The Tahoe is new, the buck is big and Tank found out
his wife was pregnant. Why the glum, scared look?
Have you ever unexpectedly bumped into a long, lost friend? During this impromptu encounter, you end up spending more time reminiscing about the “good old days.” Before you know it, several hours have elapsed reliving both wonderful and heartbreaking moments, as only can happen with an old friend.
This happened to me recently. I was looking for a particular gun for an article, and the silly rascal was playing a game of hide-and-seek with me. Looking into the deep abyss of my safe, it was here where the chance meeting occurred.
Tank (center) with his biggest deer taken to date in WV
with his old friend, the Remington 700 .30-06.
“My” First Deer Rifle
Like most kids, the first deer I killed was with a borrowed rifle. I don’t remember whose it was, but it was a Remington 760 pump-action with “see-thru” mounts and a glossy Bushnell scope, one we later jokingly referred to as “the classic Amish Assault Rifle.”
The Remington 760 is very popular in the Pennsylvania woods. Back then, most deer hunters also hunted small game with pump-action shotguns. It only made sense to run the same action you were familiar with and believe me, those carrying Remington 760s knew how to run them as fast as any semi-auto rifle — which were illegal back then.
I kill a chunky “forky” (four point) with the borrowed 760. I was hooked! When you are young, time takes forever to pass from the current deer season to next year’s. This provides a young fella’ with lots of time to dream about the coming season and what gear he needs for next year. Naturally, I wanted my own deer rifle.
Guns
Being a proud “Boomer,” things were different back then. I received a Daisy 1894 BB gun for Christmas at age 5 and a .22 long rifle Harrington & Richardson bolt-action rifle for my 8th birthday. If this happened today, my parents would probably risk being charged with “Contributing to the delinquency of a minor.” Like I said, things were different back then — for the better! I never gave my parents reason not to give me a gun. By them doing so, they showed me trust, one I never betrayed. It, in turn, made me more responsible.
Ever since kindergarten, the first two weeks of summer vacation were spent on my grandparents’ dairy farm. I was blessed by having room to roam and exposure to my uncles who were both hunters. After the afternoon milking and supper, it was time to hunt groundhogs. I had three years of supervision hunting them before getting my own .22 rifle.
Being an experienced hunter, my grandparents and uncles had no qualms about my hunting whistle pigs by myself. Along the way, my uncles taught me how to set double spring traps, baiting them with sardines, to trap sweetcorn-raiding raccoons.
Uncle Jerry taught Tank a lot about hunting groundhogs and deer. This was Jerry’s biggest buck — but Jerry died the following fall.
Remington 700
Picking a rifle was a no-brainer. The best hunters I knew were my uncles and they both carried Remington Model 700s. They must be the best if they carried them, right? Around this time, I started reading outdoor magazines and a common theme back then was the .30-06 being the best all-around cartridge there was.
Loaded correctly, you could take anything from ground hogs to grizzly using 100- to 110-grain bullets for vermin and up to 220-grain heavyweights for grizzly. Not that there was an abundance of grizzlies on the Pennsylvania farm, in my young mind it never hurt to have the potential to take one if necessary.
After getting my Remington 700 .30-06, I soon started handloading for it. And I did indeed use 110-grain Remington soft points for ground hogs and 180-grain Remington round-nosed Core Lokt bullets for bigger things — just no grizzlies.
Deer taken with the Remington 700 .30-06. Maybe it’s time to bring it out of retirement? The spike at extreme left was Tank’s daughter’s first buck.
The Man With One Gun
For years I carried the Remington .30-06 for everything. During summer, it was my 110-grain handloads for vermin and fall saw me carrying my 180 Core Lokts. All I had to do was adjust my Redfield 3-9X40 scope the required amount of clicks up or down for each load. I killed enough ground hogs to fill a pickup truck bed with that rifle, as well as several bucks.
I carried that rifle on the hunt when my uncle Jerry died in W.Va. and then killed my biggest buck the following year. Holding the rifle at arm’s length, I notice the dings, dents and scratches. I remember how upset I was when they happened. Now I’m glad they’re there, telling their tale of past hunts together.
The action of my Remington 700 is just as smooth as I remember. The trigger is sharp and crisp and the Redfield Scope still clear. After shooting imaginary deer on the wall, I wonder why I stopped hunting with the old friend?
Friends Galore!
Then I see all the lever guns, single shots, bolt guns representing just about every manufacturer in North America and am jarred back to reason. Curiosity, experimentation and the need to try something different are the culprits filling my gun room now.
Surely the man with one gun lives a simpler, quiet, if not boring life. But he sure is missing out on a lot of fun by doing so. And when I look at the gun that started it all, I am thankful for my Remington 700 .30-06. I think he’s deserving of a reward and need to take him on a hunt. After all, old friends are the best! And he’s responsible for all my other friends.
Today is National Medal of Honor Day which celebrates the highest military honor in the country.
The Medal of Honor is reserved for bravest actions in the face of the enemy. To earn the medal, a servicemember has to distinguish himself or herself conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity while risking their life under fire and beyond the call of duty against an enemy of the United States.
First established in 1862, a year after the Civil War broke out, the Medal of Honor has changed over time, including in how and who can earn it – and today, the Medal of Honor is exceptionally tough to earn.
Private Jacob Parrott was the first recipient of the Medal of Honor for his actions during the Civil War. There has also been one woman awardee, Mary Edwards Walker, a contract surgeon who saved countless lives with her medicine during the Civil War.
Since the medal was established more than 150 years ago, 3,536 Medal of Honors have been awarded to 3,517 recipients (there have been some multiple awardees before the criteria were restricted).
The medal and how it was earned changed right before World War I. By that point, more than 60 percent (2,198) of the total Medals of Honor ever earned had been awarded.
The Civil War is by far the conflict with the most Medals of Honor awarded. During the four-year conflict, 1523 Union troops received the highest military award. Then, during the Indian Wars against Native Americans (roughly 1862 to 1911) 426 medals were awarded. In the Spanish-American War (April 1898 to December 1898), 110 medals were awarded. In the Philippine-American War (1899 to 1902), American troops earned 80 Medals of Honor. During the Boxer Rebellion (1899 to 1901), 59 medals were awarded. Finally, in the American-Mexican border War (1900 to 1919), 56 medals were awarded.
Over the course of many hours Brady utilized three helicopters (after the first two were rendered inoperable because of damage from enemy fire) to evacuate 51 seriously wounded men, many of whom would have died without prompt medical treatment. (Photo by Ken Scar/U.S. Army Cadet Command)
The story from World War I and onwards is very different. During the Great War, just 126 Medals of Honor were awarded. Then, during World War II, American troops earned 472 Medals of Honor. In the forgotten war of Korea (1950 to 1953), 146 medals were awarded, and 268 medals were earned in Vietnam (1955 to 1975). Since then, only 30 medals have been awarded (two in Somalia, eight in Iraq, and 20 in Afghanistan).
The Army leads the way with 2,467 medals. The Navy follows with 749, while the Marine Corps boasts 300. The Air Force, the newest service until the creation of the Space Force, has 19. Finally, the Coast Guard has one.
A big myth about the Medal of Honor is that you have to die to earn it. But according to the statistics, only about 19 percent of the awardees received the highest military award posthumously.
Another interesting fact is that U.S. citizenship isn’t a requirement for earning the medal. To this day, 764 awardees were born overseas and not all of them later became U.S. citizens. However, one must be serving in the military to get the medal.
Today, there are 63 Medal of Honor recipients alive.
By law, recommendation packages for the highest military award must be submitted within three years of the action in question. This statute of limitations encourages timely reporting of actions worthy to be recognized with the medal.
But Congress, though a specific act, can bypass that requirement and green light Medals of Honor for actions that took place decades ago. Recently, successive administrations have been using this window to correct past mistakes and the Pentagon has been re-reviewing records of past conflicts and upgrading awards to the Medal of Honor.
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Italian Infantry Weapons of WWII
Chimpanzees look like cool, friendly, wise, placid creatures. They’re not. They’re actually bloodthirsty monsters just like the rest of us.
There is a commonly held but flawed presupposition opining that, somewhere out there, some people are innately good. That just has not been my experience. There are certainly fine folks of character wandering about. I strive to count myself among them.
However, underneath, I would assert that we all come from the factory broken. Absent a little divine grace, we’re all predictably dreadful. Should you be covetous of examples, I would put forth Adolf Hitler, Jeffrey Epstein, Hillary Clinton, your typical two-year-old toddler, and whoever invented digital pop-up ads.
Anthropomorphizing animal behavior to fit a human construct is a timeless fallacy. A more accurate comparison would be to depict humans as animals.
Human Nature
I’m not sure where you stand on the whole kinship to monkeys thing. I have my own opinions about how we all got here. However, anthropomorphizing human character traits onto the animal kingdom will not take you to a happy place.
The adorable kitten that seems so entertaining as it chases the spot from your laser sight around the room? That little monster is just trying to catch some defenseless creature so it can rip the very life out of it.
The puppy who so enjoys its new squeaky toy? That thing is, in its mind at least, killing a bunny rabbit with its teeth. We live in a pervasively broken world. The animal kingdom is dirty with examples.
The War
Chimpanzees are cute … from a distance. I cut my teeth on Saturday morning Tarzan movies. There was a time when I coveted such a pet myself. However, it turns out that chimps are actually bloodthirsty killers, just like the rest of us.
In the early 1970s, Mike, the alpha male leader of a pack of chimps in Tanzania, was reaching the end of his use-by date. As a result, this previously coherent pack of primates fractionated into two clans. The researchers who were studying them titled the two groups the Kasakela and the Kahama. I have no idea what those names mean.
The separation was not instantaneous. It took about eight months. Eventually, the Kahamas consisted of six grown males — Hugh, Charlie, Godi, De, Goliath and Sniff — along with three adult females and their associated offspring. The Kasakela retained eight adult males — Figan, Satan, Sherry, Evered, Rodolf, Jomeo, Mike and Humphrey — as well as a dozen females and their kids.
There was plenty of space. You might think that these two tribes of chimps, all descended from common progenitors, might just stake out some territory and live in harmony. Perhaps they’d host play dates for the little guys or engage in the occasional supper club among friends just to maintain the family ties. Nope, that’s not the way things went at all.
Over the next four years, the Kasakela clan engaged in an intentional and focused campaign of extermination against the Kahamas. Hugh and Charlie of the Kahamas also undertook deep penetration missions into Kasakela territory, sowing mayhem. They used all manner of improvised weapons in pursuit of their martial goals. Sharp stones were particularly in evidence.
This is Ham, the first primate in space. I’m not
sure he actually volunteered for that mission.
Details
Chimpanzees are fiercely territorial. During the course of the Gombe War, male chimps on both sides aggressively patrolled the periphery of their communities, raiding as the opportunities arose. Then, on January 7, 1974, things got seriously kinetic.
Six adult Kasakela males, along with one female named Gigi, ambushed Godi while he was out feeding and beat him to death. Then, they fell upon De, wounding him so severely that he succumbed in short order. After that was Goliath. Hugh followed soon thereafter. They then attacked and killed Charlie, followed by a female named Madam Bee.
In each case, the Kasakela chimps operated like a cohesive unit, systematically isolating their enemies so they could attack on favorable terms. Eventually, Sniff was the only remaining Kahama male. However, roughly a year later, a Kasakela war party encountered him alone and killed him as well. Along the way, the Kasakela murdered one female, ran two off, and kidnapped three who were brought back to Kahama lands as war booty.
Once the Kahama tribe was liquidated, the Kasakela moved in and seized their territory. However, other neighboring chimp clans were stronger and more numerous. In short order, the Kasakela were pushed back into their original boundaries.
Jane Goodall, the legendary chimpanzee expert, was on hand to document these events. In her memoir “Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe,” she wrote, “For several years, I struggled to come to terms with this new knowledge.
Often when I woke in the night, horrific pictures sprang unbidden to my mind — Satan, cupping his hand below Sniff’s chin to drink the blood that welled from a great wound on his face; old Rodolf, usually so benign, standing upright to hurl a four-pound rock at Godi’s prostrate body; Jomeo tearing a strip of skin from Dé’s thigh; Figan, charging and hitting, again and again, the stricken, quivering body of Goliath, one of his childhood heroes.”
Ruminations
I wish the Russians would leave the Ukrainians alone. I’d also be happier if their Arab neighbors could just stop firing rockets into Israel. It would be nice, while we’re dreaming, if we Americans got along a little better, too. Then, I wouldn’t have to sit on a pistol every time I zip into town to pick up a gallon of milk. However, that’s just not the world we live in.
I carry a gun because people are bad. It turns out that chimps are born sinful as well. So are lemurs, frogs, tigers, elephants and bacteria. We push back against that darkness as best we can, but it also behooves us to be prepared. That’s why the founders included the Second Amendment right there after the First.
After reading about the Gombe Chimpanzee War, a Polish poet named Katarzyna Zechenter wrote “The First Civil War in Gombe 1974–1978.” In it, she said, “Still, I don’t understand, were these chimps so human, or are we such animals?” Indeed.