Heroic

Real courage in action:

The long-suppressed instincts of a platoon leader surged back to life. He raced across the room, grabbed the gunman by a handle on the back of his body armor, pulled him to the floor and jumped on top of him.

“Was he shooting at the time? Was he about to shoot? I don’t know,” Mr. Fierro said. “I just knew I had to take him down.

The two crashed to the floor. The gunman’s military-style rifle clattered just out of reach. Mr. Fierro started to go for it, but then saw the gunman come up with a pistol in his other hand.

“I grabbed the gun out of his hand and just started hitting him in the head, over and over,” Mr. Fierro said.

As he held the man down and slammed the pistol down on his skull, Mr. Fierro started barking orders. He yelled for another club patron, using a string of expletives, to grab the rifle then told the patron to start kicking the gunman in the face. A drag dancer was passing by, and Mr. Fierro said he ordered her to stomp the attacker with her high heels.

His wife and daughter were injured in the chaos, and his daughter's longtime boyfriend was one of the fatalities.

Mr. Fierro and his wife run a small brewery. They sell merch. Just throwing that out there in case you know anybody who needs t-shirts.

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Nice Shootin', Tex.

A new timeline from Greenwood Police show it only took 15 seconds for the Greenwood mall shooting to come to an end.

Police reviewed surveillance video that showed the moments the suspect left the food court bathroom to the time Eli Dicken pulled out his gun, aimed and took out the threat.

Autopsy results also revealed the suspect was hit eight times from about 40 yards away. Police say Dicken fired 10 rounds.

Those numbers are impressing many gun experts and owners.

They're sure impressing me. That's some rock solid shooting any way you slice it.

Can you go 8-out-of-10 in fifteen seconds with your CCW gun at forty yards? Suppose that's what it takes?

Worth thinking about.

"This has been a Public Service Announcement from the Society for Daily Dry Fire Practice."

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Coincidence? Well, actually yes.

This piece at The Bulwark today, comparing the arcs of the Russian and Ukrainian armed forces over the last thirty years from a guy who's been watching, closed by quoting a familiar passage from the French novel The Centurions:

"I’d like [France] to have two armies: one for display with lovely guns, tanks, little soldiers, staffs, distinguished and doddering Generals, and dear little regimental officers who would be deeply concerned over their General’s bowel movements or their Colonel’s piles, an army that would be shown for a modest fee on every fairground in the country. The other would be the real one, composed entirely of young enthusiasts in camouflage uniforms, who would not be put on display, but from whom impossible efforts would be demanded and to whom all sorts of tricks would be taught. That’s the army in which I should like to fight."

The reason I recalled that passage is that Colonel David Hackworth used it to close out his memoir, About Face, which I'm currently re-reading for probably the fifth time.

If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.

The Right Stuffski

Last night Bobbi and I finished watching The Spacewalker, a Russian film about the Voskhod 2 space flight, which was (as you might guess from the title) the first spacewalk. It was hairier than Soviet government propaganda admitted at the time, some real by-the-skin-of-their-teeth stuff.

I didn't realize, until Bobbi told me, that the Soviet capsule needed an extendible airlock (unlike the NASA Gemini capsule) because they couldn't vent the whole capsule to vacuum for the duration of the walk without the risk of tube-based electronics overheating.

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On the one hand, and on the other...

John has a good breakdown of the incident here. This was a congregation that had put some planning in ahead of time...

"Next question: How many of these guys carried medical gear on their person?"

Definitely learned the lessons of Sutherland Springs.  Nobody was going to be prowling the aisles of this church, shooting defenseless and cowering victims.

But on the gripping hand...

From the same social media discussion that spawned the comment about medical gear in the caption to the first photo came the following exchange:

Friend A: "Shared this on a church related group and immediately got the"elitist" tag. Of course" 

Me: "It's amazing how many people out there are now confident that they, too, could make a 12-yard double-action headshot, from the holster, on a moving target, over the heads of their fellow parishioners. 'Bruh, I've seen your church security team come in and shoot at the range. Some of y'all have a hard time making a single-action headshot on a stationary B27 at seven yards with all the time in the world to shoot and not a no-shoot in sight.'" 

Friend B: "There is an infinite amount of excuses for screwing around instead of learning and doing work" 

Friend C: "You'd think that seeing the guy who wasn't trained and made poor choices/bad draw get killed and the guy that was trained put the killer down quickly would be a lesson. I doubt it will be, though. People can't learn if they think they already know."

Your hypothetical self-defense gun usage could be the proverbial "three yards, three shots, three seconds"...or it could be forty-five feet on a moving target, or it could start by that dude you didn't see approaching you grabbing your arm or knocking you off your feet.

Get some training. Practice what you learn. Do the work.
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"This is going to be a fighting ship..."

Is this actually the wreckage of the USS Johnston?

(If you haven't read The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Finest Hour, you're wrong, and you should take steps to fix that, soonest.)
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June 6th

An 18-year-old who waded through the bloody surf at Omaha Beach in 1944 is now 89 years old.
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Go read...

Right here.
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Tab Clearing...

• Coolest Motorhome.


• Derpy laws produce derpy situations which require derpy solutions.


• The Day of the Gun.


• Thin red line of 'eroes.

Tab Clearing...

Three wiki tabs open again...

• Melatonin


• Operation Gothic Serpent


• David C. Waybur

The last is my absolute favorite WWII... or any war, for that matter... Medal of Honor story: "You've heard about the guy who stepped out into the open and took on four tanks with his Tommy Gun and knocked one of them out, right?" (Apparently a round went through the vision slit and killed the driver and it drove into the gully.) .45ACP: It knocks out tanks.

Unbreakable.

Awesome story in the ABQ Journal about Deputy Robin Hopkins, who got shot taking the fight to a bona fide dirtbag back in October.

I'd be happy being a tenth that tough.
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Hoosier Daddy

So, let me tell you about a kid from Miami, Indiana who enlisted in the United States Marine Corps as a private in 1909, eventually took a commission as a lieutenant in the Indiana National Guard, spent time in the cavalry, was a captain leading an infantry company at Château-Thierry and commanded an infantry battalion in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. After the Great War, at the ripe old age of 27, he then transferred to US Army Air Corps and earned his wings as both a balloon pilot and an airship pilot.

Between the wars he won a few international balloon races; was the test pilot for the world's only successful metal-skinned dirigible; learned how to fly fixed-wing craft; and participated in an unsuccessful attempt at the world record for balloon altitude and bailed out after the balloon's envelope ruptured at altitude, riding the plummeting pressurized gondola down until it was safe to parachute.

During WWII he was promoted to Major General in '43 and took command of 8th Fighter Command before taking over the 2nd Bomb Division of the Mighty Eighth. He flew a couple dozen combat missions over occupied Europe and didn't retire until 1953, by which time the Hoosier country boy who'd been a private in the Marines when airplanes were novelties was now a lieutenant general who had commanded fleets of jets.

Meet Lieutenant General William Kepner:

So cool that his buddies probably stored their beer in his pockets.

"We got a Black Hawk crashed in the city..."

It was twenty years ago today.

Unfair.

I bag on the IMPD a lot for their ongoing public relations crisis surrounding some high-profile OWI (officering while intoxicated) cases, so it's only fair that I report that the department has another side as well.

In the wee hours of last Friday morning, on the northwest side of town, a dirtbag who had recently been released from prison where he'd been serving time on felony dope charges got into an altercation with his girlfriend. Whatever the altercation was about, this guy figured that his domestic issues could be resolved by holding his girlfriend and her baby at gunpoint in their apartment.

At some point, she got out onto the balcony and screamed for help. A neighbor called the cops. There was the sound of gunfire from inside the apartment.

IMPD officer Rod Bradway was first on the scene and apparently engaged in some shouting through the locked door with the dirtbag and, when the man's girlfriend started screaming again, Bradway kicked in the door and went through.

The dirtbag had been hiding behind the door and opened fire, catching Bradway in the side, between the front and back panels of his vest. Bradway returned fire as he fell, and apparently his covering officer killed the dirtbag, but Officer Rod Bradway died of his wounds.

But he fell forward, with a gun in his hand, doing the right thing; risking his life to save another.

There are a lot worse things to have carved on one's tombstone.
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You don't know what you've got until it's gone...

A touching memorial to Ed Rasimus.

Ed and I bounced horns a couple of times, but mostly I was just a dewy-eyed groupie who was tickled he even paid attention to my maunderings. There's one less empty chair in Valhalla, and we who remain are diminished.

You think you're bad?

What I've been reading:



I don't care how tough you think you are, bring a frickin' hankie.

An interesting life...

So, I was reading about the Great War, which led me to precursors of the Great War, such as the Italo-Turkish War of '11-'12, most widely remembered for its notable feature of the first aeroplane bombing attack by Italian pilot Giulio Gavotti on the Turkish lines from his German-built Etrich Taube aircraft.

Another famous pilot of the Taube was German pilot Gunther Plüschow, who showed up at the German naval station in Tsingtao, China with another pilot and two crated Taubes in 1914. When his fellow pilot crashed his machine, it left Plüschow to fly alone against the British and Japanese forces besieging Tsingtao.

After various feats of aerial heroics of the dogfighting with pistols and bombing warships sort, Plüschow was sent on a one-way trip out of Tsingtao with the last secret dispatches from the beleaguered garrison.

He crashed his plane, bartered his way into a junk, boated downriver, caught a ship to San Francisco, traveled by train across the US, took a steamer from New York to England, was captured, escaped, caught a ferry from England to neutral Holland, became an explorer and adventurer after the war, and died flying exploratory missions over Tierra Del Fuego, and you just don't get tales of adventure like that anymore these days...

Laconic.

I just finished re-reading Gates of Fire for the first time in several years. The most-remembered highlights of the book are the one-liners delivered by Spartans the likes of Dienekes and Leonidas.

This Veteran's Day, go read an interview with a real hero, Silver Star recipient MSgt Robert Blanton, who answers the question "Give us a rundown of the event in which you earned the Silver Star?" thus:

Clearing houses, got ambushed, rammed my vehicle through the house to get one of my team leaders out, got attacked by a suicide bomber, captured a guy and we killed 12.

I believe I get more wound up describing a trip to the grocery store than this man does recounting smashing the gates of hell open with the front bumper of his Humvee.
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Pretty cool.

My peeps at Coal Creek Armory will be presenting a custom-built 1911 to a local combat wounded veteran on Veteran's Day.

That's a sharp-looking pistol, and a very worthy cause.

Gunsmith Bob builds a hell of a good 1911. There aren't many 1911s that are match-tight, shoot into an inch or less at 25 yards, and can still be taken right out of the box and run through a 2-day, thousand-round class without cleaning.

Another day at the office...

Apparently the helicopter that went down was carrying some guys from DEVGRU. No word if they were the same guys who pulled off the Abbottabad raid (and we may never know, at least officially.)

If so, it's a reminder of the ops tempo that SOCOM has been dealing with for ten+ years now. The media only notices them once in a blue moon, when something big like taking down Bin Laden happens, as though they'd been sitting around waiting for something to do, twiddling their thumbs since the Battle of Takur Ghar.

UPDATE: Latest RUMINT is that none of the operators on board were the guys from Neptune Spear... (...who are probably busy elsewhere already.)