandad grew up on a sheep farm in SD. There wasn't a whole lot of opportunity for upward mobility, but by the time WWII rolled around he had managed to take a couple of semesters of college, paid for by working under god knows what conditions, so realized that the best way to get out of South Dakota and never go back was to join the Marines.

Fast forward a couple of years later and he's in a leaky tent with some poor other sod on the other side of the world in the middle of the night, poorly trained and armed to the teeth. Hanging above these two idiots is a large wheel of cheese<1>. So, bored out of his mind in the middle of the night, grandad says to the other moron in the tent, "I'll bet you five dollars that if I shoot that wheel of cheese, it'll explode." Pvt Dumbass allows that he'll take some of that action.

"Now, your grandad, was always a smart one, and with a couple of semesters of college under his belt, he knew his physics. So, he knew what would happen to a material like cheese when it got hit with a bullet"

And so grandad, the fucking genius, in the middle of a camp of marines, at night, in an active war zone, pointed his rife up and pulled the trigger. I have never felt like I came by my poor impulse control and desire to do dumb shit just so that something is happening more honestly in my life.

The eventual fate of the cheese, btw, went to the grave with grandad.

--
-Pasha
"Don't change the subject"
"Too slow, already did."

<1> I have no idea why they were storing cheese in the tents of individual marines, and being as he was dead when I heard this story, I can't exactly ask them.


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Gryphonadmin
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Apr-17-17, 05:13 PM (EDT)
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7. "RE: Field Expedient"
In response to message #6
 
   ><1> I have no idea why they were storing cheese in the tents of
>individual marines, and being as he was dead when I heard this story,
>I can't exactly ask them.

(shrug) Gotta put 'em somewhere...

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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Kendra Kirai
Member since May-22-16
78 posts
Apr-14-17, 07:41 PM (EDT)
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4. "RE: Field Expedient"
In response to message #0
 
   Instantly brings to mind to me Maxim 44 of the 70 Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries:

If it will blow a hole in the ground, it will double as an entrenching tool.

...granted it doesn't QUITE match up but....:)


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