David E. Petzal - The Gun Nut

He is 90 this year, a frail old man gripped by Parkinson's disease. But in 1941, when he went to war, he was a recruiting-poster-handsome 6-footer, a lieutenant in one of the toughest units ever to wear American uniforms--Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506 Parachute Infantry Regiment.

He became an officer because he saw incompetent officers and swore that he could do better. He went Airborne because he wanted to be part of an elite unit, with men he could depend on alongside him. But like every man who fought in that war he was a reluctant soldier;  he wanted nothing more than to get the job done and go home.

When his unit shipped to England Winters was billeted with an English family and had a room to himself. In the spare time he had, he locked himself into that room with a book of tactics and turned himself into a soldier--as it turned out, a remarkable one.

He was brave--unfailingly and almost suicidally so. The men of his unit who survived marvel that he lived. He always put his soldiers first. He was always fair. And in combat, he always made the right decisions. In the first action he commanded, his squad took out a German artillery emplacement, doing it with such efficiency that the action is still used at West Point as a model of how to attack a fixed position.

He was given the Distinguished Service Cross, and there are people working today to have it upgraded to the Medal of Honor. But Dick Winters shows no interest; he agrees with the other paratroopers who jumped on Normandy that the real heroes are the men who lie there forever.

When Band of Brothers aired in 2001, Dick Winters became a celebrity. His mail--already considerable--grew to the point where he was unable to answer it. He does not believe that he is a celebrity, or that he deserves fame. He sees himself simply as a soldier who did the best he could and was lucky to emerge from the war alive. He knows that he and Easy Company are only representatives for other men and other units who fought just as hard and suffered just as much, and that it was by sheer chance that he--and they--became famous.

There are men just like Dick Winters wearing the uniform today, but it is not their fate to serve in a war where the sides are clearly drawn and a united country stands behind them. We will probably never know their names, but that does not detract from what they are or what they do for us.

Monday, May 26, is a good time to thank them.

A National Guard friend of mine, currently on active duty, tells me that the weight of the much-modified M-16 she is carrying (with red dot sight) is 9 pounds. This caused my semi-annual smile, because one of the selling points of the Armalite rifle from which the M-16 evolved was that it weighed only 7 pounds, and was much easier to lug though the rice paddies than the M-14 which was 9 pounds, or the M-1 which weighed 9.6 pounds (SIR!). So we are back to square one.

Actually, there is something to be said for heavy rifles. Some years ago in Texas, Craig Boddington loaned me an 8mm Remington magnum that had been built for him by John Rigby (in California, not London) and weighed 12 pounds. Because of its weight, the rifle had almost no recoil, and as fate had it, the shot I got was one where I had to jam my eye right against the scope. I resigned myself to a great scope cut, but nothing happened. The rifle hardly moved when I pulled the trigger.

The Thompson submachine gun weighed 12 pounds and was extremely effective because it recoiled very little. Ditto the Browning Automatic Rifle at just under 20 pounds. Civilian guns, too, profit by some weight. A skillful shot can hit with a 6-pound rifle (in a reasonable caliber) but an unskilled shot will have fits--the gun will be just too twitchy.

The real problem with a heavy gun comes in rough country, particularly mountain country. You not only have to carry the thing uphill, but because the footing is uneven, you'll be fighting the rifle every step of the way as it does its best to pull you off balance.

The average television commercial is one of the more dismal aspects of modern life, being designed for the brain-damaged and the permanently silly. This one, however, is a small masterpiece, and is particularly appropriate for this time of year. It was sent me by a former captain in the 101st Airborne, and was sent to him by a fellow Screaming Eagle captain who served two tours in Viet Nam and was wounded near the end of the second one. A hand salute to A-B and to the people who made this gem.

At the recent Remington Seminar where they introduced the R-15 black rifle (that is really a camo rifle), a number of the older gun editors were seen to mutter in their false teeth about the radical turn that an old, traditional company like Remington was taking, and how they disapproved.

At length, one of the attendees spake unto them, saying:

"Look, you've got thousands and thousands of young guys out there who love these things, and if it keeps them shooting, I'm all for it. A lot of them learned to shoot from a drill sergeant; their fathers didn't teach them. They were busy playing golf or jogging. This is what they know and what they like."

I don't remember who said it, but give the man a medal. We've been Bolt-Action Nation for so long that we forget we were once Lever-Action Nation, and that what converted us was millions of young men being introduced to the 1903 Springfield, courtesy of the U.S. Army and the United States Marines.

As long as it goes bang, let us think kind thoughts about it.

Here is a smallish news story that further illustrates these facts: a) the government is a chief supplier of a lot of the dangerous stuff the government doesn't want us to have and: b) the press, upon which we rely for our news of the military, knows hardly anything about the military.

This past May, I made my fifth trip to the battleground at Little Bighorn, and was once more impressed by what a raving incompetent LTC George Armstrong Custer was. Apologists for Custer often cite the fact that an appreciable number of the warriors who opposed him had repeating rifles, while the 7th Cavalry troopers were armed with single-shot Model 1873 Springfield carbines. To those folks, I have two words: Rorke's Drift.