Category: All About Guns
My buddy Sario Caravalho is a fascinating guy. Born and raised in Hawaii, he was one of the US Army’s first Green Berets. Sario entered the Army in 1955 and went straight into Special Forces from basic training.
Back then experienced senior NCOs taught SF tactics via O.J.T. in the absence of a formal school. Sario subsequently left the Army in 1976 after three combat tours in Vietnam. His remarkable career spanned the entire evolution of modern American special operations.
Table of contents
Covert Op into Iran
Sario’s first operation downrange was a mission into Iran to recover the bodies of the aircrew of a downed American spy plane in 1962.
CPT Larry Thorne commanded his part of that remarkable op. CPT Thorne fought for Finland and then Germany against the Russians during WW2 before smuggling himself into the US and joining the US Army. He was later killed in action in Vietnam.
CPT Thorne is the only member of the Waffen SS buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Here’s his incredible story. CPT Thorne drafted Sario’s letter of recommendation to Officer Candidate School. In 1964, Sario found himself a young SF lieutenant in one of the first contingents deployed to Vietnam with the 5th Special Forces Group.
Welcome to the Jungle Sario
Those first Southeast Asian operations were TDY—temporary duty- by the Green Berets of the 1st SF Group based in Okinawa. Nobody expected that we would be there for ten years and lose 58,000 great Americans along the way. Like the rest of the Army, SF figured Vietnam out as they went along.
Sario’s first trip downrange in Vietnam had him serving on one of nine A-teams operating as the advanced contingent of the 5th SF Group.
While operating out of the An Khe SF camp, Sario and his indigenous troops captured a handful of SKS and AK-47 rifles after defeating an NVA (North Vietnamese Army) unit in battle. General Westmoreland personally flew in afterward with his entourage to inspect these radical new weapons.
The Kalashnikov assault rifle is the most-produced firearm in human history and is ubiquitous today. Back in the early sixties, however, these captured examples were both exotic and unfamiliar.
When General Westmoreland climbed back into his helicopter, his staff pogues took the captured guns with them. Sario still seems a wee bit bitter about that.
Turning Up the Heat
Sario worked out of the SF camp at An Khe before the 1st Cav showed up and blew the neighborhood to hell. He was then posted to Tan Linh east of Saigon and kept occupied humping the boonies alongside ARVN and Montagnard forces.
Given the remote nature of the place, resupply was via Air Force C-123 aircraft. F-4 Phantoms flying close air support would roll in so low over their camp to drop Snakeye bombs and napalm outside the perimeter that their jet wash frequently blew the tents down.
With nine months of his one-year combat tour in the bag, Sario began to imagine the sweet smell of home. A mere three more months, and he would be on that freedom bird headed back to the World.
Then LTC Hale, the C-Team commander, broke the news that the SF XO at an obscure little outpost called Duc Co had been KIA (Killed In Action). The beleaguered SF contingent there was surrounded and cut off. For his sins and with three months left in-country, Sario climbed aboard a Huey headed for Duc Co.
The Lay of the Land
A typical SF contingent for a place like Duc Co would be two officers and maybe ten enlisted soldiers along with a small Vietnamese SF team. The proper muscle came from between 100 and 200 indigenous Montagnards, a few crew-served weapons, and a whole lot of air support.
Sario said that during his first tour, they had access to most any imaginable personal weapons, but that the M-16 had not yet been fielded in theater. He said they had M1s, M2 carbines, M14s, Grease Guns, BARs, and M1919A4 and A6 belt-fed machineguns in abundance.
For serious work, the camp was equipped with a single 4.2-inch mortar as well as a brace of the smaller 81mm sort. They also had a 57mm recoilless rifle and a WW2-vintage 3.5-inch bazooka. When it was time to make his grand entrance at his new posting, the Army delivered Sario in style.
The One Man Air Assault
Sario Caravalho made his way to Duc Co as the sole passenger in a UH-1 Huey Slick escorted by a pair of armed Huey gunships. The gunships slathered the surrounding area with rocket and minigun fire to ensure that the Slick could get in without undue mischief.
When the Slick touched down, out stepped Sario all by his lonesome. He was greeted by the SF Team Sergeant as mortar rounds fell liberally all around. It was obvious this was going to be a long three months.
Sario’s three air assault aircraft were in and out immediately. However, not everyone was so fortunate. A few days later, a Huey attempting to bring in ammo and supplies went down close enough to the camp to salvage.
Sario harvested both M-60 door guns and repurposed them for perimeter defense. At the time, the M60 was brand new and difficult to acquire in Vietnam. Compared to their WW2-vintage M1919A4 Brownings, the new Sixties were both more portable and more versatile. Sario put the two liberated pigs to good use until some passing aviator laid claim to them again and ran off with the weapons.
Duc Co was only a couple of clicks from the Cambodian border. Extra supplies arrived solely by air. While there, Sario and his team leader worked with Major Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf. Schwarzkopf was the US advisor to a South Vietnamese airborne brigade.
The Vietnamese paratroopers had the mission to relieve the pressure around Duc Co. Schwarzkopf eventually went on to become the supreme commander of Allied forces during Operation Desert Storm.
Now Things Get Real For Sario
The siege of Duc Co took place immediately before the infamous battle of the Ia Drang Valley that was memorialized in the Hal Moore book We Were Soldiers Once, and Young. Mel Gibson made a fine movie out of it. At some point, the NVA decided that they simply must have Duc Co. Then it was game on.
Relentless NVA pressure had closed the unimproved dirt strip that was used by the C-123s to resupply Duc Co. In desperation, an SF officer named MAJ Curt Terry went looking for Air Force pilots crazy enough to fly supplies and ammunition into the beleaguered SF camp. The two pilots he found agreed on the condition that MAJ Terry tag along to prove he had skin in the game. Terry climbed aboard the big twin-engine cargo plane packing an Uzi submachine gun.
When Sario Caravalho first met MAJ Terry it was to be castigated for walking on some precious and holy Army grass someplace. However, the two eventually became close while serving together downrange. MAJ Terry was a pretty remarkable man.
Uzi Versus .51-cal
When the lumbering C-123 touched down, the surrounding NVA opened up with everything they had. This included at least one 12.7mm DShK heavy machine gun as well as several mortars. With the C-123 on the ground getting shot up worse by the minute, MAJ Terry stepped out onto the runway to try to make sense of the chaos.
The details have been muddied by the passage of time. Apparently, MAJ Terry unlimbered his Uzi and, alongside the accumulated Montagnards, ultimately charged through and neutralized the big NVA gun. The C-123 ultimately made it off the ground and safely back to Saigon despite being badly perforated.
In the process, they also managed to evacuate some of the wounded from the airborne brigade. Thanks to Terry and these brass-balled wingnuts, the SF camp at Duc Co also got enough beans and bullets to continue the fight.
Improvise, Adapt, Overcome…
Relief of the surrounded SF came in the form of ARVN airborne forces and then, later, South Vietnamese Marines. The Marines brought along an M48 tank that was ultimately knocked out and had to be abandoned.
Sario and his buddies eventually dragged the enormous armored vehicle into the camp using Deuce and a Half trucks and set it up as a stationary pillbox. In this capacity, the liberated tank helped keep the relentless NVA at bay for the rest of Sario’s time at Duc Co.
When his three months were up, LT Sario Caravalho duly headed home to reacquaint himself with his family. Back then, Special Forces, like Aviation, was not yet its own Army branch. Commissioned officers serving as either Green Berets or aviators would rotate back through their assigned branches as needed for career development. On paper at least, Sario was still a grunt.
Take 2
Sario’s second tour downrange was as company commander of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion of the 20th Infantry (11th Infantry Brigade) of the Americal Division. After a successful company command in combat, Sario rotated home once more to catch his breath.
He later did a third combat tour, again with SF. This time he was assigned to MACV (Military Assistance Command—Vietnam). Sario returned home from his MACV posting when the war ended.
The Gift That Keeps on Giving
Military service in the combat arms, particularly during wartime, is a young man’s game. Sario ultimately left the Army with 65 parachute jumps. On his first night jump, he landed backward in the dark underneath a T10 parachute.
Relative to the newer canopies in use today, the T10 was fairly primitive. Sario dislocated his shoulder and wrenched his back, injuries that would nag him to this day.
Sario is 86 years old today, though he appears twenty years younger. He is active, sharp, and opinionated, as one might expect from a seasoned special operator. Despite having left the Army in 1976, Sario still carries himself like a soldier. He explained to me that, by 1970, the ARVNs were good. He was certain that the South could have won the war had the politicians left them alone to do so.
Mining for Heroes
I met Sario Caravalho when I attended a monthly veteran’s breakfast at Harmon’s restaurant in Paris, Mississippi. Sario, retired Army 1SG Justin Hill, and Mack Thweatt, the owner of Harmon’s, host the free vets’ event on the first Saturday of every month just because they are great Americans.
I got to know Sario because I happened to sit down beside him one Saturday over grits, hashbrowns, and some GI-style scrambled eggs.
America was once awash in legit heroes. Though he would push back against the characterization, my friend Major Sario Caravalho is counted among them. They can be a bit tougher to find these days, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. Sometimes it is just a matter of sitting down at the right table.
Categories
Sako M39 Finnish Mosin
Categories
M-1 National Match Rifle
Ruger may be celebrating its 75th anniversary in 2024, but the first firearm designed and built by William Batterman Ruger, the semi-automatic Savage Model 99 conversion seen above, came some 10 years before the Standard Model debuted in 1949.
At that time, though he had yet to embark on his career as a firearm designer, he was fascinated by the mechanical nature of guns, and he was especially enamored with the Savage Model 99 lever-action rifle. In Ruger & His Guns, Bill Ruger told author R.L. Wilson about his early exposure to firearms, saying, “I remember seeing them in the store windows, and they looked so beautiful, particularly the Savage 99 and the Winchester lever-action. The mechanics were so artistically designed. They absolutely thrilled me. I associated them with great adventure and great art.”
Ruger returned to the Savage Model 99 as a college student and endeavored to make something more of it. Ruger recalled that the conversion was done “sometime during 1938 or ’39 by the hacksaw and file method” and involved replacing the manually operated action lever with a gas-operated, reciprocating rod that passed through the center of the magazine rotor and cycled the action.
Despite acknowledging some issues with his gun’s extractor, Ruger considered the design to be an improvement over the original Model 99 and offered it to Savage Arms, which turned him down. Ruger later found employment with the Springfield Armory and then Auto-Ordnance during World War II, developing machine-gun prototypes that never came to fruition, but the Savage remained in his mind. In December 1943, he highlighted his conversion in a single-page article for The American Rifleman, concluding that “… after this war, there will be a great upsurge in the popularity of self-loaders, just as there was a great increase in the popularity of bolt-action guns after the last war.”
Ruger’s first commercially successful self-loader came, of course, in the form of a rimfire handgun rather than a centerfire rifle, first advertised in the August 1949 issue of The American Rifleman (seen below), but he kept the semi-automatic Savage. After Ruger’s death in 2002, Bill Atkinson, one of Ruger’s closest friends, was allowed to select a single gun from Ruger’s personal collection. He chose the Savage and immediately donated it to the NRA National Firearms Museum, where it remains on display today.
In the gun industry, this is an old and often repeated tale. A company—in this case, Colt—decides to cease production of one of its iconic products, then finds itself scrambling to reintroduce it after another company takes up manufacturing a clone of the original.
Historically, most gun companies have sought to provide their products to governments—so-called military contracts—because they are lucrative and guarantee sales for a period of time. During war time most firearm companies retool and set up to provide arms for the war effort.
So it was in 1941 when we entered World War II that Colt ceased producing its flagship gun, the Single Action Army (SAA). When the war ended, Colt said it would no longer produce the SAA, believing that double-action revolvers and semi-automatic pistols were the guns of the future.
That may have been true, but the bosses at Colt did not realize the impact the single-action revolver had on Americans. Bill Ruger, a gifted designer and lover of guns, recognized the needs and desires of the shooting public, especially as the 1950s brought television programming to nearly every household in the country and the popularity of westerns in the social fabric of the public. His Blackhawk revolvers were an immediate and lucrative success, thus pretty well spanking the pants off Colt.
Colt scrambled to reintroduce its archetypal thumb-buster and did so in 1956. There was also clearly a burgeoning market for a rimfire single action, as evidenced by the success of Ruger’s Single Six introduced in 1953. Just as today, the development of a new product pits the bean counters against the designers in a conflict of quality vis-à-vis cost of production and price point. A year after reintroducing the SAA, Colt brought out the Frontier Scout 22 chambered in the Long Rifle cartridge.
It had a decent run, ceasing production in 1970. The biggest complaint against the Frontier Scout was the anodized aluminum frame. Colt’s brass listened to its customers and brought out the New Frontier Scout with a companion .22 WMR cylinder in 1970. The frame was steel and featured Colt’s famous color casehardening. Three barrel lengths were offered, 4 3/4-inch (somewhat rare), 6-inch (most prevalent) and a very few Buntlines with a 7 1/2-inch barrel.
Four years later I had barely turned 21 and had a burning desire to learn how to shoot a handgun. My family was not gun or outdoors people. I knew I was ignorant and read every gun magazine and book I could lay my hands upon.
Standing at the handgun counter of a Big 5 Sporting Goods store in Torrance, Calif., I gazed upon two nearly identical single-action .22s—a Ruger Single Six and a Colt New Frontier Scout. Both had an extra cylinder in .22 WMR, a real bargain I thought, and I was right. The Ruger had a price tag of $98; the Colt was $10 more. I mulled over everything I could in my scant knowledge of guns. The clerk behind the counter was of no help. I finally settled on the Colt because I thought it was prettier, and it was only a sawbuck more.
This was one of the very few times in my life where making a decision based upon beauty didn’t have unexpected and disagreeable consequences.
The little Colt immediately became my constant companion on the desert and mountain backpacking sojourns. I shot the hell out of it and eventually became fairly proficient at busting bunnies, ground squirrels and snakes. Forty years later it remains with me and is often with me on any varmint shoot.
Colt scaled down the entire revolver to make it handle similarly to the SAA with the rimfire rounds. The New Frontier Scout comes in at about 80 percent the size and weight of a SAA, yet the grip size and profile are identical.
At .3 ounce less than 2 pounds, the New Frontier Scout is 10 ounces lighter than a center-fire SAA. This allows the rimfire revolver to handle quicker than its pappy, yet retain enough heft to absorb the already mild recoil of the .22 LR, making it a great small-game pistol. With the .22 WMR cylinder there is certainly more recoil, but not enough to be a distraction. However, the .22 WMR’s report is substantial from a short barrel and can be distracting.
The New Frontier Scout had an initial run from 1970 through 1977 with some 100,000 copies made. Though not particularly rare, it seems that those of us who have bought one tend to want to keep it around. Prices for the revolver I bought for $108 in 1974 are from $450 to $700 today, depending upon condition and barrel length. I checked in with Gunbroker.com and saw but four up for sale, and one was a boxed set of a New Frontier Scout with a Frontier Scout (fixed sight version).
One of the other three was a post-’82 manufactured New Frontier Scout. From 1982 to 1986 the New Frontier Scout was reintroduced with a cross-bolt safety added to satisfy product-liability attorneys. Its popularity paled compared to the 1970s revolvers with only 19,000 produced.
All of America’s iconic gun manufacturers have had significant challenges impacting their very existence. Each has been forced to reorganize to one extent or another. Colt has had a part in all of this. The business world has several parallels to the natural world, one being if you cannot or will not adapt to changing environment (markets) you are doomed to failure.
Ruger recognized the appeal of a single-action rimfire revolver, and the Single Six has been in constant production for 61 years. One can only hope that Colt will take a close and critical look at its past decisions and operations, and make the necessary changes that will allow it to flourish once again. I would hope one of those decisions would be to bring back the New Frontier Scout as it was made in the 1970s. There is a reason so few of them are found for sale in the used gun section.