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You always assume anything really interesting must have happened on the other side of the world. I rather suspect kids raised in Jerusalem, Athens, or Volgograd feel pretty blasé about their local history as well. However, as a product of the American Deep South myself, there was quite a lot of tragic stuff that once unfolded in my backyard.
It was the early summer of 1863, and America was rabid to tear itself apart. The war had been going on for two long bloody years, and the ultimate outcome was far from certain. Lee and Longstreet were preparing to spend the Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg. Simultaneously some 1,000 miles to the Southwest 70,000 Federal troops under US Grant stood poised to wrest control of a little Mississippi town called Vicksburg from General John Pemberton’s 33,000 Confederates.
Vicksburg held a commanding view of the Mississippi River, then the equivalent of the nation’s only north-south interstate highway. Pemberton’s Confederates held it. Grant’s Federals wanted it. The stage was set for an epic siege.
Rivers of ink have been spilt exploring the innermost thoughts, campaigns, successes, and failures of the Generals. These rarefied military rock stars get all the proper press. However, it isn’t the Generals who typically do the fighting and dying. It is in the small things and the normal folk where the true tragedy and triumph may be found. Such a poignant event occurred on a friend’s plantation just outside Vicksburg proper. The farm and associated holdings have been in my buddy’s family for as far back as institutional memory might span.
The Fog of War
This plantation had the poor fortune of hosting the most favorable river landing for Union troops staging for the pending siege. All the local males of military age had long since left to fight. What remained to tend the plantation was the matriarch, the young ladies of the family, and the standard complement of slaves. The entire Neapolitan mob toiled together to fight off rank starvation.
US Grant himself along with all of his entourage had landed the day before, swept through like locusts, and moved on. One of the young Union officers had a horse that had come up lame. He appropriated another from the family stable but apologized profusely for the imposition. Draft animals in this place at this time could literally spell the difference between life and death, and the young officer did not confiscate this one lightly.
As quickly as the Union command group had arrived it was gone, moved on to the more pressing affairs of strangling the population of Vicksburg. The following day, however, there landed a solitary Union officer. He was armed, inebriated, and looking for trouble.
This Federal officer was a straggler. The specifics of his story were never known. However, when he realized both the local men as well as his superiors were long since gone he felt it was time to become acquainted with the local ladies.
This man carried a .58-caliber single-shot horse pistol as he made his way up onto the expansive porch of the plantation house. The matriarch planted herself in the doorway and forbade him entry into her home. The flower of young genteel Southern womanhood resided therein, and she could justifiably see little good to come from this Yankee drunkard gaining entry. The older woman was of modest build, however, and the younger man fairly strapping. Even in his intoxicated state, it became obvious that he was soon to get past her.
At the same time, the senior male slave was industriously digging a rose bed in front of the house, breaking up the ground with a heavy pickaxe. He was close enough to hear the matriarch’s frantic remonstrations but kept to himself. When the lady of the house planted herself boldly across the doorway the drunken soldier placed his hand on the butt of his pistol. He had traveled far from home to teach these Rebels a lesson, and no slight woman past her prime was going to deprive him of some proper companionship.
The family slave then felt compelled to act. While the inebriated Yankee argued vociferously with the lady of the house this man quietly walked up the steps behind him, swung the pickaxe he had previously been using on the rose bed, and buried the spike end up to the handle in the randy Federal’s skull. The Union officer was dead before he hit the porch.
The Gun
For many officers serving in the American Civil War, it was a come-as-you-are fight. The Union had the resources to kit out large combat formations in uniform clothing and weapons. Confederates were frequently a more motley mob. However, even Federal officers typically bought their own swords and sidearms.
I have seen a photograph of the pistol this hapless Union officer wielded that fateful day back in 1863. As near as I could tell it was a Model 1855 Harper’s Ferry single shot horse pistol. These heavy guns were typically carried across the pommel of the saddle in a symmetrical holster balanced on the opposite side by the gun’s detachable shoulder stock. They were intended to bring down an enemy’s mount if necessary. These .58-caliber guns were evolutionary developments of the original Model 1805 US Marshal Harper’s Ferry flintlock pistols.
Those earliest guns represented the first design produced by an American national armory. This flintlock weapon was the standard handgun of the American Dragoons who fought during the War of 1812. This same basic chassis was upgraded several times between 1805 and the onset of the Civil War.
The first .54-caliber M1805 guns were copied from the 1798-vintage French Pistolet Modele An. IX. The final model of 1855 featured octagonal rifling that tapered to a smoothbore at the muzzle. The ramrod was positively retained on a swivel to prevent its loss while reloading from horseback.
Most of these guns were primed using the notoriously unreliable Maynard tape priming system. They typically launched a 450-grain Minie ball with annular grease grooves. Though clearly obsolete on a battlefield liberally populated with revolvers, these massive guns still offered the sort of knockdown power usually reserved for shoulder arms.
The Rest of the Story
The matriarch of the family was rendered hysterical by the loyal slave’s spontaneous actions. While she was grateful that he had so ably defended the virtue of the young ladies inside the house, she was also justifiably terrified about what the Federals might do to them all once they discovered the killing. The story goes that the black man retrieved his pickaxe from the man’s skull and casually observed, “Well, ma’am, I’m digging an awful nice rose bed right over there.”
The slave buried the man on the spot before sowing his rose bushes liberally across the top of the grave. The heavy single-shot handgun has since been passed down through the generations all the way to the present. No one ever came inquiring after the fallen Union officer, and I suppose his corpse remains undisturbed underneath that Mississippi rose bed to this very day.
Two years later the war finally ground to its gory conclusion. The Union officer who had appropriated the horse was assigned to occupation duty in New Orleans. He posted a letter back to the matriarch of the plantation once again apologizing for having taken the animal and including fair monetary compensation for the loss. This letter remains in the family today as well.
Ruminations
Most modern students of history weigh slavery as the primary causative agent behind this bloodiest war in American history. The ownership of human beings by other humans is morally repugnant to the civilized mind, so this makes for a reasonable narrative. Interestingly, roughly 90% of those fighting for the Confederacy did indeed not own slaves. However, they were typically young and, like most junior soldiers today, had not the time to accumulate much in the way of possessions.
The capacity of individual states to determine their own destinies fundamentally shifted with the American Civil War. The founders never could have imagined the ponderous leviathan that the US federal government has become in the modern age. It is the most behemoth undertaking in all of human history. The expansive powers wielded by the US federal government would have been utterly terrifying to men who had staked their fortunes and their lives on an existential fight to throw off the oppressive tyranny of King George III, his intrusive governance, and his onerous taxes.
The concept of states’ rights died in 1865 along with the doomed Confederate cause. With the benefit of hindsight, this was indeed a modest price to pay to retire the reprehensible practice of slavery. Amidst an entire nation at war with itself, however, one small tragic drama played out on the front porch of a plantation house during a hot summer afternoon outside Vicksburg, Mississippi. This hapless Union officer’s unwitting contribution no doubt enhanced some simply superb Southern roses.
In the early 1960s, a tidy little war broke out along the border between Indonesia and East Malaysia on the island of Borneo. European colonialism had subdivided the planet into a bewildering amalgam of fiefdoms and protectorates, and the sundry peoples involved yearned to define themselves in the aftermath of the Second World War. On August 29, 1964, this tidy little war got quite messy.
Lance Corporal Amarjit Pun was the second-in-command for the point section of 10 Platoon, C Company, 2d Gurkha Rifles, on a company-strength patrol along the border south of Kumpang Langir. A company-sized element can be unwieldy on a protracted combat patrol, and all involved were looking forward to getting back to base for some rack time. However, as the patrol headed for home, they unwittingly walked into a kill zone.
The ambush was of the classic sort. Indonesian infantry well concealed in the jungle underbrush allowed the Gurkhas to walk deep into their killing ground before initiating the ambush with a murderous rain of small arms fire. In the first salvo, Lance Corporal Amarjit’s section commander was grievously wounded, while one of his NCOs was killed outright. The light machinegun team was also taken out of action. The Number 1 gunner was killed and his Number 2 badly hurt. Another rifleman was hit as well. The situation for LCPL Amarjit’s Gurkhas looked grave.
It is the most basic tenet of Infantry training to instinctively assault through an ambush. This goes against every natural urge a man might have in combat. When faced with murderous fire from an unexpected quarter, the natural response is to drop or hide. However, hesitating inside a kill zone equals violent gory death.
A friend who landed on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, once told me that stagnation meant dying. He said the fire coming from the German pillboxes was indeed overwhelming, but that combat leaders on the ground pushed their men forward into the chaos. He explained that he charged across the beach to cover, but that every member of his small unit that hesitated on that beach died.
Infantry soldiers are therefore trained on immediate action drills in response to an ambush. They are expected to react instinctively without a great deal of conscious thought. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t. In the case of LCPL Amarjit Pun, this compact little man seized the initiative and took charge.
Turning the Tide
LCPL Amarjit charged forward and retrieved the fallen L4 Bren gun intending on using the discarded weapon on the attackers to help break the ambush. As he hefted the heavy gun another burst of fire raked over him, striking the Bren and putting it out of action. A lesser man might at this point have run or broken. LCPL Amarjit, however, was a Gurkha.
Amarjit Pun stood his ground in the center of the worn jungle track and unlimbered his British-issue L2A3 Sterling submachinegun. Fire poured in from Indonesian troops concealed a mere ten yards away. LCPL Amarjit thumbed his selector to full auto and squeezed the trigger, raking the jungle with 9mm rounds.
Amarjit emptied his Sterling at its cyclic rate and dropped the empty magazine. All the while he shouted encouragement to his comrades. He fished out a second 34-round mag, shoved it into the gun, jacked the bolt back, and emptied it at the nearby Indonesians as well. Throughout it all, heavy fire from the ambushing soldiers ripped the jungle and tore Amarjit’s patrol to ribbons. LCPL Amarjit burned through magazines as fast as he could cycle the gun.
The Weapons
While the Bren light machinegun has become irrevocably associated with British and Commonwealth troops fighting everywhere from North Africa in World War 2 to the Falklands, the gun was actually a Czech design. A license-produced version of the Czech ZGB 33 light machinegun, the ZGB 33 was itself a modified variant of the ZB vz. 26. Vaclav Holek was the primary designer. The name Bren is a portmanteau derived from Brno, the Czech city in Moravia where the gun was designed, and Enfield, the site of the Royal Small Arms Factory.
The earliest Bren gun weighed about 25 pounds and fed from a sharply curved magazine located atop the weapon to accommodate the rimmed .303 British round. The L4A4 Bren used by LCPL Amarjit’s men was the later version rechambered to accept the rimless 7.62x51mm cartridge. This variant can be identified at a glance by its straighter magazine. This 30-round box magazine was intentionally designed such that it would be interchangeable with that of the L1A1 SLR FAL rifles used by British forces at the time.
The Bren is indeed heavy in action, but its sedate 500-rpm rate of fire renders it thoroughly controllable. The Bren served in a similar role as the American BAR. Unlike the BAR, the Bren enjoyed a quick change barrel capability. The reliable tilting bolt, gas-operated action rendered splendid service in dirty environments. Additionally, while the gun was limited by its magazine feed system, the top-mounted design made mag changes fast. Each man in a British Infantry squad typically carried spare magazines for the Bren.
The Sterling submachine gun was an evolutionary improvement on the Sten that helped the British win World War 2. Developed in 1944, the Sterling was the brainchild of George William Patchett, the principal designer at the Sterling Armaments Company of Dagenham. Trial versions of the Sterling actually saw limited action in the closing months of World War 2, specifically with British Commando forces and at Arnhem with the British 1st Parachute Division during Operation Market Garden.
The Sterling generally favored the Sten that inspired it but represented an improvement across the board. The pistol grip was set at the rough center of balance of the gun, and the weapon fed from a superb side-mounted 34-round curved magazine. The Sterling was designed from the outset to feed from either Sterling or Sten magazines.
The Sterling is built around a drawn steel tube milled out and perforated as needed. It is finished out in a peculiar bake-on crinkle finish. This finish seems strangely similar to pickup truck bed liner. While early Sterlings featured a charging handle slot milled in line with the ejection port, production models were moved slightly higher.
One curious aspect of the Sterling design as it relates to American shooters is that the gun can be legally constructed from a registered transferable Sten tube. The BATF has allowed enterprising gunsmiths to adapt Sten tubes to accept demilled Sterling parts kits. The final product is referred to as a Stenling in the vernacular. As the Sterling is a markedly more pleasant and effective weapon than the Sten, this is a popular conversion.
The Sterling’s delightful balance and sedate 550-rpm rate of fire make it unusually controllable. The gun fires from the open bolt and is selective fire via a thumb-operated selector level oriented above the trigger. The collapsible stock on the Sterling is a bit complex but remains nonetheless rigid and effective.
The Sterling is one of the most controllable open-bolt subguns I have ever run. The telescoping recoil system of the German MP40 is perhaps incrementally smoother, but the Sterling still runs like a champ. The Sterling is also unusually compact and handy. This makes it the ideal weapon for combat leaders and second-line support troops who might need their hands free for other tasks.
The Rest of the Story
LCPL Amarjit stood his ground on that tiny jungle trail, dumping magazine after magazine of full auto 9mm fire into the Indonesian troops. His furious close-range assault broke the back of the ambush and bought enough time for the rest of the company to maneuver in place and displace the enemy. The Indonesians subsequently retreated into the jungle. Amarjit’s Gurkhas gathered up their casualties and returned to their base camp.
LCPL Amarjit was unhurt during the chaotic exchange. However, his uniform and equipment had been pierced by Indonesian bullets in three different places. The combination of LCPL Amarjit’s unswerving bravery in the face of the withering enemy attack and the heavy volume of automatic fire from his Sterling submachine gun broke the Indonesian ambush and prevented further casualties to his Gurkha unit.
LCPL Amarjit Pun earned the Military Medal for his actions on that jungle trail back in 1964. The Military Medal was established in 1918 and was used to recognize acts of valor among other ranks such as NCOs and Warrant Officers. Recipients were granted a modest stipend and entitled to include the post-nominal letters “MM” after their names in official correspondence. Though the award was discontinued in 1993 in favor of the Military Cross which is granted to all ranks, the Military Medal still recognizes exceptional bravery in combat.
Wars are fought for territory, greed, and all manner of lofty nationalistic motivations. However, men invariably fight for their buddies. When the incoming fire seemed overwhelming and his comrades were falling LCPL Amarjit Pun unlimbered his Sterling submachine gun and won the day. Sometimes big things do indeed come in small packages.
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Honolulu Police Chief Arther “Joe” Logan has asked residents to call the police if they see another citizen open-carrying. This request, from a live stream for “Spotlight Hawaii,” comes on the heels of the HPD issuing concealed-carry licenses.
According to Logan, dispatched officers will be required to investigate any complaints. Police will need a physical description of the person in question as well as any other detail that can aid in their investigation.
“Obviously, concealed carry and the definition of ‘conceal’ means that you can’t see it or it is unrecognizable to the average person,” said Logan. “If it is noticed and you can see it, I would ask you to call 911.”
Back in June, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling on a case known as New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen that struck down New York’s “may-issue” carry scheme and opened the door for firearm enthusiasts to carry across the country.
However, it has also led to some controversial requirements for those wishing to obtain a permit in Honolulu. An applicant must be able to remove their weapon from the holster and hit a silhouette target, placed at five distances, from nine to 45 feet.
SEE ALSO: Federal Judge Strikes Down Draconian Hawaii Handgun Purchase Requirements
The owner of 808 Gun Club Tom Tomimbang said last month that he is not too concerned about the requirements in an interview with Hawaii News Now.
“Practice, practice, practice, right?” Tomimbang said. “If they do that before they take the actual qualification course, they should be able to do it.”
Chief Logan says this requirement test is not really to prove someone can shoot, but that they can shoot under duress – which is why they added a timed element to the test.
“You might have to learn how to cope with that stress while shooting,” he said.
Currently, there are around 600 pending applications for CCW licenses on Oahu, and they are being processed in the order in which they were received.
Aside from the requirement test, these 90-day applications require applicants to undergo background checks, mental health evaluations, and live-fire training before the HPD issues the certification – similar to a driver’s license with a picture included.
Gun carriers who get caught in public without their license will face a misdemeanor criminal offense.
Chief Logan has declared that he will not wait on the city of Oahu to complete action on Bill 57, which would limit concealed carriers from possessing a weapon on public transit, at schools, or in the voting booth.
SEE ALSO: Smith & Wesson Files Suit in Hawaii for Public Records Disclosures
Furthermore, the bill would also prevent carrying in Hanauma Bay Nature Preserve, the Hawaii Children’s Discovery Center, the Honolulu Aquarium and the Honolulu Zoo. Those permitted to concealed-carry would also be required to stand 100 feet away from the outer edge of groups of 25 or more who are participating in “first amendment expressive activities.”
State Legislature is expected to discuss adopting statewide standards for carrying restrictions by location in January. Meanwhile, Bill 57 passed the initial reading at a November 29th city council meeting. The bill is required to be voted on twice more before it can be implemented.
Logan has been making the rounds with members of the city council to ensure the language of the bill is clear for citizens and law enforcement alike. He wants everyone to understand what to do in confusing situations where a legal carrier is forced to pick up their child from school last minute. According to Logan, these murky circumstances need some elaboration.
“The way the language of the law is written is really going to impact how we enforce, ” Logan said. “It’s something we need to figure out.”
Logan says that with officers putting their lives in danger, a clearly worded ordinance or law is expected to protect them.
“It becomes a little difficult for us on an enforcement level, ” said Logan. “We’re already asking our officers to do a lot.”
Back when War was Glorious, Colorful and Brutal. Now War is just Brutal. Grumpy