The bravest dog of World War I started his military career as a stray who wandered onto Yale Field, and became the mascot of the 102 Infantry 26th Yankee Division. Yet unlike most mascots, Stubby, a pit bull mix named for his short tail, went to war and experienced 17 major battles on the Western Front.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Riggs Library
Following training with his division, the beloved dog was snuck onboard by his unit’s soldiers. After being discovered, Stubby won over the commanding officer by sitting and saluting with his paw at the command to “Present Arms.”
He stayed with the soldiers for 18 months, once being hospitalized for mustard gas, another time being injured by a German grenade. He proved an invaluable compatriot as he could warn of mustard gas attacks, hear incoming missiles before the men, and find the living wounded in No Man’s Land.
He even caught a German spy hiding in the bushes, for which he was promoted to Sergeant, the only dog to have such a position in the US Army at that time.
The most decorated dog of World War I returned to his country a hero, met with presidents and was draped with medals that he wore on his coat.
With his longtime master Robert Conroy, he went on to attend Georgetown University Law where he continued to raise morale as the school mascot, even learning to push around a football on the field at halftime to the cheers of the crowd.
As a tribute to his memory, his ashes were placed inside a taxidermy of the dog, which is now front and center in the “Price of Freedom: Americans at War” exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
Know Before You Go
All military dogs have one rank above their handlers. This is to maintain order and discipline among soldiers so that if they abuse, neglect or even fail to heed the feedback of the dog (especially with bomb or drug sniffers) the soldiers can get UCMJ (punishment)
By John Taffin
They used to dominate the gun writing field but they are mostly all gone now. When I went to my first NRA show more than 40 years ago there they were. I was more interested in them than I was the products on display. This was better than being at the Academy Awards. I’m talking about characters—real honest-to-goodness characters. As I walked the aisles it seemed they were everywhere. Not only did I meet them but most of them also became friends over the years.
I’m talking about the likes of Rex Applegate, Charles Askins, Jimmy Clark, Dean Grennell, Bill Jordan, Elmer Keith, John Lachuk, Bob Milek, George Nonte, Skeeter Skelton, Hal Swiggett, John Wootters … I was privileged to visit some of them in their homes, as well as have some of them visit me. It was a wonderful Technicolor world, but like most of the rest of the world, everything has changed. The world has become too much plain-vanilla and today I can count the characters remaining on the fingers of one hand.
As a budding sixgunner the man from the list I identified with the most, the one whose articles I looked for every month, was Charles A. Skelton, who soon became affectionately known as Skeeter. He basically began his writing career right here with this magazine in the late 1950’s. At the time he was Sheriff of Deaf Smith County, Texas. Skeeter was on the Amarillo Police Department in 1950 when he met the love of his life, Sally. He also served on the Border Patrol and as a Federal Agent. When I read his first article in GUNS I was hooked on Skeeter for life.
I first met him at the NRA show when I looked up and saw this fellow walking towards me in a nice blue suit, tie, and light-colored Stetson. I knew immediately it was him. I walked up to him, said hello introducing myself, and handed him a picture. He grabbed me by the arm and said: “Son, let’s go somewhere quiet where we can talk.” And talk we did. The picture I showed him was of the barrel of a sixgun. Not just any sixgun, but a Colt Single Action. And on the barrel it said: “Russian & S&W Special .44” and I had found the way to his sixgunning heart. Thanks to the urgings of Skeeter Skelton, S&W brought back the Model 24 and
Model 624 .44 Special in the early 1980’s.
I was just a teenager when I discovered Skeeter in these pages. I’ve saved all of his articles, but even if I hadn’t I would still remember them. Such articles as “Pistols For Plainclothesmen” in which he extolled the virtues of pocket pistols. Eventually I had a Smith & Wesson Chiefs Special .38 dehorned and slicked up just like his. I lusted over his nickel-plated Detective Special with ivory stocks and shortly thereafter came up with a nickel-plated Colt Cobra .38 Special, however, money was too short at the time to have ivory stocks made. I still want to do this someday. Someday.
He covered the bigger sixguns with “Belt Guns On The Rio Grande” and one of my favorite pictures of Skeeter is with his holstered .44 Magnum. “These Are The New Varminters” dealt with long-range shooting of .357 Magnum and .44 Magnum sixguns. One of those he featured was a Ruger 7-1/2-inch .357 Flat-Top Blackhawk. Ruger never made such an animal and he had cut down a 10-inch Flat-Top Blackhawk to come up with this handier sixgun. (No one knew at the time how rare the 10 inchers would become!) He also wrote of his Ruger 7-1/2-inch .44 Magnum Flat-Top Blackhawk, how he found it for a good price in a gun shop and made his own grips to fit his hand. I sent my original Ruger .44 Magnum Flat-Top Blackhawk back to Ruger to be re-barreled to 7-1/2 inches. Just as with the 10’s .357, the 7-1/2-inch .44 Magnum Flat-Top was very rare.very
Skeeter also liked .44 Specials. When the .44 Magnum arrived he sold his .44 Special S&W and began carrying a 4-inch .44 Magnum. It did not take him long to realize the Magnum was too much for peace officer duties and he went back to the 4-inch .44 Special. He didn’t abandon the .44 Magnum but instead used it for hunting which is exactly what most of us did. He wrote of the .44 Special Colt Single Action which I had used as the key to his heart. At a time when .44 Specials were virtually impossible to find, he talked of finding a Colt Single Action for $125 and having it re-barreled and re-cylindered to .44 Special. When the New Frontier .44 Special came along, he had a 5-1/2-inch version with carved ivory grips by Jerry Evans and this was one of his “special Specials.”
Skeeter was a big fan of the .357 Magnum, especially the 5-inch S&W. With the coming of the K-Framed .357 Magnum, Skeeter found it much easier to carry all day, however the original .357 Magnum became his outdoor gun. He wrote of how hard it was to find his first 5-inch .357 Magnum at a time when even if I could find one I couldn’t afford it. One of his most memorable articles was the one dealing with the K-22 and how he had lusted over a picture of Gary Cooper in Life magazine on a cougar hunt with his K-22. Skeeter lusted over sixguns then and so did I.
Skeeter was also a fan of the .45 Colt in the Colt Single Action, the Colt New Frontier and the S&W Model 25. He shared his favorite loads for us for the .38 Special, .357 Magnum, .44 Special and .45 Colt. Every Skeeter fan knows his favorite loads. For the .357 Magnum he mostly used .38 Special brass with Ray Thompson’s 358156 gas check bullet seated in the bottom crimping groove over 13.5 grains of 2400. This load is a little milder than Elmer Keith’s and a lot easier on both sixguns and sixgunners. Skeeter did not load his .44 Specials heavy and everyone knows what the Skeeter .44 Special Load was and is. Remember, Skeeter carried his .44 Special in his peace officer duties and as such he used the Keith 429421 bullet over 7.5 grains of Unique. This load is about 900 fps and did everything he needed it to do. It didn’t take me long to agree with him and most of my .44 Special loads over the past four decades has been the Skeeter Load. I got it from him and he got it from Elmer Keith. Two of Skeeter’s favorite sixguns were the .44 Special Colt New Frontier
5-1/2-inch and the .357 Magnum S&W 5-inch. Just a few very special Ruger 3-screw Flat-Top .44 Specials were made soon after
Skeeter’s passing. This is John’s and its serial number is S.S.4.
When both Colt and S&W dropped all .44 Specials in the late 1960’s/early 1970’s, Skeeter looked for a solution. He took a pair of .357 Magnum sixguns to his gunsmith and in probably the most influential article he ever wrote, told how to turn them into .44 Specials. Both of these were Perfect Packin’ Pistols with a 4-inch barrel on the S&W and a 4-5/8-inch barrel on the Ruger. This article appeared 40 years ago and I wonder how many Ruger .357 Magnum Blackhawks have been converted to .44 Special over the years?
Today, several gunsmiths still do these and Ruger, thanks to Lipsey’s, finally offers the .44 Special chambered in the mid-framed New Model Blackhawk. I have examples in both blue and stainless. They are excellent shooters and I think of Skeeter every time I shoot one of these or one of the many conversions I’ve had done. My most used load still remains the Skeeter .44 Special Load.
Skeeter is directly responsible for getting both Colt and S&W to bring back the .44 Special in the late 1970’s. Colt offered the .44 Special in both the 3rd Generation Single Action Army and the Colt New Frontier and S&W followed with the Model 24 and stainless steel Model 624 in .44 Special. Unfortunately, all of these sixguns are now gone, however both Ruger and Freedom Arms offer .44 Special single-action sixguns today.
Skeeter passed in 1988 and shortly thereafter John Wootters sent me a letter informing me of a special sixgun being built for Skeeter while he was in the hospital in Houston. “Many years ago, Skeeter and I shared a hunting trip in northern British Columbia, during which we jointly discovered the skeleton of a mature Stone ram, probably killed in an avalanche. We slipped the horns, and Skeeter took one and I the other… I’ve been saving them for the ‘right gun’ for 15 years. This is the right gun. The so-called ‘Little Ruger’ in .44 Special was the favorite type of sporting pistol and cartridge of my late buddy, Skeeter Skelton, who spent much of his terminal illness in a hospital here in Houston… Sadly, Skeeter had to fold his hand before the last raise, and the project never went further until recently.”
This special sixgun was finished after Skeeter passed and I first saw it with John Wootters on the Y.O. Ranch when we were hunting together. Wootters went on: “The little .44 is a sweetheart, quiet and pleasant to shoot, accurate (naturally, in that chambering), light as a feather, and pretty as a yellow cactus blossom. It leaps to the hand of its own will, and seeks a target with the eagerness of a pointer pup. I will cherish it ’til the day I die… Having been struck by the similarity of our taste I thought you might like to hear about S.S.1.”
Bill Grover worked with Bob Baer and John Wootters on S.S.1 and then later built six more Skeeter Skelton Specials to remember Skeeter. Mine is S.S.4 and now wears 1-piece ivory stocks. It carries memories of three good friends now gone, Skeeter, Bill Grover and John Wootters.
Cake and Perfidy: the 1968 Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia
By Sasha Maggio
A classmate commented on my post for the week, and the post was largely on SIGINT but in one part I make a tiny little comment about how sometimes things like radio could be used to broadcast narratives to particular “target audiences” like how the Soviet Union used it to garner public support in 1968, but also other times.
My point was that just because you get the message and you interpret it accurately, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. And this classmate goes, “What are you talking about? Can you explain that?”
I was already moody to begin with so I’m like 😒 “yup…” I’ll fucking explain it… So, I said:
In 1968, Czechoslovakia was dealing with some personal problems at the time (internal unrest) and Moscow was getting nervous (as Moscow does when people start complaining about how they manage everything).
Moscow is all like, “Hey, what’s up? Want some help?”
And Czechoslovakia was like, “No thanks. We got this. We’ve seen how you ‘help’… we’re good.”
Moscow goes, “Ok, suit yourselves. But just remember how much we like aggressively saying we told you so.”
The internal unrest kept on for some time though.
After a while Moscow is like, “You know what would be great? Let’s get all of our ‘friends’ together for game night!” But instead of game night it was a Warsaw Pact “exercise” that they spread out over a couple months.
They invited Czechoslovakia, of course. Moscow was like, “Com’on! Everyone is going to be there! Poland is coming, they’re bringing kielbasa. Even Bulgaria RSVP-ed. You’re going to feel left out.”
And Czechoslovakia was like “No thanks. We’re kinda busy with our own stuff right now. But you guys go ahead, have fun. Oh… and don’t touch our stuff.”
NATO was watching, of course, and they were like, “I don’t know. They say it’s just an exercise, and it looks an awful lot like an exercise…. Hey…Did Steve bring cake? I heard there was cake in the break room.”
And Steve at NATO was like, 😆 “Fuck yeah, I brought cake! It’s my birthday, bitches!”😆🎉🎂
After a little while Moscow was like, “You know, this is going really well. NATO’s keeping quiet. Everyone is getting along. Let’s get some more people on board!” And they run a series of stories that they broadcast to their own people to gain public support because anytime a country sends its military anywhere to “help fix someone else’s problems” it’s important to have the support of the general public so the military doesn’t return home to find its own country dealing with “internal unrest”…
Anyway, so Moscow is all like, “Soviet people, Czechoslovakia needs us. They’re asking…. No, they’re begging for our help! Do you mind terribly if we help them?”
And the Soviet people are like, “Well, you have done so much for us, it would be nice to do something for our neighbors. Especially if they need us. Go forth, brave Soviet Army, and help the Czech people!”
And Moscow was like 😎“You got it!”
Meanwhile, Czechoslovakia is like, “Look, we don’t care that East Germany is bringing pretzels for everyone. We hear the West German pretzels are better anyway. Go do your exercise and leave us alone. We’re busy…. And don’t touch our stuff.”
So, the exercise continues and the stories continue and NATO starts to be all desensitized to the movement and activity throughout that region because it does look like an exercise and the narrative they’re getting is that it’s just an exercise so they weren’t too concerned. (Even if they were concerned, it’s not like they were going to go one-on-one with Moscow over Prague anyway.)
And Moscow keeps trying, “Hey…. Czechoslovakia…. You sure you don’t want in?”
And Czechoslovakia is starting to think: This does look like an exercise, and it has been going on for some time… they may be telling the truth… but we’re kind of too busy right now and we really want to break free from that group anyway… And they say, “Look, we don’t want in. But we won’t kill your commo guys if they cross our border. How’s that?”
And Moscow is like, “You guys are the best! We’re really missing you in this exercise. Hungary says hi, BTW.”
And Czechoslovakia is like, “Yeah, whatever… Don’t touch our stuff.”
Then the Soviets ‘find’ this cache of weapons near the border with Germany (that mysteriously appeared right where they put it) and they’re like, “OMG Czechoslovakia! Do you see this?! We’re totes shocked! It has CIA written all over it!”
It actually probably did have “Property of CIA” written all over it, but in a mix of Cyrillic and Roman letters like “Прoпeрty of ЦРУ” or maybe it once said “ОВД” or “собственность государства” or “военного имущества” or something that’s just ridiculously crossed out and written in by hand is “Property of ЦРУ”… but I digress…
It worked though. Czechoslovakia was like, “Ok, ok, ok…. Is it too late to join the exercise?”
And Moscow, thrilled to the core, was like, “It’s never too late for you – our good friends the Czech people! Welcome! Добро пожаловать!”
And the next thing they know, there’s a Soviet flag and tanks in Prague and everyone’s speaking Russian.
I ended the story with: Some of this may have been dramatized for effect. Tune in next week when we discuss Transnistria… 😒 And the class was like: What? 😑
Enjoy what you just read? Please share on social media or email utilizing the buttons below.
About the Author:Sasha Maggio is a full-time linguist and research analyst with a background in, among other things, Psychology, Intelligence, and Military Studies. She also collaborates on the podcast The Live Drop.
About the Editor: Angry Staff Officer is an Army engineer officer who is adrift in a sea of doctrine and staff operations and uses writing as a means to retain his sanity. He also collaborates on a podcast with Adin Dobkin entitled War Stories, which examines key moments in the history of warfare.
The Classics Reloaded: “Rules For A Gunfight by Drill Instructor Joe B. Fricks, USMC”
byVANDERLEUNonAPRIL 24, 2019
1. Forget about knives, bats, and fists. Bring a gun. Preferably, bring at least two guns. Bring all of your friends who have guns. Bring four times the ammunition you think you could ever need. 2. Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice. Ammunition is cheap – life is expensive. If you shoot inside, buckshot is your friend. A new wall is cheap – funerals are expensive. 3. Only hits count. The only thing worse than a miss is a slow miss. 4. If your shooting stance is good, you’re probably not moving fast enough or using cover correctly. 5. Move away from your attacker and go to cover. Distance is your friend. (Bulletproof cover and diagonal or lateral movement are preferred.) 6. If you can choose what to bring to a gunfight, bring a semi or full-automatic long gun and a friend with a long gun. 7. In ten years nobody will remember the details of caliber, stance, or tactics. They will only remember who lived. 8. If you are not shooting, you should be communicating, reloading, and running. Yell “Fire!” Why “Fire”? Cops will come with the Fire Department, sirens often scare off the bad guys, or at least cause them to lose concentration and will…. and who is going to summon help if you yell ”Intruder,” “Glock” or “Winchester?” 9. Accuracy is relative: most combat shooting standards will be more dependent on “pucker factor” than the inherent accuracy of the gun. 10. Someday someone may kill you with your own gun, but they should have to beat you to death with it because it is empty. 11. Always cheat, always win. The only unfair fight is the one you lose. 12. Have a plan. 13. Have a back-up plan, because the first one won’t work. “No battle plan ever survives 10 seconds past first contact with an enemy.” 14. Use cover or concealment as much as possible, but remember, sheetrock walls and the like stop nothing but your pulse when bullets tear through them. 15. Flank your adversary when possible. Protect yours. 16. Don’t drop your guard. 17. Always tactical load and threat scan 360 degrees. Practice reloading one-handed and off-hand shooting. That’s how you live if hit in your “good” side. 18. Watch their hands. Hands kill. Smiles, frowns and other facial expressions don’t (In God we trust. Everyone else keeps your hands where I can see them.) 19. Decide NOW to always be aggressive ENOUGH, quickly ENOUGH. 20. The faster you finish the fight, the less shot you will get. 21. Be polite. Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet if necessary, because they may want to kill you. 22. Be courteous to everyone, overly friendly to no one. 23. Your number one option for personal security is a lifelong commitment to avoidance, deterrence, and de-escalation. 24. Do not attend a gunfight with a handgun, the caliber of which does not start with anything smaller than ”4″. 25. Use a gun that works EVERY TIME. “All skill is in vain when an Angel blows the powder from the flintlock of your musket.” At a practice session, throw your gun into the mud, then make sure it still works. You can clean it later. 26. Practice shooting in the dark, with someone shouting at you, when out of breath, etc. 27. Regardless of whether justified or not, you will feel sad about killing another human being. It is better to be sad than to be room temperature. 28. The only thing you EVER say afterwards is,“He said he was going to kill me. I believed him. I’m sorry, Officer, but I’m very upset now. I can’t say anything more. Please speak with my attorney.”
Finally, Drill Instructor Frick’s Rules For Un-armed Combat. 1: Never be unarmed.
1. Forget about knives, bats, and fists. Bring a gun. Preferably, bring at least two guns. Bring all of your friends who have guns. Bring four times the ammunition you think you could ever need.