To Remember my dad…

by Don Sikes , Vera Cruz, Missouri, Sunday, January 31, 2021, 16:59 (1392 days ago)

My dad came from a poor cotton sharecropper family in Luisiana… He joined the USAAF in 1948 when he was still 17… He said his hands couldn’t take the cotton fields any longer and besides his sisters kept bragging that they could pick more in a day than he could in two… Anyway, after he joined up he was sent to the far east during the Korean Conflict, assigned to the Air-Sea Rescue Service stationed in Japan (hence I came along). During the 1960’s he was stationed in Okinawa in support of air operations to Viet-Nam… He was lucky in that he never had to set foot to ground there, but did his best to make sure the planes that flew were in the best shape to do so…

My dad’s family has been dirt poor farmers since back in the 1800’s… the furthest back I’ve been able to link my family is to a Capt John Sikes of the Boston Militia during the 1760’s (or so my cousin’s sources say)… So I guess there has been some sort of military tradition in my family since the beginnings of the United States of America…

To come to my point, He acquired an M1 Carbine back in his “Nam days” and it was his connection to his time in the service back during the Korean Conflict and the Viet-Nam War… He had put a custom “Sporter” stock on it to better fit his frame (he was 6’2”)…

When I was enlisted into the USAF in 1972, he gave me his M1 Carbine as a “carry-on of tradition”… I cherished that carbine… It was my goto gun for basically all my shooting, to include some javalina and small deer hunting in Arizona… along about 1976, my house was broken into and they took that carbine… I looked everywhere but it was never recovered… I was heartbroken that it was gone…

Well, here I am at 69 years old, my dad pasted-on back in 2002… One of my sons was a Targeting Systems Tech on a C-130 Gunship crew when he was in the USAF in the mid-1990’s… My other son was in Intelligence Operations in the Army in Afganistan and Iraq… Now one of my grandsons is off to college and my other grandson just joined the Navy…

I’ve been thinking about my dad’s legacy and I come back to his old M1 Carbine… Well… I just acquired a ‘60’s issue M1 Carbine from Plainfield Arms … I know, it’s a commercial built one not issued during WW2 or the Korean Conflict, but quite a few were issued to Other nations and to some of our police units and to the South Vietnamese Army during the 1960’s…

What I plan to do is to put a “Sporter” stock on it similar to the one my dad had on his and tune it up to use as my “around the farm” critter buster… and eventually give it to one of my grandkids as a continuance of the “family heritage” heirloom…

I’ve been collecting a few guns in my life… many “treasures” that have come and gone (very reluctantly) but the one that breaks my heart was the M1 Carbine that my dad had… this one will only leave my hands one way… to one of my family when my time is up…