By Phil Bourjaily

"Triggers: Weapons that Changed the World" premieres Wednesday at 10 p.m. on the Military Channel. It’s a show made for gun nuts with a special interest in military hardware, which describes more than a few of you readers.

Each episode focuses on the evolution of a class of weapon--handguns, rifles, machineguns and so on. It’s very much a hands-on program: host Wil Willis assures me that he and his guest experts shoot every weapon they talk about on the show, ranging from the obscure to the iconic to the just plain big. Along the way they evaluate the guns for accuracy, power and other crucial attributes of a combat arm.

Willis took time to answer a few of my questions about the show, beginning with his own military background.

By David E. Petzal

Before Melvin Forbes came along, the path to a featherweight big-game rifle was to take a conventional bolt action, chop, gouge, hack, and drill it until all the excess steel was gone, then screw in a short barrel the diameter of a soda straw and bed the whole mess in a scrawny stock made out of bass wood. I encountered just such a rifle in a deer camp in the Adirondacks in 1969, and it frightened me so badly I lived in the woods for two days.

In the early 1980s, a West Virginia gunsmith named Melvin Forbes was approached by a customer who, the preceding fall, had been caught in a Montana blizzard and, at the end of his strength, was forced to hang his heavy rifle in a tree in order to slog through the drifts. So when he got back, he asked Melvin to build something really light, and Melvin did. Having a horror of not doing things right, he built what the man wanted using a Remington 600 action, and turned out a .308 that weighed under 6 pounds with scope and was not a boiled-down monstrosity.

By Phil Bourjaily

The Field & Stream head office (Dave Hurteau) sent all us field editors an e-mail telling us to be sure to hunt our designated “Best Day of the Rut” – November 12. Since I have not bowhunted since 1989 I planned to call my cousin Shaun to tell him to go deer hunting in my place and report back.

Before I could call him, he called me and asked if I would come help him find the deer he had just shot. We found it only about 100 yards from where it had been hit. The long, lumpy gray muzzle makes me think it is an old buck.

What makes the story even better is that Shaun made the bow in the picture. It’s a self bow, meaning it’s made from one piece of wood – in this case, osage orange. This particular style of self bow is an “ambush bow” -- a 65 pounder with a fairly compact 58” knock-to-knock length. In fact, Shaun had just finished it that same day, made a string, took some test shots, went hunting and killed a buck with it.

He named the bow for a friend who had recently died in an accident, and painted it in Lakota fashion as a tribute. The red to starry black represents the transition from Warrior Path to the Star Path.

By Phil Bourjaily

The Libyan rebels displayed tremendous ingenuity in repairing, jury-rigging and improvising weapons of all kinds in the fight against the government forces of Muammar Ghaddafi (like the helicopter rocket pod mounted in a truck bed shown below - The Eds).

The bulldozer tank, however, may be the most interesting of all the homemade weapons of the conflict. It is essentially the result of exactly the same thought process that created the tank 100 years ago.