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Wednesday, February 8, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
The Ghosb Dance
ab Big Sandy
Last week I was given
the opportunity to step into
the future. Those opportuni-
ties don’t come around very
often, and so with a maga-
zine assignment in my hip
pocket, I jumped at the invi-
tation to attend — and bring
a friend — to the Bushmaster
Users Conference at the Big
Sandy Range in Arizona.
The Bushmaster Users
Conference — in only its sec-
ond year — is an opportunity
for several defense industry
giants to display their lat-
est and greatest weapons
upgrades, munitions, target-
ing systems, and combat
vehicles for interested clients.
Those clients, who arrived by
the bus-full on demonstration
day, hailed from 21 coun-
tries around the world. They
came in from Saudi Arabia,
Norway, Lithuania, Poland,
Taiwan, and elsewhere —
military officers and pro-
curement bureaucrats eager
to see the next generation of
warfighting technologies in
action.
At the invitation of an old
Marine Corps colleague, who
now works for Bushmaster
— a subsidiary of a gigantic
company known as Orbital
ATK — and who was serving
as the Range Safety Officer,
Jim Cornelius and I arrived
early in the week, pitched a
tent under the rich spread of
the Milky Way in the ocotillo
and scrub, and settled in for
several days of extraordinary
access to — and hands-on use
of — a host of weapons and
equipment.
To a large degree, the
success of any journey can
be judged by the journey
itself. We bombed out of
the Siberian excesses of a
Sisters winter, down through
Nevada, turning hard south
through the ranching com-
munity of Fallon — which is
also home to the U.S. Navy’s
Top Gun School — until we
reached the shores of Walker
Lake, near Hawthorne.
I wanted to stop at Walker
Lake for just a minute,
because the historical irony
was not lost on us. Walker
Lake, you see, is the place
where the Ghost Dance reli-
gion was born. A vision of
the Ghost Dance came to the
Paiute spiritual man Wovoka
in a dream, on the shores of
Walker Lake, in 1889. The
Ghost Dance spread rap-
idly, and as practiced by the
Lakota, also underwrote to
no small degree the massa-
cre at Wounded Knee, where
nervous Army soldiers with
Hotchkiss guns murdered
some 150 (probably more)
natives, including men,
women, and children.
And so it is that today, on
the southern tip of Walker
Lake, consuming the town
and everything around it,
exists what the modern U.S.
Army hails as the “Largest
Ammunition Depot in the
World.”
And that is undoubtedly
true. Stretching into the hori-
zon are thousands of storage
magazines and igloos. Mile
after mile, the magazines
spread out into the horizon of
sagebrush and snowcapped
ranges, and give some small
PHOTO BY CRAIG RULLMAN
The venerable M2 .50 caliber machine gun overlooking the Big Sandy Range in Arizona.
notion of the incredible
strength of the U.S. military.
So we stopped, gave a nod
to Wovoka and the fevered
dream he believed would help
bring a better life to peoples
utterly crushed by a culture
with superior technology and,
one can suppose, an on-going
and insatiable appetite for
resources.
At Big Sandy I was able
to sit inside the next genera-
tion of the General Dynamics
Light Armored Vehicle, the
new Oshkosh Joint Light
Tactical Vehicle — no pic-
tures please — and to receive
personal briefings from the
designers of the vehicles,
the weapons systems, and
the weapons themselves.
And the takeaway is simple:
modern warfare is about to
become more lethal, and to
be fought from farther dis-
tances, than ever before. With
air-burst munitions, soon-to-
be-unveiled proximity muni-
tions, and weapons whose
ranges measure stand-off in
terms of miles, warfare has
never been more precise, or
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destructive.
If it isn’t point-and-click
lethality, it is very close.
There was another irony
in that. Jim and I had a lot
of time to discuss what we
were seeing, and where we
were seeing it. It wasn’t so
long ago, just over a hundred
years or so, that the ridges of
the Big Sandy were solidly
Apache country, and stand-off
was measured in the length of
an arrow shot. Times have
changed, indeed.
It would be easy to con-
fuse this experience with a
glorification of war and vio-
lence. That would also be a
mistake. Shooting machine
guns and cannons is, without
a doubt, a great deal of fun. I
have never seen a reasonable
human get behind a crew-
served weapon, fire it, and
walk away without a smile.
But no one at Big Sandy was
glorifying their potential for
destruction. Certainly not the
Polish and Lithuanian offi-
cers with whom I spoke, who
are justifiably nervous about
Russian intentions in their
backyards, and who have
seen the horrors of aggres-
sive warfare repeatedly vis-
ited upon them, have watched
their cities reduced to rubble
and their people enslaved by
extremist ideologies.
That hard forge has made
them realists. They know
what they are up against,
know that they are out-
gunned, and they are seek-
ing to defend themselves in
a meaningful way from very
real threats, with the most
lethal and accurate weapons
systems available.
War, in all of its horrors,
is an escapable fact of human
existence. It has been with
us, in one form or another,
from our beginning. It does
not appear likely that we will
achieve life on this planet
without it. It may not even be
desirable if, like the Lakota
at Wounded Knee, the aban-
donment of armed conflict
means that we surrender to
those who refuse to abandon
it, and whose designs for us
are rooted in extermination
and slavery.
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