Robert “Jock” McLaren (center) was one hard-core veterinarian. Australian War Memorial photo.
As a species, we are enthralled with seeing people explore their limits. Sometimes it is in the small things. “Would you rather do this by mouth or take a shot?” I will not infrequently query at work.
Some folks will ask for a shot because they are in a hurry or want to get better faster. Others are not in such a rush and make a reasoned decision to take it slower. Then, there are the beefy 21-year-old college guys who get a little weepy and ask if they can call their moms and talk about it. That’s frankly just pathetic.
Many times when discussing hard medical things to come, I have had patients say, “Oh, I could never do that.” I beg to differ. Oftentimes folks just need to be properly incentivized.
It is amazing what the human animal is capable of if there is simply no alternative. Friday runs at Airborne school, 61 days of institutionalized pain and deprivation during the Ranger course, and the horrors of Hell Week during BUD/S that produces baby Navy SEALs are all designed to explore and define a person’s limits. Each institution is carefully crafted to motivate people to quit. Most commonly, a person’s limitations are defined by their circumstances.
In jump school, it is silly stuff like a funny hat and a shiny pin to put on your uniform. However, if there is a threat to a child, then suddenly, that petite 117-pound mom becomes the tactical equivalent of a raging grizzly bear. As the timeless axiom goes, it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it is rather the size of the fight in the dog. It really does all come down to motivation.
Jock McLaren (left) is shown here in 1945 touring his old POW camp.
The Problem
The vermiform appendix is a most curious organ. Vermiform means “worm-like.” The appendix is a finger-like blind pouch that sprouts off of the cecum at the junction between the small and large intestines. For ages, we thought the appendix was just an afterthought, something that God inadvertently left in there while He was distracted by something else. In recent years we have come to appreciate that the appendix likely serves as a beneficial reservoir for good gut bacteria. It seems God actually never gets distracted.
The problem is that the appendix is bad to get clogged up and infected. Appendicitis is one of the most common indicators of emergency surgery. In 2015, there were 11.6 million cases of appendicitis and 50,100 deaths worldwide. If your appendix gets ripe, that thing has to come out. Now hold that thought.
Surgical procedures are tough enough with the proper tools under controlled
circumstances. Jock McLaren had to make do with slightly less.
The Manliest Man in the World
Born in Scotland, Robert Kerr “Jock” McLaren served as a grunt in Europe during World War I. After the war, Jock immigrated to Queensland, Australia, studied to become a veterinarian, and settled down to make a life for himself. When Australia was dragged into World War II, Dr. McLaren volunteered to go off and do his bit yet again.
During one engagement with the Japanese in 1942, Jock McLaren was captured and remanded to the hellish Changi POW camp in Singapore. The Japanese viewed captured soldiers with particular disdain and typically tried to work and starve them to death. McLaren escaped in short order and, upon his recapture, was transported to another ghastlier camp in Borneo.
Jock escaped yet again along with a Chinese comrade named Johnny Funk and trekked 270 miles across the Pacific, hopping from island to island in a hollowed-out log. Once they arrived on the island of Mindanao, they realized that the Philippines had fallen to the Japanese … and that Jock McLaren had developed appendicitis. With the Japanese actively hunting for them, Jock now had a hard decision to make.
Equipped solely with a razor blade, two spoons, and a hand mirror, Jock McLaren removed his own appendix. He sort of sterilized his equipment by boiling water in a rice pot over a campfire. The operation took four and a half hours without anesthetic. He closed the wound with plant fibers harvested from the surrounding jungle. Two days later, he was on his feet and evading the Japanese yet again. Soon thereafter, McLaren was fighting alongside Philippine guerillas.
Jock McLaren commandeered an antiquated 26-foot whaling boat he christened The Bastard, festooned it with pilfered mortars and machine guns, and used the vessel to terrorize occupying Japanese troops. Despite a hefty bounty on his head, McLaren survived the war. Of his surgical ordeal in the jungle, he later opined, “It was hell, but I came through all right.” I suppose it really all comes down to your motivation.
Gun Counter Sale Store Shop shutterstock_Nomad_Soul 1686855574.jpg
U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- More people own guns today than ever before. That growth continues a long-term trend that goes back several decades. In addition to that gradual increase, we’ve also seen extraordinary growth in new gun buyers in the last two years. We had to rewrite who owns guns and why they own them.
Today, about four-out-of-ten families have a firearm in their home. Despite the astounding changes in gun ownership, the way some politicians talk about guns and gun owners is out of date. New gun owners are subjected to a crash course in being misperceived and misrepresented by politicians and the mainstream news media.
What is real, and what is fantasy?
Sitting President, Joe Biden, echoed old myths about gun owners at a fundraising event in June. He said, “More people get killed with their own gun in their home trying to stop a burglar than, in fact, any other cause.. Think about that. Because it’s hard to do. It’s a hard thing to do.”
Mayor John Fetterman, the Democrat candidate for the US Senate from Pennsylvania, also felt the need to comment on guns and gun ownership. He said,“I have seen with my own eyes at the scenes in my community what a military-grade round does to the human body.” He said that rifles, particularly modern rifles, should be outlawed.
New York Governor Kathy Hochulsaid,“This whole concept that a good guy with a gun will stop the bad guys with a gun, it doesn’t hold up. And the data bears this out, so that theory is over.”
Those statements don’t fit what we know. We know a lot about new gun owners because we talked with them. Gun stores asked new gun owners why they wanted a gun so the gun shop employee could direct the customer to the appropriate products. The industry trade group representing firearms manufacturers and distributors collected those answers.
The stereotypical gun owner used to be an old white man who bought a gun to go hunting. Several years ago, personal safety replaced hunting as the major reason new gun owners buy firearms. Today, gun owners are from every demographic group; male and female, rich and poor, urban and rural. Gun owners represent every ethnic and racial group. About one-out-of-four African-American adults own a firearm. It seems strange that the mainstream media and politicians have deliberately ignored that change.
We saw firearms ownership increase for many reasons. Concealed carry of a personal firearm is now common in all but a handful of states. Not only are tens of millions licensed to carry a personal firearm in public, but we also exercise those permits daily.
Today, about one-out-of-a-dozen adults carry a firearm in public when and where it is legally permissible to do so. We also stop most attempted mass murders when the government allows us to carry our firearms. Good men and women, ordinary civilians, use firearms to protect themselves and their families more than four thousand times a day. Excluding some politicians, more and more of us have concluded that armed defense works.
Another reason for increased gun ownership is the unusual increase in crime we’ve seen in the last few years. Our judicial system stopped removing repeat criminals from society during the Covid lockdowns. The resulting increase in crime touched our families and friends. Many of us discovered that the police will not be there to protect us. Millions of us responded by buying a firearm and protecting ourselves.
We should probably add a third factor that increased the rate of firearms ownership. The Covid lockdowns reduced the time we could spend with friends and extended family. We spent more time looking at our computers and our phones. During the lockdowns, the news media had a larger influence on our perception of what is happening in the world around us.
To deliver viewers to their declining list of advertisers, the news media fed us a concentrated diet of sensationalized crime reports. Crime indeed increased in the last few years, but the tiny screens brought crime to where we live as never before. In combination, factors like these significantly increased both the number and diversity of legal firearms owners.
We defend ourselves with a firearm between 1.7 and 2.5 million times a year. 44 percent of black gun owners reported using firearms to defend themselves or their families. Many of us know someone who used a firearm in self-defense. In contrast, I never heard the mainstream media correct President Biden’s statement that our guns kill more of us than they save. That leaves our personal experience in direct contradiction with the President’s claim and the media’s twisted narrative about gun owners.
Mayor Fetterman’s claim sounds strange to me as well. Looking at our history, even the ubiquitous 9mm handgun cartridge was first carried as a military round. Today, the 9mm is the most common handgun cartridge carried by both law enforcement and civilians.
When a policeman is carrying it, the modern rifle is called a “personal defense weapon” or a “patrol rifle.” The same gun made out of metal and plastic is relabeled by anti-gun politicians as an “assault rifle” and a “military-grade weapon” when our neighbors own one. The modern rifle is called a “weapon of war,” even though no modern military branch would field the semi-automatic rifles that US civilians are allowed to own today. Today’s military rifles are capable of automatic fire, and ours are not.
Fetterman’s gun-confiscation proposal might make some sense if we only looked at one side of the argument. Fetterman deliberately ignored the hundred thousand times a year that long guns were used in armed defense. We have about 25 million modern rifles in civilian hands here in the US. If these gun owners were a problem to society, then we would surely know it. Modern rifles save many more lives than they cost, but that isn’t what we see on television.
The news media sells sensationalized stories and leaves out the additional facts that put violence into perspective. About four times as many people are killed with knives than are killed with rifles each year. Drowning kills ten times more people each year than die from “assault weapons.” According to FBI homicide statistics, more people were killed with hands and feet than were killed with a long gun of any kind.
We agree that violent crime is shocking, but the mainstream news media never called out the distortions of these anti-gun politicians. The media often reports when a criminal uses a firearm. In contrast, the media seldom reports when our neighbors use their legally owned firearms to stop a crime.
Each time that a major US media outlet mentions an armed citizen using a legally owned firearm to save lives, the media runs hundreds of stories where criminals used a gun. That media bias turns the world upside down. In fact, armed defense is several times more common than a criminal using a firearm during the commission of a crime. This deliberate editorial policy misrepresents the news of armed defense by a factor of over a thousand to one. That is why we think that mass murder is common and that armed defense is rare.
If you only know what you’re told by the mainstream press, then you might believe the gun-control politicians too. One hint is that many Democrat politicians own guns even as they vote for ever more gun-control laws to disarm the rest of us.
The stereotype of gun owners is a lie. The media calls us male-pale-and-stale, and who cares if old white men are disarmed anyway. In fact, gun owners now look like a cross-section of the USA. Minority urban women are the fastest-growing segment of new gun owners. I think Democrat politicians are afraid that more women and minorities will decide to become gun owners. These new gun owners might enter the culture of armed America and protect themselves.
What possessed the brain damaged art director for this cheesy 1980’s action movie to affix Arnold Schwarzenegger’s grenades to his web gear by their pins? Methinks these guys have likely never handled live grenades. Wow.
“Somewhere, somehow, somebody’s going to pay,” was the tagline for the 1985 Schwarzenegger action movie Commando. This classic stylized bloodbath orbited around a retired special operator named John Matrix whose daughter is kidnapped. The archetypal evil mastermind takes the little girl in an effort at motivating Schwarzenegger’s super-soldier character to overthrow a small island nation-state on his behalf. The central theme, should you wish to think this deeply about it, explores the limits to which a devoted father might go to protect his child.
This was one of my favorite scenes from the movie. A dumpy Vernon Wells accuses the utterly shredded John Matrix of getting too old to fight. Incidentally, Wells also played the lunatic villain Wez in the Australian post-apocalyptic classic The Road Warrior.
According to www.moviebodycounts.com, for his era, Arnold Schwarzenegger was Hollywood’s deadliest actor as determined by total on-screen kill count. Commando was his bloodiest movie by the same metric. His record has since been eclipsed by more modern fare, but he was the unchallenged 1980’s king of gory vengeance. As an aside, one scene that was proposed but later cut had Schwarzenegger chopping a henchman’s arm off with a machete and then beating him to death with it. His dialogue was to have been, “Thanks for lending me a hand.” Sheesh…
The M202 FLASH launcher fired 66mm incendiary rockets and was intended to replace WW2-era flamethrowers. FLASH stood for FLame Assault SHoulder. It must have been a slow day in the US Army’s overworked acronym generation office.
John Matrix logged seventy-four kills in Commando. Among them fifty-one people were shot, seven were blown up by emplaced explosives, and five others succumbed to hand grenades. Another five met their gory demise thanks to an M202 rocket launcher.
A 13-year-old Alyssa Milano catches a ride aboard her perambulating battleship of a movie dad.Alyssa Milano has come a long way since her big-screen debut as a helpless teenaged girl in the Schwarzenegger kill-fest Commando.
Two faceless disposable bad guys got cut into pieces by thrown circular saw blades, one person was stabbed to death, and one particularly unfortunate rascal was impaled on a hissing steam pipe. As an aside, Schwarzenegger’s youthful daughter Jenny was none other than 13-year-old Alyssa Milano, the modern face of the Me Too movement.
How would you like to wake up to this every day before class? It worked for me while I was in college.
Commando was actually a pretty silly movie. The guns were cool, but the dialogue seemed like it was penned by a Third Grader, and the acting simply reeked of cheese. I’m nonetheless not too proud to admit that I had a life-size movie poster from the film plastered on my dorm room wall back when I was a college student. However, a year before Commando hit the big screen, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, saw a very public example of just how far one real guy might actually go to avenge a crime committed against his child. That guy’s name was Gary Plauche.
The Setting
By all accounts, Gary Plauche was just a normal dude. He coached little league and supported his community.
Leon Gary Plauche was born on November 10, 1945, in Baton Rouge. He served in the US Air Force and attained the rank of Staff Sergeant. After leaving the military he became a heavy equipment salesman and also worked as a cameraman for a local TV station. Though he had a temper, he was known for his affable demeanor and quick jokes. Plauche fathered four children—three boys and a girl. Gary was separated from his wife June in the early 1980s. This was predictably hard on his kids.
In case you were wondering exactly what a real monster looks like, this is it.
In 1983 Gary’s 11-year-old son Jody began taking Hapkido lessons from a 25-year-old ex-Marine named Jeffrey Doucet. Jeff Doucet had humble beginnings. He dropped out of school in Ninth Grade and, as a child, lost a sister to a rattlesnake bite. The discipline and exercise intrinsic to the martial arts seemed good for Jody. Doucet took the kid under his wing and cultivated a bond that appeared to be therapeutic given the circumstances. Doucet was a regular visitor at the Plauche home and frequently gave Jody a ride to the dojo for training.
Jeff Doucet abducted this young man when he was 11. Doucet was later suspected of molesting numerous other local children as well.
Authorities later determined that Jeffrey Doucet had been molesting the young man for more than a year. In February of 1984, Doucet kidnapped Jody and took him to a motel in Anaheim, California, near Disneyland where he sexually assaulted the kid repeatedly. Meanwhile, the authorities scoured the country looking for them both.
Yeah, that’s creepy. Jeffrey Doucet was a master manipulator.
Doucet eventually allowed Jody to make a collect call to his mother. The cops traced the call to the motel and staged a raid. Law Enforcement officers hit the hotel room, rescued the child, and took Doucet into custody without incident.
When faced with an unimaginably horrible circumstance Gary Plauche didn’t really know where to turn.
Jody was returned home on March 1, 1984. Once he was safe the details of the protracted abuse came to light. Gary, who was 39 at the time, was interviewed by a news crew in a ghoulish effort at ascertaining his feelings on the situation. He told the interviewer that he did not know what to do and just felt helpless.
The Setting
It took a little planning to pull off Gary Plauche’s hit. The event in all its gory detail was captured by a local TV news crew.
Two weeks after Jody returned to Louisiana, Jeffrey Doucet was extradited from California to Louisiana to stand trial for child molestation and sexual assault. Doucet’s Flight 595 out of Dallas landed at Ryan Field in Baton Rouge, and Doucet was led through the terminal in handcuffs. Meanwhile, wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses, the aggrieved father Gary Plauche stood nearby at a bank of pay phones speaking with his best friend. He cryptically whispered into the phone, “Here he comes. You’re about to hear a shot.”
Local TV news crews captured Jeffrey Doucet as he returned to Baton Rouge to face justice for pedophilia.
In the immediate aftermath of what was to come it was assumed that local Law Enforcement officers had tipped Plauche off regarding the timing and location of the transfer. Plauche enjoyed friendships with many of the local cops, so this was not an unreasonable assumption. It was later determined, however, that a former co-worker from the local ABC television affiliate WBRZ-TV was Plauche’s source of intel. Then as now tragedy sells, so the media slathered the sordid story with attention.
Though he did not realize it, Jeffrey Doucet was mere moments away from some serious frontier justice.
This bit is all pretty unsettling when you think about it. Humans in the Information Age are drawn to calamity like politicians to other peoples’ money. Throughout this whole ghastly episode, TV crews hounded the major players in search of that Pulitzer-grade image that might graphically capture one man’s anguish in the face of something so epically horrible. At 9:30 pm with the manacled child molester Jeffrey Doucet passing just behind him, Gary Plauche gave the world those images.
The Killing
Sheriff’s Deputy Major Mike Barnett took Plauche down immediately.
Plauche retrieved a small revolver of unknown make from his boot, stepped alongside Doucet, placed the gun to the right side of his head, and fired a single .38-caliber hollowpoint round. The cops subdued him immediately. Plauche’s friend Deputy Sheriff Mike Barnett can be heard on the tape asking him, “Gary, why? Why, Gary?”
Plauche tearfully answered, “If somebody did it to your kid, you’d do it, too!”
The Aftermath
I don’t myself care much for Michael Moore’s work.
The sex criminal Jeffrey Doucet fell into a coma and died in hospital the following day. Video footage of the horrific scene has taken on a life of its own. Michael Moore used it in his anti-gun documentary screed Bowling for Columbine. The clip also featured prominently in an unsettling compilation of real-life video killings titled Traces of Death 2 released in 1994. It was viewed more than 20 million times on YouTube prior to its removal.
This is still America, so Gary Plauche’s tragedy naturally graced a t-shirt.
Gary Plauche was charged with murder in the second degree but subsequently pled no contest to manslaughter. He was given a seven-year suspended sentence along with five years’ probation and 300 hours of community service. He completed all of this in 1989.
The public was naturally mesmerized by this whole horrid tale.
Opinions were mixed on the outcome of the Plauche case. Some felt that shooting a man in the head in cold blood in an airport warranted more than probation and community service. Others believed that the circumstances surrounding the crimes committed against his child absolved him of responsibility. Plauche’s defense team made a compelling argument that Doucet was a charismatic manipulative predator who had used Plauche’s family challenges to take advantage of his son.
Gary Plauche had no criminal record prior to his gunning down a child molester in the Baton Rouge airport.
Psychological assessments alleged that Plauche was so traumatized by these events that he was unable to discern the difference between right and wrong at the time of the killing. Any parent can imagine the unfettered anguish this might precipitate. The judge in the case, Frank Saia, ultimately agreed and opined that Plauche represented no risk of further criminal behavior. He felt that sending Plauche to prison would serve no material purpose for the state.
This guy was just a freaking sociopath.
It was later revealed that Doucet and Plauche’s wife June were having an affair at the time. This revelation just served to muddy the waters further. However, forensics determined that Doucet’s assault on Jody occurred just as had been alleged.
Jody Plauche has since parlayed his horrible experience into an effort at helping others similarly traumatized. Good for him.
In 2019 Jody Plauche released a book titled, Why, Gary, Why? The Jody Plauche Story. The book was described thusly, “Through his own incredible story of using his past for good by helping others, he shares how any reader who has suffered great trauma can move on and not let the past define him or her.”
Jody went on to letter in four sports before finishing high school.
I’ve not read it myself, so I can’t comment on its contents. However, the excerpts I have found do yield insight into Jody’s subsequent attitudes about the shooting.
This horrible episode inevitably brought the Plauche family a great deal of attention. Here Jody and Gary are shown alongside Geraldo Rivera.
He wrote, “I think for a lot of people who have not been satisfied by the American justice system my dad stands as a symbol of justice…My dad did what everybody says what they would do…Plus, he didn’t go to jail. That said, I cannot…condone his behavior. I understand why he did what he did. But it is more important for a parent to be there to help support their child than put themselves in a place to be prosecuted.”
Here is Gary later in life attending a Saints game. He lived out the rest of his days in relative normalcy.
In his final interview prior to his death, Gary Plauche showed no regret for killing Jeffrey Doucet and stated that he would do it again if given the opportunity. In 2011 Plauche had a stroke as a complication of diabetes and was placed in a nursing home. He died in 2014 at the age of 68.
Though Jody was angered by the killing in its immediate aftermath, he subsequently understood and appreciated his father’s motivations. Interestingly, he later said his dad’s implicit willingness to kill anyone who harmed his family was an impediment to his coming forward to report Doucet’s abuse.
Of his father, Jody wrote, “A lot of people remember the guy who shot somebody. I remember someone who would pick up stray animals…someone who was just a kind soul, a gentle person.”
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