Marine Corps

Loadout Room Tips: Water Purification Tab Storage

One of the tips I picked up in the Marine Corps was how to carry 2 water purification tablets for an emergency. Typically we would just keep the small bottle or individual wrapped ones inside our first aid kits. During a training evolution at the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center, the instructors would occasionally share survival tips and tricks.

When I was in, we didn’t have access to any fancy water filtration systems like they do now. Our options were to boil the water or use purification tablets. Boiling usually wasn’t allowed for tactical reasons.

One of the instructors suggested we take two water purification tabs and duct tape them to the side of our USGI canteen. This way we always have a few tabs available as we are filling our canteens from a lake or stream. Plus if we had to dump our packs during an E&E (escape & evasion) scenario, we would always have a way to purify our water on the move.

In the above picture, I took two pre-packaged water purification tabs and duct taped them to the side of my canteen.

Hoback Knives OSF Hero Series

Jake Hoback, of Hoback Knives, makes some absolutely fantastic knives. These are high end, premium grade blades for EDC. These are the kind of knives you can take to hell and back. The OSF, or open source folder, is one of the most popular. The knife is a simple design, but a very effective one. The OSF Hero series is at its core an OSF knife, but they’ve been designed to honor the men and women in the military, as well as first responders. As one of two Marines who write for the Loadout Room, I was quite honored to receive the Marine variant of the OSF Hero series.

The Blade

The OSF Hero has a 3.5-inch blade made from CPM-S35VN stainless steel. S35VN is a material improvement on S30. It is a steel that can get extremely sharp and the OSF Hero comes very, very sharp from the factory. This steel is also extremely corrosion resistant and very strong. It’s a thick .1875 inches. This thing looks more like a pry bar in the back than a knife. The steel is also heat treated to blend in with the handle.

The blade uses a modified sheep’s foot blade that looks a little like a Wharncliffe to me, but I’m not a knife maker. The tip is less for stabbing and combined with the generous belly of the blade you get a solid slicing and cutting blade. The unconventional tip will allow you to stab when necessary, but it’s not the most conventional stabbing tool. It’s great for working in situations where you want to avoid accidentally stabbing when cutting.

It slices through meat, paper, cordage, rope, and more with ease. It just glides through cardboard to the point where it’s almost cathartic to cut with this knife.

The Handle

The OSF knives, and by extension the OSF Hero series use titanium frames and full thick handles. As you can see on the Marine variant of the OSF Hero the handles feature a worn cerakote finish of scarlet and gold, the USMC’s official colors. The Eagle, Globe, and Anchor in the middle are laser etched and incredibly detailed. It looks absolutely gorgeous.

In practical terms, the handle fills the hands and allows an excellent blade to handle ratio. The rear backspacer is large enough to allow safe and effective use of the knife but is compact so I get a nice sized handle. The handle is smooth and lacks any kind of stippling, but the large grip makes it easy to hold.

The OSF Hero – A Treasure or an EDC?

A knife like this is hard to classify. It’s made to last and to work as a tool. Without a doubt the craftsmanship and engineering put into this knife makes it one helluva great EDC knife. At the same time its tough to classify when you are looking at something dedicated to the finest fighting force in the world. The color, the laser engraving make it easy to classify this knife as a collector’s item. However, cerakote is tough and laser engraving isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

The OSF Hero is a mighty fine knife. Something that walks the line between beautiful form and perfect functionality. The OSF Hero is an amazing knife and one that shows that craftsmanship is still alive in 2019.

Old school Marine Corps 782 gear and how it relates to modern day survival gear

I served in the Marine Corps back in the 1990s and was issued this exact gear for all training deployments and field exercises. We used the 782 gear loadout for desert warfare, jungle warfare and mountain warfare. We didn’t have different loadouts for different environments like they do now. We used the same gear and just made small tweaks to the contents. It required an adaptive mindset to figure out ways to make it work, no matter the environment we were operating in.

The following video covers this old school loadout and how the gear and contents relate to modern-day equivalents and the 10 C’s of survivability.

*Photo courtesy of Corporals Corner Youtube channel

Photo of the day: SPIE Rigging above Camp Lejeune

During my enlistment in the Marine Corps, I had the opportunity to use a lot of different gear. Towards the end of my enlistment, my unit was attached to the 24th MEU(SOC) to perform recovery of downed aircraft personnel. In layman terms, if one of our pilots went down behind enemy lines, we got the call to go locate and extract him. In order to obtain the (SOC) designation which is ‘Special Operations Capable’, we had to pass several different training evolutions and skill-set evaluations. One of those skill-sets was something known as SPIE (Special Purpose Insertion Extraction) Rigging.

You’re pretty much dangling on a rope from a helicopter. It’s one way to extract out of a landing zone if the helo cannot land. Back then we didn’t have all the now fancy harnesses that are available. We had a very early generation harness and a length of rope to tie our own swiss seat (as a backup) and then use one of our carabiners to clip into the rope hanging from the helicopter. You learn real quick to trust in both your skills to tie the damn swiss seat correctly, the integrity of the rope itself and the carabiner you’re using. Failure is not an option when you’re 1000’ off the ground flying through the air while hanging from a helo.

*Photos courtesy of the author

US Marine drops some knowledge on holsters

Holsters are a necessary part of owning a pistol. A holster allows safe carry of a firearm for both duty and range time. I personally, if carrying a duty pistol at all, am relegated to using either the SERPA design or the old school USGI green Cordura holster. Both are terrible options in my opinion so for this article I’ll discuss what I use for personal carry. First off all of my holsters are manufactured from Kydex material. It’s a thermoplastic that can be easily molded with the proper application of heat. It’s durable, easy to work with, and comes in a variety of different colors to suit your style. The days of the Cordura holster with snap retention are over. If you’re still in the stone ages an upgrade is long overdue. Two of my four overt holsters are mounted using a genius system that Safariland came out with called the Quick Lock System or QLS. This allows the user to mount sets of “forks” onto their holsters and quick swap holsters with minimal effort. This is perfect for mounting your pistol in different places as well if you find yourself mounted and need it in a more accessible position. The other two holsters are a higher ride using a paddle and belt loop mounts respectively. I prefer to use these holsters when not wearing my gear belt.

Of the small number of holsters, I have two are an active retention style, meaning the user has to trigger some mechanism to draw the weapon. SERPA, Bladetech Thumbdrive, ALS from Safariland are the three I am most familiar with. The two I personally own that I’m not forced to own (looking at you SERPA) are the Bladetech Thumbdrive and the ALS or Auto Locking System from Safariland. These are both good solutions to the need for retention that I desire. Some jobs may require a higher level of retention but I stick to level II meaning only one mechanism of securing the firearm. The rest of my holsters use retention adjustment screws and rubber washers to passively retain my firearms in a satisfactory manner. My SOB Tactical deep concealment holster actually “clicks” when the firearm is inserted whereas the Kydex from Cascadia Concealment is a firm fit but no audible click.

Holster selection is based on your desired endstate and carry style. I wouldn’t rock my Safariland ALS on a mid-ride outer waistband to a restaurant however I would use my Cascadia Concealment appendix inner waistband (AIWB) and spare mag holder. I also wouldn’t use an active retention holster at a USPA match if draw speed was coming down to the hundredths of a second. Overall you need to analyze what your need for the holster is. What is your mission? Taking the wife out to the mall may require a discreet AIWB whereas a day on the range your passive retention OWB rig works sufficiently, and finally for the Police Officer responding to a domestic violence call that extra level of active retention may be needed should the call go south and a suspect tries to take the Officer’s weapon. As long as you PRACTICE and put the reps in, very few holsters are the “wrong answer”.

A few other notes I’ll share to hopefully shorten some learning curves include the ride height, cant, and spacing of the holster. Ride height is referring to how high the holster sits on your body with relation to the hip. I prefer the Mid-ride set up putting it out of the way of any gear I may be wearing on my torso. It also allows me to have a smoother and quicker draw stroke due to the length of my arms. Also, consider ride height should you find yourself in a vehicle. Can you access the firearm quickly from the seat? The cant of the holster refers to the angle off of perpendicular (right angle for those of us that struggled with shapes) the holster sits. The common variants are a straight drop, FBI, and negative cant. The straight drop is what I use on my mid-ride setups, however, my waistline mounted holsters are all FBI or 10-20 degree forward cants to allow me to grip the firearm smoothly without awkward elbow positioning. Negative cant is primarily used when drawing from crossdraw so think appendix or small of back carry where the firearms angle is less than 90 degrees. And the final note of spacing refers to how far the holster is off my body. This is a fine line for me. Too close and it snags on my plate carrier or jacket, too far it snags on everything else and prohibits me from doing certain things. This is a shooter preference much like everything else but for me, the QLS system spaces the holster perfectly away from my hip.

At the end of the day, very few holsters are dead wrong to buy. The only holster that’s a poor choice is one you don’t practice with. That being said I personally recommend Cascadia Concealment, a LEO owned company out of the pacific northwest, Safariland of course though on the pricey side they make amazing gear in use by a lot of battle-proven units. Hopefully, this helps you make a more informed decision on holsters but to state it for the record long as you practice you almost can’t go wrong.

Author – Tanner Hodges

Photo of the day: Scout Sniper team remains undetected in their hide site

MARINE CORPS AIR STATION YUMA, AZ, UNITED STATES

Marines with Scout Sniper Platoon, 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, lay inside a hide site after constructing it to test its capacity during Weapons Tactics Instructors course here, Sept. 25, 2013. Hide sites are used as positions for Marines to observe and, if needed, fire from. Their structure provides 360 degree concealment, maximum fields of observation and protection from weather.

*Courtesy of DVIDS