On Saturday, January 8th, a small handful of Militiapersons deployed to The Badlands to see how it was doing for the new year, and get an overview of any work that would be needed to be done in the upcoming year.

Most of us were still letting out a long sigh of relief on account of there being no major Y2K disruptions.

It was surprisingly warm for early January, and there was no snow on the ground.

Being the intrepid militia people that we are, at least one of us, anyway, tried some shooting with my gas mask on.

In the cold weather, your gas mask tends to fog up. You can apply commercially available products, such as "No Fog" or other similar treatments, if these are available. Since we had none on hand, I used the field-expedient technique of limiting fog build-up on my lenses: I spit on them, on the inside, and smeared it around. This provides somewhat of a streaky view, and would probably be hell at night, but I was able to see more clearly than the total fog of a cloudy lens. Regular parrafin wax smeared on a lens may also have the same effect. (E-mail me if you have ever tried this....)

Another issue was the difficulty in getting my eye close enough to use the sights. I couldn't. The Israeli mask just doesn't allow for a good cheek-to-stock weld. A mask with the filter mounted on the non-firing side will be much better here.

So I merely sighted along the top rail of the rifle, and sent a few downrange.

The results? Not a pretty picture....

Hopefully the bad guys will be wearing their masks at the same time......

We also started the process of taking at least a couple of pictures at each training. Hopefully, we can print them in the newsletter (coming soon) or post them on the web page. At the very least, we can put them on some kind of picture board at rallies and meetings and stuff like that. Maybe this will inspire people to come out and train. Hmmm....Maybe we could even video tape some of the training, at least some of the non-embarrassing stuff...

See you next time...

-Lee