Category: A Victory!
Henry Mucci and the Rangers – from The American Exprience
Mucci was so charismatic you couldn’t believe it… If you ever had to go to war, that’s the kind of man you wanted to go with.” — Alvie Robbins, PFC.
We all would have died for him, he was the very best.” — Vance Shera, Sergeant.
We knew he was selling us the blue sky, but we would have followed him anywhere.” — Robert Prince,<;C Company Captain
Extraordinary Fighters
General Walter Krueger and his top G-2 man, Horton White, were the ones to choose Mucci. As Krueger and White considered the raid, they knew they would need an elite fighting force. Hampton Sides, author of Ghost Soldiers, writes: “[They] would need a group of men trained in stealth techniques and the tactics of lightning assault.
The expeditioners must be in exceptional physical condition, as they would have to walk some 30 miles on foot in each direction, marching around the clock. They would have to be versatile, self-reliant, and extremely proficient with light arms, as the odds were better than good that they would encounter major enemy resistance along the trek.”
Intensive Training
Mucci had just such an outfit. In fact he had trained them: the 6th Ranger Battalion. Mucci was a man of vision. It was he who took the unit of Army mule skinners and turned them into the elite jungle fighting force known as the Army Rangers. For one year, in the mountains of New Guinea, Mucci trained his team, one of the first American special operations fighting forces.
Mule Skinners Become Rangers
The men Mucci had started with were for the most part boys from the farms and ranches of middle America — big, strong men. Known as “mule skinners,” they had been recruited to train in the mountains of New Guinea with heavy artillery carried on the backs of pack animals. By 1944, the Army considered the mule skinners obsolete, and General Krueger was looking to train a new special unit. Mucci was his man.
Testing Physical Limits
Ranger training under Mucci bordered on inhuman. A boxer, judo-expert, athlete, and former West Pointer, Mucci believed in training his men to the absolute limits of their physical capacities. He personally taught them all aspects of fighting: hand to hand combat, knifing, bayoneting and marksmanship. He led them on torturous exercises across the tropical New Guinea jungles, through treacherous rivers, and up mountainsides in the ferocious heat. Jungle combat, night combat, amphibious combat; Mucci taught and reveled in it all.
John Richardson, 6th Army Ranger, recalled: “I thought he was going to kill us. He called us rats, he called us everything but a child of God. And he told us, “I’m going to make you so d—– mean, you will kill your own grandmother…. I wondered why he was putting us through so much, but before it was over, there was no question about it, I knew why. And once he got us trained and picked out, he loved us to death. And there wasn’t anything too good for us…. He knew what he was doing when he was training us.”
Slave Driver — With a Purpose
Bob Anderson, 6th Army Ranger remembered, “He worked us so hard that sometimes I’d think I hate that man and I’d double-time back to my camp and say, ‘You can’t kill me, I can do more. You can’t give me enough, I can do more than you can give me.’ So he had us in shape and once he got us trained he was the nicest man you ever saw. But he knew how to train men.” No doubt, Mucci got his men in peak physical condition. They were ready for the raid. They were ready for anything.
Superb Leader
Sometimes the fit is perfect. Mucci was the right man to train and lead the Rangers. He had all the qualities of a superb military leader: he knew men, he had vision, and he was decisive. Robert Prince said, “He made a Ranger battalion out of a bunch of mule skinners, and he inspired us and trained us — and any success we had belongs to Colonel Mucci.”
Honors
The rest is history. Mucci’s actions and decisions on the raid were flawless. General Douglas MacArthur awarded Mucci the Distinguished Service Cross and said that the raid was ” magnificent and reflected extraordinary credit to all concerned.” The military promoted Mucci to full colonel.
National Hero
Upon his return home, Mucci was treated as a national hero in his home town of Bridgeport, Connecticut. He unsuccessfully ran for Congress and later became an oil representative for a Canadian firm in Bangkok. An athlete till the end, he died at 86 in Florida from injuries related to swimming in rough surf.
Former NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre has been ordered to pay back more than $4 million to the organization. (Dave Workman)
As news broke across the landscape that a six-person Manhattan jury had found against the National Rifle Association in a lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James, one story in the New Yorker may have best explained why the establishment media has had such disdain for the organization.
Former NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre was ordered to repay more than $4.3 million back to the association, noted CNN.
The jury verdict, Fox News reported, said LaPierre had over “decades misspent millions of dollars of the group’s money on luxury personal purchases.”
But it was near the end of the New Yorker piece, which was “published in partnership with The Trace, a non-profit news organization covering guns in America,” where perhaps an explanation surfaced unintentionally about media animosity toward LaPierre and the NRA surfaced. Author Mike Spies said LaPierre—who stepped down from NRA prior to the five-week trial, citing health reasons—and NRA had transformed the country. The article was brutally unflattering to LaPierre.
The Trace is backed by anti-gun billionaire and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Spies wrote that concealed carry permits had become “easy to get.” He complained how “Firearms continued their encroachment into public spaces” and that “Stand Your Ground laws swept the nation.”
NRA had been a force behind congressional passage of legislation to prevent liability lawsuits against the firearms industry. It has worked over the years by mobilizing its members into action, to block extremist gun control legislation which, in the wake of the 2022 Bruen ruling, would almost certainly be deemed unconstitutional. Editorial columnists have portrayed NRA as ultimately responsible for violent crime and accused the organization of having a “guns everywhere” policy.
“The Supreme Court,” the article said, “affirmed the individual right to own a firearm, and directed lower courts to ignore public-safety considerations when reviewing regulations.”
And Republicans, Spies wrote, “took an absolutist position on the Second Amendment.”
All of this happened on LaPierre’s watch, and anti-gunners hate him for it. It happened while newspaper editorial boards routinely disdained what many in the firearms community have come to consider “restoration” of Second Amendment rights. While firearms might be considered an “encroachment” by the gun prohibition lobby, mountains of laws and local ordinances and municipal regulations had, for generations, encroached on the right to keep and bear arms until it became little more than a government regulated privilege.
While the establishment media—sometimes referred to as the “legacy” media—zealously defends the First Amendment and other tenets of the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment has not fared well on editorial pages.
The trial revealed much about NRA’s financial mismanagement. The CNN article, spanning more than 1,400 words, provided the most detail about what had been revealed during the trial. It also noted that NRA attorney Sarah Rodgers argued the “misconduct” had been “concealed from the organization.” AG James had wanted to dissolve NRA, but the court would not allow that.
In addition to the verdict against LaPierre, who has already paid back $1 million, MSN noted that former chief financial officer Wilson “Woody” Phillips was ordered to reimburse the organization for $2 million.
Over the past couple of years, reports have surfaced that NRA has lost millions of dollars in revenue and more than a million members. There have also been staff losses. Social media has seen many posts from people claiming to have either left the organization or vowing not donate again until LaPierre was gone. Now, in the wake of the verdict, and weeks after LaPierre stepped down, only time will tell if the association will recover, and how long it will take.
Significantly, other gun rights organizations have risen in prominence while the NRA has struggled through the past few years. The Second Amendment Foundation has become the national leader in gun rights litigation. Gun Owners of America is also busier in the legal and lobbying arenas. The National Shooting Sports Foundation is more in the spotlight, as are other organizations, including the Firearms Policy Coalition. In the states, there is much more activity involving the California Rifle & Pistol Association, Florida Carry, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Illinois State Rifle Association, Massachusetts Gun Owners Action League, and others, often in tandem with SAF or the NRA.
Now there is much speculation about who will succeed LaPierre. As noted by The Outdoor Wire’s Jim Shepherd back on Feb.15, “Two most frequently mentioned are former NRA figures: longtime NRA-ILA head Chris Cox and former Executive Director of General Operations Joe DeBergalis. Both were purged by LaPierre.”
Shepherd, a veteran journalist, has been in the courtroom frequently during the trial.
He also mentioned NRA President Charles Cotton. Other names mentioned in the Shepherd column were SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan Gottlieb, Safari Club International and Safari Club International Foundation CEO W. Laird Hamberlin, and Larry Keane, senior vice president and general counsel at the National Shooting Sports Foundation.
Whether any of these names will wind up at the helm of NRA remains purely speculative. But one thing is clear: With a crucial election coming in November, tens of millions of firearms owners will be looking for leadership and guidance, not just at the national level but also for local legislative races, because it is in several state capitals where gun rights have been under withering attack by anti-gun Democrats who have not been oblivious to NRA’s troubles.
With the trial over and LaPierre in retirement, things may begin happening fast.
About Dave Workman
Dave Workman is a senior editor at TheGunMag.com and Liberty Park Press, author of multiple books on the Right to Keep & Bear Arms, and formerly an NRA-certified firearms instructor.
