What time is it?? Are we there yet??

Submitted by Eric Daniel

The purpose of a watch is to tell time. After that, it’s all just bells and whistles. Throughout my career, I’ve had more than a few; some were big and gaudy (G-shock) some were big and spendy (Citizen Aqualand Promaster, which I still use for diving by the way) and some were cheap and unreliable (the army issue tritium faced watches.)

This is the watch I’m currently using, and really have no intention of deviating from. Technically, it’s referred to as the Timex Men's Easy Set Alarm Watch #T50832. The watch will run you about $45 and it does everything I ask it to with out a lot of fuss or manipulation.

First off, the face is analog (i.e. it has hands) and there are luminescent strips on the hands so that you can read the watch at night without having to use the back-light. If you want to back-light the watch, however, it uses Timex’s “indiglo” feature, which provides enough blue-green light for you to read the watch without lighting up your position.

The alarm is easy to set; you simply rotate the bezel till the alarm needle is set to the correct time and then pull out the alarm pin. Pull the alarm pin out to the first stop (one beep) and you’ve set the alarm for 1-hour mode (the alarm will go off when the minute hand hits the alarm needle.) Pull the pin to the second stop (two beeps) and the alarm is set for 12-hour mode (the alarm will go off when the hour hand hits the alarm needle. So that you can’t screw up the needle setting, once you pull the alarm pin out, it disengages the alarm setting gear on the bezel.

Setting the time and date on the watch is simply a matter of pulling out the time/date set screw and rotating the bezel. There is no twisting of tiny knobs or mashing of buttons, which makes it easy to change the time on the fly.

Finally, not that I’ve tested it, or ever anticipate validating it, the watch is water resistant to 50m, which is good enough for everything I’ll ever do with it.

P.S. Astute readers will notice that I’ve got the watch wrapped around one of the Silverfoot watchbands Buzzard commented on a while back. I have to agree with him, these watchbands are easy to use, reliable, and pretty much indestructible.

Buy this watch here

Mine's the green duffle bag...

Submitted by Lori Baumgartner

When I was a young GI stationed at Ft. Stewart the one thing that I couldn't live without was a key chain beeper. I’ll tell you why. Know when your getting ready to grab your gear off the back of a five ton truck, and of course, everyone's gear looks just like everybody else's? Well this little device hooks on to your gear and when you point the transmitter at it, it beeps!! We found it to be the perfect thing to locate lost gear. Pretty cool huh???

ED -- Lori, you didn't include a link for the product you described, but I thought your suggestion warranted posting, so I did some looking around. Is this similar to what you used?

Get a luggage locator here

Stoppum floppum, the SERPA sticks to your hip

Submitted by Chris Crum

After trying half a dozen holsters, I settled with the Blackhawk SERPA tactical holster because it does not slip around your thigh, does not pull your trousers down, is comfortable, you can run with it, it has a very secure and fast locking mechanism which is easy to find in any situation, you can get your hand in your pocket due to the two points which attach to your belt around your pocket, and the single push button lock is adjustable. I cannot say enough about the durability and practicality of this holster. It made carrying my Beretta 9mm duty weapon better on the last two deployments.

Get the SERPA here

Stand in the place where you work

Submitted by Eric Daniel

Back in ‘04 our Scout Platoon was doing some integration training with the 11th ACR folks over at Ft. Irwin. While sitting in on a training meeting the subject came up of “degraded” land navigation. The First Sergeant was concerned that soldiers were becoming too dependent upon GPS units and that they were loosing their traditional land navigation and orienteering skills. Knowing that the Guard, non-enhanced units especially, is typically a couple of decades behind the active army when it comes to gear, the First Sergeant turned to me and asked me how we navigated out in the desert. I replied, “Just like everyone else, First Sergeant, with a star chart and a sextant,” where upon the discussion devolved into discovering just what a sextant was…

Anyway, I have always been a firm believer of carrying some form of reliable as gravity navigational equipment as a backup. For me, this means carrying a compass, and while the Army issue lensatic compass (the tritium illuminated kind) is reliable, my preferred compass is a commercial type manufactured by Silva. The Silva M15 Ranger Professional compass is simple, straight forward, and easy to operate. It has a sighting line and mirror to allow you to take accurate “cheek-hold” azimuth sightings, as well as a straightedge and ruler on one side for measuring. In addition it also has a couple of 1:25,000 and 1:50,000 scales which make it handy for plotting your location or an airstrike without having to get out your map protractor (for you artillery guys out there there is also a version with a milliradian ring.)

The big thing the M15 has going for it, however, is a permanent offset capability for magnetic declination. What this means is if you ever find yourself out in the middle of nowhere engaged in some old school dirt beetle action, you can adjust your compass (using a set screw) to compensate for the grid-magnetic declination angle, which means no more conversion calculations. With an adjusted compass, whatever azimuth you plot on your map is the one you follow using your compass.

P.S. As mentioned previously, me and favorite things don’t seem to get along. While Silva seems to take great pride in touting the capabilities of the Ranger M15 compass, they offer no suggestions on where to get one in the US (the distributor they list for the US is Brunton.) As such, I would recommend the Brunton 15TDCL as an acceptable substitute for the Silva M15.

Get the Brunton 15TDCL here

The often imitated, but never duplicated, Buck 110

Submitted by David Lockhart

This knife should be standard issue to every sailor. As it is, every sailor worth their salt has one strapped to their belt. This tool is indispensable to the job. I used it to strip paint, splice lines, clean fingernails...you name it. I kept the blade sharp enough to cut a six-inch hawser like it was butter. I still have my original knife from thirty years ago when I finished boot camp. Along with my dungarees, it was the first thing I purchased at the 32nd street exchange.

Buy the Buck 110 here

Photon microlight

Submitted by James Hollon

A must have for all deploying soldiers. I carried one on my dogtag chain throughout my OIF deployment. Always handy and available, lightweight, and the battery last for years (depending on amount of usage). I've had one in use for 3 years without replacing the battery. I recommend red light for map reading, or blue because of the short wave length of the light. No WHITE LIGHT!

ED - James, yes, these are brilliant little lights to have.  They're just the ticket for when a little bit of light is good enough (seems now a days seems everyone is packing one of those surefire portable lighthouses you could signal Venus with.)  My only word of caution though is check the water integrity.  I do not recall the brand of LED microlight I was using, but when the sucker got wet it would turn on (yes, the package said it was water resistant; I checked before I bought it.)  I eventually solved the problem by putting a little medical pill bag over the light if I knew I was going out in the wet.  Bottom line though, these are good lights to have.

Buy a microlight here

Say hello to my little MG3

Submitted by Eric Daniel

Ok, this entry might be a little outside the realm of Kit Up, as I most certainly did not buy this, but it definitely was not government-issue (at least not my government) and it is a brilliant piece of kit, and as Meat Loaf once said, “two out of three ain’t bad.”

Anyway, one of the byproducts of conducting security operations in Iraq is you end up with a lot of confiscated weapons, and over the years, quite a respectable collection had been assembled by the various units rotating through the IA mission on our FOB. Naturally we had such staples as the AK-47, AKM, RPK, RPD, and PKM, but we also had some pretty cool specimens as well, like Dragunov SVD sniper rifles, a working DShK, RPGs, even such oldies but goodies as a couple of Mosin-Nagant M1891bolt action rifles and a PPSh-41 sub-machine gun (non-functional unfortunately, otherwise this thing would have been a blast.)

The piece d’resistance, though was a brand-new, never been fired, fully functional German MG3.

We came about this little gem after detaining a collection of Iraqi oil and pipeline security folk who were conducting illegal shakedown checkpoints out in the hinterlands. In the process of cataloguing their equipment the scribing NCO described the MG3 as some sort of Star Wars blaster rifle, and so it’s true nature went undiscovered until I happened to see it propped up against the wall in the supply room, whereupon I discerned the true nature of this fine piece of warmongery.

The machinegun itself was in a sorry state. It was bone dry (a blessing as it would turn out), packed with dust, and had never been fired. Since it had never been lubricated (that I could tell), cleaning it up was simply a matter of field stripping it, blowing the majority of the dust out and then giving it a good bath and scrub in solvent. Once clean, dry, lubricated, and reassembled, my MG3 and me went out to the range to convert some linked 7.62 NATO into heat and noise. For those of you who have never had the opportunity to fire an MG3, it is quite possibly the finest, single barreled medium machinegun ever built. Based on the German MG42 of WWII fame, the MG3 is essentially the MG3 rechambered from 7.92mm Mauser to 7.62mm NATO. Its ROF is 1,200 rounds per minute and it is an absolute dream to shoot.

Had we simply found the weapon in a raid I would have ditched my M16 and hauled that sucker with me everywhere, but alas and alack, I had to give it back when we eventually released the Iraqis we had detained. I shudder to think now what state “my” MG3 is in, but for the week or so we were together, and the thousands of rounds we fired together, I was in absolute heaven.

Check out the MG3 here