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Dan Wesson Guardian 1911 .45 ACP
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Made my day that’s for sure!
The Spartan kick pic.twitter.com/rolELKpLa3
— Washingtons ghost (@washghost1) December 9, 2025
Soldiers have some of the coolest toys. However, you have
to suffer a great deal to really play with them.
A dear friend was once a grunt with the 173rd Airborne Brigade posted in Vicenza, Italy. The 173rd is a storied paratrooper unit whose origins date back to 1917. Its members are called the Sky Soldiers. I’ve heard the 173rd described as, “The most fit group of alcoholic sociopaths in the known universe.”
Any healthy society venerates its warriors. Failure to do so is a great way to become conquered. However, along the way, sometimes reality gets a bit blurred.
If you shape your opinions from movies and the media, you could be forgiven for believing that American soldiers are all like John Rambo — rock hard super troops with chiseled physiques and ice water for blood. That was not my experience.
For the most part, even our elite special operations forces are really just souped up kids. They are indeed fit and exquisitely well-trained. They also have some of the neatest toys. However, even the new O-6 full Colonels are typically not yet 40 years old. The actual trigger pullers are often just teenagers.
As an aside, my wife’s grandfather fought in North Africa, Sicily and Italy during World War II. He once told me that a soldier should never remain in combat for more than a year. He said that, after about 12 months under fire, a man gets mean and is no longer afraid of anything. You cannot threaten him with court martial, peer pressure, or any other such vapid corporeal stuff.
I would actually assert that 19-year-olds make the best soldiers. Anything younger and you lack the requisite self-confidence. Much older and you start to question things. If the Big Green Machine was populated by old guys like me, we would, to pirate a phrase from the classic sci-fi opus Aliens, “Just nuke the site from orbit … it’s the only way to be sure.” It is that extraordinary teenaged sweet spot about which we will concern ourselves today.
Communal Suffering
Soldiers are subjected to corporate hardship for a variety of sound reasons. One is that sleep deprivation and hunger are combat analogues. Going without food and sleep reliably ratchets up the stress without a great deal of unnecessary risk.
As a side benefit, it is those ghastly road marches and protracted deployments that give you bragging rights with your grandchildren decades later. If you use a little poetic license describing how horrible it all was, they’ll never know the difference.
My buddy’s platoon was deployed to the field for a month. During this time, they conducted patrol base operations and ran tactical missions like recons and raids. As they were living in the field, that meant MREs for food and no showers for a full 30 days.
I’ve done that before myself and didn’t much care for it. However, over time you reach a sort of dirt stasis. Old dirt has to fall off to make room for new dirt. Once you find that filth balance, you attain a sort of unhygienic Zen. Most folks are good with it. And then there was this one idiot guy …
The M107 water carrier consists of a 400-gallon aluminum water tank mounted on a military trailer.
Details
While my friend’s unit was living tactically, they still required support. The easiest way to keep these guys in fresh water was to give them a dedicated water buffalo. The military designation was the M107. This was a giant 400-gallon aluminum tank mounted on a military trailer all painted camouflage. Everybody everywhere called them water buffaloes.
The M107 is pretty simple. There’s a big hatch on top to make them easy to fill, and spigots on the side so several soldiers can get water at once. The design is pretty stupid-proof.
In this case, they parked the water buffalo in the middle of the patrol base and just cycled by as needed to recharge canteens and get water to shave, brush their teeth, and so forth. Four hundred gallons should be enough to last 30 guys for a good while. However, over time, they began to notice something weird about the taste.
He said at first, they all assumed it was just that obligatory dearth of hygiene. However, late one evening, my friend dropped by the water buffalo to top off his canteen. While there, he heard something sloshing around inside. Producing his red lens flashlight, he carefully climbed up on top of the water buffalo and cracked the hatch.
He was shocked to discover one of his fellow grunts happily bathing inside the thing. This flaming moron was scrubbing down with soap and a dishrag, effectively ridding himself of his accumulated grunge. My buddy shouted for assistance and unceremoniously dragged the slippery miscreant out of the tank.
The platoon leader placed the young man under arrest and remanded him to their higher headquarters. Part of that was due to the rank stupidity he had shown in bathing in the unit’s drinking water. More importantly, however, it was to prevent my buddy and his fellow paratroopers from, no kidding, murdering him.
When I think back to my time in uniform, I remember being dirty a lot.
Ruminations
The unit scored a fresh water buffalo, and the guys all had the willies for a few days. My buddy had no idea what ultimately became of the mad bather. He never came back. I somehow doubt he had a long and productive career as a soldier.
I imagine, given his simply breathtaking proclivity toward poor judgment, that he eventually ended up incarcerated someplace. Wherever it is, I do hope they have nice showers.
I took this photo myself. Those Alaskan brown bears can become absolutely enormous.
I spent my last three years in the Army stationed at Fort Wainwright, Alaska. For a substantial portion of that time, I was the operations officer for a CH-47 Chinook helicopter unit.
I picked flight crews and assigned mission responsibilities. That also meant I got to do some really cool flying all across the last frontier. If you were paying taxes back in the 1990s, sincerely and from my heart, thank you for that.
Megafauna
When you encounter moose while flying out over the vast Alaskan muskeg, they typically either ignore you or run. These things are as big as Clydesdales and quite deadly up close, but they’re herbivorous ungulates. They don’t hunt people for food. Alaskan brown bears, by contrast, will gladly make a meal of you.
One fine day, I was piloting a Chinook helicopter north to south just east of the Salcha River on the far side of Eielson Air Force Base. We were flying nap-of-the-earth right above the trees at maybe 160 knots (about 185 mph). In this configuration, I serendipitously happened upon an absolutely enormous cinnamon grizzly bear.
I wasn’t trying to molest the wildlife. He just happened to be right in my flight path. I popped the cyclic back and cleared him by scant feet.
A CH-47 tops out at 50,000 pounds, and it makes the devil’s own racket. Most animals are rightly terrified of it. In this case, my flight engineer reported that, as we passed over this big gentleman’s head, he stood up on his hind legs and swatted at us. Human beings are not the apex predators in this space.
The Monster
In 1923, along the Unuk River near Cripple Creek north of Ketchikan, Alaska, a young fur trapper named Jess Sethington struck out to make his fortune. He packed a .38-caliber revolver and a .33-caliber rifle for personal protection and subsistence. He was never heard from again.
For years afterwards, trappers reported a particularly large bear in the area that regularly stalked them and molested their camps. The bear was unique for the strange groaning sound it seemed to make. Locals named the beast “Old Groaner.”
Old Groaner operated mostly at night and showed little fear of man. Several prospectors and trappers had fired at him, but none had connected in the dark. With all this in mind, in November 1935, two grizzled prospectors struck out into Old Groaner’s territory to stake a claim, accompanied by their dog.
The Attack
One of the miners ventured out alone with the dog and his rifle to post signage establishing his claim. Setting his rifle aside to erect the sign, he was surprised when his dog rushed past him barking furiously.
Grabbing his weapon, he saw a massive grizzly swat the dog away effortlessly and charge. With no time to shoulder the weapon, he fired from the hip instinctively. The muzzle was mere inches from the animal at the time.
The impact threw the man backwards, but his shot had connected. As the bear struggled to rise, the prospector gauged his angles and shot the enormous beast two more times. Old Groaner was done.
The Aftermath
The massive bear’s paws were more than ten inches across. However, that wasn’t what made the animal memorable. Once they got the big bruin dressed out, they found its jaw and skull to be grossly deformed. This accounted for the weird groaning sounds.
The two miners dug three .38-caliber pistol bullets out of the animal’s jaw along with a pair of .33-caliber rifle rounds. It seems that Jess Sethington had connected five times before the monster bear killed him. That was the sole physical evidence of Sethington’s gory demise that was ever discovered.
This was my bear gun while I was stationed in Alaska. It took a BATF Form 1 to build it legally, but when stoked with sabot slugs it was easy to carry while offering some proper downrange thump.
Ruminations
Alaska plays home to some 140,000 bears of all sorts. That’s an estimated 100,000 black bears, 30,000 brown/grizzly bears, and a further 4,700 polar bears. However, Alaska is a really big place. If you split Alaska in half, Texas would be the third-largest state.
Despite the space over which these animals are distributed, they are hardly rare. Attacks on humans are quite unusual, but I met two men during my time there who had been mauled while out hunting.
I never left the confines of the Army post without a serious gun. More often than not, that was a registered short-barreled 12-bore stoked with sabot slugs. I still felt underequipped at times.
An adult male brown bear can reach 10 feet long and weigh 900 pounds in the summer. What purportedly determines whether you survive a violent encounter with one of these creatures is the relative size of your head to his jaws. If he can get his teeth around your skull, he will pop it like a grape. If not, you only get scalped.
There is an amazing series of books that were required reading for those of us planning to spend any time in the bush, titled simply, “Alaskan Bear Tales.”
There are three volumes, and you can find them on Amazon. Be forewarned, these stories can be pretty gruesome. However, they serve as a reminder that there are some places where man is not always at the top of the food chain.
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A deadly team
