The young men and women of our American military constantly make us proud not only of their actions, but their values.  A classic example is seen below, written by Captain Nathan Broshear, USAF, a part of the earthquake rescue mission now ongoing in Haiti.  It is reprinted here with permission, made possible by his dad Paul Broshear, and brought to my attention by Michael Schimmer.

Haiti: this is why I serve

Commentary by Capt. Nathan D. Broshear
12th Air Force (Air Forces Southern) Public Affairs

2/23/2010 – PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — I’m often asked why I choose to be in the Air Force. Some people ask to start up conversation, others to be polite, and some genuinely wonder what compels Airmen to swear to support and defend the Constitution, put themselves in harm’s way and deploy far from home.

Most people who ask are looking for a one-word answer. They expect you’ll simply say: adventure or flying, travel, education or some other military benefit.

Usually, after about 20 seconds of explanation their eyes turn glossy as you struggle to capture the essence of what you do and why you do it – all without using military jargon.

I’ve been in Haiti since January and I know when I return, people will ask me, “What did you see there? Are we really helping?” The answer to these questions is really the same answer to the question, “Why are you in the Air Force?”

I’ve learned service has rewards greater than any paycheck, trip abroad or educational degree. In it exist opportunities to be where others cannot, to stand where others will not, and to do what people would do if only they could be where you are.

The rewards of serving aren’t one-word answers; they’re the tiny snapshots of humanity, dignity and kindness playing over and over in the minds of Airmen who’ve “been there.”

These scenes of hope replay in my mind each night as I lie down to sleep in my tent:

Airmen download thousands of pounds of life-saving food and water from aircraft that don’t even shut off their engines. They’re done in minutes and begin working on the next aircraft – 24 hours a day — so far, more than 3,000 times.

I hug a Haitian man as he tells me, “Without you, I would be dead … thank you, America.” I see the man again a few days later and he greets me like we’ve known each other for years. All he asks is for me to take a picture with him – not for him to keep, but so I can take the picture home with me and tell others his story.

An Air Force nurse cries with a patient recovering in a clinic, not from pain, but because they would soon part. Later, the whole ward — every patient with life-threatening injuries–sings together while nurses dance for them.

People come together for the greater good. Airmen unload airplanes from Venezuela, China, Qatar, France, Brazil, Chile, Australia, Colombia, Nicaragua, and dozens more. They salute every aircrew as they depart, no matter what flag is on the jet’s tail.

I stare in wonder at owls flying across a full flight line at 1 a.m. A private jet pulls in, full of volunteers. They ask, “Where’s the nearest hotel?” I point to a few tents and cots in the grass next to the tarmac. They sleep outside and don’t mind a bit.

I hold a baby born just after the earthquake on board a Navy hospital ship. The mother lost one leg and sustained multiple other injuries after debris fell on her, yet the baby is healthy…and all mom wants to talk about is how happy she is to be home again.

A family huddles under a tarp held up by sticks on a median between traffic lanes. They’re cooking rice and beans from a huge sack marked “A gift from the people of the United States of America.” They look up, smile and give us a big “thumbs-up” as we drive by.

I hear my family on the phone saying, “I’m proud of you….”

I give an MRE to someone who’s never had one, and likely hasn’t eaten all day.

When the first commercial flight arrives in Port-au-Prince, Haitian families reunite a month after the earthquake. Tears of joy stream down their faces as they embrace.

A group of Airmen get off a transport airplane carrying their bags after traveling for an entire day. They’ve got every right to rest, but just hours later, they’re building tents, marshalling aircraft, mapping food distribution points and driving earthmovers….all 700 of them.

A nurse tells me about a Haitian baby boy born on board the U.S.S. Carl
Vinson….the mother names him “Vincent.”

A woman stands atop the mountain of rubble that was once her home. She points out where she and her son were when the earthquake hit, then explains how a fallen door miraculously protected them from harm. There’s a hole in the rocks, just big enough to crawl through, marking their exit from death. The woman calls the escape, “God’s hand.”

When I return home and I’m asked why I serve, I’ll struggle to communicate the sights and sounds of hope that come with the privilege of being an Airman. My storytelling will fall short of putting a person where I’ve been.

I won’t be able to conjure up the sensory signals of mutual respect, trust and compassion that come from being there when you’re most needed.

Why do I serve? The one-word answer: Haiti.

Capt. Nathan Broshear

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Today, the long-standing ban against carrying guns in national parks passed into history. If you’re legal to carry in the given jurisdiction, you’re now legal to carry in a National Park situated there.

It’s about time.  It’s no secret that criminals strike as far from the eyes of the police as they can, and you don’t get much farther from them than in the wilderness of National Parks.  It’s equally well known that predators prefer helpless prey.  As a result, National Parks and such attracted some evildoers who thought “Deliverance” was a training film.  A few years ago, a man from the Gainesville area was murdered in such a sanctuary by a psycho who said he wanted to find out what it felt like to kill someone. The victim, who normally carried a licensed gun, had told friends that he was uncomfortable camping without a firearm with him but was scrupulous about obeying the law. This left him helpless to defend himself.

Our friends, the Gun Rights Examiners, are all over this.  Liston Matthews explains in his segment HERE how, contrary to the false wailings of those who would ban private ownership of firearms, self-protection is covered by religious mandate.  It is so in virtually every belief system. I recently met Liston for the first time, and found him as sharp in person as he is in print.

Meanwhile, old friend Dave Workman notes how the anti-gunners and their sympathizers in the mass media are putting a grotesquely false spin on this simple return to a basic American freedom, not to mention the cornerstone Human Right of self-defense. You can read his incisive take on the matter HERE.

I expect to see a reduction in violent crimes against the person committed in public parks next year, as a direct result of this wise change in the law.

Heck, I can almost hear the banjo music fading now…

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If you’ve read my column in Backwoods Home Magazine for any length of time, you’ve noticed how frequently I’ve made the point that it’s close to hopeless for a smaller person to try to shoot well with a gun too big or too long in the stock for them, and easier for a larger person to adapt to a gun that’s too small.  Well, this past weekend, I was reminded that there actually is such a thing as a gun too small for the largest shooters.

I was at a Glock match in Orlando (www.gssfonline.com) with the usual suspects and three shooters new to this particular discipline. One of the latter was Vince Edwards, an accomplished shooter in IDPA (www.idpa.com) and a very competent firearms instructor. Now, back when Vince was a cop he carried his department’s issue Glock 22 and shot it well, but as soon as he left the agency and was able to pick his own gun he chose a full size 1911 .45 automatic. You see, Vince stands six-feet-five, tips the scales past the 300 mark, and wears Size 15 shoes with proportional size hands. I’ve seen sausages in Polish butcher shops smaller than this guy’s fingers.

Well, he’d been away from Glocks for a while, so he came out to our range to get the feel of things with some of ours, which he used in the subsequent match at the excellent Central Florida Rifle & Pistol Club. In just a few practice rounds for the Major Sub event, where you use a subcompact .45, his hands proved so big that the slide of my Glock 30SF drew blood from the web of his hand during firing. Not something you see with those guns every day.

Well, at the match, we all shot that same gun in Major Sub division. Worked for me. Worked for six-foot Jon Strayer, who kicked butt with it. Worked for five-foot-nuthin’ Gail Pepin, current Florida State IDPA Woman Champion, who was the high female in Major Sub at the Glock shoot.  But when Vince shot it, there was jam after jam. It wasn’t the ammunition: he shot the same factory round-nose, full power .45 hardball the rest of us were using.

Photos showed later that Vince, who shoots with the popular straight thumbs grasp (see below), had his humongous thumbs in proximity to the slide. All that we can figure was that the combination of the web of his hand making contact with the underside of the moving slide, and pressure of his thumbs against the side of the slide, was enough to retard the mechanism and prevent complete extraction. So, yes, there is such a thing as a pistol too small for the shooter’s hands.

When my oldest was six, I bought her a Chipmunk .22 rifle, scaled down for kids. I couldn’t sight it in for her, because my fat adult male head couldn’t get down far enough on the child-size stock to bring my eye in line with the rear sight. (Talked the tyke through her own sight-in of her own rifle, though, and that worked out well as an educational experience.)

Bottom line: clothes that don’t fit you, won’t work for you, and neither will firearms that don’t fit  you.

Arrow points to spent casing, yet muzzle of little .45 caliber Glock 30SF is still on target in the hands of 6’5″ firearms instructor Vince Edwards. Notice thumb placement vis-a-vis slide.

Here, in the midst of the shooting action, Vince works to clear a jam (arrow 1). Note how the flesh of his large hand is in contact with bottom edge of slide (arrow 2) and where cuts from slide have necessitated Band-Aids at web of hand (arrow 3). Glock considers the G30SF a “subcompact” gun. Vince does not have a subcompact hand.

Gun performed flawlessly with same type of ammo for all others using it, including five-foot Gail Pepin. Note muzzle back on target, and ejected casing from last .45 round (arrow). Hands are not blocking the working parts in any way.

Another example. Child-size .22 Crickett rifle at Pro-Arms Gun Shop in Live Oak, FL is dwarfed in the hands of Roger Clark, who stands six-one-and a half and weighs well over 200 pounds…

…and the gun is so small for him, Roger has a hard time even getting his eye down to where he can align the sights. However, it’s easier for a man Roger’s size to shoot the tiny rifle, than for a little girl to shoot a rifle sized for him.

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Whaddaya know…some correspondence in the Comments section in regard to the recent blog entries on the Appleseed Project led to an invitation to talk about it on Appleseed Radio.  At this time, it’s tentatively scheduled for this coming Tuesday evening, February 16, at 7:00 PM Central Time. I understand that instructions on where to find it are at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/AppleseedRadio. Thanks to Mike Adam and Sam Damewood for making it happen. Don’t be surprised if you hear me ask Mike more questions than he asks me; I’m still learning about this way cool outfit. And if you’re free the evening of Sunday the 14^th, nothing quite expresses Valentine’s Day sentiment like the true story of a citizen who drew his own gun and shot an armed robber who threatened him and the woman he loved. Mark Walters will host that brave individual to tell his story on Armed American Radio or at WGKA starting at 8 PM Eastern time. I might be on as one of the commentators there, if I can get home to a hard line phone to join in after attending a Glock match with my sweetie. (Nothing quite says “Valentine’s Day Romance” like disciplined gunfire, either.)

On each show, you might hear me sipping a Starbucks Frappucino in the background. It seems that in California, where some gun owners’ civil rights activists are demonstrating for freedom to get concealed carry permits by open-carrying unloaded handguns in public, a chain of upscale coffee shops called Peet’s banned the practice. The open carry advocates moved to a local Starbucks, which welcomed them and their guns, stating that their policy is that Starbucks coffee shops will cleave to the letter of the law. All RIGHT!

The Brady Bunch have a website where outraged anti-gunners can register mass protest against Starbucks’ policy, and implore them to ban guns in their shops. Might be a good idea for folks from our side to let Starbucks know that we appreciate their respect of American law and individual freedoms. The link for that is HERE.

Now, I’m not normally an habitué of Starbucks. I have an unhealthy fear of being called a Yuppie. (The last time someone called me a Yuppie, I was so shocked I spilled my Perrier on my Reeboks.) But ya just gotta support a company that supports gun owners’ rights, even though Paul Helmke and some of the rest of the gun-banning crowd seem to be wetting their panties over Starbucks’ policy.

So, what the heck, see if a nice latte from Starbucks goes down well with a discussion of why individual citizens’ access to firearms is a civil rights issue and a personal safety issue.

Besides, if you listen to me talk on either night, you’ll probably need some caffeine to stay awake, anyway.

Here, Mas open carries in a Starbucks in Arizona. Note that no one seems to care. Pistol is a SIG P226 9mm in an LFI Concealment Rig by Ted Blocker.

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Before you take a rifle course you need a, uh, RIFLE. You probably already own a suitable gun. If you don’t, let the hosts know beforehand, and they can most likely round up a loaner for you. Even if you’ve never fired a gun before, that’s something the experienced and dedicated Appleseed crew can deal with. They’ve certainly done so before.

At the single event I attended, I saw everything from a WWII Russian Mosin-Nagant (which kicked hell out of the brave young man who shot it, yet he persevered and shot remarkably well!) to an M-1 Garand and more than one M1A/M-14, and an SKS and an AK47 semi-auto clone, and a few AR15s. That said, though, the OVERWHELMING majority of shooters chose the humble .22 Long Rifle cartridge, usually in a semiautomatic rifle.

Half or more of the course is fired from prone position, and that gets in the way of the firing hand working a lever action, and tends to cause short-stroke malfunctions with the forward hand when operating a slide-action. Appleseed legend has it that their best score ever was fired by a septuagenarian master of the smallbore rifle, using a bolt action target gun…but few of us are old masters, and when you have a relatively short time to drop to prone or sitting, load, fire two shots, reload, and fire eight more, the bolt gun is slo-o-ow. It’s not so much the time it takes for the four motions to eject the last spent casing and rechamber the next shot…it’s more that the gun moves off target during that violent motion, and the hand has to re-take its firing hold and position on the trigger – and take up trigger slack – ten times instead of just once, while the clock is running.

That’s why the great majority who are Appleseed veterans recommend a semiautomatic. I saw the super-popular Marlin Model 60 there, but this rifle is generally encountered with a tubular magazine…not fast at all to reload.  The dominant gun, by far, was the Ruger Model 10/22 semiautomatic, so named because it holds ten rounds of .22 Long Rifle in its relatively easy to swap out box magazine. (Yes, longer magazines are available from aftermarket sources, but many of them don’t work reliably.)

The flip-up iron sight on the rear of a standard 10/22’s barrel is designed for plinking, and not conducive to either maximum accuracy or easy adjustment for zero. Experienced Appleseeders recommend the Tech-Sight, an aperture type iron sight reminiscent of those on the WWII Garand and the Cold War M14, with very reliable and repeatable click adjustments. Fit THIS on a Ruger 10/22, attach a GI surplus web loop sling, and you have the LTR (Liberty Training Rifle), the quasi-official .22 of Appleseed.

We nearsighted geezers do better with magnification. The pretty girl shooting next to me did great with a red dot optic, but her younger eyes were sharper than mine, and for me, the big red dot obscures the center of a precision target. I’ll take a powerful telescopic sight…I set mine at 8-power magnification…but that’s just me. I tried the course of fire again with a 2.5X Weaver scope on another .22, and it delivered ample precision and “feedback.”

Most first-timers at Appleseed won’t win the Rifleman’s Patch. That’s OK. It’s not about that! It’s about the history at the core of our nation’s history. It’s about both personal and collective discipline, and the heritage of marksmanship in what USED to be – and hopefully will be again – known worldwide as A Nation of Riflemen. Bring what you have…come ready to learn…and open yourself to the Appleseed message of pride in your country, a nation built upon baseline American values of individual accomplishment and self-reliance.

Blackhawk cushioned shooting mat, which folds into a rifle case, worked GREAT for Mas, and at least one other shooter there. This one has been augmented with car blanket for even more comfort. Rifle is Ruger 10/22 with Evolution adjustable-length stock and ATN red dot optic. Orange “chamber flag” to show that gun is completely unloaded is standard Appleseed safety protocol, and is issued when you get there.

Ordinary Ruger 10/22, with Tasco telescopic sight and milsurp web loop sling, is “good to go” for Appleseed.

This determined young shooter ran the course with hard-kicking bolt action Russian Mosin-Nagant, WWII vintage. OUCH…but he did well!

The Rifleman’s Patch is a benchmark of Appleseed shooting…but the experience is much more about history, discipline, responsibility, and skill acquisition than it is about winning an award.

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