Ordnance Quotes

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE

Maxim 3: An ordnance technician at a dead run outranks everybody. -The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries

Nagumo was suddenly on his own. At this crucial time, the cost of his failure to learn the complicated factors that played into carrier operations suddenly exploded. Now, when every minute counted, it was too late to learn the complexities involved in loading different munitions on different types of planes on the hangar deck, too late to learn how the planes were organized and spotted on the flight decks, too late to learn the flight capabilities of his different types of planes, and far too late to know how to integrate all those factors into a fast-moving and efficient operation with the planes and ordnance available at that moment. Commander Genda, his brilliant operations officer, couldn’t make the decisions for him now. It was all up to Nagumo. At 0730 on June 4, 1942, years of shipbuilding, training, and strategic planning had all come to this moment. Teams of highly trained pilots, flight deck personnel, mechanics, and hundreds of other sailors were ready and awaiting his command. The entire course of the battle, of the Combined Fleet, and even perhaps of Japan were going to bear the results of his decisions, then and there.

He picked up the wrench and broke the guy’s wrist with it, one, and then the other wrist, two, and turned back and did the same to the guy who had held the hammer, three, four. The two men were somebody’s weapons, consciously deployed, and no soldier left an enemy’s abandoned ordnance on the field in working order. The doctor’s wife was watching from the cabin door, all kinds of terror in her face. "What?" Reacher asked her.

NOTICE Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR Per G.G.,Chief of Ordnance

Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain - which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad - Marmite, village fetes, country lanes, people saying 'mustn't grumble' and 'I'm terribly sorry but', people apologizing to me when I conk them with a nameless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, stinging nettles, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, crumpets, hot-water bottles as a necessity, drizzly Sundays - every bit of it. What a wondrous place this was - crazy as fuck, of course, but adorable to the tiniest degree. What other country, after all, could possibly have come up with place names like Tooting Bec and Farleigh Wallop, or a game like cricket that goes on for three days and never seems to start? Who else would think it not the least odd to make their judges wear little mops on their heads, compel the Speaker of the House of Commons to sit on something called the Woolsack, or take pride in a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy? ('Please Hardy, full on the lips, with just a bit of tongue.') What other nation in the world could possibly have given us William Shakespeare, pork pies, Christopher Wren, Windsor Great Park, the Open University, Gardners' Question Time and the chocolate digestive biscuit? None, of course. How easily we lose sight of all this. What an enigma Britain will seem to historians when they look back on the second half of the twentieth century. Here is a country that fought and won a noble war, dismantled a mighty empire in a generally benign and enlightened way, created a far-seeing welfare state - in short, did nearly everything right - and then spent the rest of the century looking on itself as a chronic failure. The fact is that this is still the best place in the world for most things - to post a letter, go for a walk, watch television, buy a book, venture out for a drink, go to a museum, use the bank, get lost, seek help, or stand on a hillside and take in a view. All of this came to me in the space of a lingering moment. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I like it here. I like it more than I can tell you.

You cannot predict how another person is going to behave in a relationship. You can risk-assess, you can be cautious, you can make sensible decisions about who you choose to trust and invite into your life and heart. But you can’t manage the untruly variables of another living, breathing human. To choose to love is to take a risk. Always. That’s why it’s called falling – no one meanders-with-a-compass-and-Ordnance-Survey-map into love.

It was worth repeating, because it constituted the First Law of Sentient Ordnance: Thou shalt not blow up the wrong planet. On that point the programmers had been insistent to the point of fussiness. Accordingly,

I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey Maps; but I found that Bistritz, the post town named by Count Dracula, is a fairly well-known place. I shall enter here some of my notes, as they may refresh my memory when I talk over my travels with Mina.

She didn't need ordnance; she needed someone who could work around the problem. And that left her the single undead general in the Kel Arsenal, the madman who slept in the black cradle until the Nirai technicians could discover what had triggered his madness and how to cure him. Shuos Jedao, the Immolation Fox: genius, arch-traitor, and mass murderer.

Shut up, Ed—the world below us has turned into a map. A real map! The woods look like the “Woodland: Deciduous” markings of Ordnance Survey. It is just as they drew it! Who knew! Who knew you could put the whole world on paper, after all! The artists were right! This is so reassuring!

Still, I also had grasped enough of the West’s views of such fatalism—that it made of us primitives, naïfs, and fools—to keep such beliefs to myself. In the West, it was believed that attitude and ambition saved you. In Africa, we had learned no one was immune to capricious tragedy. What I didn’t know then was that ignoring my own southern African knowledge was its own kind of mischief: it rendered me speechless when I should have spoken, helpless when I was profoundly capable, and broken when in fact the very places inside me that had been damaged and snapped were their own kind of strength. I saw the landscape around us as tattooed with death, fraught with the possibility of unrecovered land mines and undetonated ordnance.

I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey Maps; but I found that Bistritz, the post town named by Count Dracula, is a fairly well-known place. I shall enter here some of my notes, as they may refresh my memory when I talk over my travels with Mina. In

bomb v. 1. effective deliver of ordnance (DOD) Phrases such as "effective delivery of ordnance" are not likely to invoke mental pictures of thousands of tons of bombs falling on buildings and people.

In his fitful eastward progress through Belgium and Germany that winter, my grandfather had shared all manner of billets: with dogfaces and officers, in misery and in comfort, in attack and in retreat, and pinned down by snow or German ordnance. He had bedded down under a bearskin in a schloss and in foxholes flecked pink with the tissue of previous occupants. If an hour's sleep were to be had, he seized it, in the bedrooms or basements of elegant townhouses, in ravaged hotels, on clean straw and straw that crawled with vermin, on featherbeds and canvas webbing slung across the bed of a half-truck, on mud, sandbags, and raw pine planks. However wretched, accommodations were always better or no worse than those on the enemy side.

To an Israeli Jew, a photograph of a child torn apart in the attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem is first of all a photograph of a Jewish child killed by a Palestinian suicide-bomber. To a Palestinian, a photograph of a child torn apart by a tank round in Gaza is first of all a photograph of a Palestinian child killed by Israeli ordnance. To the militant, identity is everything. And all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions. During the fighting between Serbs and Croats at the beginning of the recent Balkan wars, the same photographs of children killed in the shelling of a village were passed around at both Serb and Croat propaganda briefings. Alter the caption, and the children’s deaths could be used and reused.

Of all the men who were photographed that day, the chief’s life had come closest to the American ideal, closest in observing the principles on which this nation had been founded. He was immeasurably greater than Chester Arthur, the hack politician from New York, incomparably finer than Robert Lincoln, a niggardly man of no stature who inherited from his father only his name, and a better warrior, considering his troops and ordnance, than Phil Sheridan. His only close competitor was Senator Vest, who shared with him a love of land and a joy in seeing it used constructively.

Having had some time at my disposal when in London, I had visited the British Museum, and made search among the books and maps in the library regarding Transylvania; it had struck me that some foreknowledge of the country could hardly fail to have some importance in dealing with a nobleman of that country. I find that the district he named is in the extreme east of the country, just on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia and Bukovina, in the midst of the Carpathian mountains; one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe. I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey maps; but I found that Bistritz, the post town named by Count Dracula, is a fairly well-known place. I shall enter here some of my notes, as they may refresh my memory when I talk over my travels with Mina.

Knox, who possessed a booming voice that could be heard throughout the camp, had never fired a cannon in his life when he became head of artillery in 1775. He was a local bookseller in Boston who was fascinated by weapons. He had read just about every book published on ordnance and convinced Washington to put him in charge of his artillery,

Boxing Day. Country pubs. Saying 'you're the dog's bollocks' as an expression of endearment or admiration. Jam roly-poly with custard Ordnance Survey maps I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue Cream teas The shipping forecast The 20p piece June evenings, about 8pm Smelling the sea before you see it Villages with ridiculous names like Shellow Bowells and Nether Wallop

For the ammunition and equipment required for the infantry and artillery, a good laboratory and workshop had been established at Richmond. The arsenals were making preparations for furnishing ammunition and knapsacks; but generally, what little was done in this regard was for local purposes. Such was the general condition of ordnance and ordnance stores in May, 1861.

Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the history of the world. From 1964 to 1973, the United States dropped more than two million tons of ordnance on Laos to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail and try to stanch a Communist insurgency—more than was dropped on all of Germany and Japan during World War II. There were 580,000 bombing missions, which averages out to one every eight minutes for nine years. Sometimes, U.S. planes returning to Thailand from missions over Vietnam indiscriminately dropped their remaining bombs on Laos. More than 270 million cluster munitions—“bombies”—were used, and 80 million of them failed to detonate. In the four decades since the end of the war, only 1 percent have been cleared. More than fifty thousand people have been killed or injured in UXO accidents; over the last decade, nearly half of those casualties have been children.

Bukovina, in the midst of the Carpathian mountains; one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe. I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey maps; but I found that Bistritz, the post town named by Count Dracula, is a fairly well-known place. I shall enter here some of my notes, as they may refresh my memory when I talk over my travels with Mina. In the population of Transylvania

The goal of Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee was to investigate all things related to German science. Target types ran the gamut: radar, missiles, aircraft, medicine, bombs and fuses, chemical and biological weapons labs. And while CIOS remained an official joint venture, there were other groups in the mix, with competing interests at hand. Running parallel to CIOS operations were dozens of secret intelligence-gathering operations, mostly American. The Pentagon’s Special Mission V-2 was but one example. By late March 1945, Colonel Trichel, chief of U.S. Army Ordnance, Rocket Branch, had dispatched his team to Europe. Likewise, U.S. Naval Technical Intelligence had officers in Paris preparing for its own highly classified hunt for any intelligence regarding the Henschel Hs 293, a guided missile developed by the Nazis and designed to sink or damage enemy ships. The U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) were still heavily engaged in strategic bombing campaigns, but a small group from Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio, was laying plans to locate and capture Luftwaffe equipment and engineers. Spearheading Top Secret missions for British intelligence was a group of commandos called 30 Assault Unit, led by Ian Fleming, the personal assistant to the director of British naval intelligence and future author of the James Bond novels. Sometimes, the members of these parallel missions worked in consort with CIOS officers in the field.

Later on this fat bird colonel comes up and asks what the hell happened out there. What'd they hear? Why all the ordnance? The man's ragged out, he gets down tight on their case. I mean, they spent six trillion dollars on firepower, and this fatass colonel wants answers, he wants to know what the fuckin' story is. 'But the guys don't say zip. They just look at him for a while, sort of funny like, sort of amazed, and the whole war is right there in that stare. It says everything you can't ever say. It says, man, you got wax in your ears. It says, poor bastard, you'll never know - wrong frequency - you don't even want to hear this. Then they salute the fucker and walk away, because certain stories you don't ever tell.

About a month later, we left for our final training exercise, maneuvers on the planet Charon. Though nearing perihelion, it was still more than twice as far from the sun as Pluto. The troopship was a converted “cattlewagon” made to carry two hundred colonists and assorted bushes and beasts. Don’t think it was roomy, though, just because there were half that many of us. Most of the excess space was taken up with extra reaction mass and ordnance. The whole trip took three weeks, accelerating at two gees halfway, decelerating the other half. Our top speed, as we roared by the orbit of Pluto, was around one-twentieth of the speed of light—not quite enough for relativity to rear its complicated head. Three weeks of carrying around twice as much weight as normal…it’s no picnic. We did some cautious exercises three times a day and remained horizontal as much as possible. Still, we got several broken bones and serious dislocations. The men had to wear special supporters to keep from littering the floor with loose organs. It was almost impossible to sleep; nightmares of choking and being crushed, rolling over periodically to prevent blood pooling and bedsores. One girl got so fatigued that she almost slept through the experience of having a rib push out into the open air. I’d been in space several times before, so when we finally stopped decelerating and went into free fall, it was nothing but relief. But some people had never been out, except for our training on the moon, and succumbed to the sudden vertigo and disorientation. The rest of us cleaned up after them, floating through the quarters with

During the war in the Persian Gulf, massive bombing attacks became "efforts." Thousands of "weapons systems" or "force packages" "visited a site." These "weapons systems" "hit" "hard" and "soft targets." During their "visits," these "weapons systems" "degraded," "neutralized," "attrited," "suppressed," "eliminated," "cleansed," "sanitized," "impacted," "decapitated" or "took out" targets. A "healthy day of bombing" was achieved when more enemy "assets" were destroyed than expected. If the "weapons systems" didn't achieve "effective results" during their first "visit," a "damage assessment study" determined whether the "weapons systems" would "revisit the site." Women, children or other civilians killed or wounded during these "visits," and any schools, hospitals, museums, houses or other "non-military" targets that were blown up, were "collateral damage," which is the undesired damage or casualties produced by the effects from "incontinent ordnance" or "accidental delivery of ordnance equipment.

love to see the Irish Ordnance Survey offer something similar.

As weaponry advances, the techniques used against obsolete ordnance may be neglected or lost.

fighter that had just been recovered and dropped off at the boneyard. They were a dime a dozen, but sometimes they had unexploded ordnance that could be a real problem with the other boneyard ships orbiting Ceres.  One little bang and I could spend weeks (and a year’s fuel allotment) chasing down the strays that had been knocked

To some people mishaps never come singly. Shells vanished from the desk of Commander Richardson, but in their place arrived two Free Balloon Barrage detonators. Richardson soon forgot his unnerving experience, and a month later he was again speaking on the phone — this time to Captain Long at the Ordnance Board when he prodded one of the detonators with his pen-nib. There was a deafening explosion, and as Richardson staggered into the outer room clutching a wounded hand the phlegmatic Swan picked up the receiver. “Would you mind calling back a little later, sir?” he said. “Commander Richardson has just shot himself, but I don’t think it’s anything more serious than usual.

The car rolled slowly along the deserted corniche, headlights cleaving its way through Beirut by night. In gentle swerves to avoid potholes, the Mercedes waltzed along a straight road in a dance of death. Sick palm trees and parched grass divided the tarred road of civilization. The sea alone was testimony to God’s beautiful creation. But in its belly, corpses, limbs, garbage, and ordnance mingled with a sea life on the verge of extinction.

I was afraid, every morning, that I would awake from my sleep to hear that Lee had gone, and that nothing was left but a picket line. He had his railroad by the way of Danville south, and I was afraid that he was running off his men and all stores and ordnance except such as it would be necessary to carry with him for his immediate defence. I knew he could move much more lightly and more rapidly than I, and that, if he got the start, he would leave me behind so that we would have the same army to fight again farther south and the war might be prolonged another year.

even today, 85 years after the battle, an average year of scavenging on the Somme battlefield provides the disposal squads of the French Army with 90 tons of dangerous ordnance.

At Vicksburg 31,600 prisoners were surrendered, together with 172 cannon about 60,000 muskets and a large amount of ammunition. The small-arms of the enemy were far superior to the bulk of ours. Up to this time our troops at the West had been limited to the old United States flintlock muskets changed into percussion, or the Belgian musket imported early in the war—almost as dangerous to the person firing it as to the one aimed at—and a few new and improved arms. These were of many different calibers, a fact that caused much trouble in distributing ammunition during an engagement. The enemy had generally new arms which had run the blockade and were of uniform caliber. After the surrender I authorized all colonels whose regiments were armed with inferior muskets, to place them in the stack of captured arms and replace them with the latter. A large number of arms turned in to the Ordnance Department as captured, were thus arms that had really been used by the Union army in the capture of Vicksburg.

they have about forty Dassault Rafale E’s, the top-of-the-line export variant of the standard French tactical fighter. This is a very bad-ass aircraft indeed, boys and girls. Good range, good sensors, good ECM, day and night, all-weather capable, and it can deliver large amounts of all kinds of very nasty ordnance with unnerving accuracy.” “Vive la France,” somebody down the table muttered.

In December, 1861, arms purchased abroad began to come in, and a good many Enfield rifles were in the hands of the troops at the battle of Shiloh. The winter of 1862 was the period when our ordnance deficiencies were most keenly felt. Powder was called for on every hand; and the equipments most needed were those we were least able to supply.

Evolution is the sadistic headmaster of the Succeed-or-Die School of Invention, motto: Disce aut consumere!—“learn or get eaten!” It is sad and sometimes ugly when a species fails in this school, especially ugly if the change they are confronted with is caused by human thoughtlessness. Sometimes the two happen in tandem and ugliness can create unexpected beauty. New railway lines are notorious for the havoc and destruction they can bring to a landscape, impacting both natural and artificial environments. However, the need to keep general human traffic away from the iron dragons that pass along these new lines has created a new habitat and led to a renaissance in rare wildflowers in some areas. But perhaps the most surreal and ironic example of this is the fact that many naturalists now support the military’s habit of firing big explosive shells at landscapes. Exploding ordnance falling from the sky has the dependable effect of keeping humans away and, consequently, firing ranges have accidentally created some of the most healthy ecosystems in Britain. Naturalists and the military are now working more closely, and this unlikely partnership is becoming less accidental and more deliberate.

By 1777, confident of a British military victory, Colonial Undersecretary William Knox circulated to members of the ministry a comprehensive policy entitled "What Is Fit to Be Done with America?" Besides a state church, unlimited tax power, a standing army, and a governing aristocracy, the plan anticipated: "The Militia Laws should be repealed and none suffered to be re-enacted, & the Arms of all the People should be taken away, . . . nor should any Foundery or manufactuary of Arms, Gunpowder, or Warlike Stores, be ever suffered in America, nor should any Gunpowder, Lead, Arms or Ordnance be imported into it without Licence . . .

Basically, identifying the location of a target means that you can deliver ordnance on it. Either by yourself, with a rifle, grenade, or heavier weapons like a mortar or Javelin missile, a fireteam can do a lot of damage. For targets beyond the effective range of weapons available to a platoon, you can use the most deadly device ever developed: a radio. One of my instructors told me that four soldiers with rifles are a fireteam, but one soldier with a radio is an army. With a radio, you can call in battalion artillery, or close air support, and rain hellfire down on a target.

Weps,” Ramsey called out to his weapons officer, making brief eye contact with the man. “We believe this is the last Imperium ship in Terran or Alarian space, so do be generous. We can always bill the Alarians for our expended ordnance later.

Mombasa, too, furnished with such Palaces and sumptuous houses, Will be laid waste with iron and fire In payment for its former treachery. Along the Indian coast, swarming With enemy ships plotting Portugal's Downfall, Lourenço with sail and with oar Will give his uttermost, and then give more. Though the powerful Samorin's giant ships Choke the entire sea, his cannon-shot Thundering from hot brass Will pulverize rudder, mast, and sail; Then, daring to grapple the enemy Flagship, watch him leap On deck, armed only with lance and sword, To drive four hundred Muslims overboard. But God's inscrutable wisdom (He knows Best what is best for his servants) Will place him where neither strength nor wisdom Can avail in preserving his life. In Chaul, the very seas will churn With blood, fire, and iron resistance, As the combined fleets of Egypt and Cambay Confront him with his destiny that day. The united power of many enemies (Might was defeated only by might), Faltering winds and a swelling sea Will all be ranged against him. Here, let ancient heroes rise To learn from this scion of courage This second Scaeva who, however maimed, Knows no surrender and will not be tamed. With one thighbone completely shattered By a wayward cannon-ball, still He battles on with his forearms alone And a heart not to be daunted, Until another ball snaps the ties Binding flesh and spirit together: The leaping soul slips its body's prison To claim the greater prize of the arisen. Go in peace, O soul! After war's Turbulence, you have earned supreme peace! As for that scattered, broken body, He who fathered it plans vengeance. Already, I hear their hot perdition Looming in a thunderous barrage On Mameluke and cruel Cambayan From catapult, from ordnance and cannon. Here comes the father, magnified By his anger and grief, his heart On fire, his eyes swimming, his soul Transfixed by paternal love. He has taken an oath his noble rage Will make blood run knee-high In the enemy ships; the Nile will mourn, The Indus witness, the Ganges be forlorn.

As had been the case with Gray, most snipers aimed for the brain as the gold standard of all possible killing shots. Sure, you pack the right ordnance and a torso hit would also likely be fatal, but the head shot was like a faithful dog in a professional killer’s world because it just never let you down.

Barrayaran warships tended to be not so much mothballed as hoarded. The eldest members of the General Staff were notorious for an attitude toward ordnance that resembled that of a famine survivor stashing foodstuffs, and perhaps for analogous reasons. Ships that most Nexus militaries would have sent directly to the scrapyards were instead tucked away to age a few more decades like dodgy food in the back of a refrigerator, out of sight, before the Staff—or more likely, its successors—was finally persuaded to give them up.

Ordnance Survey maps in all their shapes and sizes are the most beautiful manifestation of twentieth-century British functional design. Ever since I can remember, I have spent stolen moments, wasted evenings and secret hours studying the mystery and beauty of the Ordnance Survey maps of these islands. The concrete trig points that had originally been used in their creation became almost as powerful in mystical properties for me as standing stones. ˜ Bill Drummond,

It was left to a British colonel, Henry Shrapnel, to invent what was to become for generations the most effective antipersonnel shell, and to the Royal Ordnance at Woolwich to start work on rockets.

The most important technology of the industrial age was the ability to produce parts that were perfectly identical and interchangeable. Blacksmiths and carpenters couldn’t do it; in fact, humans can’t do it routinely in any profession. Only machines can. It was the U.S. Army’s Ordnance Department that developed this ability to have machines make parts for other machines, spending nearly fifty years on this effort—an inconceivable period of research for a private corporation in the nineteenth century.

Halsey was neither a genius nor even a working scholar in any academic or technical field, but he had a quality of brilliance that may have been even more important in a combat capacity. He was, it was said, “brilliant in common sense.” He knew that battles and wars were won not principally with well-drafted paperwork or subtle diplomacy or high materials and engineering ratings aboard ship, but by something quite simple and direct: placing ordnance on target. He knew, working backward from there, that the quality of the mind and spirit of the men distributing that ordnance was at least as important as the mechanical state of the weapons themselves. And he knew that small and simple acts, trivial in themselves but intangibly powerful, raised and perfected that quality; sometimes those things were as prosaic as showing up and listening to people.

We walked down onto the beach, following a ragged trail of debris. Seagulls had been strangled by the sea into sodden, twisted things of bones and feathers. Huge grey tree stumps, smoothed to a metallic finish, had been washed up like abandoned war-time ordnance. All along the beach, in fact, the sea had left its offerings like a cat trying to curry favour with its owner.

Vaughn?” she inquired. “One of them. Neil. It’s a family business.” Winsome and Gerry showed their warrant cards and Neil Vaughn invited them inside. The side of an old cardboard box served as a doormat, and they wiped their feet as best they could without reducing it to shreds. Vaughn seemed to be the only person around. After he asked them to sit down, he returned to a desk littered with papers and swiveled his chair to face them. The inside of the trailer was bleak, as such places usually are, and on the pasteboard walls were hung with a girlie calendar curling at the edges, a large chart with written-in squares and an Ordnance Survey

In 1951, Grace Murray Hopper, a mathematician with the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance Naval Reserve, conceived of a program called a compiler, which translated a programmer’s instructions into the strings of ones and zeroes, or machine language, that ultimately controlled the computer. In principle, compilers seemed just the thing to free programmers from the tyranny of hardware and the mind-numbing binary code. Hopper

Even with the active efforts of my electronic gear to preserve my hearing, the explosion of the drop ship stabs my eardrums. I can feel the shock wave from the detonation radiating through me as it moves away from the source at the speed of sound, and it feels like someone has thrown me to the ground and then jumped on my chest. For a moment I think that the drop ship must have had some low-yield nuclear ordnance on one of its pylons, and I’m convinced that Sergeant Fallon has just blown up half the PRC, and us along with it. I’m vaguely aware that I’m prone on the ground all of a sudden, knocked off my feet by the impulse of the shock wave.

An SJH, in ballistics shorthand. It was a brutally efficient piece of ordnance. Not exactly a dum-dum, named after Dum-Dum, India, where a British army officer had invented a bullet that mushroomed out on impact and acted as a miniature wrecking ball inside the body. Innovation wasn’t always good for you. The .45 SJH had blown right through the front of Cassie Decker’s skull and ended up lodged deep in her brain. It had been dug out of her during the autopsy and the slug preserved as evidence in her murder investigation. It had retained enough of its shape

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR PER G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE

At the beginning of his reign, England had to import almost all of its guns from abroad; by the time of his death, England’s cannon industry was among the finest in the world. Under the supervision of the Ordnance Board, which carefully parceled out contracts to a small group of private firms, English foundries developed the first cannons made of cast iron.

The United States Congress ordered an end to the bombing of Cambodia in August 1973. By that time American aircraft had dropped about 2.75 million tons of ordnance, causing massive carnage that has never been fully documented or accounted for. Yet Congress’s ban was enacted not out of concern for the Cambodian victims. As Representative Tip O’Neill said during the floor debate, “Cambodia is not worth the life of one American flier.” The

There were four pieces of ordnance, supplies of powder, shot and lead, and, for individual use, "fixt peeces," snaphances, pistols, seventy swords, coats of mail, quilted coats, and thirty-five suits of armor.

Officers helped ordies (ordnance men) build up and haul and load Zuni rockets.

McNamara’s whiz kids were smart. But they had almost no experience in either war or weaponry, and were not necessarily an able substitute for those whose careers had been a study of ordnance and guns. One of the government’s ballistic experts was appalled at their role. “Their qualifications,” he said, “consisted of, and apparently were limited to, advanced academic degrees, supreme confidence in their own intellectual superiority, virtually absolute authority as designated representatives of OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense], and a degree of arrogance such as I have never seen before or since.”32

To choose to love is to take a risk. Always. That’s why it’s called falling—no one meanders-with-a-compass-and-Ordnance-Survey-map into love.

The killing and mangling in 2014 of some 13,000 people, most of them civilians, and the destruction of the homes and property of hundreds of thousands, was intentional, the fruit of an explicit strategy adopted by the Israeli military at least since 2006, when it used such tactics in Lebanon. The Dahiya doctrine, as it is called, is named for the southern suburb of Beirut—al-Dahiya—which was destroyed by Israel’s air force using 2,000-pound bombs and other ordnance

The watch is very old, purchased from a specialist dealer in a fortified arcade in Singapore. It is military ordnance. It speaks to the man of battles fought in another day. It reminds him that every battle will one day be as obscure, and that only the moment matters, matters absolutely. The enlightened warrior rides into battle as if to a loved one’s funeral, and how could it be otherwise?

(On October 31, 1952, U.S. Operation Ivy began with the detonation of Mike, the world’s first high-yield two-stage thermonuclear device, at the Enewetak Atoll [formerly spelled Eniwetok] in the Pacific. At 10.4 megatons, the experimental liquid deuterium device exceeded the explosive power of all ordnance detonated in World Wars

The governor answered that he could say nothing to it till he had conferred with other of the magistrates; so after supper he went with him to Boston in La Tour’s boat, having sent his own boat to Boston to carry home Mrs. Gibbons. Divers boats, having passed by him, had given notice hereof to Boston and Charlestown, his ship also arriving before Boston, the towns betook them to their arms, and three shallops with armed men came forth to meet the governor and to guard him home. But here the Lord gave us occasion to take notice of our weakness, etc., for if La Tour had been ill minded towards us, he had such an opportunity as we hope neither he nor any other shall ever have the like again; for coming by our castle and saluting it, there was none to answer him, for the last court had given order to have the castle-Island deserted, a great part of the work being fallen down, etc., so as he might have taken all the ordnance there.

By a combination of bad decisions, bad bombing, and bad ordnance, the 78 dive bombers in the second wave made no substantive contributions to the attack.

much relief came from the well-directed efforts of Governor Harris and the Legislature of Tennessee. A cap-factory, ordnance-shops, and workshops were established. The powder-mills at Nashville turned out about four-hundred pounds a day. Twelve or fourteen batteries were fitted out at Memphis. Laws were passed to impress and pay for the private arms scattered throughout the State, and the utmost efforts were made to collect and adapt them to military uses. The returns make it evident that, during most of the autumn of 1861, fully one half of General Johnston's troops were imperfectly armed, and whole brigades remained without weapons for months.

The President's objection to this was, that it was his bounden duty to preserve and protect the property of the United States. To this I replied, with all the earnestness the occasion demanded, that I would pledge my life that, if an inventory were taken of all the stores and munitions in the fort, and an ordnance-sergeant with a few men left in charge of them, they would not be disturbed. As a further guarantee, I offered to obtain from the Governor of South Carolina full assurance that, in case any marauders or lawless combination of persons should attempt to seize or disturb the property, he would send from the citadel of Charleston an adequate guard to protect it and to secure its keepers against molestation.

I imagined playing outside, maybe even on a real playground or an actual soccer field with grass, without armed soldiers interrupting my game. Instead, I played in streets and on hills and in front and back yards littered with the remnants of bullets and explosives fired at us by Israeli forces, much of this ordnance marked “Made in the United States.” It’s impossible to play without accidentally kicking or stepping on these artifacts.

We borrowed a heavy-duty pneumatic impact wrench from the shipyard and started work to remove the guns. As each gun carriage was unbolted, the Maryann, a crane barge, came alongside. We rigged wire straps to the carriages, and they were hoisted aboard the barge and delivered to the yard ordnance shop for reconditioning.

Ben rolled the two-thousand-pound shell out of the freezer, and we used a chainfall to lift it aboard the diving barge. It was a fifteen-inch shell that at one time had been used by old U.S. coastal guns, long since obsolete. The U.S. imprint was clearly visible stamped into the base of the shell. Stabilizing fins had been welded to its base in order to give it the characteristics of a spiraling bomb. The old shell had been sold to Japan years before as scrap iron, and it had been returned to the U.S.A. with a vengeance. Ordnance experts came out, retrieved the shell, and sent it back to the Bureau of Ordnance in Washington, D.C., for analysis.

She took a large-scale Ordnance Survey map from the shelf in her office and laid it across her desk. ‘This is where we need to park,’ she said, jabbing her fat finger onto the paper. ‘If he’s there, we don’t want to be so close to the house that he can hear the engine.

But careful investigation by ordnance experts revealed that antiaircraft shells caused every one of the 40 explosions in Honolulu, except for one blast near the Hawaiian Electrical Company’s powerhouse.

He chose not to work through the limited official channels that the Army and the OSRD had devised to constrict the flow of information. “I wanted to let Oppenheimer know what we were doing. Someone in the Bureau of Ships knew one of the people in the [Navy] Bureau of Ordnance who was going out to Los Alamos. I remember that I met the man at the old Warner Theater here in Washington, up in the balcony—real cloak and dagger stuff.

strike or assault another.”23 Even though these definitions of “arms” signify weapons carried by hand, Webster added that “fire arms, are such as may be charged with powder, as cannon, muskets, mortars, & c.”24 However, elsewhere Webster states: “The larger species of guns are called cannon; and the smaller species are called muskets, carbines, fowling pieces, & c. But one species of fire-arms, the pistol, is never called a gun.”25 The Framers certainly had in mind the kinds of arms that General Gage confiscated from Boston’s civilians and that militia acts required: muskets. shotguns, pistols, bayonets, and swords. When the Constitution was being debated, Webster asserted that the people were sufficiently armed to c.efeat any standing army that could be raised, implying that they had similar arms.26 However, the words “keep and bear arms” suggest that the right includes such hand-held arms as a person could “bear,” such as muskets, fowling pieces, pistols, and swords, and not cannon and heavy ordnance that a person could not carry or wear.