My guide in New Zealand, David Blainey, had served ten years as a soldier in that country’s “forces,” as the army is called, and would have stayed another ten had not an ankle betrayed him. He loved the service, and one afternoon he asked me what was the most important thing I had gotten out of my time in the U.S. Army.

That took some thought. I had a very easy time and spent most of it in front of a chalkboard, teaching. I learned public speaking, and the Army system of education, which is the most effective in the world, and I learned how to spit shine, and I learned that there were men who had never gone to college who were better soldiers than I would ever be. And all of that was important.

But the most important thing, I told David, was meeting men whom you would die for. There are very few of them, but they are unmistakable. In my case it was a Lieutenant Colonel who later made full Colonel, and in David’s case it was a Brigadier for whom David was a driver.

I don’t know exactly what confers this quality on an officer or an NCO. The supreme example in the history of the U.S. military is Robert E. Lee, but no one has really gotten a handle on the unknowable Marse Robert. The best example I can give you is Major Dick Winters as portrayed by the British actor Damian Lewis in Band of Brothers. Winters was nearly worshipped by the men he commanded, and Lewis caught this to an uncanny degree.

In any event, human beings such as this are exceedingly rare, and getting to meet one is a privilege that you will not have in civilian life. For me, it was worth the years in a green suit, and then some.

Recently both the sporting goods stores I frequent completed remodeling jobs, taking out their stand-up gun racks and putting in new ones. From one store, I scrounged a bunch of rack bottoms, lined with cutouts for the butts of long guns. From the other, I scored the top halves, with notches cut in them for the gun barrels. Both the tops and bottoms are made of oak and luckily for me, they’re a close match in color. I am set. All I need now is a gun room.

And, I do need a gun room, or at least, a walk-in gun closet. I don’t own that many guns compared to most gun writers, but the ones I do own are stored too close together in small safes. My guns get more dings going in and out of the safe than they do in the field. Pumps and double guns can sit in close proximity to one another without touching but semiautos and bolt actions can easily reach out and gouge the gun to their right.

Unfortunately, we don’t have an extra room in the house for me to appropriate.  Peter Mathiesen, one of my F&S colleagues and a much handier man than I faced the same problem and solved it by making himself a basement gun room. He framed up a wall to enclose a small, windowless room in one corner of his basement and wired in a light. He built gun racks like the ones I scrounged from the two stores then hung a stout, lockable metal door on his new wall and the job was done. When you walk in now you see his guns lined up and standing at attention in their racks, safe from one another and ready to go hunting.

Does anyone out there have a home-made gun room, or gun storage advice to share?

Since turkey seasons are winding down all over the country, it’s time to post up your season highlights. I’ve already run the picture of me and my one turkey of the spring but I hadn’t told the story of the very brief and satisfying hunt:

As is my routine during turkey season, I dropped my younger son at school and  got to the public area I hunt a little after 7:00 a.m. I drove around drinking coffee until I saw a glinting black spot in a freshly burned field. Although the area is billiard table-flat, there were enough willows to use as cover for my approach so I parked the jeep, pulled on my stuff, and snuck to within 125 yards or so of the bird. I saw him look around the first time

I yelped. Second time, he popped in and out of strut, then turned and walked my way. I never made another call after that.

He gobbled once coming in, and when he got to what I thought was 40 yards and change, he veered off course. I could call more to straighten him out and bring him closer or I could shoot. I shot.

From the time I stepped out of the jeep to the minute I pulled the trigger only 25 minutes elapsed, and packed into that short span of time was nearly all my excitement for the season. I worked a total of only four birds this spring:  one I shot; one I scared away; one was taken from me by a hen and one gobbled to everything, almost committed, then wandered away, still gobbling to everything.

Besides that, in 14 days of hunting:

I found exactly 11 morel mushrooms.

I saw all kinds of birds, including two sandhill cranes walking around very close.

I got two ticks.

I got no (0) mosquito bites.

I lost a small blind and a decoy, but found the decoy in the woods a week later.

I lost seven mouth calls to Jed, who twice emptied my mouth call wallet and chewed the calls he found after I came in from hunting.

Any season in which I find a turkey and the bugs don’t find me counts as a good year, although frankly, this one was a little light on excitement, but I’m not complaining.  How was your spring?