Historical note about the artwork: it was damaged in the attack on the Pentagon September 11th, 2001. But was repaired and remains a valuable part of the Marine Corps Combat Art Collection.
Category: Real men
Zane Grey, who became one of America’s most successful authors, hunted the “Tonto Rim” of Arizona for most of a decade with Model 1895 Winchesters in .30 Government (.30-06).
What Zane Grey termed the Tonto Rim in Arizona is officially the Mogollon Rim, named for Juan Ignacio Flores de Mogollon (pronounced ‘muggy-own’) who was Capitan-General of Spanish held New Mexico 1715-1717 and home to a flourishing elk population. It was a favorite bear and turkey hunting ground for Grey, who became one of America’s most successful authors, and who hunted there for most of a decade with Model 1895 Winchesters in .30 Government (.30-06).
Zane Grey looks up the steep-sided Tonto Rim, one of his many Model 1895s in hand.
To equip for his annual fall hunt in Arizona in 1919, Grey (1986: 246) recalled later that: “I had the fun of ordering tents and woolen blankets, and everything we did not have on our 1918 trip. But owing to the war it was difficult to obtain goods of any description. To make sure of getting a .30 Gov’t Winchester I ordered from four different firms, including the Winchester Co. None of them had such a rifle in stock, but all would try to find one. The upshot of this deal was that, when after months I despaired of getting any, they all sent me a rifle at the same time. So, I found myself with four, all the same caliber of course, but of different style and finish…One was beautifully engraved and inlaid with gold – the most elaborate .30 Gov’t the Winchester people had ever built. Another was a walnut-stocked shotgun butted fancy checkered take-down…The third was a plain ordinary rifle with solid frame. And the last was a carbine model.”
Zane Grey and his party had successful hunts for turkey, deer and bear, leaving alone the recently introduced Rocky Mountain elk which were struggling to fill habitat emptied of Merriam’s elk by over hunting in the previous century.
Grey’s use of the venerable ’95 Winchester in the justly popular .30-06 eventually came to the attention of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company and in 1924 they presented him with yet another one, a fabulously engraved and gold inlaid ’95.
“One was beautifully engraved and inlaid with gold—the most elaborate .30 Gov’t the Winchester people had ever built.” (Photo: Buffalo Bill Historical Center)
Zane Grey (1986:358) summed up his atavistic philosophy about hunting: “Stealing through the forest or along the mountain slope, eyes roving, ears sensitive to all vibrations of the air, nose as keen as that of a hound, hands tight on a deadly rifle, we unconsciously go back. We go back to the primitive, to the savage state of man. Therein lies the joy.
How sweet, vague, unreal those sensations of strange familiarity with wild places we know we never saw before! But a million years before that hour a hairy ancestor of ours felt the same way in the same kind of place, and in us that instinct survives.
That is the secret of the wonderful strange charm of wild places, of the barren rocks of the desert wilderness, of the great-walled lonely canyons. Something now in our blood, in our bones once danced in men who lived then in similar places. And lived by hunting!
Reference cited:
Loren Grey 1986 Tales of Lonely Trails, Northland Press, Flagstaff.
This book is a selection of some of Grey’s best work, and the stories and excerpts reveal a man who understood that angling is more than an activity–it is a way of seeing, a way of being more fully a part of the natural world. No writer exceeds Zane Grey’s ability to integrate the fishing experience with a world he saw so vividly.
Though he made his name and his fortune as an author of Western novels, Zane Grey’s best writing has to do with fishing. There he was free from the conventions of the Western genre and the expectations of the market, and he was able to blend his talent for narrative with his keen eye for detail and humor, much of it self-deprecating, into books and articles that are both informative and exciting.
What if your entire professional career distilled down to a single event? Imagine that you have one of the hardest jobs in the entire world. You have worked, struggled, sacrificed, and bled to reach the absolute pinnacle of your particularly grueling profession. You have toiled and trained countless days, weeks, months, and years so that at that one perfect crystalline moment you would be ready. Then out of the darkness, you place your hand on a terrified young woman who is hurt, sick, and hopeless and you say, “Jessica, it’s okay. I know you’re scared, but you’re going to be okay. We’re the American military, and you’re safe now. We’re gonna take you home.”
One nameless member of the US Navy’s SEAL Team 6 got to utter those very words on the evening of 25 January 2012. While for Jessica Buchanan that was likely the single most moving thing she had ever heard, that was likely a pretty epic moment for that Navy SEAL as well. Just thinking about it gives me the willies.
The Place
If hopelessness and depravity were minerals you dug up out of the ground, Somalia would be where you’d go to find them. I’m not sure if it is their dark angry religion, their generational legacy of abject squalor, or some heretofore unidentified toxin in the food or water, but something about Somalia just isn’t right. Not meaning to seem all judgy, but we were just trying to keep those people from starving and they fought us like there was no tomorrow. It’s honestly fairly surreal.
The Reality Of It
Arguably the greatest scourge in modern warfare is mines. These diabolical monsters are cheap, easy-to-use combat multipliers. It takes literally no talent to sow a decent minefield. Once activated, these things just sit quietly and wait for something juicy to wander by. They kill and maim efficiently, effectively, and indiscriminately. The problem is that in many to most cases there is no way to turn them off.
Mines are emplaced most commonly from a state of desperation. There are seldom accurate maps produced that document their locations. Even if there were, those maps would never be 100% reliable. Older generation mines lack a self-destruct system, so they can remain in place for years if not decades after whatever war that spawned them is complete. At that point, hapless farmers or children playing can trip over the things with predictably horrible results. So it was with Somalia.
Somalia is a simply horrible place in the Horn of Africa. It is home to some 17 million people. The nation’s terribly unfortunate geography synergistically combines with some epically bad governance to produce cyclical famines and friable infrastructure. In 1993 we lost seventeen servicemen killed and another hundred or so wounded just trying to keep local Somali warlords from seizing international food aid and using it to enhance their personal power. Nineteen years later in 2012, you’d think we’d have learned our lesson. However, with the benefit of hindsight, I suppose we didn’t.
The Setting
In October of 2011, American Jessica Buchanan along with a Dane named Poul Hagen Thisted were working through the Danish Refugee Council in Somalia on a wide-ranging demining project. Their stated goal was to teach Somali children how to survive in a mine-rich environment. That seems an honorable pursuit to me. However, one motley contingent of Somali pirates apparently felt otherwise.
With the uptick in maritime attacks off the eastern coast of Somalia, the free world’s navies began patrolling these pirate-infested waters regularly and aggressively. Shipping companies also posted armed security contractors onboard their transiting vessels. As a result, the pirates’ traditional hunting grounds dried up. In response, these bottom-feeding parasites began prowling inland for Western aid workers like Buchanan and Thisted.
Jessica Buchanan was an English teacher from Ohio out to save the world. While traveling cross country in a trio of land cruisers en route to the city of Galkayo, Jessica’s group was attacked by the aforementioned Somali pirates. These modern-day brigands kidnapped Buchanan and her Danish friend before driving them for hours with weapons pointed at their heads. The two captives were later forced to walk throughout the night to a militarized compound in Galguduud some 90 miles inland from the Indian Ocean. There they remained…for 93 days.
It’s not that the United States government had forgotten about Jessica. It is simply that her captors were a bunch of greedy unwashed psychopaths. They demanded $45 million to release their captives. Negotiations eventually resulted in an offer of $1.5 million cash, but the pirates felt that they could do better. Meanwhile, Jessica was getting sick.
Jessica had a thyroid condition that demanded daily medication she was no longer receiving. In addition to inadequate food and unsanitary water, she developed a urinary tract infection (UTI). Out here in the World, that’s a week’s worth of antibiotics and a little cranberry juice. In the desert wastes of Somalia, an untreated UTI meant a slow miserable death. It eventually became clear that something had to be done.
The Op
I have it on reliable information that movies are not actually real. However, the rescue of Jessica Buchanan and Poul Hagen Thisted was movie-grade awesome. It all started with a tactical parachute jump out of an American cargo plane.
The players were DEVGRU—the US Navy’s SEAL Team 6. These high-speed frogmen were still riding high after having killed Osama bin Laden roughly five months before. Now on the ground in eastern Africa, 24 operators covertly ditched their chutes and formed up for a cross-country march to the Somali pirates’ evil lair.
The pirates had done their part to help out. As they were now conducting terrestrial operations, that meant a discrete static compound irrevocably tied to geography. This fact facilitated aerial surveillance. By the time they parachuted out of that airplane, the SEALs knew exactly what they would be facing.
Jessica later said that she and her captors heard what sounded like rodents scurrying in the bush. Her guard shouted an alarm to his comrades, and then the whole world exploded. At this point, Buchanan had no idea that these were American special operators. At the time she feared al-Shabaab terrorists or a rival pirate mob. She later confided that she did not think she could survive being kidnapped yet again.
Throughout it all, Buchanan and Thisted just curled up and tried to be small. Now nearly delirious with malnutrition and disease and expecting death at any moment, the American captive heard those words she had long dreamt of hearing. I obviously wasn’t there, but I can guarantee you that whoever first reached Jessica on that horrible chaotic night had trained their entire professional life for that specific moment.
SEALs do their best work at night. The pirates really never had a chance. They unlimbered their AK’s, but the SEALs, equipped with state-of-the-art night vision and the finest intelligence and logistics support on the planet, were an unstoppable force. In moments, the SEALs had killed nine pirates. There were unconfirmed rumors that they might have captured another three, but I couldn’t find any references to what became of them. Piracy as a career path doesn’t offer much of a retirement plan.
When she was rescued, Jessica was shoeless and unable to walk. One of the burly SEALs just threw the thin woman over his shoulder and jogged to safety. As they waited for the exfil helicopters the SEALs made a circle around the captives. When they heard what they thought were pursuing pirates, the frogmen physically shielded them with their bodies.
Once they were safely aboard the helicopter one of the SEALs gave Jessica a folded American flag. She later said, “I just started to cry. At that point in time I have never in my life been so proud and so very happy to be an American.” I hate to tell you this, but if you can read that without being moved then something about you is broken.
Buchanan and Thisted made full recoveries. Thisted later stated that his lucky break was being captured with an American. None of the attacking SEALs received so much as a scratch.
The Weapons
DEVGRU and the Army’s 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta are our Tier 1 counter-terrorist units. They are as highly trained and exquisitely equipped as our great nation is capable of making them. The end result is the most capable military force in the world. Their standard assault rifle reflects that same rarefied mantra.
The HK416 was a collaborative effort in the late 1990’s between Delta and Heckler & Koch. Representing a holy melding of the M-4 carbine and the short-stroke, piston-driven gas-operated system pioneered in the ArmaLite AR-180, the HK416 combined world-class reliability with superlative ergonomics. The end result changed the game a little bit.
Nowadays the HK416 has been officially adopted by the militaries of France and Norway. The US Marine Corps also fields the weapon in a slightly modified form as the M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle. The HK416 maintains a sterling reputation for accuracy and reliability.
The Aftermath
One of the ways Jessica coped with her protracted captivity was by imagining that she and her husband Erik might someday have a baby. These episodes eventually evolved to the point where she visualized her child, a boy, alongside the two of them in a place of complete comfort and safety. As the weeks stretched into months and her health began to fail this exercise helped keep her strong.
Jessica and Erik were reunited at a military base in Italy. She was thin, emotionally wrecked, and traumatized both mentally and physically. Four weeks later she began throwing up. The nausea got progressively worse until it manifested almost every time she ate. Jessica naturally assumed it was a function of the rich food to which she had become so unaccustomed.
Soon thereafter, she had a positive pregnancy test. 8.5 months after her rescue she and Erik welcomed their son. God’s got a weird sense of humor sometimes, but that strikes me as a pretty cool way to commemorate her rescue.
When I first became involved with the U.S. Army’s High Altitude Rescue Team (HART) back in the 1990s, there was a steep learning curve. The mission was to retrieve injured climbers from Mount McKinley and support the National Park Service (NPS) in their mountain operations. At 20,310 feet, Mt. McKinley is the highest point in North America. They call it Denali now. This was quite an unnatural space for a helicopter.
The National Park Service owned the mountain, and they had a contracted civilian helicopter that was based in Talkeetna, Alaska, during the climbing season. This single-engine French Aerospatiale Lama was stripped down to its bare essentials to give it maximum performance at extreme altitudes. When first I crawled aboard this aircraft, I noticed that the copilot’s seat and flight controls had been removed. Needless to say, I was impressed by the bravery required to be a pilot of this helicopter.
For routine trips up the mountain, if ever that was a real thing, the NPS used the Lama. For those times when the Lama was broken, or a bit more horsepower was required, they called us. I can honestly say that flying a helicopter over the top of Mount McKinley was the most extraordinary thing I did as a U.S. Army Aviator.
The Aircraft
For the HART mission, we utilized otherwise unremarkable Boeing CH-47D heavy-lift helicopters. We gutted our Chinooks of any unnecessary kit and fitted them with auxiliary internal fuel tanks and an onboard oxygen system for the crew due to the altitudes in which we would be flying. This labyrinthine thing included plumbing that ran oxygen lines to each crew station to support the flight crew while operating these unpressurized aircraft at extreme altitudes. Our crewmembers also had walkaround bottles that would keep them conscious while moving about the cargo compartment.
The max gross weight for a CH-47D is 50,000 pounds. Its twin Lycoming turboshaft engines put out an aggregate 9,000 shaft horsepower. It is an immensely powerful machine. However, at 21,000 feet the Chinook becomes a big fat pig. Great care had to be taken to plan maneuvers well in advance when the air was that thin. Those sorts of altitudes are terribly unforgiving. However, thusly configured the big Chinook would reliably get us there and back.
The Mission
Denali is actually the tallest mountain on earth, as measured from the base to the summit, even taller than Everest. While the peak of Everest is higher, you don’t have to climb as far to get there. Each year about 1,200 climbers attempt the ascent. Roughly half of them make it. Folks die on that rock all the time. There have been 96 fatalities on the mountain since the first successful ascent in 1913.
The NPS maintains a presence at both the high and low base camps on Denali throughout the approximate three-month climbing season. The low base camp is at 7,200 feet on the Kahiltna glacier. The high base camp is at 14,200 feet.
At the beginning of the climbing season, the HART team is responsible for emplacing the equipment to support these base camps. This consists of tents, food, fuel, radios and the sundry stuff required to keep people alive in such an austere environment. The HART team also retrieves everything at the end. These Army Chinooks also cover the gaps that the small civilian helicopter cannot.
Denali makes its own weather. As many a tourist has discovered to their disappointment, oftentimes the mountain is socked in while the rest of the surrounding area is clear and pretty. As the CH-47 is fully instrument capable, it can sometimes reach the mountain when the Lama cannot. The Chinook is also equipped with a rescue hoist that offers capabilities not available to the smaller machine. In 1988, the HART team set the world record for a helicopter hoist rescue at 18,200 feet. In 1995, the HART team performed a live rescue at 19,600 feet, setting a record for the CH-47 airframe.
War Story
On 3 June 1996, we were on a training mission to get our aircrews qualified for the climbing season. We always ascended the mountain in pairs. The weather had been sketchy and getting to high altitudes had been a challenge.
Two days before, a Spanish climber named Juanjo Garra lost a crampon and fell at the 18,000-foot level at Denali Pass, breaking his leg. At these sorts of altitudes, this is a catastrophic injury. NPS rescue personnel laboriously carried the man to the 14,000-foot base camp, but by then, he was in dire straits.
As we shot a careful approach into the high base camp, we knew nothing of Mr. Garra or his injury. Once we touched down, an Air Force pararescueman who was climbing the mountain as part of a training exercise flashed us with a signal mirror. He explained that Garra had to be removed from the mountain or he could die.
The formal approval process for rescue support was laborious. Each live mission had to be approved by the first General Officer in the chain of command. However, they claimed we Army officers were supposed to show initiative. Mr. Garra was soon strapped in alongside his climbing partner, a Spanish cardiologist. Incidentally, I think that was the closest I have ever come to being kissed by a man. That guy was pretty stoked to be getting off that mountain.
We flew the two Spaniards to the low base camp where they were loaded onboard a ski-equipped airplane for the trip to the Anchorage hospital. I flew home that afternoon assuming I had done a good thing. My boss felt otherwise.
Once we got the aircraft shut down I was dragged into my commander’s office for a proper butt chewing. My on-the-spot decision had completely circumvented the chain of command. I had allowed two foreign nationals onboard a U.S. Army aircraft without proper authorization. The liability had been astronomical. What if the aircraft had crashed? What if there had been an in-flight emergency? What if, what if, what if…
While I was getting reamed out, the phone rang. It was the U.S. Coast Guard congratulating us for the rescue. They wanted the names of the crew for the press release. My boss hung up the phone and sighed. He reluctantly congratulated me for saving a man’s life but then directed me never to do it again.
It has been 27 years since that weird afternoon on Mt. McKinley. I left the Army soon thereafter and went to medical school. Along the way I bought a laptop and tried my hand at writing. Until I was researching this article I had never known Juanjo Garra’s name. I sincerely hope he is well.
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A side note from Grumpy