FN FAL

 

Back to guns.  I got a book on these for Christmas [The FN FAL Battle Rifle, by Ron Cashner], and briefly entertained the idea of purchasing one, but then realized that their scarcity and cost ($1500-2000) put them out of my budget for the immediate future.  I have yet to fire one in person.  Most are semiautomatic, but I saw a select-fire (full auto capable) model for sale at the recent Dulles Gun Show for $12,000.  As Class III weapons go, that’s a bargain.  DS Arms is still making new ones, based off the Austrian variant, the STG58, generally considered the best version of the FAL. 

Oddly, I have fired the gun, but in a slightly different form.  When we were living in Paris, the nearest US PX was in Belgium, right over the border from France, a three hour drive.  The closest bases in Germany, Kaiserslautern & Ramstein, were 5 hours away.  Initially we would make day trips, until my parents discovered a hotel in Mons, Belgium, the Raymond, which catered to US personnel, mainly people transferring to Brussels and waiting for their sea shipments to come or go.  It had AFN TV and a unique mozzarella pizza I’d never tasted anywhere else.

We’d go out looking around local Mons, and found a toy store which sold plastic guns which fired little plastic bullets.  The muzzle velocity was well short of allowing these bullets to pierce skin, so they were OK.  One was a Thompson SMG – semi auto, of course – and the other was an FAL.  I have no idea where they went, but we enjoyed them for awhile.  I still have my replica MP40, which actually looks exactly like a real one, but you can see the gun is nowhere close to being capable of converted to actually fire bullets, much less full auto.  Anyhow.

While the US upgraded to a semiautomatic rifle, the M1 Garand, slightly before WWII, the UK went through WWII with the Mark 4 Lee Enfield, a bolt-action rifle, as its main weapon.  By the time WWII ended, it was obvious that an upgrade to a better weapon was a good idea.  After some flirting with the idea of a smaller round (in .276 caliber) was done, eventually the US bludgeoned everyone into accepting .308/7.62x51 as the “main round” for NATO.  Fabrique National, the famous Belgian gun company, had been working on a weapon which morphed into the FAL, chambered in 7.62x51.  Oddly, despite insisting that its allies adopt 7.62x51, the US then went ahead and adopted its own intermediate round, the 5.56mm cartridge.  D’oh!

While the US adopted the M14 (in 7.62x51), then the M16 (in 5.56mm), the UK and its Buddies – Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, etc. – adopted the FAL.  In its main form, the gun has a 21” barrel and is fairly long.  Later, shorter versions came out, including a folding stock “paratrooper” model.  There is an inch pattern which only the British use, and a metric pattern which everyone else uses.  The inch version is semi-auto only, whereas the metric version is select fire (capable of both semi-auto and full-auto fire).  The Israelis and Australians made small changes to their models.  The Indians actually combined elements of the inch and metric pattern versions to make their own. 

Brazil has also been a big fan of the FAL and used it for a long time.  West Germany wanted to use it for the Bundeswehr (West German Army) and asked to produce it in Germany under license.  But the Belgians, who didn’t forget German misconduct during WWII – which included looting and destroying the FN factory at Herstal (northeast of Liege, east of Brussels) on their way out as the Allies pushed them back into Germany – gave them a hard NO.  So the Germans developed the H&K G3. 

Major Conflicts with the FAL. Despite the absence of a World War III, the world has not been completely at peace since August 1945.  Various low-level wars and guerilla conflicts have absorbed the resources of numerous countries which adopted the FAL as their main weapon, pretty much everyone except the Soviet Bloc (who use the AK47 and its variants) and the US, which loves its M16. 

Jadotville, Zaire.  A recent film which features the weapon prominently, even in the promotional photos.  A battle broke out on southeast Zaire in 1961, and a unit of Irish soldiers – with no combat experience – was sent down there, ending up in a siege.  In addition to the FAL, they also used Lee Enfield rifles, Bren guns, and a Vickers heavy machine gun.  Remarkably, none of the soldiers were killed. 

Malayan Emergency, Oman, Aden, Northern Ireland.  During these brief conflicts involving British forces, the weapon of choice was the FAL.   Of these Malaya was a jungle scene, Oman and Aden were desert, and Northern Ireland was urban – Belfast, mainly.  “The Troubles” had the distinction wherein the IRA would lurk among the heavily populated civilian areas, effectively using the locals as shields.  All well and fine when guerillas wear civilian clothes in the jungle or rural areas, but in the middle of the city the challenge is for troops not to shoot civilians who can’t help being caught in the crossfire.    

Suez Canal (1956), Six Day War (1967), and Yom Kippur War (1973).  Leaving aside the original war of liberation in 1948, in which the Israelis were mainly armed with surplus guns from Nazi Germany – now there’s an irony – these three major Middle Eastern conflicts between Israel and its Muslim neighbors saw the IDF using the FAL.  Although there was some discussion of the gun’s reliability in desert conditions, overall the Israelis were pleased with it.

Vietnam War.  Although Harold Wilson’s Labour Government in the UK was against the war in Vietnam – as was John Lennon – the Australians sent troops to fight.  They were issued FALs, which performed well in the jungles of Vietnam.  Generally the troops found the weapon worked best on semiautomatic fire. 

Falkland Islands War (1982).  What’s amusing about this brief war is that not only were the Brits using the FAL, but so were the Argentinians.  Both sides enjoyed the weapon.  The Argentinians were also well equipped with Dassault Mirages and anti-ship missiles.  Merci, mes amis Français.  

It’s on my list of guns to get, but not sure when I’ll have an opportunity to acquire one: ideally a 21” full size model from DS Arms. 

The American School of Paris

 

Whoa!  A subject I can discuss which I didn’t cover already:  my high school.

Basics.  Established in 1946, after the Germans finally left.  The current campus dates from around the 1960s, supposedly at the former SHAPE facilities, vacant once DeGaulle took France out of NATO – and SHAPE moved up to Belgium.  The school actually has a Lower School (elementary school), a Middle School (junior high), and Upper School (high school).  I went to Marymount, a Catholic school in Neuilly, for fifth through eighth grade, but since Marymount stopped at eighth grade, I had to go somewhere else for high school.

Alternatives.  Georgetown Prep was the outlier, effectively a boarding school had I gone.  My father indicated Good Counsel in Wheaton, MD, would have been where I went had we stayed in Maryland instead of moving to Paris as we did.  Had I gone to Georgetown Prep, I would have been a freshman when Neil Gorsuch was a sophomore and Brett Cavanaugh was a senior.  Maybe going to ASP negatively impacted my legal career, as I’m not a judge, much less a Supreme Court justice.

#2 was the Lycee International in St Germain-en-Laye.  With all classes in French except for English and history, that was a non-starter.  I could barely handle French as it was.  So nope.

ASP was the closest thing to an American high school in Paris, even though it’s actually a private school.  So that was an easy choice for me.

IB.  Instead of Advanced Placement (AP), I took the International Baccalaureate program, despite having no intention of attending college anywhere other than the US.  As it was, I went to the University of Maryland, College Park, my home state university at its flagship campus in College Park. 

IB means three Sub-level courses – for me, those were French, Math, and Psychology (there is no High Psychology) – and three High level courses – and for me, English, Biology and History.  The exams are rated from 1-7, 4 being passing and 7 being an A+.  I got 4 in French, 4 in Math (though got a 6 on the mock exam), and 6 in Psychology.  On the High classes I got 5 on English and Biology and a SEVEN on History.  This is why I went to law school and not medical school.  If I recall correctly, my IB thesis was on Western European volunteers in the German armed forces in WWII.

Sports.  I wasn’t particularly athletically inclined.  The only sport I played was rugby, which for our school in Europe was the equivalent of football.  As mid-height and stocky, I played forward:  at some point I played most positions except hooker or eight man, but as a practical matter I was usually flanker or second row.  I went on one trip to Brussels – Chris Bren bought me my first beer (probably a Stella Artois).  But I wasn’t among the varsity elite and not invited to their parties.  I’m not even listed as a member of the team in the yearbook, although I show up in the pictures.  And I did get a letter (P) on my letter jacket... which I still have.  (It barely fits.)

I tried rugby at UMCP, but the school was so huge, with a top level football team which effectively excluded most of the male student body, that the rugby team was overstocked relative to other schools.  That being the case, the Terp team could be extremely selective.  After banging up my finger, I gave up.  I suppose that finger injury was lucky, as I didn’t screw up my anterior cruciate ligament. 

Other Extracurricular Activities.  Mainly AD&D & RuneQuest with my brother and our gamer buddies Myles & Eoin, Jean, Sean, Sean & Phil. 

Roscoe’s.  I only started going to Roscoe’s, the bar in downtown Paris where the ASP alumni hang out, when I was back in Paris on semester break during college in Maryland.   The drinking age in Paris is 14, compared to 21 in the US, so most high school students and all college students are old enough to drink.  I’d stick with Heineken, whereas the draft beer was Stella Artois.  I could usually count on meeting ASP comrades at Roscoe’s.  After we moved back to the US in 1990, I didn’t have an opportunity to visit Paris again until October 2017, but that short stay was too short to swing by Roscoe’s – the Marine House on Boetie and the Champs Elysees were as close as I got.  If it’s still an ASP-friendly bar, I’d be happy to know.

Favorite Teachers.  Mr. Kite, for freshman English, Mr. Ferguson for psychology, Mr. Mimmack for history, and Fraulein Delacroix for German, were my favorites.  I was not a trouble maker, didn’t smoke, drink, or sample the local hashish, and generally got along well with most teachers and students. 

Late Bus & SNCF.  When I first started at ASP, we were living at the Embassy Compound at Neuilly.  For those of you less familiar with Paris, that’s a suburb right next to Paris (“banlieu”), to the northwest.  That compound is two four-story buildings, a few blocks away from the Bois de Boulogne.  There’s a Boulogne Compound as well, three three-story buildings – down to the southwest of Paris.  I recall the first time we drove past it – I had no clue it existed.  But the buildings are the same architecture and style as the Neuilly Compound, just three stories instead of four.  Wait, is that ours?  It can’t be, those buildings only have three floors, and there were three, not two, of them. MIND.  BLOWN.  Our Embassy Fourth of July parties & fireworks (courtesy of the Marines) were there.  That and Halloween (trick or treating, a tradition unknown amongst the French at that time, i.e. 1979-82) were our occasions to visit the Boulogne Compound.  I later learned my ASP buddy Phil, with whom I’m still friends today, lived there at some time, so we may have been in the same place at the same time and not even known it.  Just like we were in the same Webelos den in Paris without even realizing it.  Weren’t we amazing?  I know, right?

Anyhow.  With lots of Compound Kids going to ASP, the school bus wasn’t a problem.  There were the usual buses after classes ended, and then a later bus, aka The Late Bus, which took us home if we had extracurricular activities like rugby. 

In May or so of 1984, we moved from the Neuilly Compound to an apartment in Paris itself, the upper Eighth Arrondisement, on Boulevard Malesherbes.  The bus route for school was such that we – my brother and I - were the only ones at that stop.  So the bus driver wasn’t too diligent about picking us up. 

We soon learned that the local train station, Gare St. Lazare, was about the same distance from our apartment, in the opposite direction, as the bus stop.  Not only that, the train ran directly to St. Cloud & Garches, the commuter train stops nearest ASP itself.  A direct route!  More mind blowing.  And if we got a Carte Orange – “orange card” – this gave us unlimited access to the trains AND the Paris Metro, a flat rate for all public transportation for a full month. Awesome. 

There were three daily trains:  8:00 (only as far as St. Cloud, needed a bus to get to school), 8:15, and 8:30.  The 8:15 train got us to Garches at 8:40, plenty of time to walk to school and get there before first period at 8:50 a.m.  The 8:30 train would get you to class late.  If you missed the 8:15 train, you could get the 8:30 train.  If you missed the 8:30 train, the next train wasn’t until 9:15 or so.   Good luck with that: you’d miss the first two periods, assuming you actually cared. 

All well and fine for that.  But here’s the kicker.  That aforementioned “late bus”, which came all the way to the Compound, did NOT come all the way to Blvd. Malesherbes.  Nope, it went as close as the E-TOILE and then went off somewhere else.  So I’d have to take the Metro from the E-TOILE to Villiers, our closest stop.  Since FNAC-Wagram was right there, I simply stopped there, with my Walkman, and walked all the way home from Wagram, past Parc Monceau (where the Communards were executed in May 1871).  Don’t you love history?

This meant, instead of worrying about catching a late bus which still meant a Metro trip, just taking whichever train came by after school - which would take us to Gare St. Lazare - was the better deal.  Well, I’d hit FNAC or Virgin on some other day.  Switching to the train was the best deal overall.  Thank you, SNCF!

Bottom line….

Spending 4 years at Georgetown Prep and being on the Supreme Court?  Or 4 more years in Paris and just being another attorney in Virginia?  I think I’ll take 4 more years of Paris.

Who Wants To Live Forever?

 

First off, two nuggets of weirdness I’d like to share with my beloved readers, whoever you might be.

I went to buy beer at the Safeway, a regional supermarket.  Beer is an “age-restricted item”, which requires a Safeway Authority Figure to verify my State-Issued Vehicle Operation ID to make sure a child is not purchasing low-potency alcoholic beverages.  In her casual haste to fulfil her duties, the SAF entered my year of birth as 1169, prompting the Cashier Computer to go into “WTF” mode, meaning I would have to bring my purchase from the self-checkout register to the Actual Flesh & Blood Store Cashier register.  Once the Cashier verified I was 52 years old, instead of 852 years old, my beer purchase was finally consummated.  And there was much rejoicing.

Then, the weather report.  As my hearing is well below milspec (which is why I’m an attorney and not an Army-trained killing machine) I have the TV thing set with captions.  And in the wintery time, in a place such as Northern former Confederate State Virginia which sometimes sees that snow stuff, obviously that possibility was germane to weather reporting.  However, the captioning indicated that because the temperature would be rising above freezing, the snow would transition to “eyes”.  Raining eyes?  Really?  Now that’s a form of precipitation I’ve never seen.   Imagine that.  We’re all Mortys living in Rick’s world. 

I’ve been plowing through Westworld, Season 3.  Whereas season 1 & 2 took place in the “park” area, somewhere in Utah, season 3 takes us out to the real world, as the Hosts (Androids) manage to determine how to survive on their own.  Aaron Paul, aka Jesse Pinkman from “Breaking Bad”, is here as veteran with PTSD who ends up working with Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood).  Of course, the #1 issue is always, who is a guest (human) and who is a host (android)?

Biological Functions.  This came up during “Blade Runner”, the early 80s sci-fi film based on PKD’s book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, with Harrison Ford as Deckard, an assassin who takes out rogue replicants (androids), the main one being Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer).  Replicants are hardwired with a two year lifespan, which Batty is trying to fix, only to find that it can’t be fixed.  Then the faux-clever question is, “is Deckard himself a replicant”?  First off, if he was doing it for more than 2 years, then no.  But here’s another big issue.

Humans have these things called biological functions.  We eat, drink, poop, pee, sleep, get sick, age, and die.  Androids need at least some power source, but beyond that there’s no reason to program them with all those biological functions.  Why do so??? That would be like retro-engineering a modern car with the same features as a Model T.  Best to keep androids the way they are and not worry about making them replicate humans.

The really stupid thing is that aside from plot reasons, there’s no reason to show people in movies or TVs shows peeing or pooing, or getting sick.  So those occur off-camera, presumably, for any character who is human.  If you’re uncertain if you’re a human or a robot, the simple deal is:  do you get hungry and have to eat?  If you eat, do you poo?  Do you get older and sick?  The narrative of “Westworld” occurs over 20-30 years, and we see at least one human character age so much he’s played by two completely different actors at those different times.  But all the hosts – the most notable being Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Meave (Thandie Newton) look exactly the same.  Well, of course:  an advantage of androids is that they don’t age and are theoretically immortal.

The catch is, how does a HUMAN get to enjoy that immortality?  How do you transfer your consciousness from your meatbag, aging, peeing and pooing shell, into that sleek, non-aging host body?  So far as I can tell, none of the guests from Westworld made that transition.  They can make host copies of guests, but while the copies might have memories of the guest, there is no continuity of consciousness; the host is just a copy, the original person eventually dies.  The best they can do is reduce all the hosts’ personalities and memories to a small globe which can be removed and inserted into any other host body.  They can also make copies of these globes and inhabit multiple host bodies simultaneously.  Think of how the narrative might change with that possibility.  Anyhow, none of us are androids and unlikely to be one anytime soon, or ever.

Robocop.  One scenario where it did happen, albeit under somewhat suboptimal circumstances.  In the first movie, Detroit, facing an unruly police union, decides to avoid the issue by making robot cops: a robo-cop made from somewhat deceased cop, Murphy (Peter Weller).  Robocop starts off as a robot, but Murphy’s prior memories leach back in.  In Robocop 2, they pull the brain, eyes and spinal cord of the subject (truly evil bad guy) into a second generation robot.  They had to use the bad guy, Cain; the good guys they tried it with first immediately killed themselves.  Is this a truly practical solution?  Probably not.

In any case, the insanely rich and well funded Delos Corp never seemed to manage to figure out how to transplant an original guest consciousness into a host body:  the best they could do was somehow copy the humans into a very convincing android who supposedly had the original’s personality and memories.  But if the original human simply died at some point, what’s the point of all these android copies?  It doesn’t do the original human any good, and doesn’t solve the ultimate problem.

The other issue is that our brains have limited memory capacity.  Once we reach that limit, new memories are only acquired at the expense of old ones.  So if you could live to be 1000, but your brain can only reliably store 100 years worth of memories, which of those do you retain? That would be 10%.  Then if you live to be 2,000, we’re talking 5%, and so on.  This sounds like a problem which will never be fixed no matter how brilliant the scientists are.  Let’s talk to Dr. Strange…