David E. Petzal - The Gun Nut

First, you have to understand that I mean this as the highest form of praise. If someone tells me that they read my stuff in the bathroom, I swell up like a toad that’s been inhaling helium. So, with that understood…

My colleague at Field & Stream, Deputy Editor Jay Cassell, has assembled The Gigantic Book of Hunting Stories a collection that is astonishing in number (119; 782 pages) and outstanding in quality.  In most collections there are a few gems, some good stuff, and a fair number of pieces that were obviously included to pad out the page count. But TGBOHS is the best work of the best writers, all the way through. All the heavyweights are represented here.

It starts with Teddy Roosevelt and progresses through nine more chapters: waterfowl, small game, big game, deer, Africa and Asia, and so on. Nothing is neglected.

A small example of how good TGBOHS is: Corey Ford was for years a mainstay of Field & Stream, and is remembered for his series, The Lower Forty, and for his story, The Road to Tinkhamtown, which is on the short list of the greatest pieces the magazine has ever run. Tinkhamtown is in here, but Ford also wrote a very short piece that may be its equal, or better, and very few people have ever heard of it, much less read it. It’s written in the form of a letter and is titled “Just a Dog.” It ran only once, in 1940, and created such a furor that it has never run again. Reading the piece is like getting punched in the chest. Jay Cassell has rescued Only a Dog from oblivion, and it alone is worth the price of the book, which is $25 from skyhorsepublishing.com.

Christmas is coming. Need I say more?

To put this book in perspective, I've been reading about World War II since a couple of years after the war ended, and I've never seen anything like it. I was put onto Old Breed by Paul Fussell, himself a World War II combat vet and a literary critic of the severest kind. Fussell called it "one of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war," and it is. It is also appalling.

Prior to reading Old Breed, the best book I had seen on the Marines' World War II campaigns was Robert Leckie's Helmet for My Pillow, which was published in 1957. Leckie was a gifted professional writer, and had more than a little of the poet to him. Old Breed was written by Eugene Sledge, a genteel Alabama boy who served as a mortarman with K Company, 3rd Batallion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division. Sledge served through the campaigns on Pelelieu (obscure) and Okinawa (famous) and lived to write about it, working from notes he kept in a Bible during the fighting.

It is the most unsparing look at the horrors of combat I've ever seen any where in any form. Sledge describes incompetent (some obviously unhinged) officers, casual cruelty by Marines equal to anything the Japanese did, untrained replacements, death, grief, unending filth, mud, rain, and constant terror. He and his steadily dwindling company were reduced to a state where they were one step from madness, and a great many of them did cross over that line--far more than was ever admitted to the public.

"Luck" does not begin to describe what protected Sledge. On Okinawa, of the 230 men in Company K who made the landing, only 20 some were left standing when the island was declared secured. And yet, through it all, he remained tremendously proud to be a Marine, and proud of what his comrades did.

Eugene Sledge went on to become a biologist and a teacher, and lived with his nightmares as best he could. Old Breed was published in 1981, and has been reprinted three times. In 2001, its author went to join his fallen friends, but what he wrote will long survive him. It is both a tribute and a warning. This is what happens when you let the genie out of the bottle.

Book good. Not have to turn book off and on. Can read book in bathroom. Can throw book at cat when cat knock porcelain vase off shelf.

Anyway, here are two real good books that you should know about. The first is Wild and Fair: Tales of Hunting Big Game in North America, edited by Tom McIntyre and published by Safari Press. Tom has rounded up 23 people who have hunted a lot and can actually write and had them contribute short chapters on whatever they wanted to write on whatever type of hunting they chose.

This book will not relieve the heartache of psoriasis, or cure bad breath in dogs, or show you how to factor Chandler's wobble into a doe's estrous cycle. But, on the other hand, you can actually read the sumbitch for the fun of it, which is the object of the drill, and pretty scarce these days. Safaripress.com

The second book won't be out until late this year. It's the revise/update of Safari Rifles, written by Craig Boddington in 1991. (This one will be called, logically enough, Safari Rifles II.) Since then, the book has gone on to become the definitive work in the field, eclipsing even John Taylor's African Rifles and Cartridges. Craig has been on 75 safaris. I will say that again: Craig has been on 75 safaris, and has no axes to grind, so his is the most impartial and best grounded advice available. It's also a Safari Press book. Watch for it.

Here are three books I hope you found under your Christmas tree. The first two are reprints, and while they are not gun-related, they are will cause you to lose track of time. Both are in print, and pretty widely available. The third book is brand spanking new.

The Forgotten Soldier, by Guy Sajer (a pen name) is the story of an Alsatian teenager who was drafted into the Wehrmacht and sent to fight in the Soviet Union. He managed to survive that disaster as well as the retreat to Germany. By a series of miracles he made it home, where he was presumed dead. Doubts have been raised about the book's authenticity, but the U.S. Army War College has it on their reading list, and that's good enough for me.

The Long Walk, by Slavomir Rawicz (his real name). The story of a Polish cavalry officer who was captured by the Soviet Army in 1940, taken for a spy, sent to Moscow and subjected to a year's fun and games with the NKVD. Shipped to a prison camp in Siberia, Rawicz and six fellow prisoners escaped in the dead of winter and, over two years, walked from Siberia, across the Gobi Desert, over the Himalayas, and into India, where they were rescued ed by the British Army.

If you'd like to find out just how much men can endure without going mad or giving up and dying, these two books are good sources.

The Field & Stream Hunting Optics Handbook, by Thomas McIntyre
It's hard to make the subject of optics comprehensible, much less interesting, so imagine a book on the subject that is actually entertaining. Tom Mcintyre, whose immense, hyper-educated brain is packed with all sorts of odd information (and who has done one hell of a lot of hunting), has managed to combine loads of useful knowledge and all kinds of weird but fascinating intel on optics-related subjects.

An example: At the massacre at Wounded Knee, the bodies of the Sioux were searched by 7th Cavalry troopers, and on one of the dead warriors was found the binoculars carried by Lt/Col George Armstrong Custer at The Colossal Miscalculation at the Little Bighorn. In 2005, these glasses were auctioned for $56,625, working out, as Tom puts it, to slightly less than $100 per life, counting both the Greasy Grass and Wounded Knee. If you can resist stuff like this you have a heart of stone, and maybe a brain of stone, too.
The book is $20. wwwLyonsPress.com

It has come to my attention that some of you read books, which makes you part of a dying breed, and that many of you are interested in military history. That being so, you should be aware that this is the 50th anniversary of one of the greatest books to come out of World War II, and the greatest book ever written by a Marine.

It’s doubtful that any special-interest group in the United States of America has been portrayed more unfairly than hunters and gun owners. The reasons are too numerous and sordid to go into in this limited space, but suffice it to say, when I opened a package the other day and saw a book inside called America Armed: Portraits of Gun Owners in their Homes, what came to mind was the acronym BOHICA—Bend over; here it comes again.