M1 rifle was friend to many a soldier

In a recent conversation with my brother, who served in the U.S. Army, I'd asked him if he'd been issued the rifle that was the standard fighting-weapon of WWII, the model M1 Garand .30-06. He replied, "Are you kidding? I slept with mine."

In a frozen muddy ditch in Korea, or maybe in the "meat grinder" corridor on Iwo Jima, a young soldier clutched the one thing that would keep him alive, and, in the end, bring him safely home from the horror of war. He cradled his M1. "It's not a gun, it's a rifle," he'd say, and he could tear it down and then reassemble it in less than a minute in the dark. The American fighting man of WWII with his Garand M1 was the finest fighting machine that history had ever seen. With this rifle, our hometown boys overcame the seasoned, professional juggernaut army of the Nazis and defeated the fanatical and suicidal forces of the brutal Japanese.

On Jan. 3, I was both appalled and sickened to see the photo of the "grand old Garand," as it lay ignominiously among all the drug-seized weapons being destroyed by the U.S. marshals. It deserved a better fate. How in the world did it not survive this tragic end? Surely they had some appreciation for its historical worth.

Somewhere tonight, there's an old Korean War veteran in a nursing home bed, or a young Marine, sleeping in an unmarked sandy grave in the far Pacific. Maybe the M1 at the recycling yard had at one time been their best friend. Maybe they wish now that they were sleeping with it.

Jim Nichols
Billings

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