Month: October 2023
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T3E2 Trials .276-Caliber Garand
This is a typical whitetail buck. You can see how
he is clearly trying to look cool for the ladies.
We live way out in the middle of no place. The fact that I sort of shoot guns for a living makes that pertinent. One of the fringe benefits is copious wildlife.
Some of that is not so cool. I wage an ongoing war of extermination against the water moccasins that breed like venomous scaly bunnies in the lake that passes for our backyard. I’m barely holding my own on that front. The deer, however, are kind of neat.
My wife hates them because they eat her flowers. I think of our local deer herd as handy shelf-stable protein should Putin follow through on his oft-repeated threat to nuke the planet. For now, however, they’re a bit like pets.
I can identify many of the locals. One doe is missing half of her left ear, no doubt secondary to some unfortunate encounter with a dog in her wayward youth. She birthed twins last year, both of which are little button bucks today. The females tend to be homebodies, while the bucks always wander.
One afternoon I glanced out my bathroom window to see an enormous 10-point who was obviously enraptured with a small, young doe. She was, for her part, having none of it. He chased her around like an idiot trying to look cool while she trotted hither and yon in search of a safe space. I called my wife’s attention to the apparent age discrepancy, and she declared that he was “The Harvey Weinstein of deer.”
Anyway, the point is that women reliably disengage a man’s higher-order brain functions. Anyone who feels otherwise has clearly never met an actual human. Guys who might be respected political leaders or captains of industry can be rendered intellectually incompetent by a strategic glance from an attractive woman. It’s really a bit like a superpower.
This is a typical whitetail doe. She clearly wants nothing to do with guys.
It’s Timeless, It’s Irresistible, and It’s Everywhere…
I sat huddled comfortably at the base of a big elm tree alongside my dad. I was tucked down behind the portable blind my mom had sewed for us out of sharpened dowels and camouflage cloth. My skinny teenaged mitts gripped my Browning Auto-5 12-gauge in a death rictus while my trigger finger hovered over the safety. Above 60 yards distant, a big turkey gobbler slowly ambled our way.
My dad is a master at this. He had been tormenting this poor guy for half an hour, yelping a few hen calls while interspersing the occasional gobble. In his capable hands, a Lynch’s box call conjured a sort of irresistible jealousy in the randy bird. This gobbler heard girls whooping it up with some other guy, and he was on the prowl for a hot date.
Dad waited until the moment was perfect and popped out a quick yelp. This was more than the big guy could stand. He broke into a trot headed our way with love on his mind. Dad tapped me on the thigh. It was time.
I let the beast get within about 25 yards before I pivoted up onto my knees and raised the 32-inch barrel of my shotgun above the edge of the blind. For a pregnant moment, our eyes met. Up close, wild turkeys are incredibly ugly. The look on his face said, “Oh, crap.” The look on mine said, “You’re dinner.”
And indeed, he was. I don’t recall if this particular bird was served on Thanksgiving, Easter or Christmas. However, after my mom had her way with him in the kitchen, he was some epically good eating. It was always a bit of a competition among us three brothers to see who would be the first to find a piece of lead shot in our meal. All three of us turned out pretty well. Imagine what we might have accomplished had it not been for all that childhood lead exposure.
Wild turkeys are just crazy ugly. However, you haven’t lived
until you have had one properly prepared for holiday dinner.
Stupid on a Whole New Level
We’ve not even begun to discuss the simply breathtaking antics of the human male. These same primal drives that bought my turkey buddy a face full of #4 shot have caused men to break bones, abdicate thrones, and, in extreme cases, suffer violent, gory death. John Hinkley shot President Reagan in a doomed effort to impress Jodie Foster, an actress he had never met.
The real shame of it is, as near as I can tell, women really don’t care. Like that harried doe outside my bathroom window, for the most part, they just cannot be bothered with our foolishness. I have chased my wife for 40 years, and I still don’t have a clue. Perhaps someday I’ll figure out how to impress girls, or like all those other guys, I’ll just die trying …
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Touche I believe!
SUDDENLY, HUNTER BIDEN’S GUN CASE DEFENSE GOES CONSTITUTIONAL
Dave was sitting in camp listening to the news one evening last month
when a report about Hunter Biden’s defense strategy against a gun
law violation almost ruined the sunset.
If the past three years have taught us anything, it’s that the guy in the White House has some pretty radical views on the Second Amendment. So when his son’s attorney declared (with a straight face!) that his client will probably beat the gun charges against him because they are “likely unconstitutional,” it might be time to check if you’ve arrived in the alternate universe of hypocrisy.
I was sitting in a makeshift, solitary camp on the evening before the fall grouse opener (more about that in a minute), enjoying the sunset and listening to a news report when the announcer revealed how attorney Abbe Lowell had offered this defense for Hunter’s felony gun charges: He expects the charges to be dropped before trial because the statute may not pass the constitutional smell test, based on an appeals court ruling this past summer relating to guns and drug use. Sure, his client asserted on the federal Form 4473 that he was not a habitual drug user when he bought a Colt revolver in .38 Special. That’s a fib, and it’s a felony.
Therein lies a dilemma for gun rights activists. They dislike the law, but it’s evident they dislike the Biden family and how Hunter has been getting extraordinary treatment during his legal dramatics even more. Apparently, some folks don’t think gun ownership should be restricted based on drug use, but the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms took an interesting perspective on the whole affair, and it makes sense.
In a news release, CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb observed, “This is really the only thing that counts; whether Hunter Biden was heavily using drugs at the time of the gun purchase is not the issue, and we can’t lose perspective on this. The president’s son may have other demons with which to deal, but this case is about providing false information on a gun purchase form, which is a federal crime, and which is made explicitly clear on the Form 4473.”
However, there is no small irony — actually, it’s bizarre — in the fact that the son of Joe “I wanna ban assault weapons and 9mm pistols” Biden will apparently fight his federal charge on constitutional grounds; you know, the same Second Amendment his dad has been trying to erode since arriving on Capitol Hill about 50 years ago.
A long-gone Seattle radio announcer had a term for this some 40 years ago: “Weirder than skaditch!” I’m not sure what “skaditch” was, but it had to be something way out in the weeds.
Pants On Fire!
Having made a career out of reporting on gun politics, the Biden case would make a great script for a movie spoof. Joe got poked pretty hard recently by Gottlieb and the CCRKBA when his son’s indictment on the gun charge was revealed.
“Joe Biden has been lying about guns for years,” Gottlieb said. “We can’t list all of Joe Biden’s canards about guns, but the few real whoppers include his claim that the Second Amendment prohibited people from owning cannons, for which even the Washington Post Fact Checker called him out.”
Then there was that prevarication about the effect of a 9mm bullet on the human body, reported by Newsweek in May 2022. The story explained Biden’s claim he had chatted with a trauma surgeon about gunshot wounds, asserting this unidentified doctor told him, ‘A .22-caliber bullet will lodge in the lung, and we can probably get it out, may be able to get it, and save the life. A 9mm bullet blows the lung out of the body.’”
“Let’s face it,” Gottlieb said at the time, “Joe Biden has lied about guns for his entire adult life, and now, according to the federal indictment, his son allegedly has the same problem. This time, it has led to a criminal charge, and we’ll just have to see how this shakes out in court.”
Something Remarkable
In the middle of this sitcom, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced her ban on open and concealed carry — essentially suspending the Second Amendment in the process — in Albuquerque and surrounding Bernalillo County.
Federal lawsuits sprang up like weeds, and within days, she backed away from the order, limiting her restrictions to public parks and places where children might gather. It was still unconstitutional, according to critics.
Angry gun owners gathered to protest in Albuquerque, and something remarkable happened. Actually, something didn’t happen. CCRKBA’s Gottlieb noted these armed protesters didn’t burn anything, there were no vandalism reports, nobody’s traffic was blocked, and nobody was arrested.
“What a stark contrast to the violent ANTIFA demonstrations and urban rioting we have seen in recent years,” he said. “Instead of setting fires, these gun owners set an example … The country has now witnessed an example of just how far anti-gun extremists are willing to go in an effort to push their agenda. This should alarm every American citizen, and not just the law-abiding gun owners in Albuquerque who peacefully exercised their First Amendment right to defend their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, showing the nation in the process they’re the good guys.”
Thirty minutes into this year’s Washington grouse season, Dave
followed through on a self-imposed challenge to start the hunt
with a handgun. That’s a fat fool hen and a deadly accurate Ruger MKIV pistol.
Meanwhile, In the Woods
All of this did not distract me from fulfilling a mission reported in this column some weeks ago regarding hunting grouse on the opener with a .22-caliber pistol.
For this exercise, I grabbed my Ruger MKIV as I headed out the door to drive the 70 miles to my “secret spot,” camp overnight and attack those rogue fool hens as soon as the sun was up. But, I had an edge, thanks in part to my colleague Jeff “Tank” Hoover and his former editorship Roy Huntington. Call it the “magic bullet.”
A couple of months ago, Tank wrote about a little gadget Roy cooked up, which enables guys like me to file off the front end of a .22 Long Rifle RNL bullet so it is flat. Tank and Roy both said such projectiles hit harder and knock ‘em down for the count. Naturally, I had to see this for myself, and Roy obligingly made one of these little units for me, even inscribing my initials.
Roy Huntington’s .22-caliber bullet die did the trick for Dave’s opening morning fowl buster.)
One inserts the cartridge, the bullet nose extends out the other side of this die, and you give it a few strokes with a file.
Recall how I reported I had “talked myself into” this, and 30 minutes into the 2023 grouse season, after pressing the trigger once with decisive results, I talked myself right back out of the idea, mission accomplished. That hooter hit the ground deader than the bacon I’d eaten for breakfast. I texted Roy a message with an image of the pistol and my bird, telling him, “It works!”
This happened when I came across about eight birds just off an old logging road. A few of them flushed in several directions, but I heard one hooting at me from a tree, about 15 feet up and maybe 25-30 feet away. Turning my head slightly, I saw the bird staring at me — they don’t call them “fool hens” for nothing — and in one slow, smooth motion, I raised my pistol, flipping off the safety and cut loose, taking him just under the neck.
For the rest of the season, I’m sticking with the shotgun. Maybe. Well, probably not.
We’ve Got Mail
Responding to my column on carrying a sidearm in predator country came this note from a reader from Idaho:
Re: some of your recent stuff online…
“Cougar attacks are rare.” But not nonexistent.
A good reminder, as spouse and I just took a two-lane drive through backcountry Washington from Boise to Pacific Beach. I’m a small-stature guy who has had a CCW since 1976 (Maine, then Idaho), was a reserve patrol officer for 9 years, and whose full-time career locale was a non-permissive environment with NO security provided. I carry a 1 5/8” North American 5-shot .22 Mag, but in the woods, I bring bigger and did so on our trip. Although I now reload, I carried HSM .357mag 180-grain Bear Load in my Blackhawk on this trip.
I’ve never seen a mountain lion, though 7 years ago, my wife saw one in the field opposite the patio of our condo. And then yesterday we had this visitor, who I saw at 7pm when I went out to call our two house cats home. I’d guess she was twice the size of our 14 lb. male cat. We watched her stalk and catch a mouse, then leave.
Ok now, grouse hunting with a .22. I think the complainers are of the “I’m not skilled enough to do that so it shouldn’t be allowed” type of person.
Sadly, they may make the rules …
You and Dr. (Will) Dabbs are my two must-reads in GUNS. Keep up the good work.
Steve Palley RN Emeritus
Boise, ID
Dave replies: Great to hear from you, Steve, and I admire your ammunition choice for that Ruger Blackhawk. I’ve got a North American 5-shooter in .22 Magnum as well. I’ll be writing about it shortly, so keep your eyes peeled. Thanks for the interesting photo, and for reading Insider Online!
Mike Thornton
Michael Thornton is a hardcore 30 year-veteran of the United States Navy, a founding member of SEAL Team Six, and one of only three SEALs to receive the Medal of Honor in ‘Nam – an honor he earned in blood on Halloween 1972, when he almost single-handedly battled through enemy territory against a swarming horde of enemy soldiers, charged through a naval artillery bombardment to save his commanding officer from certain death, and then swam three hours through North Vietnamese waters with two wounded guys hanging off his back and a half-dozen chunks of grenade shrapnel lodged in various parts of his abdomen.
If that’s not badass enough for you, then clearly you’ve come to the wrong website.
Mike Thornton was born March 23, 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina. He joined the U.S. Navy and served as a Gunner’s Mate on a couple destroyers, but in 1968 he decided to try his hand at making the Navy’s elite Underwater Demolitions Team – the original precursor to the SEALs. Training was brutal, exhausting, and unbelievably intense – of the 129 men who signed up for UDT Class 49, only 16 graduated and were accepted into the program.
One of those 16 was Mike Thornton. Not long after completing one of the most brutal military training courses on the face of the planet, he was assigned to SEAL Team One and deployed to the Republic of Vietnam at the height of the Vietnam War.
Thornton arrived in-country in 1969 and spent the next three years doing a wide variety of super-badass over-the-top Navy SEALs stuff. He gathered intel on enemy positions, scouted deep behind enemy lines on daring covert missions, captured prisoners when he could, battled enemy forces on the reg, and basically did all that cool Black Ops classified SEAL stuff that was presumably so hardcore and top-secret classified that we’ll likely never really know the full details of all of it.
Team One was at the heart of many of America’s Special Operations in ‘Nam, and in the fall of 1972 this was still very much the case. In October, 23 year-old Petty Officer Mike Thornton was sent on a mission to the Qua Viet Naval Base in Quan Tri Province on a dangerous mission to gather intel on some NVA positions, capture a few prisoners, and then somehow extract back to friendly lines. Thornton’s team would consist of himself, three South Vietnamese Special Forces operators, and the unit commander, Lieutenant Thomas Norris, a hardcore Medal of Honor recipient Navy SEAL who was already a legend among the SEALs thanks to a wild mission he’d undertaken a few months earlier when he went undercover deep into enemy territory to rescue a downed American pilot. Facing extreme danger, and surrounded constantly by a massive force of NVA soldiers, Norris succeeded in extracting not only the pilot, but also the crew of a team that had already gone in to get the pilot and ended up getting pinned down. The mission was so hardcore that they made a movie out of it – it’s called Bat*21, and Norris was so tough that they got Gene Hackman to play him in the movie.
Needless to say, this was not a crew of guys you wanted to face in a dark alley late at night.
The SEALs deployed first by sailing an ordinary-looking Vietnamese junk boat up a river late at night, then by boarding a small rubber boat and infiltrating enemy lines under the cover of darkness. Well, unfortunately, the mission started to go sideways right away – the map wasn’t really lining up with what was supposed to be there, and it didn’t take long for Norris and Thornton to realize that they’d landed a little too far into enemy terrirotyr. So now, instead of scouting temporary enemy fortifications that had been thrown up days before, these guys were now straight in the middle of a hardened network of NVA bunkers that had been designed years ago to repel full-scale assaults by massive formations of enemy troops and armor.
It wasn’t really the kind of place you wanted to be walking around with an American flag patch on your shoulder.
So, ok, the SEALs were off-course, and were now wayyyy deeper in enemy territory then they would have hoped, but a mission is a mission, and these guys were pros. They immediately went to work – noting bunker positions, troop concentrations, fortifications, vehicles, and radio towers. They Splinter Celled their way silently and stealthily through the heart of an enemy naval base first by boat, then on foot, collecting tons of valuable intel, all somehow without being detected by the hundreds of hardened veteran NVA troops that now surrounded them from every direction.
Then, over one particular ridgeline, the SEALs saw a couple of NVA guards standing nearby. They were far enough away from the main base that they could potentially have been grabbed and taken prisoner without alerting the base, so the SEAL team moved in to try and take them into custody. The two South Vietnamese SEALs grabbed one of the guys, but they weren’t quick enough to grab the second guy – that dude bolted for it and started screaming his damn head off for the NVA to sound the alarm.
Thornton ran him down and capped him with a well-placed pistol round, but it was already too late – the SEAL stopped dead in his tracks as he heard the sound of alarm sirens blaring from a nearby camp.
Thornton ran for it. By the time he’d reached the spot where his buddies were waiting for him, he was already being run down by a group of roughly fifty NVA soldiers, who immediately started spraying AK-47 gunfire into the jungle all around him.
One of the South Vietnamese SEALs launched a LAW rocket into the middle of the attacking forces, hoping that the resulting explosion would buy the SEAL team a little time to take off and run to the extraction point.
The SEALs were now in a fight for their lives. They had to get back to their extraction point before they were completely surrounded and overrun by a force that massively outnumbered them.
Fighting through the pitch darkness, facing down presumably hundreds of enemy soldiers, the five Navy SEALs fought the way you’d expect the most badass military force in the world to fight. They fired, repositioned, fired again, and launched grenades and LAW rockets, constantly changing position in an attempt to confuse the enemy about how many guys they were facing. The SEALs had the advantage of surprise, and concealment, and the NVA couldn’t just charge in there after them because they couldn’t quite figure out how many guys they were actually facing. So, through the darkness of the Vietnamese jungle, the Navy SEALs spent the next four hours (!!) battling their way back towards the water.
Bullets were zipping through the jungle from every direction as the SEALs made their escape. Five men against hundreds. As his ammunition began to run out, Norris (who took up the rear of the SEAL position) ditched his M-16 and took an AK-47 off a dead enemy soldier, using captured ammo to keep up a steady hail of fire back towards the ever-closing NVA troops. At the head of the column, Mike Thornton raced through pitch-black jungle navigating his team to the extract point. As dawn began to break and the SEALs approached the beach, Norris got on his radio and called in for two Destroyers to come in and lay down some covering fire. Shortly after, though, he received a report that heavy fire from fortified NVA shore guns had damaged both Destroyers and drove them back from the coast. A cruiser was inbound to help, but for now the SEALs were on their own.
Thornton continued to the extraction, firing his M-16 in all directions, until suddenly an enemy grenade landed dangerously close to him. It exploded, ripping shrapnel through the SEAL. White-hot shards of splintered steel embedded in his back in six different places, as the concussive force of the blast sent him flying hard into the ground. With his ears ringing, and his back screaming in pain, Thornton still held on to his weapon, and rolled over onto his back just in time to see four NVA troops running up onto the ridgeline to finish the job – despite every muscle in his body screaming in pain, Thornton still somehow had the calmness and unimaginable skill to take out all four of those guys before they could spray him full of 7.62.
One of the South Vietnamese SEALs rushed over to pick Thornton up, and the SEAL asked what had happened to Tom Norris. The SEAL responded, “He’s gone. Let’s go”. The guy said that Norris’s position had been overrun, he was shot in the head and killed, and the rest of the team had to fall back. He urged Thornton to get to the beach to extract, because the window to get out of this alive was very rapidly closing, and a US Cruiser was already maneuvering into position to lay down some cover fire.
But Navy SEALs don’t leave a man behind. And Thornton wasn’t about to start now.
With AK-47 fire zipping around him from every direction, Michael Thornton ran 400 yards through a hail of bullets to reach the body of his good friend. Four NVA troops were standing over the fallen SEAL, but Thornton killed them with his rifle, screaming with rage, and finally fell to his knees at his friend’s side. Norris was bleeding badly from a gunshot to the head, but Thornton wasn’t about to leave that guy behind. With enemy troops ripping shots past his head, and blood pouring from grenade wounds in his back, Mike Thornton threw Tom Norris on his shoulders and started to make a run back for the beach.
It was at this point that the U.S. Navy cruiser reached firing position. And the coordinates the firing teams had were the ones that Tom Norris had given them – at a time when Norris thought he wasn’t going to get out of this fight alive.
The shell landed pretty much right where Norris’s body had been. The explosion blew Thornton 20 feet through the air, slamming him hard to the beach, ringing his ears, and blurring his vision. As he lie on the ground, he heard something amazing. A familiar voice, quiet and fading, but clearly audible even among the gunfire and artillery.
“Mike, buddy.”
Tom Norris was alive.
Surging with adrenaline, Mike Thornton jumped back to his feet, threw Norris on his back, and started running to the shore. With bullets, mortars, and naval artillery chewing up the beach and the trees around him, Thornton ran though the fire, finally reaching the shore, where one of the Vietnamese SEALs also lay wounded from a gunshot to the back.
Thornton grabbed that guy too. Then he jumped in the water, inflated his life vest, and proceeded to swim through salt water with six grenade wounds in his back for four hours while dragging two seriously wounded men.
The American ship that had been sent to extract the SEALs was preparing to go home, convinced that nobody could have survived that mission, when suddenly they saw a dude in the water shooting his rifle in the air trying to get their attention. It was Mike Thornton.
Every member of the mission survived.
When Thornton received his Medal of Honor in 1973, Tom Norris was still recovering in the hospital, and they weren’t about to let him leave just to attend a medal ceremony. So, the day of the ceremony, Thornton went to the hospital, put Norris in a wheelchair, and snuck him out the back door so he could attend.
After Vietnam, Mike Thornton would go on to be a BUD/S instructor in Coronado, where he would train future Navy SEALs, as well as members of the British Royal Marines’ badass Special Boat Service. He was a founding member of SEAL Team Six in 1980, and retired as a Lieutenant in 1992. Nowadays there’s a really badass statue of his rescue mission standing outside the SEAL museum in Ft. Pierce, Florida.
Links:
Mike-Thornton.com
NavySEALs.com
Achievement.org
Defense Media Network
Wikipedia
Suggested Reading:
Collier, Peter and Nick Del Calzo. Medal of Honor. New York: Artisan, 2006.
Dockery, Kevin. SEALs in Action. New York: Avon Books, 1991.
Norris, Tom and Mike Thornton. By Honor Bound. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016.
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