Category: A Victory!
Top honors for “Human Projectile Of The Month” go to an as-yet-unidentified dude who, we’re told, is also a serious contender for the annual Darwin Award. That prestigious prize is given — posthumously — to the person who does the human gene pool the greatest service by removing himself from it in the most extraordinarily stupid fashion. Well, the Darwin folks might see it that way, but we consider it a gallant, if not brainless, form of ballistic research.
Troopers from the Arizona Highway Patrol got involved with this historic event after motorists reported some mysterious scorched and blackened scars on a stretch of deserted highway. The more officers found, the stranger the case got until they pulled back, regrouped, and launched a full-scale investigation.
Here’s what they kinda “pieced” together: JATO units are basically huge canisters of solid rocket fuel used to achieve “Jet Assisted Take Off,” typically lifting big transports into the air from rough-ground short runways or shooting overloaded planes from the decks of aircraft carriers.
They were not, repeat not, designed to augment the inherent boost factor of a 1967 Chevy Impala. But we guess — let’s call him “Zippy”— didn’t know that when he hooked one up to his ride.
Ol’ Zip apparently chose his runway carefully, selecting a nice, long, lonely piece of straight-as-string highway in good repair. Not guessing he might need a bit more than five miles of zoom surface, Zippy’s test track had, that far down the strip, a gentle rise on a sloping turn.
Anyways, the Zipster kicked the tire, lit the fire, and ran his Chevy up to top cruising speed. And then he hit ignition!
Investigators know exactly where this happened, judging from the extended patch of burned and melted asphalt. The pocket-calculator boys figure Zip reached maximum thrust within five seconds, punching that Chevy up to “well in excess of 350 mph” and continuing at “full burn” for another 20 to 25 seconds.
Early in that little sprint, at roughly the 2.5-mile mark, the Human Hydra-Shok stood on the brakes, melting them completely, blowing the tires and rapidly reducing all four ’skins to liquefied trails on the pavement.
Remember that gentle rise on the turn? That’s where Zippy concluded his land-speed record attempt and went for aerial honors, ultimately reaching an altitude of 125 feet and still climbing when his flight was abruptly terminated. We’ll never know how far and how high The Big Zip might have gone. A cliff face of solid rock kind of got in the way, posing a serious violation of the laws of physics vis à vis two chunks of matter attempting to occupy the same space at the same time. Zip gave it hell though, blasting a three-foot deep crater in the terra-very-firma.
The best modern forensic science could do was ID the car’s make, model, and year. As for Zip, only trace evidence was found of bone, teeth and hair in the crater, and splinters of fingernail embedded in what is believed to be a piece of steering wheel. If there ain’t room for this one in the Guinness Book of World Records, there damn sure ought to be an honorable mention in Weatherby’s.
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An Amish Barn raising
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.
Taking place in Grafenwoehr, Germany, the competition — which first ran from 2016 to 2018 before being paused due to other competitions and the COVID-19 pandemic — comprises 10 graded events designed to measure a tank crew’s physical fitness, marksmanship and mental acuity. 
“The other crews that were behind and chasing … are really talented crews, and the fact that we’re the first American team to [win] on this stage is incredible,” he added.