With the 237th Birthday of the United States Marine Corps yesterday (oorah), this week we’re looking at one of the Corps’ iconic personal weapons: the KA-BAR fighting knife. The Kbar knife company, now KA-BAR Knives, Inc, (the trademarked name is actually KA-BAR, including the all capital letters) was around for a while before creating the blade we all can recognize. A rather large group of Pennsylvania cutlers formed the Tidioute Cutlery Company in 1898.

Company legend claims that a fur trapper wrote to the company praising one of their blades. The trapper was accosted by a bear when his gun jammed, leaving him armed only with a knife. Said trapper proceeded to take down and kill the wounded bear with his knife. However, the trapper’s penmanship was kind of lousy, so that all that could be read from the phrase “kill a bear” was “K a bar.” With a name and story like that coming out of nowhere, the company saw a winning brand name (though they wouldn’t change the actual company name until after the war. They had shit to do, like make a few metric asstons of knives.)

The fighting knife commonly called the USMC KA-BAR was born in the beginning of WWII. Pearl Harbor kick-started an American wartime production machine that needed a laundry list of gear and needed it yesterday. WWI-era trench knives were used for this initially, and while they were decent enough weapons, they were lousy as tools, and both were needed. For a while, a stiletto-looking copy of the British Fairburn-Sykes fighting knife was used by Marine Raiders, but they proved even more useless as tools. As usual, supply was the lumbering paperwork dinosaur it’s always been, and troops often bought their own knives, usually hunting styles.

Eventually the supply pogs got their shit together and took data and suggestions from veterans of the Battle of Guadacanal for a design that would become the K-bar. The initial bits were all there: The clip point, almost like a scaled-down Bowie knife, the small crossguard, stacked leather handle, and thick pommel. There were a few early design flaws, almost all of which revolved around “it breaks too easily with (insert feature here), let’s fix it.” While not all Kbars were from KA-BAR, it was the company that bore the knife’s name that was generally agreed to have made the best.

Then, as now, the Kbar was issued first and foremost to warriors armed with pistols, carbines, and machine guns (riflemen already had bayonets). Today, it is most currently issued to S.A.W. gunners in the USMC.

There have been surprisingly few variants in design over the years. One of the most interesting is called the Stone skull & cobra knife. One of the design problems that cropped up in the Pacific campaign was the leather handle rotting after prolonged exposure to seawater. Enter E.W. Stone, Sr., a sailor aboard the USS Holland. After several Marines and Sailors commented on the problem, Stone used scrap aluminum from downed Japanese fighter planes to form new handles for these blades. Checkered and hand-molded grips based on snakeskin patterns helped assure they wouldn’t slip from the user’s hand in wet weather, and distinct skull-shaped pommels made for useful percussion tools & weapons.

Stone knives are one of the more obscure bits of WWII memorabilia, with a number of fakes and copies in circulation. Stone’s son Bill maintains a website with some nice looks at the originals.

As for my personal Kbar? I have 3, actually. One is in my bugout bag. One was my Grandfather’s from his time in the Pacific theater during WWII. One was a gift from my little brother, which I took into combat (and at one point used to disassemble a particularly belligerent grenade launcher that had gone down at an inopportune moment, but that’s another story) and is kept at hand to this day.

So that’s a look at the Kbar. Happy Veteran’s Day, Semper Fi.

Hey folks,

Entirely “real world” post for this one. If you’re here for the stunts, stage combat & action movie stuff, just scroll on past.

…those of you that remained, carry on.

The last couple of months have been an online shitstorm for the U.S. military on multiple fronts.

(not in chronological order)

One mensa candidate (a Staff NCO, no less) decided to wax poetic about Trayvon Martin while on the rifle range. Unspecified punishment.

Then some Army dipshit loses a comrade to an IED blast and takes it upon herself to tell said comrade’s wife that she’s now a widow… on Facebook. Unspecified punishment.

And the blogosphere loses its shit over a Scout-sniper team photo featuring an SS flag. Mercifully, cooler heads prevailed as the team’s higher-ups gave a “put that shit away and never bring it out again.”

One would think that with the educational power and scope of the internet, one could figure out that Scout Snipers, posing in front of a flag that said, “SS,” would realize they stood for the phrase “Scout Snipers,” as opposed to the Schutzstaffel. Then again, that may well fucking be vastly overestimating the average cognizance level of your typical internet user.

((Yes, yes I can use six-syllable words and “fuck” in the same sentence, thank you very much.))

Then a soldier in Afghanistan sends photos of his supposed war buddies posing with corpses and pieces of suicide bombers to the L.A. Times. The Times and the brass do the usual monkey dance of “please don’t publish” “we’re gonna publish just because you asked us not to!” And the internet is presented with posed-for-Facebook pictures of soldiers with pieces of their enemies.

And, lest we forget, video of Marines pissing on dead Taliban show up online.

And I’m not even going into the Qur’an burning bullshit, or the Secret Service prostitutes nonsense, or the Marine getting ad-sepped for talking shit about Obama on Facebook while active duty stupidity.

So, now that I’ve aired some dirty laundry of my comrades, where am I getting at?

One word: crackdown.

I guarantee you that U.S. military units around the world have, over the last few months, gotten word of “don’t let this stupid shit come from YOUR people.” Lectures have been given, PowerPoint rangers have wielded their laptops and spouted their bullet points, and yet another check-in-the-box class, probably with some fucking bullshit title like “social media sensitivity awareness” has already garnered a small commendation for it’s pogalicious author. The latest layer of ass-cover was knitted with precision, every stitch and fucking knot covered and aligned.

In a practical sense, this means that the default setting of saying anything of an active duty military nature online will be boiled down to silence. Yeah, yeah, yeah, OPSEC IS IMPORTANT. The potential embarrassment of your higher-ups shouldn’t be, but it winds up being so (to them, at least).

((Aside: yeah, I have friends that are higher-ups. And they know as much as I do that upper ranks make people political creatures. That’s the only way they last long enough to stay higher-ups. Doesn’t make them any more base or noble, just an aspect of their being. Fuck, “aspect of being?” Fucking liberal arts degree is showing again. I’ll cover that up with some rum later.))

So we hear less stories from the battlefield. We already are. It used to be that online stupidity happened already in the field, and was punished according to higher-ups’ discretion. (read “Just Another Soldier” by Jason Christopher Hartley for a good example of being fucked over for embarrassing your c.o.). Nowadays, incidents like the urination and the SS team photo are coming online well after the warriors in question are out of the battlefield (and in some cases, out of the military entirely) and the shitstorm still ensues.

I’m not going to debate the merits of any of these individual cases((one exception: I believe in treating the bodies of enemy dead with dignity and respect. That said, signing up to be a suicide bomber is probably the most blatant statement of “I-don’t-give-two-fucks-what-happens-to-my-body” that’s humanly possible. You may as well bequeath your un-vaporized bits to the FB photo collage of whoever has to clean up what’s left of your sorry ass. End aside.)), but I will say that this road leads to fewer war stories coming out.

And we don’t have many to begin with. I’ve already written in the past about how student veterans are being actively discouraged from discussing their wartime experiences. That’s only going to get worse as shit like this keeps cropping up.

So, what can you, humble citizen, do to alleviate this? Or at least help it not get worse?

#1: Fucking think. Before you comment, post, resend or what have you, think about what’s going on. And more importantly, think about WHY it’s happening.

#2: Do your fucking research. The Scout-sniper example above could’ve been averted if a few people could’ve stopped to realize something instead of screaming “NAZIS!”

#3: Recognize the actions of an individual as such.

Popping smoke,

~Jay

There’s been a good deal of travelling on my end over the last week.  This past Wednesday was the United States Marine Corps birthday, and Thursday was Veteran’s day.  As the old joke goes, awfully nice of Congress to give us jarheads a federal holiday to recuperate from the hangover.

Wednesday was also when my friend Mike was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross.

I won’t put down the full citation here, but his story deserves being told, so here I am.

March 22, 2009.  Now Zad was a ghost town in a wide valley.  It’s smack in the middle of Helmand province, and known for some of the bloodiest fighting since OEF (Operation Enduring Freedom) began.

I was returning to base from an early morning patrol.  From the gun turret I gave a noncommittal gesture that’s halfway between a wave and a salute at the foot patrol heading out just as we were coming back.  Near the front I noticed Mike, with his engineer and radio operator nearby.  I wouldn’t see him alive again.

As I was back in the base cleaning my gear, an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) exploded at Mike’s feet, severing his left leg.  His first reaction was to set his squad in the defense.  Sure enough, Taliban showed up and the shooting started.  Mike called in his own casualty report and kept leading his squad.  At one point he was calling in strafing runs from the arriving attack helicopters.  Reinforcements came, and Mike only let himself be evacuated when his entire squad was ready to move out.

He died in the casevac chopper.

This past Wednesday, the Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus presented the Navy Cross to Mike’s mother.  The stands looked like a mini-reunion of my old unit.  The ceremony itself was swift and meaningful.  The real reminiscence was later that night at a bar that was one of Mike’s preferred hangouts.  The shots came as smooth and plentiful as the stories.

It was on the plane ride that I started to really think about my dual professions of warrior and storyteller.  This wasn’t helped by the fact that my body has decided that having hangovers is all well and good now that I’m in my 30′s.  And eventually my thoughts ran to what pisses me off about so much of the movies and TV surrounding the wars I’ve fought in.  And by that I mean besides lousy scripts and lousier execution.

It boils down to two words: No Heroes.

Seriously, none.  Not a single film or television depiction of Iraq or Afghanistan to date depicts heroic actions by any of the actual players.  I can’t even make a case for the fictional characters as being heroes either.  When it comes to depicting Americans fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan, film show them overwhelmingly as one thing: victims.

Go down the list of films made about Iraq and Afghanistan: Green Zone, Home of the Brave, In the Valley of Elah, Stop Loss, the list goes on.  At best, American troops are depicted as blue-collar schmucks stuck toiling away for the Big Bad Bush.  At worst they’re broken, crippled trauma victims who need a hug and adult, again, because of the Big Bad Bush.

I got one word for that: Bullshit!

Since boots landed on the ground in Afghanistan in October of 2001, Seven medals of Honor have been awarded.  An Eighth will be awarded in 2 days to Salvatore Giunta, which will make him the first non-posthumous award since the wars began.  Including Mike, 26 Navy Crosses have been awarded, along with 21 Distinguished service crosses by the Army and 3 Air Force Crosses by the Air Force.

That’s 58 recipients of the highest military honors for combat action from October of 2001 to today and you’re telling me that not a single one of these stories deserves to be told on the screen?  BULLSHIT!

Over 2 million troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan since the war began and none of them have committed any acts of heroism worthy of cinematic note?  BULLSHIT!        

And why is this?  I got three places to point fingers.

The first goes to whatever miscellaneous dickheads within the Pentagon fucked up big in their own depiction of American heroes.  The lies and bullshit spun about the capture of Jessica Lynch and the death of Pat Tillman effectively crushed any attempt to talk about the no-shit American heroes of this war.  Lynch herself called bullshit on the official tale of her capture before Congress.  I’m firmly convinced that those two incidents killed any Pentagon effort to tell the real stories of heroism coming from the Global War on Terror.

My next place is the global news media.  I’ve got a lot of bones to pick with you fuckers, but in this case I’ll start with your collective rush to be the first and the half-assed lip service you give to being accurate.  They may not have created the bullshit in the first place, but the most copious spreader of it during the Lynch incident was none other than The Washington Post.  And after the backlash you lot were even more skittish than the Pentagon about telling stories of American heroes.  It doesn’t help that with the possible exception of the Murdoch empire, you lot are all collectively a part of my third place…

The left of center and the hardcore Bush haters.  This one is probably going to piss off the most people, but right now I could fucking care less.

I’ll be the first to admit I have legions of friends, colleagues and loved ones who fit the description I just filled.  Some of my nearest and dearest are among their ranks.  Several have been bastions of help when I was deployed, and more made it possible for me to actually attend Mike’s ceremony, something that I’ll be grateful for the rest of my life.

But yeah, you guys have some of the blame here.  Part of it is the unabashed hatred for the Bush administration that was so full there wasn’t a possibility of supporting anything he did, including the war.

And part of it is the ultimate cop-out that is the phrase “Support the troops, not the War.”

Really?  Fucking really?  You know what troops do?

FIGHT FUCKING WARS!

And they’ve been fighting this one for going on a fucking decade!

As much as I know my loved ones who say it mean well, I can’t help but fucking despise the wishy-washy sentiment behind it.  It’s a branch off the same thought process that wants to win a war without killing anyone or breaking anything, and it’s as fucking ludicrous and naive as the thought of toning a muscle without breaking a sweat.  It’s the fucking epitome of wanting to have your cake and eat it too, and even when staring in the face of that impossibility, turning away and looking up pictures of cake on the Internet.  Fuck that phrase and fuck the pretentious, naive sentiment behind it.

I created this blog for lovers and creators of action art.  Hopefully, that’s most of who’s reading it right now.

You want to support the troops?

Tell their stories.

Find them and tell them.

Find the stories of Michael Ouellette and Brian Chontosh.  Find the stories of Michael Murphy and Jared Monti.  Find the stories of Paul Smith, Jason Dunham, Robert Miller and Salvatore Giunta.

You know names like Abu Ghraib and the Fort Hood Massacre.  You’ve heard incessantly of our humiliations, victimizations and fuckups.  Now get up off your fucking ass and hunt down the stories of the no-shit, flesh and blood heroes who fought, killed and died in far corners of the world so you could ignore what they’re doing to watch American fucking Idol.

These heroes aren’t going to tell their stories for you.  They’re in the next world beyond our ken, or in a comfortable tavern talking about the game on TV and not saying a damn thing about what they’ve done.  You have to find them.

The news media aren’t going to tell their stories.  They’re still digesting what celebrity gossip and political fuckuppery into five-second soundbites they can.  You have to find them.

Find them and fucking tell them.

I just gave you some of their names.  And for most of you reading this, it’s the first time you’ve heard of them.  Seek them out.  Find out what they did. 

Tell their stories.

So I’m doing utility stunts on this little indie movie, and it’s a fairly standard scene: our hero takes on a half-dozen walking pieces of sword fodder and proceeds to kick six kinds of ass. Your truly is goon #5. And on one particular take, the young lady playing goon #4 is either repositioned or didn’t clear the space quickly enough or any of a dozen other things, but the end result of which is the back of my noggin impacting directly with her tailbone. The first words out of my mouth when the director yelled “cut” is the title of today’s episode.

One of the most significant bits of news coming in lately was The Rolling Stone article featuring General Stanley McChrystal and his staff and the subsequent media and political shitstorm that ensued, resulting in General McChrystal resigning his command over U.S. forces in Afghanistan. General David Patreus is stepping down as commander of U.S. Central command to replace McChrystal.

I’ll admit I’ve steered somewhat away from this topic, as it relates to real-world combat and not to stage or screen, but an event like this that lit up the international media is definitely worth noting on here. So I’ll leave my commentary at this: However much of an incredible warrior and commander General McChrystal is, and how much his strategies have aided U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, he still serves at the pleasure of the President. And the President wasn’t pleased. For me to go into further detail would devolve this blog into the ramblings of yet another disgruntled veteran who needs to get more comfortable on his barstool.

The U.S. Supreme court has now ruled that the second amendment is a fundamental right by a 5-4 majority. This comes on the heels of a ruling 2 years ago that stuck down Washington D.C.’s handgun ban. The gun law that kicked off this decision was a similar ban on handguns held by Chicago and one of its suburbs. This is pretty much guaranteed to fire off a typhoon of litigation across the U.S. as different states, cities and counties determine how much regulation individual firearm use can be made, and for what reason.

Why is this a big deal? Because for those of us who make action art, restrictions on the ability to own and use weapons has major repercussions on what we can create. Look at the website of any weapons vendor online, and you’ll see a list of “cannot ship to” areas. And on each and every one of these sites, the same names crop up over and over: California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts. All states with restrictive weapons laws, whether on firearms, blades, or even imitation weapons like Airsoft. And all too often I find that the biggest hurdle between independent action artists and the tools they use to do the job isn’t their status as mental patients, convicted felons, or any of the “common sense” restrictions involved in some of the more sane gun control laws.

Instead, it’s money. Pure and simple. Liscences and fees and permits that will let someone cut through the red tape to have a blank-fire pistol on their stage or on their set. Doesn’t leave a whole lotta room for the would-be Robert Rodriguezes of the world with barely enough change in their pocket for film and blanks. Going over the pros and cons of heading out to L.A. or NY with my fellow actors, I pointed out that in my niche, I benefit from living in the south, with their more relaxed weapons laws.

I’m hoping that the recent SCOTUS decision will result in more thoughtful and reasonable weapons laws as opposed to simple blanket bans. Wishful thinking, I’ll admit, but it’s nice to imagine.

I’ll leave you with some more fun from the rockbox. A crossdressing Taliban commanderwas killed by ISAF forces in Afghanistan when he attacked troops.

Popping smoke,

~J~