Ft. Hood Shootings

Earlier this week, a tragedy occurred on a military base that is only minutes away from my home. This picture is found at KTLA.com In Ft. Hood, Texas, a gunman has injured over 30 people and taken the lives of at least a dozen people. Rather than comment much on the event myself at this time, I would like to share with you something written by one of those brave American soldiers that was on the scene at the time it happened. The soldier’s name will remain anonymous to protect the source, although you may see pictures of this and other brave souls on the media. Here, unedited and exactly as I received the story, is one point of view from the middle of the activity. Please take a moment to say a prayer for our troops and their families as you read this:

Since I don’t know when I’ll sleep (it’s 4 am now) I’ll write what happened (the abbreviated version…..the long one is already part of the investigation with more to come).  I’ll not write about any part of the investigation that I’ve learned about since (as a witness I know more than I should since inevitably my JAG brothers and sisters are deeply involved in the investigation).  Don’t assume that most of the current media accounts are very accurate.  They’re not.  They’ll improve with time.  Only those of us who were there really know what went down.  But as they collate our statements they’ll get it right.    I did my SRP last week (Soldier Readiness Processing) but you’re supposed to come back a week later to have them look at the smallpox vaccination site (it’s this big itchy growth on your shoulder).  I am probably alive because I pulled a ———- and entered the wrong building first (the main SRP building).  The Medical SRP building is off to the side.  Realizing my mistake I left the main building and walked down the sidewalk to the medical SRP building.  As I’m walking up to it the gunshots start.  Slow and methodical.  But continuous.  Two ambulatory wounded came out.  Then two soldiers dragging a third who was covered in blood.  Hearing the shots but not seeing the shooter, along with a couple other soldiers I stood in the street and yelled at everyone who came running that it was clear but to “RUN!”.  I kept motioning people fast.  about 6-10 minutes later (the shooting continuous), two cops ran up.  one male, one female.  we pointed in the direction of the shots.  they headed that way (the medical SRP building was about 50 meters away).  then a lot more gunfire.  a couple minutes later a balding man in ACU’s came around the building carrying a pistol and holding it tactically.  He started shooting at us and we all dived back to the cars behind us.  I don’t think he hit the couple other guys who were there.  I did see the bullet holes later in the cars.  First I went behind a tire and then looked under the body of the car.  I’ve been trained how to respond to gunfire…but with my own weapon.  To have no weapon I don’t know how to explain what that felt like.  I hadn’t run away and stayed because I had thought about the consequences or anything like that.  I wasn’t thinking anything through.  Please understand, there was no intention.  I was just staying there because I didn’t think about running.  It never occurred to me that he might shoot me.  Until he started shooting in my direction and I realized I was unarmed.  Then the female cop comes around the corner.  He shoots her.  (according to the news accounts she got a round into him.  I believe it, I just didn’t see it. he didn’t go down.)  She goes down.  He starts reloading.  He’s fiddling with his mags.  Weirdly he hasn’t dropped the one that was in his weapon.  He’s holding the fresh one and the old one (you do that on the range when time is not of the essence but in combat you would just let the old mag go).  I see the male cop around the left corner of the building.  (I’m about 15-20 meters from the shooter.)  I yell at the cop, “He’s reloading, he’s reloading.  Shoot him! Shoot him!)  You have to understand, everything was quiet at this point.  The cop appears to hear me and comes around the corner and shoots the shooter.  He goes down.  The cop kicks his weapon further away.  I sprint up to the downed female cop.  Another captain (I think he was with me behind the cars) comes up as well.  She’s bleeding profusely out of her thigh.  We take our belts off and tourniquet her just like we’ve been trained (I hope we did it right…we didn’t have any CLS (combat lifesaver) bags with their awesome tourniquets on us, so we worked with what we had).  Meanwhile, in the most bizarre moment of the day, a photographer was standing over us taking pictures.  I suppose I’ll be seeing those tomorrow.  Then a soldier came up and identified himself as a medic.  I then realized her weapon was lying there unsecured (and on “fire”).  I stood over it and when I saw a cop yelled for him to come over and secure her weapon (I would have done so but I was worried someone would mistake me for a bad guy).  I then went over to the shooter.  He was unconscious.  A Lt Colonel was there and had secured his primary weapon for the time being.  He also had a revolver.  I couldn’t believe he was one of ours.  I didn’t want to believe it.  Then I saw his name and rank and realized this wasn’t just some specialist with mental issues.  At this point there was a guy there from CID and I asked him if he knew he was the shooter and had him secured.  He said he did.  I then went over the slaughter house.  the medical SRP building.  No human should ever have to see what that looked like.  and I won’t tell you.  Just believe me.  Please.  there was nothing to be done there.  Someone then said there was someone critically wounded around the corner.  I ran around (while seeing this floor to ceiling window that someone had jumped through movie style) and saw a large African-American soldier lying on his back with two or three soldiers attending.  I ran up and identified two entrance wounds on the right side of his stomach, one exit wound on the left side and one head wound.  He was not bleeding externally from the stomach wounds (though almost certainly internally) but was bleeding from the head wound.  A soldier was using a shirt to try and stop the head bleeding.  He was conscious so I began talking to him to keep him so.  He was 42, from North Carolina , he was named something Jr., his son was named something III and he had a daughter as well.  His children lived with him.  He was divorced.  I told him the blubber on his stomach saved his life.  He smiled.   a young soldier in civvies showed up and identified himself as a combat medic. We debated whether to put him on the back of a pickup truck.  A doctor (well, an audiologist) showed up and said you can’t move him, he has a head wound.  we finally sat tight.  I went back to the slaughterhouse.  they weren’t letting anyone in there.  not even medics.  finally, after about 45 minutes had elapsed some cops showed up in tactical vests.  someone said the TBI building was unsecured.  They headed into there.  All of a sudden a couple more shots were fired.  People shouted there was a second shooter.  a half hour later the SWAT showed up.  there was no second shooter.  that had been an impetuous cop apparently.  but that confused things for a while.  meanwhile I went back to the shooter.  the female cop had been taken away.  a medic was pumping plasma into the shooter.  I’m not proud of this but I went up to her and said “this is the shooter, is there anyone else who needs attention…do them first”.  she indicated everyone else living was attended to.  I still hadn’t seen any EMTs or ambulances.   I had so much blood on me that people kept asking me if I was ok.  but that was all other people’s blood.  eventually (an hour and a half to two hours after the shootings) they  started landing choppers.  they took out the big African American guy and the shooter.  I guess the ambulatory wounded were all at the SRP building.  Everyone else in my area was dead.    I suppose the emergency responders were told there were multiple shooters.  I heard that was the delay with the choppers (they were all civilian helicopters).  they needed a secure LZ.  but other than the initial cops who did everything right, I didn’t see a lot of them for a while.  I did see many a soldier rush out to help their fellows/sisters.  there was one female soldier, I don’t know her name or rank but I would recognize her anywhere who was everywhere helping people.  a couple people, mainly civilians, were hysterical, but only a couple.  one civilian freaked out when I tried to comfort her when she saw my uniform.  I guess she had seen the shooter up close.  a lot of soldiers were rushing out to help even when we thought there was another gunman out there.  this Army is not broken no matter what the pundits say.  not the Army I saw.  and then they kept me for a long time to come.  oh, and perhaps the most surreal thing, at 1500 (the end of the workday on Thursdays) when the bugle sounded we all came to attention and saluted the flag.  in the middle of it all.  this is what I saw.  it can’t have been real.  but this is my small corner of what happened.

 

 

 

 

Heroes & Guns: Jamaica Wild

I’m having fun in this on-going series as I have the opportunity to get out and try or revisit some guns, including the holsters, saddle slings & other equipment; I get to reread work from my favorite authors and I get to discuss what I am reading with others. Wasn’t it someone from TV’s old series, “A-Team”, that said, “I love it when a plan falls together”?

So for my latest installment, I am pulling from two separate books of Sandi Ault’s Wild series. You must go visit her website at www.sandiault.com and see the gorgeous pictures of her wolves and read about all her extensive research. Meanwhile, enjoy:

Jamaica’s Pistol

In Wild Indigo, Jamaica is called upon to use her handgun to protect herself from a desperate Pueblo man and to  rescue a little boy. In the ensuing struggle, the Pueblo man, Hunter, throws a rock and knocks the gun from Jamaica’s grasp. As she scrabbles to the corner to get the gun, he grasps her legs and a hand to hand battle is on. ‘He moved toward the edge [a cliff] as I kicked and wriggled. He swung backward, ready to hurl me over the side, and I threw my arms behind his head and grabbed on tightly. Hunter roared again, and then suddenly released me onto the floor of the ruin. I dashed to the fire pit and grabbed the gun. I turned it on him and he raised his palm as if to stop the bullet, the other hand clutching his chest. We stood gasping, both of us, staring at each other, gulping air, the rain and hail pounding us.’ [Wild Indigo by Sandi Ault, published January 2007 by Berkley Prime Crime]

 

Again, in Wild Sorrow, the gun comes out as Jamaica, her wolf Mountain and her horse Rooster are caught out in a blizzard and need to find shelter with a murder victim they had discovered in an abandoned Indian school building. Not knowing if the murderer is still around, ‘I led Rooster through a blinding whiteout to the door. Once I had tied the reins to the door handle, I opened my saddlebag and grabbed a flashlight and my LED headlamp. I drew my handgun out of my pocket, then slid through the narrow opening and looked around…’ [Wild Sorrow by Sandi Ault, published March 2009 by Berkley Prime Crime]

 

What is this gun that Jamaica has to pull several times from her under coat or belt holster? Her gun of choice on and off duty is a SigSauer P229. The day of the six shooter is becoming a fast retreating memory as American law enforcement agencies are readily accepting the semi-auto pistol. This particular gun combines high round capacity together with a serious big bore cartridge that is readily and commonly available, and it does it in a package that is both light to carry and reliable to shoot.

 

There are good and bad sides to the equation, “Is this gun for me?” or more importantly, “Is this a gun that Jamaica should carry?” I think, absolutely. Let’s take the bad first: The only true slight downsides I’ve found with this gun are when taking it out on the range for a couple hours of practice, the recoil when using the .40 SIG can be fatiguing and the P229 is a bit larger and heavier than what I would consider for recommending as a conceal carry gun for a person of smaller build. For Jamaica, a woman in great shape, this would not be a problem. On the heavily weighted GOOD side of the scale, it has a double action trigger pull with a decocking lever that is simple and easy to teach to those shooters who formerly carried revolvers. Once you have your own particular gun sighted in and your chosen stance, you cannot blame this gun for bad accuracy – that would be what I call, ‘user error’. The gun impressed me with its accuracy, even in a quick moving tactical course. The grip is well designed, comfortable and serves a double purpose of making the rearward recoil push more straight back than can be felt in some competing models. The P229 comes in models for 9mm Luger, .357 SIG and .40 S&W, all of which ammo is common to purchase and easy to reload. The patented automatic firing-pin lock gives an added safety advantage and there are no complicated firing sequences with the double action/single action semi-automatic. This is a seriously good self-defense and law enforcement pistol and a gun I would want to carry in any of the action packed scenarios experienced by BLM Agent Jamaica Wild.

Heros & Guns – Jamaica’s Shotgun

With special thanks to author Sandi Ault and her book Wild Inferno. Visit her site at www.sandiault.com

In Wild Inferno, the Hotshot crews are getting a briefing before they go out to fight a wild fire that is blazing through the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. While on patrol, Jamaica herself often carries a Remington 870 Super Magnum Pump-Action Shotgun. Here is a brief excerpt from Wild Inferno showing one of the uses of this gun:

 

The wildlife agent took over the briefing: “This she-bear may be reluctant to take her baby near the highway or down through the black where it’s already burned. And they’re starving. We’re going to try to get up there and bait some traps so we can capture them and transport them to someplace safe. But in the meantime” – he held up a double-barrel pump—“we need to talk about these shotguns—a couple of these have already been issued to the crews in that area”.

            Some of the firefighters laughed and joked about bear hunting season being open, but the wildlife agent held up his hand to stop them.

“These shotguns will only be used to fire a beanbag round. That’s a strong nylon pouch with about forty grams of lead shot inside. The beanbag is inserted into a standard twelve-gauge shotgun shell. When that shell is fired, the bag is expelled at around two hundred ninety feet per second. In flight, it spread out and distributes the impact over about six centimeters of the target. It is meant to deliver a blow that will minimize long-term trauma with no penetration, but will briefly render the animal prone and immobile. Now, this beanbag round has a maximum range of around sixty-five feet, but it’s inaccurate over about eighteen or nineteen feet. The idea here is to stun the bear and give you time to get away, not to harm the bear.

“This is just for your safety….” [Wild Inferno by Sandi Ault, Publ. by Berkley Prime Crime, Feb 2008]

 

As a defensive tool, the Remington 870 is a fantastic choice for Jamaica and, often, may be found in use by BLM agents, Forest Rangers, military and even your local police department. The beanbag round mentioned is a common device used for putting down wild life, or even persons, when you wish to stun or impair them, but not necessarily to do permanent, penetrating harm. The gun has versatility, reliability and a very dependable action that make this one of the most sold and highly praised shotguns in today’s market.

 

My personal experience with this gun can be summed up in one cliché, to borrow an advertising term> ‘it takes a lickin but keeps on tickin’. First of all, my shotgun of choice for hunting and for personal protection is a pump action. They are easy to learn and easy to use. The 870 uses a bottom-loading, side ejecting receiver which, after 1000’s of rounds, does not seem to jam easy unless there is ‘user error’. Yes, it is a very rugged gun that functions reliably under the very worst of conditions and is durable enough that after a hard life with you, it will still function well for the person you pass it on to – with an almost guaranteed bang for every trigger pull. It’s heavy enough to absorb the shock but not too heavy that it puts an undue strain on you. There are many variations of the Remington 870 with availability in 10, 12, 16, 20 gauge [also a 410 bore], barrel lengths from 18 to 30 inches and weight from 7 to 8 pounds. A handy tool or a sportsman’s friend, this pump action shotgun has a 4 to 8 round internal tube magazine that can chamber up to the 3 ½ inch shell. Because its components are produced on high-speed production machinery, the gun has far out paced the earlier guns that required precision machined parts and hand tooling that made earlier guns much more expensive and time costly to produce. Parts are readily available and interchangeable should something break. It’s affordable, simple to maintain, easy to learn use of and just plain fun to shoot. Jamaica has my stamp of approval on her personal choice of shotguns.

Heros & Guns

Many of you that check in to my blog know that I am an avid outdoors person and teach many classes that involve hunting and gun safety. I am not a gun nut or an expert in any way, but I do get out there and work with a lot of people on safety. I can’t stress safety and training enough. Guns (and knives and bows as well) do not cause injuries – unsafe use of them is the problem.

 

In addition to teaching safety courses as a certified instructor, I also love to read. Now, if there were an expert title for book readers, I would rank in the top 2% of the world. In many fiction and non-fiction books, guns are mentioned. Our heros and heroines pull out their trusty XXX gun and blow away the bad guys, the attacking bear, the snake threatening our child; even at times, to blast the links to the chains holding our victim! I am going to critique, with absolutely NO expert qualifications, some of the guns used by the characters we find in our books. Many authors have probably had people ask them what type of gun their character uses and want to know more about that choice. How fun to take some of my favorite authors & characters and explore their choices! I give credit to the authors where credit is due and only am expressing my thoughts, good or bad, as to why or what in specific I like about this gun. I do not intend to insult any author or manufacturer, but I am sure I will generate some controversy and discussion. I am an open minded person and you are entitled to your own opinions, whether they differ from mine or not. My mind can also be changed if the facts are there to contradict me, but again, these are just my own personal feelings on the issue. I’ll start with a very easy one, as follows. Please enjoy this new series, ‘Heros & Guns’

 

Cussler’s Five-seveN

One of our favorite adventure/thriller authors, Clive Cussler, has a book released in 2008 titled, ‘Arctic Drift’, I noticed the main character has had a change of his hand gun of choice. Maybe he had made the switch in an earlier book, but I was surprised to see a main character pull out his trusty new Five-seveN, a hand gun manufactured by a company called FNH. Last year I worked with the NRA as a Pistol Instructor at an event called the Women’s Wilderness Escape. My task there was to help teach women a taste of the softer side of shooting. The event I worked with was hand guns–a revolver [S&W .22] and a semi-automatic called the Five-seveN. We’ll focus on the 5-7 (my abbreviation for it, not its true name).

FNH USA Five-seveN

This photo courtesy of the web site: www.fnhusa.com

 

The 5-7 has many good features, but I want to point out from the start that I think this is the wrong gun for our hero nor would I recommend it for personal protection or for our protectors on the streets to carry this type of gun. There are two basic types of ammunition available for these guns – a restricted military/police type ammo and the over the counter civilian version. The m/p version has a bunch of lethal stopping & penetration power. With Dirk’s resources, in his make believe world, of COURSE he has the lethal, vest and helmet penetrating version, or anything he wants manufactured in their handy dandy workshop! In the real world, the civilian version of ammunition is all he would be able to acquire. This version of ammunition, well, renders the gun slightly underpowered as far as stopping power goes; maybe just a bit more lethal than a .22. If you are reloading your ammunition, you will find the shell casings extremely difficult to work with. So, Dirk – put away your 5-7 in the gun safe and bring back something more efficient for this role, say a 9mm?

 

On the other hand, the 5-7 has some great selling qualities. The gun is easy to disassemble, clean & reassemble with only 3 basic parts. In the thousands of rounds we put through these guns, not a single misfire, jam or other incident occurred. The magazine release is on both sides of the grip as is the slide lock, making the gun easy to use with either hand. The magazine is relatively quick and easy to load, although the spring gets very tight when you are trying to squeeze the last round or two inside. You almost cannot load the magazine incorrectly as the ammo will spring back up and jump out if you are doing it the wrong way. The weight/balance ratio of the gun made for ease of holding for long periods of time and the gun’s grips are extremely well situated so that there is little chance of injury should you grip it incorrectly and the slide doesn’t jump back to attempt to slice your thumb web or knuckle. (Several guns in the past, with just the slightest inattention or lack of familiarity have caused battle scars on both hands). The recoil is very light. As for accuracy? Fresh out of the box, about a dozen guns had great aim with no need for any adjustment from the factory setting of the sights. Even the smallest, most timid woman out of 50 students had no problem mastering this gun with relatively good accuracy. It is a very fun gun to shoot and easy to learn to use.