Icon Of Sin posted:

“Swimmers in the same pool” makes me think of the dwarf my soldiers in AK told me about. The story went that she was snuck into the barracks in a rucksack, somehow there’s a tricycle involved (riding it naked around the barracks, as one does), and that around half the company had a turn with her before they snuck her back out. Bonus: they told me she worked at Child/Youth Services on post if I ever wanted a turn

Icon Of Sin posted:

“Swimmers in the same pool” makes me think of the dwarf my soldiers in AK told me about. The story went that she was snuck into the barracks in a rucksack, somehow there’s a tricycle involved (riding it naked around the barracks, as one does), and that around half the company had a turn with her before they snuck her back out. Bonus: they told me she worked at Child/Youth Services on post if I ever wanted a turn

Thump! posted:

Sounds like some extremely Wainwright poo poo if I’ve ever heard it.

DarkDobe posted:

Are there other Wainwrights or...

Fearless posted:

There's a Fort Wainwright outside of Fairbanks, AK. That post probably does not refer to the base in Alberta.

Guest2553 posted:

At least they get human contact periodically. Years back at a station there was someone known as 'porn guy' because he had like five or six screens playing porn between two different computers. It wasn't a shock thing either, it was just...always on. Even when he wasn't there, because you could see it in the background when he opened his door to leave the room, or through the window when the curtains were open. Every once in a while he'd ask some rube for tech support on one device while porn was playing on the other one. He must have been paying for at least some of it because even if streaming sites existed, he wouldn't have had a high enough bandwidth or data cap to download it all in a time frame measured in anything other than years.

I don't recall anybody knowing his actual name.

Wild T posted:

He was jacked in, that's for sure

FrozenVent posted:

Y’all ever heard of the Detroit Mail Boat? Google it.

We had that thing pull up alongside with a god drat US mail bag, the big ones, full of porn. This one dude owned a gigantic amount of porn, like a cabin full.

He was down to share too, which... pass.

FrozenVent posted:

Y’all ever heard of the Detroit Mail Boat? Google it.

We had that thing pull up alongside with a god drat US mail bag, the big ones, full of porn. This one dude owned a gigantic amount of porn, like a cabin full.

He was down to share too, which... pass.

Memento posted:

Four posts down on page 35, poo poo gets real

Milo and POTUS posted:

Please quote it because I don't have archives

The author, John Ross, who reg’d just before posting posted:

Hi folks. I’ve just finished reading all 35 pages of this thread. Wow! Quite an effort! I joined this group primarily because I realized I needed to contact a man whose name I’ve forgotten and who is (or was) known by the Internet handle “Tenement Funster”, and I could not find him by other means. Please have him email me privately at jrinvest@earthlink.net

Since I’m here, I’ll address a few of the issues brought up in this thread. In no particular order:

1. I must be a psychopath. UC is a work of FICTION. First of all, fiction must tread a fine line, in that it must be an interesting story that’s original, but it must also be plausible. The characters have to act in ways that work with the invented storyline. I read a lot of fiction, especially thriller/adventure/crime/espionage fiction. One major complaint I have is that too many authors who write in this genre put their protagonists in hellish situations, and then have them triumph (somehow) without ever doing the down-and-dirty things that would be required if the situation really happened. (Read the “Recommended Novelists” section on my website.) If you think I’M a psychopath, what do you think of bestselling novelist James Ellroy? And, as a corollary, is everyone who enjoyed my book (there are quite a few, I’m told) also a psychopath?

Many of you seem very bothered that I wrote a story where the protagonist doesn’t play by the “code of conduct” that other adventure-novel authors adhere to. Think about this for just a moment: The Second Amendment, as we all know, is an “Emergency Clause” to prevent tyranny in the event that the government decides to ignore the Constitution. Prior to 1996, no novelist to my knowledge had tried to write a story with this as its dramatic concept. I decided to tackle it. When I did, I refused to have any of the scenes typical of adventure/thriller novels, where the protagonist finds himself tied up and helpless at the hands of his antagonist, who is about to torture and kill him, but he miraculously escapes. I was determined to write a story that COULD happen, though it might be unlikely.

To do this, I did not make my protagonist invincible. Henry isn’t a champion athlete or any example of physical near-perfection, like we usually see. He’s not ex-Special Forces. He has no hand-to-hand combat or martial arts skills whatsoever. He would lose most fistfights against just one assailant, and EVERY fight against multiple opponents. He isn’t an accomplished mountain climber, wrestler, gymnast, or swimmer. He can’t even run very fast. He has no specialized training from any government agency, and he isn’t fluent in multiple languages. He has no friends or associates that possess any of these exceptional traits, either. He doesn’t have the daughter of some all-powerful tycoon smitten with him.

What strengths does Henry have? He comes from an affluent family and is fairly good at making his own money. He’s smart and fairly knowledgeable about history. He has a passion for shooting with skills that are far above average, and he isn’t bothered with gutting out game animals he’s killed. He is an accomplished pilot of multiple types of aircraft including aerobatic ones, and is a competent recreational skydiver. He also has an above-average understanding of what motivates other people and “makes them tick,” so to speak. He can do a passable job of mimicking other people’s voices. Finally, he has some VERY close friends, one with a LOT of money. In short, I gave my protagonist only those skills and assets THAT I MYSELF POSSESS. That way I knew I wouldn’t be cheating when I wrote my story.

As I started to imagine the storyline, I asked myself, “How would my protagonist get thrown into such a horrible situation where he finds himself going up against a major portion of the entire U.S. government?” The answer, taken from history, was obvious: An accident, or other random unforeseen event.

Writing the novel, I was constantly faced with the question “What would this person and his associates have to do in order to survive, if this really happened to them? These people are in a fight for their lives against overwhelming odds, where ONE miscalculation means they all die very soon. HOW can they possibly prevail?”

The answer isn’t always pretty.

In your critique of UC, there is a scene in late Summer 1994 in Washington D.C. at a 25,000 person rally at the Lincoln Memorial, where a man makes a speech about the need to fight for our rights with business suits and logic in the halls of the legislature, not with guns on the streets (or words to that effect.) You liked what he had to say when you discussed that passage.

That event really happened, and it was unofficially called “Gunstock.” I was the person who made that speech. It was taped for C-SPAN. I’m the bearded, overweight guy in the grey suit.

In short, UC is NOT what I hope happens, or what I predict will happen. It’s an adventure yarn and fictional “What if?” dreamed up by an aspiring author who wanted to adhere to logic and the lessons of history when he was pounding on his keyboard. Accordingly, many of the decisions my characters make may NOT be what I would choose, but the issues they face are ones we all must address in one way or another. The single most commented-on passage (judging from my email traffic) is the scene in Henry’s college poly-sci class where he asks, “When is it not too late to resist tyranny, but also not too early?” and he uses the example of the woman being told by the man with the handcuffs to get in the van. Like many other passages I wrote, this verbal exchange really happened to me. You are the first person I’ve heard of who ridiculed it. Despite that, it’s a question we must all ponder…

2. My ham-handed use of foreshadowing. You guys must be a LOT more intelligent than the vast majority of the people I know, myself included. In a long, involved story, people often forget small details that came before, when they finally become significant, sometimes hundreds of pages later. One place I wasn’t ham-handed enough for you, apparently, was when talking about young Henry’s Winchester 63. It was significant ONLY because it made him realize, very early on, that machine guns were interesting and offered something for his passion for shooting that other guns didn’t. That’s all. But that, when you think about it, was quite a lot, in the overall scheme of the storyline.

3. My obvious penchant for nutjob conspiracy theories. I have no axe to grind and no dog in any particular fight, to use two tired metaphors. My point with including various controversial real-life events such as JFK, RFK, Waco, OKC, Vince Foster, etc. is that they all have multiple elements that scream “WAIT A MINUTE, that makes NO SENSE!” and these elements get ignored. Jack Ruby murdering Oswald to “spare Jackie having to return to Texas to testify” is but one example of this. Another is the OKC bombing. Earl Taylor-Edgarton is a character loosely based on a real-life improvised explosives expert who has said on several occasions that taking down the Murrah building with a just a van full of ANFO parked outside in the outdoor parking lot was a physical impossibility. I have an explosives license, and a smattering of experience with high explosives and blasting agents over the last 30 years, and I agree with him. SOMETHING other than (or in addition to) what the news media reported happened there. As to what, I have no idea.

4. I did a lot of research, but some things slipped by and others were pure accidents. I knew that Sirhan used a .22 revolver holding more than 6 shots on RFK, and wrongly assumed it was an H&R without further study. Congressman Heebner was not based on any real-life legislator, just a name I used at random, as was the state he represented. He may as well have been Congressman Scroggins from Delaware. Similarly, in the lawsuit involving the chemical company, I made up the fictional German firm “Becker AG” without bothering to find out that there was a real German company of that name that made non-chemical products.

5. UC has gone into six printings since its December 1995 release. After my friend Col. Rex Applegate died of a stroke, in subsequent printings I changed the text to refer to him in the past tense in the “Present Day” section. You have one of the more recent editions--I didn’t accurately predict his death three years early. BTW Rex must have been a psychopath because while he was alive he loved the story and bought CASES of my books as presents for his friends.

6. When Henry pretends to be a Fed in his confrontation with Wilson Blair in the first pages of the “WAR” section, where he identifies his agency as “The Wrecking Crew,” it’s my admiring tribute to Donald Hamilton, one of my favorite authors. Don wrote me a fan letter after reading UC, as did Mickey Spillane. That made my year, getting praise from those two psychopaths...

7. “I feel such an infinity with you” was indeed an intentional malapropism uttered by Cindy, wanting to sound like an airhead, not illiteracy on my (or her) part, or a typo.

8. The 9mm “Cyclone” rounds allegedly patterned on the Abe Flateau 20mm design and allegedly used by ATF at Waco (as well as many of the other Waco specifics in UC) were the result of exhaustive research done by James Pate on the entire Waco debacle. I believe Jim won an award for this research, and I know he was called as an expert witness at McVeigh’s trial. I didn’t make that stuff up; I used his findings.

9. A .220 Swift at full throttle using thin-jacket varmint bullets WILL blow up before it reaches the second side of an EMPTY soda can, at least it will on a can made 15 or so years ago. The can will be blown into a number of pieces, and you’ll find one piece with the obvious entrance hole, but none of the others will have anything resembling an exit hole anywhere near .22 caliber in them. Put an aiming spot on the front of the can with a felt-tip marker, a similar spot at the expected exit point on the opposite side, and load Hornady 50 grain SPSX bullets to 4000 fps and try it. You’ll usually find the piece from the back with the marked spot entirely intact. This load will also completely perforate ½” mild steel plate.

10. Phone issues. A local telco service tech told me in 1995 that what I wrote was quite possible for pay phones in the rural Midwest. That was good enough for me.

11. Government agent behavior. I asked over a dozen government agents in various enforcement agencies to review parts of my manuscript and tell me if what I had written was plausible. I was especially concerned about the Wyoming scene where ninja-suited, MP5-toting ATF agents drive out on the prairie to apprehend an NFA weapons dealer. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM said that is EXACTLY what they would expect them to do. So I left it in as written. As an aside, one agent told me that the feds in UC were, on the whole, too well-organized compared to real life…

12. Henry’s shooting feats in UC, with one exception, have all been performed by me in front of witnesses, and some are on film or videotape, including the 4-bore elephant scene. I hit seventeen straight flying claybirds out of an electric thrower with a 9mm subgun (on semi) at Knob Creek in 1999 in front of over 1000 witnesses, as well as five straight with a .30-06 Colt Monitor machine rifle, and five straight with a 16-lb. .50 BMG single shot shoulder weapon. (.50 BMG Incendiary ammo detonates on flying clays, BTW, which is REALLY cool…) Henry’s single shooting feat in UC that I have not performed is the one with the Cape Buffalo stampede. The idea for that scene came after I saw a herd of 200 of these animals race across a dry riverbed some 200 yards from us in Africa in 1983, and I asked my guide “What the hell would we have done if that stampede had been 200 yards west of where it was, and they had come right at us?” The guide told me the only thing you can do in such a situation is to pick the animal coming straight at you, brain-shoot it at 12-15 feet, and dive down behind the carcass. I thought about that advice for a long time on that hunt, and after…

13. Similarly, many of the scenes in UC are based on real people, including myself, doing the things they did in real life. The practical joke at the Orange Sport Parachute Center in Massachusetts really happened in the late ‘70s. My late uncle, the pulp-cover artist Graves Gladney, at age 35 made his Polish-born wife sign a letter he wrote that made it into the newspaper, begging the War Department to take him. He then broke his leg in parachute training in Texas. He went into the D-Day invasion in a Waco glider at night that crashed and killed all the other occupants. He limped to a church bell tower with his rifle, and when morning came, killed a general at over 500 yards. I have his framed commendation from Harry Truman. The part I left out when I turned this event into fiction for UC was that my uncle was in a walking cast at the time. I figured no one would believe that…

14. When I wrote UC, I had no idea that it would become the phenomenon it has; I figured the publisher would sell a couple thousand copies to various gun cranks, I’d make a little ammo-and-avgas money, and that would be the end of it. I made many of my friends into minor and not-so-minor characters, such as Allen Kane, Grant Millet, Rufus Ingram, Thomas Fleming, B.I. Bedderson, Hap Edwards, Earl Taylor-Edgarton, Danielle Pelletier, Curt Behnke, Ed Barber, David Webb, and others. I also decided to have some juvenile fun with parts of the story. For example, when I told my good friend Richard Davis of Second Chance Body Armor I was writing a novel involving a lot of gun stuff that I thought he would enjoy, he immediately said “Make sure it’s got some hot girl-on-girl lesbo action in it, too.” You’re welcome, Richard…

15. Henry’s Economics paper. I’m really surprised at the notion you thought it was garbage. My Economics professor, a nationally-recognized expert on railroads and other regulated American industries, did indeed give me an A+ on it in 1978.

16. My Internet comments about the current banking crisis. When you have a system where the government guarantees loans no sane businessman would make with his own assets at stake, and on top of that, the government virtually forces the bank to make such loans, you have a recipe for guaranteed future disaster. You won’t even give me THAT?

17. One or more of you have said words to the effect of, “John Ross must live in a very different world than I do…” Boy howdy, you got that right.

JR

Platystemon posted:

goatsestretchgoals posted:

Is this before or after he threw an Uzi(?) magazine at TF’s car?

goatsestretchgoals posted:

Is this before or after he threw an Uzi(?) magazine at TF’s car?

John Ross posted:

Cyrano4747 posted:

Mr Ross, one question:

Why is every single sexual act you depict in that book some kind of rape, intercourse with a (almost) corpse, etc., while every instance of what could be described as normal sexual relations is simply described as having happened?

You go into graphic details about homosexual gang rape and a woman stabbing a man through his eye socket from the cowgirl position, yet every time your hyper-masculine main character gets laid you fade to black before he seals the deal. It's a strange mix of borderline snuff porno and 50s moral squeamishness about human sexuality that truly baffles me.

I'm not asking for or even suggesting that you spend a great deal of time writing sexually explicit "love scenes" for your characters - indeed the thought of reading one in the middle of that book gives me a headache - but I really fail to see why you felt the need to include the bizarre rape/sex stuff that you did.

The "normal" sex acts in the book don't create massive changes to their participants, thus the "Fade to black."

The violent sex incidents are events that strongly shape Henry and Cindy's respective characters. When Henry stops the gang rape of Cammie Lynn, and doesn't feel guilt about it, he discovers something profound about himself. When he canoes away afterwards, it drives home the reality that under certain circumstances, you can kill people and never even be a suspect.

Cindy's Mafia escape similarly puts even more steel in her character. Henry sees it. This unlikely pair shares a powerful bond.

These incidents are part of why Henry and Cindy eventually end up doing the things they do instead of giving up when the sledding gets heavy. It's similar to the bond that combat veterans share that their friends can't understand.

Most readers understand this, but some ask "Why all the violent sex assaults?"

quote:

Also, why all the concern with roving packs of homosexual rapists? Just about every other "issue" in your book has some grounding in reality, albeit tenuous. Why in the hell was that even in there? What kind of purpose, either as a plot device or to advance the political agenda of your novel, did it serve?

Not "Roving packs," JUST ONE. And one was enough to drive Henry to alcohol in a way that might have destroyed him, and to finally make him say to himself "NEVER AGAIN," not just about a personal attack while out jogging, but about ANY assault against him with lopsided odds.

quote:

Finally, and I'm not being glib at all, you frequently identify the main character as being based off yourself. Have you been sexually assaulted by another man?

Perceptive, aren't you? It wasn't another man, it was four of them at once. The details weren't exactly the same as in the book, but it was bad, and I still have the scars and burn marks 33 years later. I didn't become a drunk, but I gained 60 pounds in a few months and my grades went from As to B-minuses for a time. When I stopped feeling sorry for myself, I became a champion pin shooter (in my region, not nationally) and the nightmares mostly went away. I, too, said "Never Again."

JR

John Ross posted:

Skyssx posted:

Let me summarize. This (piece of wood hitting skyshark) happened, reportedly the automatics you were paid to bring were so dirty as to effectively be burst or bolt action weapons, it's been 2.5 years since TF fixed his vehicle, and you wrote a fantasy book that is largely unreadable to most people.

Am I missing anything here?

Perhaps.

I don't know how exactly the piece of wood or whatever it was hit Skyshark. It wasn't from any explosive I provided or knew anything about. He was angry and swearing and not bleeding that I could see, and standing on his feet, and I took that to mean he was annoyed and not injured, like when hot brass goes down your shirt, so I didn't pay too much attention. If that was cavalier of me, I apologize.

"reportedly the automatics you were paid to bring were so dirty as to effectively be burst or bolt action weapons,"

I'm not sure what this statement means. The weapons were mostly well-used military surplus guns imported from third-world countries, and being what they are, look pretty ratty even when they've just been cleaned and oiled. They had been thoroughly cleaned and then shot THE PREVIOUS DAY when I unloaded them for the shoot. If you meant that they were so dirty they BURST (blew up), that is patently false.

If you meant that a blowback-operated subgun experienced a "burst" fire when the trigger was released (experienced a runaway), that may have happened with one gun. It would have little to do with whether the gun had been shot the day before and everything to do with the power level of the particular ammo then being used and the strength of the recoil spring installed at the time. With slightly-too-weak ammo, or a slightly-too-strong recoil spring, the bolt recoils far enough to eject the spent case and pick up a new round, but not far enough to catch the sear. Thus a runaway.

If you meant I brought bolt action rifles, I think I did. If you meant a machine gun fired single shots instead of full auto, kind of like a bolt action, that can happen too, for a variety of reasons. I had one AK where the selector lever would sometimes bounce out of the full-auto detent. It only did that with certain types of ammo (go figure) and seemed to cure itself of this malady on its own (go figure again).

My memory of the aftermath of denting TF's hood with the UZI magazine is less clear. I had hoped to speak with him personally, but I might as well do it publicly. Here is what happened, as I recall it:

I told the BMW's owner to get it fixed and send me the bill. He eventually sent me an email, and AS I RECALL, the estimate was for something like $713. Also AS I RECALL, he said that that seemed awfully high and that he'd get some more estimates.

After that I never got another email from him, and the whole thing slipped my mind for two reasons: I accidentally deleted or otherwise lost his email, and thoughts of contacting him got pushed out of my mind when I had a theft. Someone knew exactly where to go and what to do to steal my guns. I always wondered if someone from that shoot set me up, but I didn't have names or addresses to give to the police. Several guns have been recovered, and the Feds think they may have a lead on those involved. I won't give any more details about that, so don't ask. Since I never heard from him again, I figured he got it fixed reasonably and didn't bother contacting me.

Then three days ago I hear there's a discussion group saying I'm a psychopath and they're all talking about how I screwed one of their buddies out of a bunch of money.

Anyway, that's why I paid $9.95 to join this board. I wanted to contact TF and either send him the money for his repair, or give him a hell of a deal on a Ross/PC .500 Magnum. Please have him contact me. As to my book being unreadable, it obviously is to the people here, and I've been wasting my time explaining myself.

John Ross posted:

Pitch posted:

Now, let's not leave out Ross's other compelling African-American characters: the traveling musician who cheats on his wife with 18-year-old white girls; Henry's proverbial "black dishwasher with the do-rag [...] saying 'be cool, bro'"; Vonetta Ecks, the ATF agent whose only identifiable characteristics are fake nails and ebonic cursing.

Like most of my book, taken from real life. FYI, the 18-year-old white girl is now 40. Being the actor/Broadway entertainer's mistress set her back less than three years. She finished college and grad school and now has a family and a good job as a psychotherapist. Last time we saw each other and talked about her little adventure, she laughed and said "What was I thinking...?" She got a kick out of being in UC, BTW. As I said before, I had no idea it would take off the way it did, and a bunch of friends and acquaintances are in it.

EBB posted:

Look I skimmed is the tl;dr that some crazy guy posts too much?

My Spirit Otter posted:

Speaks volumes that you can say that sneaking a dwarf into the shacks so that said dwarf can ride a tricycle nude then have a train ran on her is a very Wainwright thing and still have to clarify which Wainwright.

Thump! posted:

Having done training at both, they’re literally the same place separated by language only.

DarkDobe posted:

Canadian and American, eh?

My Spirit Otter posted:

Speaks volumes that you can say that sneaking a dwarf into the shacks so that said dwarf can ride a tricycle nude then have a train ran on her is a very Wainwright thing and still have to clarify which Wainwright.

Thump! posted:

Having done training at both, they’re literally the same place separated by language only.

My Spirit Otter posted:

Americans were in Wainwright all the time around '10. Probably still are.

My Spirit Otter posted:

Americans were in Wainwright all the time around '10. Probably still are.

Guest2553 posted:

Naughty boy

DarkDobe posted:

Every year so far as I can tell.
Pretty sure some get lost and never recovered. Just set up camps in the woods and become bushmen until winter rolls through and kills 'em off.