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— NUCLR GOLF (@NUCLRGOLF) July 4, 2025
Category: Well I thought it was neat!
The author says that if it’s handled correctly after the harvest, the “lowly” javelina can be a gastronomic delight. Pictured is Col. Evan Quiros, owner of the famous Shipp Ranch.
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Looking back now, it was one of the most peaceful places I think I’ve ever known. Late evening just before dark, the only noises that could be heard were a few crickets and various critters working their way through the impenetrable chaparral comprised of mesquite, prickly pear, acacia, and lotebush. The setting was the Shipp Ranch east of Laredo in South Texas–one of my favorite hangouts. My friend, Esteban, had worked for Col. Evan Quiros, owner of the Shipp, for many years, and he was an expert cowboy and brush guide. I’d been lucky he’d taken a liking to me, since I was just a gringo kid who spoke poor Spanish.
Esteban had brought me out to the peaceful little spot on the east side of the Shipp to help me get a shot at a South Texas Javelina. At the time, Javelina were considered varmints, and there was no license requirement to hunt them.
My dad and Evan had business to tend to at the Shipp headquarters and had asked Esteban to get me out of their hair for a while, so we’d decided that bagging javelina would be a fine way to pass the time.
After we’d sat enjoying the quiet for a while, we began hearing some movement in the brush about 30 or 40 yards away, down the little sendero we’d been watching. Esteban tapped my shoulder and smiled.
Soon we heard the weird popping noise made by javelina when they gnash and snap their tusks. A short time later, they showed themselves, and I quickly got the drop on a large male with my Savage Model 99 .243. The shot was good, and the pig dropped in his tracks. Esteban was ecstatic, and we rushed over to check the kill. After we’d admired the javelina a minute or two, I pulled out my hunting knife, planning to gut the thing. Esteban gave me an odd look, then shook his finger in the negative.
“No, no podemos comerlo,” he said, indicating we wouldn’t be eating our harvest.
Esteban explained, mostly in Spanish, that Javelina meat smelled just like the pig laying in front of us–foul.
I was quite disappointed as I’d had no idea javelina wouldn’t be great on the barbeque. Esteban was an expert at cooking my favorite Shipp Ranch dish, which was cabrito (roasted goat). I figured he could do wonders with javelina over mesquite, but it wasn’t to happen.
“But why?” I asked.
Upon our return to the Shipp headquarters, I asked Col. Quiros about eating javelina, and he provided much the same response as Esteban had.
“The cowboys won’t even eat ’em,” the Colonel growled. “Well, sometimes if they’re hungry enough, but only in tamales, with a lot of chile powder and garlic to kill the smell.”
After that, I went many years touting the fact that javelina meat was entirely inedible until my good friend Sgt. Jim Hiltsley of the New Mexico State Police set me straight. Jim made a high-stakes bet that not only would I like his javelina recipe, I’d want more than one helping. Jim was more or less correct.
He had drawn a permit to take a New Mexico javelina and quickly filled the tag. He threw a little get-together to show off his javelina cooking skills, which turned out to be awesome. He’d cubed the meat, then pressure cooked it, then added his special barbeque sauce, and allowed it to cook for hours. It was delectable.
What I didn’t know about Jim’s recipe was that the secret to successfully cooking javelina lies entirely in the way the animal is handled after harvest. Sometime later I learned the technique from rancher Penn Baggett of Ozona, Texas.
My friend Penn explained that although javelina wasn’t his favorite meal, it could be enjoyed if it was cooked right. He explained the technique of removing the two musk glands that protrude from the javelina’s back. This must be done with surgical precision, and any slip of the blade and spilling of musk on the meat ruins it entirely. Penn decided we should harvest a Baggett Ranch javelina so he could demonstrate.
After taking what Penn decided was a perfect eatin’ size hog with a DPMS AR in .223, we set upon dressing him out. Penn hung the javelina from a tree to begin the procedure. Using an extremely sharp blade, Penn expertly carved around the glands and removed them in their entirety, including the musk sacs underneath the skin. As he skinned the hog, he was extremely careful not to touch the meat with his hand, plus he didn’t allow the meat to come in contact with any part of the outside of the hide. Penn later sent me home with a perfectly processed javelina, advising me to cook him any way I’d like.
My old friend and fellow lawman Bill Fort had decided to throw a little pachanga in Alpine, Texas, and I figured it might be just the right setting in which to have a javelina barbeque. Bill agreed. I bathed the javelina in my secret marinade overnight, then placed it in the smoker with indirect heat and heavy mesquite smoke for several hours, which produced a bright red smoke rind on the meat.
I removed the javelina from the smoke and placed it in a deep baking pan with seasoning and a bottle of Mexican beer. Sealing the pan tightly with foil, I then placed the concoction in the oven at about 225 degrees for several hours. Letting the javelina cool a bit, I was then able to easily pull the bone out of the meat, which I shredded with two forks.
At Bill’s pachanga, we served the mesquite-smoked javelina with fresh corn tortillas and pico de gallo. It was a hit with all who tried it–some didn’t believe they were eating javelina. Granted, there was an abundance of Mexican beer and other beverages present at Bill’s barbeque, but we found that the leftover peccary was even good the next day.
If you’re planning a hunt anytime soon, don’t make the mistake I did for so long in not processing your harvest due to the disagreeable odor of the javelina and rumors of it being inedible. Proper meat handling, mesquite smoking, and the right condiments can work wonders.
Alas, the lowly javelina can be a gastronomic delight.
Operation Overlord was the official title for the D-Day assault. This was the largest amphibious invasion in human history. Public domain.
Operation Overlord, the 1944 Allied invasion of mainland Europe, was one of the most audacious military enterprises in human history. 160,000 Allied troops drawn mostly from the US, Great Britain, and Canada plowed inland against some 50,000 Axis defenders. The end result was a lodgment from which the Allies eventually pressed all the way to Germany.
The Germans knew we were coming. They just didn’t know exactly when or where. Calais was the obvious spot. It is less than twenty miles across the English Channel from Dover to France near Calais. As a result, the Germans staged a great deal of their defensive effort in this area. However, as we all know, that’s not what Ike had in mind.
The invasion forces moved between 80 and 100 miles by sea to reach the actual landing beaches in Normandy. While the landings were a gory mess, particularly at Omaha, they would have been far worse had the Allies not spoofed the Germans into believing that Calais was their primary landing zone. In addition to a great deal of good old-fashioned subterfuge, a decorated German General named Hans Cramer unwittingly did his part to help the Allies.
This is Hans Cramer, last commanding officer of the
German Afrika Korps. He unwittingly helped dupe Hitler
into believing that the D-Day force was landing in Calais.
Bundesarchiv.
The Guy
Hans Cramer was the last commander of the DAK, the famed German Afrika Korps. He was captured in North Africa in May of 1943 and held in a POW camp in Wales. In 1944, Cramer was 48 years old. That seems pretty spry by my current standards, but that’s actually fairly antiquated for a soldier. Once established in his POW camp, General Cramer got seriously sick.
On 23 May 1944, General Cramer was transported across England to be repatriated to Germany courtesy of the Swedish Red Cross. Despite the global hemoclysm that engulfed the world, there was still the occasional humanitarian release between the Allies and the Axis. Cramer’s Allied handlers carefully orchestrated his trek across the UK.
First, he processed through London. Then they motored across the English countryside so Cramer could see the massive buildup of troops, tanks, and military equipment being staged for the invasion. However, his driver led him to believe he was in southeastern England, the perfect place to stage an invasion of Calais.
Once he returned safely to Berlin, Cramer was aggressively debriefed. German intelligence officers mined him for information. Everything he reported was consistent with an objective in Calais.
Everyone knew that George Patton was the Allies’ most effective combat general. In the lead-up to D-Day, his job was to command an enormous fake army. Public domain.
Operation Fortitude
This was but a tiny part of the overall deception plan. They called this overarching enterprise Operation Fortitude. The British officer tasked with putting it all together was named, no kidding, LTC David Strangeways.
At the Tehran Conference in November of 1943, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt met to hammer out the details of the coming invasion. It was there that Winston Churchill coined the phrase, “In wartime, truth is so precious that it should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” LTC Strangeways took that mandate to heart.
FUSAG, the giant fake army designed to mislead the
Germans about D-Day, even had its own unique unit insignia. Public domain.
Details
General Bernard Law Montgomery’s 21st Army Group was the invasion’s major effort. However, the Allies desperately needed to keep the German 15th Army occupied in the Calais region. To do so, they created a 300,000-man army that did not technically exist.
This giant fake army was technically deployed around Kent, Essex, and Suffolk. Great effort was invested in creating radio traffic that mimicked such a gargantuan military organization. Squadrons of imaginary aircraft and flotillas of nonexistent ships were folded into the tactical organization. Double agents captured and turned by British MI5 fed carefully-screened information back to their handlers in Germany.
This massive diaphanous unit was called the First US Army Group. They were known by the acronym FUSAG, which obviously sounds pretty cool. They even had their own unit patches and insignia.
A big part of Operation Fortitude was manning it with some proper talent. They chose America’s most flamboyant general to lead this theoretical mob. With the largest amphibious invasion in human history staging to the south, General George S. Patton was put in command of FUSAG. Patton clearly would have preferred commanding real troops. However, he absolutely owned the role.
Patton made speeches and inspected imaginary combat units. A bevy of photographers followed the flamboyant general everywhere he went, documenting his sundry inspections and presentations. The Germans rightfully thought Patton to be one of the best generals in the Allied stable. They fully expected him to command the pending invasion of Europe.
Success…
The ruse was fabulously successful. Even after the Normandy landings, Hitler and his generals still suspected it was a feint to draw attention away from Calais. This misperception of the tactical situation bought the assault troops precious time to create a foothold in Normandy.
The Germans eventually figured out that they had been duped and moved their reinforcements to Normandy right sharpish. However, by then, the Allies had established air supremacy. That made tactical troop movements in daylight tantamount to suicide.
We all know how it ultimately turned out. Less than a year after the D-Day invasion, Hitler debrained himself in his bunker in Berlin while victorious Russian troops slagged the countryside above. However, all of that might have been very different had it not been for LTC Strangeways’ Operation Fortitude and one unwitting German general.