Month: February 2025
Categories
Browning Auto 5 – 16 Gauge
Categories
Targeting
Theodore Roosevelt 26th President of the USA
GUNCRANK DIARIES
Love. It’s the glue that binds humanity together. True love is selfless. True love is sacrificial. True love overlooks faults. One chaotic evening in the emergency department, I saw for real the indomitable power of true love.
Our heroine was 29 years old. She arrived by POV (Personally Owned Vehicle) attended by her boyfriend. He was doting and attentive. The fact she was conscious and conversational shocked me. She had been shot in the head.
She was sitting up when we met, a scant dribble of dark blood tracking down the side of her face. Her left eye bulged monstrously. Bullet wounds are almost mystically sinister up close, like the blackness of an evil man’s soul. This one seemed about the diameter of a pencil and was centered on her left temple.
Miracle Of Misfortune?
I don’t know why, but we always asked what happened. It’s not that it really much matters. The type of firearm is germane to a degree, but the psychosocial events leading up to the shooting not so much. However, I just never could resist. I always wanted to hear the story.
It was the boyfriend who provided the details. He said he had come in from whatever it was he did and was unloading his daily gear — a trim little .380ACP pocket pistol part of his daily loadout. He told me he slipped the little gun out of his pocket and set it down sideways on the top of the dresser.
He had no idea how it happened. He strongly suspected the gun was defective and explained he might have a lawyer review the issue. Somehow, when he set the gun down, it went off.
Bullets are the very embodiment of physics. They describe a path based predominantly upon their orientation and initial velocity. Projectiles fall to earth driven by the constant acceleration due to gravity. Like everything else in the universe, they continue in motion until affected by outside forces. The boyfriend explained the evening’s sordid outcome was pure unvarnished random.
His girlfriend had been standing across the room inquiring as to the nature of his day. When the gun went off the little bullet had traversed the bedroom and, as foul luck might have it, struck the hapless women in the temple. After quite a lot of frenetic chaos as well as a trip screaming across town to the ER here we were.
The Truth Hurts
It was indeed a compelling tale. However, this was not my first gunshot wound. When I examined the thing closely, I noticed charred flesh with ample powder stippling fanned out from the point of impact. There was even a little tearing of the skin around the wound.
As anyone who has ever watched one of those criminal forensics TV shows might attest, you can ascertain a great deal from an entrance wound. A bullet fired at a distance just punches a hole. The same thing at contact range will tattoo the surrounding skin with unburned powder and carboniferous ick. This was definitely the latter sort. Compelling story notwithstanding, this guy had clearly put his gun to this young woman’s temple and stroked the trigger.
The lady in question was doing shockingly well, considering. The anemic little bullet had transected her left optic nerve, deflected downward through her maxillary sinuses, and come to rest behind her rearmost right upper molar. I cleaned her up and found a maxillofacial surgeon who popped the spent projectile right out.
I waited until the moment was right and got a pal to remove the boyfriend for a while. Once it was just her and me, I explained my concerns regarding the nature of the wound and how it didn’t seem to jive with the boyfriend’s story. I assured her we could keep her safe, and if he had indeed shot her intentionally, then we would need to deal with that.
Throughout it all she stuck religiously to the tale. The gun went off when he set it down. He loved her, and she loved him. There’s nothing he would ever do to harm her intentionally. I pushed as much as I was comfortable, but then let it drop.
The cops did the same, but when the victim swears it was an accident, there’s just not a lot left with which to work. They had likely rehearsed their stories en route to the hospital. I discharged her the following day, now irrevocably half blind, in the company of her boyfriend. He was as attentive and affectionate as ever.
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GOING HOME BY WILL DABBS, MD
Flying Army helicopters was the coolest job in the world.
I’m on my fifth career. You really cannot start medical school at 32 and convince anybody that’s what you always wanted to do. I like to tell folks that if it paid a little better, I’d be just as happy being the guy manning the drive-through at McDonald’s. Like most professional storytellers, I just like visiting with people.
Despite being a physician, I actually have little interest in the technical aspects of medicine. I don’t read medical journals recreationally (some actually do). Truth be known, I am much happier discussing the development of the WWII-vintage German FG-42 parachute rifle than I am explaining how Ozempic works to control blood sugar.
Part of that is timing. Young folks are impressionable. When I was young, I flew tactical helicopters for Uncle Sam.
I made some great friends as a soldier. I’m the guy in white on the left.
This is me going over the top of Mt. McKinley, Alaska — the highest point in North America.
Arguably the only thing more exhilarating than flying
Army helicopters is hanging underneath one. This was a wild ride.
Army helicopters is hanging underneath one. This was a wild ride.
Conditioning
This can be frustrating for my family. Despite not having donned a pair of fatigues for nearly half my life now, my longsuffering bride tells me that on my deathbed, my final word will be, “Hooah!” Suffice it to say, that poor woman sighs a lot.
God has been inexplicably good to me. The fact that I am currently curled up in front of a roaring fire on a cold December morning, banging out yet another Guncrank Diaries column, is the ultimate example of that profound, unmerited grace. That same good fortune followed me into the military. Most Army aviators track into a single airframe and stay there. By contrast, I was fortunate enough to fly four. When I left the military, I had around 800 hours flying D-model CH-47 Chinook helicopters.
That’s like spending 24 hours a day in that cockpit for 33 days straight. After a while, that enclosed space starts to feel pretty familiar. That’s the point. You get to where you can find the switches without a great deal of conscious thought. Uncle Sam invests breathtaking amounts of time, effort and money inculcating those skills. And then, it was all suddenly gone.
Some new friends were kind enough to show me around the latest, greatest CH-47 Chinook variant.
Plopping down in this rascal again was a bit like going home.
Flashbacks
While in med school, with a wife and three kids, I was lucky to have time to change into fresh underwear. There was no discretionary brain space to ponder Army helicopters or the similar detritus from that former life. And then, 26 years later, I made a new friend with the right connections. The next thing I knew, I was walking into a big Army hangar crammed full of sparkly new F-model Chinook helicopters, and it all came rushing back.
For starters, the place is spotlessly clean. You could safely eat off the floor of an Army maintenance hangar. And then there is the smell. It is a unique milieu consisting of JP-8 jet fuel, hydraulic fluid, sweat, love and freedom. I paused for a moment, closed my eyes and just let it wash over me.
I climbed into the cockpit of the nearest aircraft in the company of a profoundly competent warrant officer pilot. I plopped my antique carcass down into the right seat and felt the joyfully familiar claustrophobia of radios to my left, instruments to my front, and boron carbide armor plate to my right. It was briefly as though I had never left.
The controls were right where I had left them, as were most of the switches, levers and circuit breakers. The steam gauges of my era had been replaced by a series of high-tech display screens, and there were no paper maps to be found anywhere. A fresh new multi-function control grip sprouted from the rear aspect of the center console. My new warrant officer buddy explained this was there solely to control the panel displays. What hath God wrought?
I mourn the passing of paper maps. Manual navigation at 160 knots and 10 feet off the deck under night vision goggles is hard. I think doing that likely makes you a better pilot. However, nowadays, GPS also makes it essentially impossible to get lost, so there’s that.
My mom and I had some business down in Meridian, Mississippi, recently. I zipped us down in my own sexy cool little airplane.
After a while, I had dominated enough of the young folks’ time, so I climbed into my own sexy, cool little fighter plane and blasted off for my home ’drome. I suspect in the event of a true national emergency, I could take a brief stroll through the Dash-Ten manual and still make one of those big, beautiful $65 million machines walk and talk. Even if Uncle Sam never again needs my services, I will be forever grateful to the young studs of B Company, 1-111th Aviation for my brief visit back home.