Hemingway's guns

[Stepmac]

King: I just googled you and find that you did extensive work on women in the military. I was "in" from 64 to 94.

I was a drill sergeant at Fort Jackson in 1981/2 when the Army decided to train women right alongside the men. It was a disaster! I complained to the colonel and he gave me some PC BS and I'm still riled about it.

Just a few comments: Training women in the infantry alongside men short changed the men and brutalized the women. Training women in infantry like settings was out of place for the girls and you never saw such a room full of long faces when you were instructing about the care and usage of hand granades, for instance. Men on the other hand loved being soldiers (most of them) and got right to it. Women and men are genuinely different and the military should cotton to that fact!

During the VN War I was an attack pilot in the Marine Corps. We were hard chargers. There were no women around, except in those places where one would expect to find them. Women in the fighting units cannot enhance the fighting spirit of men in combat.

I have to admit that I've been "out" for a long time and when I left active service in the Marines in 1980, women were just beginning to make inroads into the squadron, but not as pilots. When I later joined the Army Reserve there were quite a few women being trained in infantry type environs. In addition, all of the women, dolls or no, became pregnant in pretty short order. One just cannot put young men alongside young women and not expect nature to make its way. This caused all kinds of problems. Problems that we did not want to have to deal with, but we had no choice.

I believe, however; that there is a place for women in the military, but in more feminine roles. I am not being "sexist", but realistic.

One last thing. When I was a company commander in a training battalion in the army infantry we had a female regular officer who was part of our battalion. This young women was as pretty as women get. She was about 22 and had her uniforms taylored. This beauty could really fill her BDU's! Blond, blue eyed and one hell of a jock! She was a 90 lb bundle of energy. She was also the fastest soldier on the obstacle course in the entire battalion.

We had a young 2Lt fellow who was as good looking young man as the lady was female. He was the second faster GI on the OC. He was rendered unusable because he was so enamored by the lady, who was trying to be a "Soldier" and was trained to ingore all feelings of the flesh. It was sad to watch. I felt sorry for the young man. If I had been 22 and not 42 I would have been in the same place that he was.

Oh, I also had a female trainee die in my arms...almost, but I carried her to the ambulance. She died soon after. Women could not take the heat while humping heavy packs! We lost quite a few women as heat casualities. So what did the army do? Why they lightened the loads of course! So the men too carried less which reduced the effectiveness of their training.

When men are in combat their relationships with women should be in the abstract. When the bullets are flying having women around is a distraction that they do not need.

[King Brown]

Speaking only from experience as a reporter covering mean places with mortar and directed fire all around, female colleagues did perfectly well and if truth be known may have been a calming influence to get our heads in gear. In Afghanistan, our women soldiers participated in the heat of battles, and Capt. Nicole Goddard, almost a neighbour, was decapitated while directing artillery fire against Taliban. I'd demean her by describing her looks. Just say you could take her anywhere. She would have been be an adornment in salons of the world.

With profound respect for your country and military, the US has been a slow learner in what works and doesn't, who can serve and can't serve their country. It has been isolating itself from the realities of war to the extent of now endangering its own survival. It is learning that technological superiority doesn’t necessarily convert into military success. It is coming to terms that the cost of wars of choice aren’t worth it. As Gates said on his departure, anyone contemplating another of these things "needs their head examined."

Canada, which paid dearly for choosing Afghanistan's most dangerous sector in Kandahar and which your country has now taken over, regards its women as equals in all branches of the services. The results speak for themselves. US elite forces welcomed us as partners in combined operations in Afghanistan, particularly sniping assignments. I also found that any notions of chivalry disappear under fire. Thank god yours and ours are coming home.

[Stepmac]

Originally Posted by King Brown

Speaking only from experience as a reporter covering mean places with mortar and directed fire all around, female colleagues did perfectly well and if truth be known may have been a calming influence to get our heads in gear. In Afghanistan, our women soldiers participated in the heat of battles, and Capt. Nicole Goddard, almost a neighbour, was decapitated while directing artillery fire against Taliban. I'd demean her by describing her looks. Just say you could take her anywhere. She would have been be an adornment in salons of the world.

With profound respect for your country and military, the US has been a slow learner in what works and doesn't, who can serve and can't serve their country. It has been isolating itself from the realities of war to the extent of now endangering its own survival. It is learning that technological superiority doesn’t necessarily convert into military success. It is coming to terms that the cost of wars of choice aren’t worth it. As Gates said on his departure, anyone contemplating another of these things "needs their head examined."

Canada, which paid dearly for choosing Afghanistan's most dangerous sector in Kandahar and which your country has now taken over, regards its women as equals in all branches of the services. The results speak for themselves. US elite forces welcomed us as partners in combined operations in Afghanistan, particularly sniping assignments. I also found that any notions of chivalry disappear under fire. Thank god yours and ours are coming home.

Thank you for your informative post. My experience in war and training for war ended when the desert wars opened up and I just barely was able to observe women in combat roles. I never saw any in actual combat (other than nurses. I was flying A-4's at the time.) Obviously your experience is more current and to the issue than was mine. During the VN War the only females that I recall where in S-1 or the nurse's corps. There were none in cockpits. That took another decade.

The felicity of war is beyond me. While compelling, the magnitude of the question is boggling.

Sad to hear about Capt. Goddard.

[Bill Murphy]

King, you might comment on Mr. McCarty's comment "I googled you and find that you did extensive work with women in military." I have a feeling he is trusting google a bit too much. I am a bit uncomfortable with this exchange on the PGCA site since we are dealing with a discussion about anti semitism and the situation in Europe and "dropping out of the Communist Party because of anti semitism". Some of us see even more important reasons for dropping out of the CP, like their record of slaughtering their own citizens and a few other minor transgressions like improper transfer of property. Let's explain our conversation here or delete it, which I will do when the time is right. I have nothing against ABT or GS, but we don't need to glorify them or their politics on a Parker gun website. If either one of you fellows wants to debate the politics of Toklas, Stein, Dos Passos, or, for that matter, Werner Von Braun, we'll meet somewhere, buy a good supply of whiskey, or whisky, and sit down for a long weekend. Not here.

[Don Kaas]

The Kingsley Browne (with an "e") who writes about women in the military is from Detroit and professor at Wayne State. Mr Brown, the waterfowling Canadian double gun enthusiast and son of an apparent ex-Communist, is from Nova Scotia. This should not be hard to differentiate...in every one of his posts "our King" flys the Maple Leaf quite proudly. I am afraid I can not compete with tea with Alice and Gertrude. My late wife's maternal uncle, Cyril was a blacklisted Hollywood director whose "name was named"...he later went on to direct "Zulu". That's the best I can do in the lefty department althought for all the years I knew him in London, Uncle Cy wasn't too "lefty". He was Jewish however so Papa Brown might have supported him on two "fronts"...Bill- do these Jewish and Communist associations bar me from the PGCA? Please let me know...

[George Lander]

Getting back to the subject of Hemingway and his guns,I have also been reading the book and as the book makes clear, Papa was a hunter and a shooter and not a collector. His guns, for the most part, were well used and well cared for. I did not find a reference to his owning a Parker although one picture in the book with him in the company of Gary Cooper it shows Cooper carrying a Parker (which could have been Papa's)

A great movie to watch is "Islands in the Stream" in which George C. Scott plays the role of Papa, although with a different name. David Hemmings plays the rummey friend who won a BAR in a poker game and uses it to kill a shark that was after one of Papa's sons.

Best Regards, George

[Grantham Forester]

Originally Posted by George Lander

Getting back to the subject of Hemingway and his guns,I have also been reading the book and as the book makes clear, Papa was a hunter and a shooter and not a collector. His guns, for the most part, were well used and well cared for. I did not find a reference to his owning a Parker although one picture in the book with him in the company of Gary Cooper it shows Cooper carrying a Parker (which could have been Papa's)

A great movie to watch is "Islands in the Stream" in which George C. Scott plays the role of Papa, although with a different name. David Hemmings plays the rummey friend who won a BAR in a poker game and uses it to kill a shark that was after one of Papa's sons.

Best Regards, George

--The same eulogy that Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1939 for his Idaho friend, who died in a duck hunting accident near Silver Creek, could as well have been his own in 1961. I was still in HS when he took his own life, we had read both "Big Two-Hearted River" and "The Snows of Kilamanjaro" as part of English Lit. back then. He had a flair for picking great titles. I was editor of our HS paper my Senior year, and always respected his solid background as a reporter and a correspondent.

I have an older Model 12, as apparently he did, and this excerpt from the book "The Idaho Hemingway" by Tillie Arnold speaks to his views on guns as working tools for a hunter: "Ernest and Lloyd were opening up the gun cases, removing guns, and I saw Lloyd (Tillie Arnold's husband) pick up a Winchester Model 12 pump shotgun. As he did so, he told Ernest that he also owned one. But I could see that Lloyd was shocked when he opening and closed the breech.--' It rattled, it's action was loose, oil sprayed out of the action and the stock had a major split, so loose it almost fell off. ' Ernest noticed Lloyd's attention to the loose stock and said ' I'll bet your Model 12 isn't as beat up as mine. ' 'Ernest, this stock is a bit loose. ' Ernest replied ' Yeah, we gotta get her tightened up, Chief-- I can't operate without this old stopper."

This was in September 1939, a month or so before the tragic death of Gene Van Guilder. Going back to the Model 12 from an earlier 1933 occurance, the fire at the Pfeiffer (Hemingway's second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, heiress to the Richard Hudnut cosmetics wealth) farm in Piggott, AK-- and from his later published book about Africa- "True at First Light"-- pg. 240: "I had the old, well-loved, once burnt up, three times restocked, worn smooth old Winchester model 12 pump gun that was faster than a snake, and was from 35 years of us being together (1928-1953), almost as close a friend and companion with secrets shared and triumphs and disasters not revealed as the other friends a man has all his life"--

I find this quote reveals both Hemingway's credo that "Guns are to shoot, and to shoot with well" and also the same affection that a man would have with his hunting dogs.

[Stepmac]

Originally Posted by Grantham Forester

--The same eulogy that Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1939 for his Idaho friend, who died in a duck hunting accident near Silver Creek, could as well have been his own in 1961. I was still in HS when he took his own life, we had read both "Big Two-Hearted River" and "The Snows of Kilamanjaro" as part of English Lit. back then. He had a flair for picking great titles. I was editor of our HS paper my Senior year, and always respected his solid background as a reporter and a correspondent.

I have an older Model 12, as apparently he did, and this excerpt from the book "The Idaho Hemingway" by Tillie Arnold speaks to his views on guns as working tools for a hunter: "Ernest and Lloyd were opening up the gun cases, removing guns, and I saw Lloyd (Tillie Arnold's husband) pick up a Winchester Model 12 pump shotgun. As he did so, he told Ernest that he also owned one. But I could see that Lloyd was shocked when he opening and closed the breech.--' It rattled, it's action was loose, oil sprayed out of the action and the stock had a major split, so loose it almost fell off. ' Ernest noticed Lloyd's attention to the loose stock and said ' I'll bet your Model 12 isn't as beat up as mine. ' 'Ernest, this stock is a bit loose. ' Ernest replied ' Yeah, we gotta get her tightened up, Chief-- I can't operate without this old stopper."

This was in September 1939, a month or so before the tragic death of Gene Van Guilder. Going back to the Model 12 from an earlier 1933 occurance, the fire at the Pfeiffer (Hemingway's second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, heiress to the Richard Hudnut cosmetics wealth) farm in Piggott, AK-- and from his later published book about Africa- "True at First Light"-- pg. 240: "I had the old, well-loved, once burnt up, three times restocked, worn smooth old Winchester model 12 pump gun that was faster than a snake, and was from 35 years of us being together (1928-1953), almost as close a friend and companion with secrets shared and triumphs and disasters not revealed as the other friends a man has all his life"--

I find this quote reveals both Hemingway's credo that "Guns are to shoot, and to shoot with well" and also the same affection that a man would have with his hunting dogs.

Beautiful post.

[King Brown]

I've no desire to stir things about CP or anti-Semitism. Steve wondered about those Paris days. It was a strange time when so many eyes were wide-closed to the dark sides of fascism and communism, both here and in the US. As for the Jews, my grandmother was a British Israelite who thought the British were one of the lost tribes of Israel. And I'm the great grandson of a full-blood Mi'kmaq whom the British tried to exterminate in the wars against France. An ancestor participated in the burning of the White House in retaliation for US destroying Toronto. The Americans of shared blood, kin and values made me a Canadian with Jefferson's invasion of Canada in 1812 which Canada is celebrating at great expense this year. For all that, the USA is my most admired other country as I've hitherto revealed. As for women in combat, let's not forget the gutsy guerilla of For Whom The Bell Tolls.

[Bill Murphy]

Don and King, I was just trying to redirect Steve to the "correct Mr. B" as Don has done. Google is a dangerous weapon in some cases, but this was obviously an honest mistake on Steve's part.