And then I realized that I had a veteran upstairs in my safe! Upstairs, enjoying semi-retirement is my United States Rifle, Calibre .30, Model of 1903. The preeminent assault rifle adopted by our military at the turn of the century . The design was a thinly disguised rip-off of the German Mauser patents! And even the "great" president Theodore Roosevelt had a hand in designing the rifle.
The cartridge it shoots, was a total rip off of the Mauser cartridges as well, with one difference. By the time the bureaucracy got around to adopting the cartridge in 1903, it had become obsolete by the extant standards of the day. So the Government changed the Cartridge in 1906, and called it .30 Calibre, Model 1906...get it? 30-06.
Which brings me back to mine. In 2006 through the Civilian Marksmanship Program, which our gun club is affiliated with, I was able to get my own 1903 Springfield in 30-06 that December to help me celebrate the 100 years this country has fought with, hunted with, and plinked at targets with one of the most useful (albeit overpowered for most applications) cartridges ever developed.
So it came in the mail right to my door. I opened the box and saw what war and long term storage can do to a rifle. The cosmoline it was packed in hid the ugly truth. I had inherited a Marine and a Pacific veteran.
Picking up at the 3,000,000 serial number, Remington started making these rifles for a country freshly at war and in desperate need for battle rifles as the also famous M-1 Garand was in short supply. So, in 1942, my rifle was made in Ilion, NY. Almost unchanged from the very first the Springfield Armory had made to supply the troops for the FIRST World War, my 1903 must have surely gone to the Pacific Theater.
The U.S. Marines have a long tradition of getting hand me downs from the other armed services. From what I've heard, not much has changed. But to look at the furniture on my rifle, the stock it came with, is to wish that, indeed, it could talk. The toe was repaired with a piece of softwood, and the rest looked as if if someone had used it as a boat paddle and/or put a fire out with it.
I can imagine it sloughing through the mud in the jungles of the Pacific. I can imagine it being fired until it was hot enough to crack the wooden hand guards and stock. I can smell the history embedded in the wood when I press it to my cheek at the firing range. I can feel exactly how a Marine felt when he shoved a clip of rounds into the magazine, and I can feel what he must've felt when he squeezed the trigger.
I hear the same report. I feel the same recoil, and the same heft. And I smell the same burnt powder that any soldier, be him from 1917 in France or from Viet Nam in the early days of sniper work there, must have smelled. That's the allure. That's the gain you get from having a veteran in your hands and not just looking at a black and white picture in a book.
And figuring this rifle of mine has seen hell, been there and back, it seems only fitting that it should never be misused again. It should never be rained upon, or dragged through the mud, or used as a pike or a club, or used to take a human life. But any life?
It's truer purpose is to send a projectile screaming super-sonic down range towards a target intended to be killed, destroyed even. Is to not use it as such a denial of its raison d'etre? Would it be like the sixty year old retirees one sees tooling around town in their corvettes....ten miles and hour under the speed limit? Is to do so a betrayal?
I am going to carry this 1903 Springfield into the woods. I am going to throw it over my shoulder like the men who carried it before me. And though I really can't imagine what it'd be like to "draw a bead" on another man, human, I'll approach that feeling with the same awe I feel when I put the front sight over the beating heart of a deer.
Maybe, one more time, the veteran will do what it was meant to do, but in some small way make it possible for something good to come from a weapon of war and death. Another just cause for the rifle to speak for: the maintaining of a healthy population of game, where unbridled success has become a burden for them and us, though the deer cannot know this.
I hope the ghosts this rifle carries with it don't mind if it kills again. I hope when I get my cheap thrill that it doesn't sicken these ghostly Marines with the thought of something dying by the tools of their trade. And I hope I do the rifle justice and I hope it, and I, have a good veteran's day together.
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