Category: Hard Nosed Folks Both Good & Bad
The US/Mexican border in 1881 was a raucous place. Civilization was but a thin veneer across this otherwise lawless landscape. Theft, graft, and murder were commonplace, and frontier justice came from the barrel of a gun. On April 14th, a truly epic gunfight played out in El Paso, Texas.
The Art of the Gunslinger
The term gunslinger is a fairly modern contrivance. I’m told that men who lived by their guns were most commonly called shootists if anything. While most of the big names were either drunks, petty thieves, psychopaths, or some toxic combination, a precious few were actually truly good at it.
I’m no great shakes myself, but I have had the privilege of working alongside some of the finest shooters in the world. SEALs and CAG guys are legendarily competent. Speed shooter Jerry Miculek is a freak of nature. However, professional gunmen in the modern era typically do what they do because of countless hours of concentrated trigger time.
Some folks, however, like Jerry and an 1881-era Marshal named Dallas Stoudenmire, just have the gift.
The Setting
In 1881 an American rancher named Johnny Hale arrived in El Paso with thirty stolen cows from northern Mexico. A pair of Mexican vaqueros named Juaregui and Sanchez gave chase into the Southern United States but never returned. In response, a mob of heavily-armed Mexican cowboys rode into town on April 14, with vengeance on their minds.
Constable Gus Krempkau spoke fluent Spanish and accompanied the men out to the Hale ranch. Enroute they discovered the cooling corpses of Sanchez and Juaregui. A pair of local cowboys purportedly named Peveler and Stevenson were overheard bragging about the murders and were arrested. The ranch owner Johnny Hale was presumed to have been complicit throughout.
There was an inquest wherein Constable Krempkau served as an interpreter for the aggrieved Mexicans. The two American cattle rustlers were subsequently remanded into custody for formal trial at a later date. Their thirst for justice slated, the Mexican posse returned home with the bodies of their deceased friends.
The Shootist
Dallas Stoudenmire had been sworn in as town Marshal a mere three days prior. He was the sixth El Paso town Marshal in eight months. A native of Alabama and one of nine children, Stoudenmire lied about his age and enlisted in the Confederate Army at age fifteen. Despite being more than six feet tall his commanders discovered his true age and discharged him.
Stoudenmire reenlisted twice more and ended the war an adult standing six foot four. He was a notoriously hard man who carried a pair of Union bullets in his body until the day he died.
Stoudenmire spent three years as a Texas Ranger. By 1881 he was an experienced lawman with a deadly reputation. Though he was known to be a gentleman around the ladies, he was an inveterate brute when drunk. He carried a pair of revolvers and was rumored to be comparably facile with either hand.
The Shootout
The day after the inquest, Constable Krempkau entered a local El Paso saloon to retrieve his rifle and pistol. Inside the rustler, Johnny Hale was unarmed, intoxicated, and despondent. An armed friend of Hale’s named George Campbell made a disparaging comment about Krempkau’s performance as an interpreter at the hearing the previous day.
Johnny Hale then snatched up one of Campbell’s two handguns and shot Krempkau. Marshal Stoudenmire was eating at the Globe restaurant across the street and rose to investigate. He came out shooting and killed an innocent Mexican bystander named Ochoa in short order.
Johnny Hale took cover behind a thick adobe pillar. Stoudenmire spotted him peering around the edge and shot him in the face. Campbell, for his part, wanted nothing to do with these proceedings and shouted his innocence to Stoudenmire. Krempkau, now rapidly bleeding out, mistakenly thought Campbell had been the one to initially attack him and shot Campbell twice before losing consciousness. One round struck Campbell’s handgun and broke the man’s wrist. The other round passed through Campbell’s foot.
Campbell shrieked in pain and reached for his dropped gun with his uninjured left hand. Stoudenmire whirled reflexively, saw the man go for his gun, and shot Campbell through the belly. Now hit three times, Campbell shouted, “You big SOB! You’ve murdered me!” Both Campbell and Krempkau bled out within minutes. Witnesses attested that the entire exchange took some five seconds.
Stoudenmire purportedly stood over the cooling corpses with his guns smoking. There were three Texas Rangers nearby. When queried later as to why they had not intervened they answered that they felt that Marshal Stoudenmire had things well in hand.
Stoudenmire’s Weapons
If Hollywood is to be believed then every cowboy packed an 1873 Colt Peacemaker on his belt and a lever-action Winchester on his saddle. In reality, there were scads of other popular firearms in circulation during these turbulent times. The shootist, Marshal Dallas Stoudenmire carried at least one Smith and Wesson Model 3.
The S&W Model 3 was a top-break, single-action, cartridge-firing revolver produced between 1870 and 1915. The Model 3 saw widespread military use around the globe. The Russian Tsarist Empire ordered thousands of the guns but reverse engineered the design for production in their domestic arsenals. These copies were generally of high quality yet sold markedly cheaper than the S&W originals. The resulting market saturation nearly put Smith and Wesson out of business.
These guns were eventually produced in a wide variety of calibers, but most of the early sort were chambered in either .44 S&W American or .44 Russian. An upgraded version of the Model 3 became known as the “Schofield” after Major George Schofield who revamped the gun for cavalry use.
Though not so elegant as the Colt Peacemaker, the Model 3 benefitted from its top-break design. The single action trigger was smooth and accurate, but the rapidity of reloading was its strongest suit. With practice, the Model 3 could produce an impressive volume of sustained fire.
Jesse James and his killer Bob Ford, Teddy Roosevelt, Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, John Wesley Hardin, Annie Oakley, and Virgil Earp used Model 3 revolvers.
The Wells Fargo Company bought up hundreds of government-surplus Schofields, shortened their seven-inch barrels to five, and issued them widely to their road agents. LTC Schofield suffered badly from depression and shot himself to death with a Schofield revolver in 1882.
The Rest of the Story
Dallas Stoudenmire was terrifying up close, particularly when drunk. In his first week as El Paso town Marshal he killed six men, one of them accidentally. By the following February, he had killed another six in the performance of his official duties. His larger-than-life reputation made him an exceptionally effective frontier lawman. However, it also made him a great many enemies.
Three days after his introductory El Paso bloodbath a friend of Johnny Hale’s convinced a local Deputy Marshal named Bill Johnson to assassinate Stoudenmire. Johnson got himself liquored up in anticipation and took up a double-barreled twelve bore. When the time came to do the deed, Johnson lost his balance in his drunken stupor and fell backward, discharging his shotgun into the air above Stoudenmire’s head. Stoudenmire responded reflexively, drew both his heavy pistols, and shot Johnson eight times, blowing off his testicles in the process. Johnson bled to death on the spot.
Shooting Bill Johnson’s balls off further enhanced the Stoudenmire legend, and he eventually found himself wearing a federal Marshal’s star. Throughout it all, a pair of brothers named James and Felix “Doc” Manning looked for an opportunity to exact revenge for friends who had fallen to Stoudenmire’s guns. This feud smoldered on until one fateful day in September of 1882.
Stoudenmire and Doc met in a local saloon ostensibly to iron out their protracted differences. Doc’s brother James, believing peace had been achieved, had already departed. However, tensions heated up between Doc and Dallas until somebody drew a weapon.
Doc’s first round hit Stoudenmire in the arm. The second struck him in the chest. However, handgun cartridges were not as powerful then as now and this bullet was neutralized by a heavy stack of papers folded in his breast pocket. Regardless, the force of this shot did knock Stoudenmire backward through the door of the saloon.
Stoudenmire then shot Doc Manning in the arm. Amidst all this chaos Doc’s brother James returned with his own weapon and fired twice. One round lodged in a nearby barber pole. His second caught Stoudenmire behind the left ear, killing him instantly.
Dallas Stoudenmire is buried in the Alleyton Cemetery in Colorado County, Texas. Both Manning brothers were tried for his murder, but they were popular figures thereabouts. A jury of their peers acquitted them both.
The following year their third brother Frank Manning was appointed town Marshal himself after the sitting lawman was killed investigating a disagreement at a local brothel. Frank was fired in short order for failing to arrest his criminal friends.
Arthur L. “Gat” Howard earned his reputation and nickname from behind a Gatling gun.
As slang for a gun, “gat” took hold in the early 20th century, but is clearly a play on Gatling gun, designed in 1862 and named after its inventor Richard J. Gatling.
Born in 1846, Howard served with the U.S. Cavalry for five years and fought in the Indian Wars on the western plains before going to work for Winchester Arms. Eventually he left Winchester and started his own cartridge manufacturing company and enjoyed some success before the factory burned down. Howard served in the Connecticut National Guard where he led the Gatling gun platoon, but it was in service of the Canadian government where Howard earned his nickname.
A Smith & Wesson New Model No. 3 single action revolver with pearl grips attributed to Howard is on offer in Rock Island Auction’s Feb. 14-17 Sporting & Collector Auction along with an unmarked black powder reproduction Model 1862 Gatling gun.
Gatling Gun
Gatling, a doctor, invented his namesake weapon hoping to make a gun that would reduce the number of men in battle and lower the devastating losses seen early in the American Civil War. A precursor to the machine gun, Gatling’s multi-barrel, crank-operated weapon was patented in 1862 but not officially adopted by the U.S. military until 1866, after the end of the Civil War.
Colt produced all Gatling guns for the U.S. market from 1866 to 1903. The grandfather of the machine gun, the first Gatling gun could fire about 200 rounds per minute. Later models achieved the fire rate of as high as 1,500 rounds per minute. The 1883 Colt Gatling gun had a full brass housing and a fire rate of 800 rounds per minute.
The Gatling gun available in the February Sporting & Collector Auction is an unmarked black powder reproduction of the Model 1862 which did not use self-contained cartridges as we know them today. It utilized steel cartridge chambers which were individually loaded with paper cartridges in the front and primed with percussion caps at the rear.
Rebellion in Canada
In 1885, rebellion was fomenting north of the border as indigenous people and mixed race settlers were unhappy about European settlers coming west, the Canadian government’s neglecting to recognize land titles in Saskatchewan and Alberta, and being under-represented in the Canadian parliament.
The Canadian government at the time had a small professional army and so enlisted militias to assist in quelling the uprising, amassing a military force of about 5,000 soldiers. Colt executives seeing a marketing opportunity, offered to loan a Gatling gun to the Canadian government.
The question was who would operate the Gatling gun? Colt and Gatling turned to Howard. He was not to be a representative of Colt, nor the Connecticut National Guard. Even Gatling stated that Howard didn’t represent him but was on the mission as “a friend of the gun.”
Gatling saw Howard, two of his guns, likely 10-barrel 1874 models, and 5,000 rounds of ammunition get on a train bound for Winnipeg. There was little time to train Canadian gunners.
In an early battle during the uprising, the Battle of Cut Knife Hill, the resistance gained the upper hand so it was up to a Gatling gun operated by a Canadian gunner to cover a retreat by government forces, preventing a possible massacre. Howard, as always wearing his blue army uniform, played a key part in stopping a charge in the decisive Battle of Batoche in May 1885 that ended the five month-long rebellion. Ultimately, it was the superior firepower of the government forces that led to the end of the resistance.
Canada after the Rebellion
Howard earned $5,000 and received a medal for his role in quashing the rebellion. He never returned to Connecticut, instead taking up residence in Montreal where he became an investor in the Dominion Cartridge Factory. Along with the stipend and medal, Howard also got assistance from the Canadian government that allowed him to import materials for the cartridge factory duty free. The business made him a wealthy man.
His actions gained Howard enough fame that his purported death and survival in a storm off Nova Scotia was reported by The New York Times. He grew weary of the tedium of Montreal and as the Boer War began in South Africa, he offered to commission a battery of four machine guns at his expense but was refused. Instead, he was offered and accepted a position as machine gun officer in the 1st Canadian Mounted Rifles.
Second Boer War
Conflict between the descendants of South African Dutch settlers, called Boers or Afrikaners, and British colonists exploded into open warfare in 1899. The British took control of most of the territory as the Boers began fighting with guerilla tactics.
In South Africa, Howard commanded a Maxim and Colt machine gun. An aggressive and fearless leader willing to fight at close quarters, he didn’t return to Canada with his unit in December, 1900, choosing to stay in South Africa where he organized the Canadian Scouts, equipped with air-cooled Colt Model 1895 machine guns.
Two months later, in February, 1901, Howard was killed at the age of 57. Reports of Howard’s death varied, with some saying he and his aide were killed in an ambush by Boers, or that they were captured and murdered. In a short article in The New York Times, he was described as “an intrepid and absolutely fearless fellow.”
The article also stated “He knew a machine gun perfectly and it was his skill in handling the gun of the Gatling make that earned for him his title during the Riel rebellion when he was in the Canadian Service.”
Machine Gun Hero
Arthur L. “Gat” Howard was a man of action who joined in the Canadian government’s effort to put down a western uprising, earned his reputation and nickname as a Gatling gunner. An American who remained in Canada, Howard fought in the Boer War where he met his death. A Smith & Wesson New Model No. 3 with pearl grips and attributed to Howard is on offer in the Feb. 14-17 Sporting & Collector Auction, as is a Gatling gun Model 1862 black powder reproduction of the weapon that ushered in the machine gun.
Sources:
“A Connecticut Yankee (and his Gatling) in Queen Victoria’s Canada,” by Terry Edwards,Small Arms Re
The Navy SEAL Who Went to Ukraine Because He Couldn’t Stop Fighting
Daniel Swift was in his element waging America’s war on terror from Afghanistan to Yemen. After his marriage failed back home, he found a new purpose: killing Russians.
by By Ian Lovett and Brett Forrest
Daniel Swift’s nerves were shot. By the start of 2019, his Navy SEAL colleagues said, he was hardly eating or sleeping.
He had separated from his wife. A court had barred him from seeing his four children, and he was facing legal charges for false imprisonment and domestic battery.
Mr. Swift told fellow SEALs in San Diego, where he was based, that he was planning to go to Africa to fight wildlife poachers. They brushed off the comment, convinced that Mr. Swift, a soldier’s soldier, would never abandon his post.
A week later, he disappeared. Navy investigators searched for him, but Mr. Swift was always a step ahead.
He resurfaced in March of last year when he slipped into a group messaging chat of current and former SEALs. He was now fighting Russians in Ukraine, he texted. He petitioned the group for supplies, and later invited members to join him on the front lines. None did. Some advised him to come home. Others marveled as word of his exploits spread.
Mr. Swift was among thousands of young men who flooded to Kyiv from the West, including American veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many said they were drawn to the cause of a democratic country resisting a larger autocratic one.
But there was another side to Mr. Swift’s quest, as revealed in interviews with his colleagues and a memoir he published online under a pseudonym. Mr. Swift was part of a large group who spent years fighting America’s war on terror and have struggled to settle back into civilian life.
The military has acknowledged the impact on servicemembers and their families, particularly special forces, who suffered the outsized casualties during the later years of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
Long deployments have pushed up divorce rates, while suicides among special forces spiked to the highest in the military. The government has launched programs to help lessen the psychological burden on spouses as well as troops.
Daniel Glenn, a psychologist who works with veterans at the University of California, Los Angeles, said many tell him that the U.S. military does a great job preparing them to go to war, but not to return from it.
“They’ve been in some of the most intense, dangerous, awful situations. They’re really good at that,” he said. “Comparatively, back in the civilian world, everything feels mundane. It’s hard to have anything that feels like a rush or makes you feel alive.”
Daniel Swift serving in Severodonetsk, Ukraine.
Many of the men who fought with Mr. Swift said this feeling was part of what drew them to Ukraine.
“A lot of people won’t admit it, but lots of people are here because war is fun,” said a 43-year-old U.S. Army veteran. Civilian life, he added, didn’t offer the same camaraderie or sense of purpose: “War is easy in many ways. Your mission is crystal clear. You’re here to take the enemy out.”
‘Viet Dan’
Mr. Swift had wanted to be a Navy SEAL since childhood. After graduating from high school in rural Oregon in 2005, he married his high-school sweetheart and enlisted in the Navy.
Two years later, he enrolled in the SEALs selection program, a grueling process highlighted by “Hell Week,” when candidates train physically for more than 20 hours a day, run more than 200 miles and sleep for about four hours total.
The vast majority of candidates wash out. Mr. Swift, just 20 years old, made it. Soon after, his wife gave birth to their first child.
A teetotaler, Mr. Swift sometimes drove fellow SEALs on bar crawls, though he often stayed in and studied tactics in military manuals.
On deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, he won a reputation for dependability, a rare Legion of Merit award and a nickname, “Viet Dan,” inspired by his fondness for action.
“Tough kid, humble, quiet, and a little bit crazy,” said a SEAL who was the third in command of Mr. Swift’s first platoon.
In 2013, when his wife was pregnant with their fourth child, Mr. Swift decided to quit. “I thought maybe God was trying to tell me to settle down and be a family man,” he wrote in his memoir, which he self-published in 2020.
He joined the Washington state police and reveled in time off with his kids, exploring logging roads through the woods, cooking hot dogs and shooting guns.
The new job didn’t suit him, though. Police officers were rewarded for giving out tickets rather than helping people, he wrote in his book. Sitting in his cruiser scanning for speeders, Mr. Swift texted friends in the SEALs and told them he missed life among them, according to Navy comrades.
In 2015, a friend from the SEALs died, and Mr. Swift decided to re-enlist as a fight with Islamic State beckoned. “I wanted my piece of the pie,” he wrote.
In Iraq again, Mr. Swift took on Islamic State militants in city streets. Later, he deployed to Yemen.
Navy SEAL candidates train during ‘Hell Week.’ PHOTO: PETTY OFFICER 1ST CLASS ABE MCNATT/U.S. NAVY
Most candidates wash out of the SEALs selection program. PHOTO: PETTY OFFICER 1ST CLASS ABE MCNATT/U.S. NAVY
The overseas missions took a toll on his marriage. In October 2018, shortly after Mr. Swift returned from seven months in Yemen, his relationship with his wife collapsed.
In court documents, Maegan Swift said he’d returned home angry, prone to yelling at her. He disputed this account in his book, but both agreed that one night when they were arguing at home, she threatened to call the police if he prevented her from leaving with the kids.
Mr. Swift went to the bedroom and returned with a pistol.
He said in the book that it was unloaded and that he told her: “See what happens when the cops try and take my children from me.”
Ms. Swift moved the children to her sister’s house while Mr. Swift was traveling. When he returned, a scuffle ensued as he tried to put his younger daughter in his car and Ms. Swift and her sister tried to stop him. Mr. Swift said he was fending off the women as they attacked him; they said he choked Ms. Swift’s sister. The police arrived and arrested him.
Ms. Swift declined to comment for this article.
A Navy psychologist said Mr. Swift had adjustment disorder, a term for difficulty re-entering civilian life, Mr. Swift wrote in his memoir. He dismissed the diagnosis.
Mr. Swift was charged in state court with false imprisonment, child endangerment and domestic battery, which threatened his military career. If convicted of a felony, Mr. Swift would lose his right to carry a gun, and this prospect shook him, according to SEALs who knew him. Being a warrior was nearly all he’d known.
Most of all, he worried about losing his kids, the oldest of whom was the oldest of whom was 11.
Mr. Swift wrote that while the U.S. government has helped veterans cope with war trauma, “what we don’t seem to care about is when they return home to things they’ve been fighting for, only to have them ripped away.”
“I have been face to face with death multiple times, and it has never been more traumatic than having my children taken away,” he wrote.
In the early months of 2019, Mr. Swift disappeared. His passport pinged at immigration control in Mexico, then in Germany, a former SEAL colleague said.
Mr. Swift tried to join the French Foreign Legion, according to another SEAL colleague, but was rejected because the recruiters worried his kids could be a distraction. He ended up in Thailand where he fought kickboxing matches and taught English.
He wrote his memoir, he said, to explain himself to his children. “If you ever want to talk to me just make a Facebook page,” he wrote, addressing his kids. “I look.”
He titled the book “The Fall of a Man.”
No retreat
After Russia invaded Ukraine in February of last year, news reports of the war’s child victims reminded Mr. Swift of his own children and stirred him to action, he later told friends.
He entered Ukraine in early March and joined a platoon running missions behind enemy lines near Kyiv, according to soldiers who fought with him there.
During his first operations, he taped body armor to his chest under a white Fruit of the Loom T-shirt because he arrived without a vest to hold bulletproof plates. His teammates called it the “Dan special.”
Conducting reconnaissance and hunting armored vehicles with a Javelin antitank missile, he soon developed a reputation as highly skilled, methodical and most comfortable in the middle of a firefight, according to men who fought with him.
Adam Thiemann, a former U.S. Army Ranger, recalled one mission, where he and Mr. Swift set off with five others to ambush a Russian barrack. Outside the compound, they surprised a handful of uniformed Russian soldiers and quickly killed them. The Ukrainian commander ordered a retreat. Mr. Swift, who’d been quiet up to that point, was incredulous.
“Retreat?” Mr. Swift said, according to Mr. Thiemann and another team member. “We didn’t even get shot at.”
When Russian troops pulled back from Kyiv at the end of March, many foreign fighters went home, feeling they’d helped fend off the existential threat to Ukraine. Mr. Swift stayed.
His foreign legion team—a unit of Ukraine’s military intelligence, made up of about 20 foreigners and a Ukrainian commander—was dispatched to the city of Mykolaiv in the country’s south.
There, Mr. Swift led the squad on aquatic missions, often using inflatable boats to travel across open sea at night to target Russian positions, according to several soldiers in his unit.
During down time, teammates said, he was quiet and uncommonly disciplined. He didn’t drink or smoke, and worked out obsessively. Even near the front, he’d go out for long solo runs.
Men fighting with Mr. Swift in Ukraine said he would accompany them for shawarma in Mykolaiv, walking around shirtless in jeans and sandals and getting waitresses’ phone numbers. In photos, he rarely smiled; he was more likely to crack a joke during missions, they said.
He told only a few comrades about his life outside the military.
One teammate, a 29-year-old American who goes by the call sign Tex, said Mr. Swift confided in him about his troubles at home.
“He loved his kids,” Tex said. “A lot of things didn’t bother Dan. But the thought of his kids maybe being told who he was and not actually knowing him, that worried him.”
Ukrainian soldiers in the eastern city of Bakhmut in January. PHOTO: EMANUELE SATOLLI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
In early June, the team headed to the eastern city of Severodonetsk, which the Russians were flattening with artillery.
The group had earned a reputation for taking on missions that others turned down. As the situation in Severodonetsk grew worse, Mr. Swift joked that if they were surrounded, at least they could shoot in every direction.
On its last trip into the city, the team tried to hit a building where they believed about 10 Russians were hiding. As soon as they fired the first rocket, however, they found themselves under heavy assault. Dozens of Russians were in the building. Mr. Swift ended up trapped in a corner, trading machine-gun fire with a Russian.
The legion team’s Ukrainian commander, Oleksiy Chubashev, was shot through the neck.
With a Russian tank approaching, Mr. Swift laid down covering fire to free a group of pinned-down comrades, who put Capt. Chubashev on a stretcher and carried him out the back of the building.
Mr. Swift joined them outside to help carry the stretcher. A video seen by The Wall Street Journal shows them hauling the body through the city in daylight, without cover, while artillery shells whistle and crash around them.
After about a half a mile in the June heat, an exhausted young soldier dropped his corner of the stretcher.
“Dan just tore into him,” a member of the team from Minnesota recalled. “He never yells. But he screamed, like, ‘What are you saving your energy for?’ ”
Capt. Chubashev died before making it back to base.
The next morning, Mr. Swift sat down beside several teammates who were drinking coffee. He said he was thinking about calling his children.
The men were shocked. They didn’t know he had kids.
Soon after, Ukrainian forces started to retreat from Severodonetsk. Several of the men on Mr. Swift’s team decided they’d had enough. They went home.
‘I’ll walk out’
Mr. Swift, by contrast, began setting up for life in Ukraine. He was looking for an apartment in Kyiv and sorted out a Ukrainian visa for a Thai woman he’d met when he was living there. He spoke of establishing an academy in Ukraine after the war to teach military tactics.
He returned to Mykolaiv, where he again led aquatic missions into Russian-held territory.
In August, Mr. Swift led an attack on a Russian-held village across the Inhulets River. Working with Ukrainian special forces, the team forced the Russians to retreat, calling in a strike on a house full of enemy soldiers and taking seven prisoners.
But they ended up sheltering in a basement under Russian artillery fire. Mr. Swift called the unit’s new Ukrainian commander, asking to pull back, according to team members. The commander said no.
Mr. Swift pulled the team out anyway. In the middle of the night, he and the team medic swam upriver to retrieve a half-inflated boat to bring their comrades and gear back across to Ukrainian-held territory. When they got back to the base, Mr. Swift quit and moved to another foreign legion team.
A spokesman for Ukraine’s foreign legion declined to comment.
By the new year, Ukraine’s hold on Bakhmut, in the eastern Donetsk region, was tenuous. Mr. Swift’s unit, dispatched there, found Ukrainian troops scattered in basements around the city sheltering from withering Russian artillery fire.
“I’m just here in the basement,” Mr. Swift said in a phone call with a former Green Beret, who’d fought with him earlier in the war. “Trying to plan missions that are not going to get us killed.”
Mr. Swift was scheduled to leave Bakhmut later in January and planned to meet the Thai woman in Romania and bring her to Kyiv.
On the night of Jan. 17, Mr. Swift led a small team of Western fighters into a cluster of homes and began clearing them of fighters from the Russian paramilitary group Wagner, according to Mr. Swift’s unit commander. As Mr. Swift led his squad between buildings, a Russian soldier fired a rocket-propelled grenade.
A projectile, either shrapnel or a bullet, penetrated Mr. Swift’s helmet and lodged in his brain.
His commander found Mr. Swift lying prone, yet coherent. As the unit hurried to evacuate, Mr. Swift fought to remain lucid and asked for help getting to his feet. “I’ll walk out,” he said.
He lost consciousness and died three days later at a trauma center in Dnipro, a nearby regional capital. He was 35 years old.
A memorial service for Daniel Swift in Lviv, Ukraine. PHOTO: STANISLAV IVANOV/GLOBAL IMAGES UKRAINE/GETTY IMAGES
Mr. Swift died while still a SEAL, though AWOL, in a war to which the U.S. hasn’t committed troops. This has complicated his family’s effort to collect benefits from Washington.
A Navy spokesman said Mr. Swift was considered to be an active deserter at the time of his death, and that “we cannot speculate as to why the former Sailor was in Ukraine.” The Pentagon has yet to make a ruling on the family’s petition.
On Feb. 11, several SEALs attended Mr. Swift’s funeral in Oregon. In a video viewed by the Journal, one by one they punched metal SEAL pins into the surface of his casket, a SEAL ritual to the fallen.
Nikita Nikolaienko contributed to this article.
The Wooden hand of Captain Jean Danjou the most sacred icon of the FFL.
The Battle of Camarón, (30 April 1863). Was a defensive action fought with suicidal courage during France’s ill-fated intervention in Mexico. The Battle of Camarón founded the legend of the French Foreign Legion.
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About 6 years ago, I had an accident at the range. We talked about it at the time, but didn’t say what the gun involved was, in order to keep the discussion focused on safety and first aid issues. Well, I think it’s been long enough now that there’s no reason to keep it obfuscated.
The rifle I was using was a reproduction 1860 Henry in .45 Colt. I loaded the magazine tube about half way to get a few shots on camera for b-roll, and just dropped the follower instead of gently lowering it down onto the top cartridge. When it hit the rounds in the tube, the top two detonated, spraying powder and some brass shrapnel out the open slot in the magazine tube. I got a bunch of powder sparkling up my face, but my shooting glasses protected me from any eye injury. One piece of cartridge case about a centimeter long hit me right about at the top of the sternum, and embedded itself in the flesh. We weren’t filming at the moment, so there is no video of this happening.
We had a first aid kit on hand, and knew how to use it. Fortunately, the injury was actually pretty minor, although we didn’t know that at the time. I was fully conscious and responsive, and I held pressure on a bandage over the injury while Karl drove us to the nearest hospital.
One hears unpleasant stories about hours-long waits in emergency rooms, but if you walk in with a trail of blood down your chest, someone tends to take a look at you right quick! After an x-ray and a CT scan, they determined that the shrapnel was not in a position to do any real damage, although it would cause more tissue damage to remove than to just leave it alone. So I got a couple stitches, and was sent on my way. It’s a small enough piece (and non-ferrous) that no, I don’t set off metal detectors. 🙂
While my experience here is simply a single anecdote, it does bring some significance to the periodic trials reports of tube-magazine detonations in trials or in service. The ammunition that exploded here on me had flush-seated primers, and flat-faced bullets. This was not a pointy bullet lined up with a proud primer. “Not only can malfunctions be stranger than we think, they can be stranger than we can think.” (Werner Heisenberg, probably)