Review of HK MR556A1

How to customize your truck as a bug-out ride.

A review of some of the popular outdoor watches

A buyers guide of some popular knifes

ATV guide

A profile of competitive shooter JJ Racaza

The ultimate zombie-proof house in Poland

Review of SCAR17S

Profile of  training company Redback One and its founder Jason Falla

Sergeant Tim Arthur is at the gun turret of an MRAP (an armored anti-mine vehicle), scanning the bleak Iraqi horizon for threats as the fuel delivery convoy rolls on toward its destination. It’s November, and a shroud of fog has settled over the area. It’s a fog so dense, so opaque that Arthur never even sees the sniper who shoots him in the face.

In an instant Arthur—a single father of four from suburban Dayton, Ohio—is down inside the belly of the vehicle. He is bleeding profusely from a laceration on his left cheekbone, excruciatingly close to his eye.

“If it had been an inch higher, it would have hit me right in the center of the eye,” Arthur says, his voice trailing off as he contemplates how lucky he was that crazy day.

Military Grade Oakley Protection

“I think the bullet must have ricocheted off of something, but it hit me right in the (glasses),” Arthur says in reference to his military issue Oakley M Frame® sunglasses. “It blew a big chunk out of the bottom corner and knocked them completely off of my face. I got a nice scar from it, but the (glasses) took most of the impact.”

Over the course of twenty-three years in the military and four National Guard deployments, Arthur has been witness to some genuinely harrowing scenes. He entered the Superdome immediately after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. He was on the ground in Kosovo. And although he was obviously cognizant of the inherent dangers when he deployed to Iraq, he was shocked to find himself wounded. Still, he managed even in those circumstances to summon a bit of humor.

“I begged them not to stitch up my face,” he says with a chuckle. “I didn’t want to look like Frankenstein.”

Fortunately for him, Arthur’s wound was shallow enough to be closed with liquid bandage and surgical tape.

Arthur earned a Purple Hearth for being injured in the line of duty. He anticipates a deployment to Afghanistan within the next two years.

The grinding roar of chainsaw motors and the familiar scent of burning gasoline filled the air in Pleasant Grove, AL that Friday morning. Just a week after a mile-wide tornado decimated this quiet Birmingham suburb, sounds and smells like these heralded a new day—resounding signals that the arduous tasks of picking themselves up and returning to normalcy were finally underway.

Jason McNaughton was one of the saw men. A forty-four-year-old father of two, he and a group of good Samaritans from his church traveled about thirty minutes to Pleasant Grove that morning to assist in sawing and clearing away the many large oak trees knocked down by the storm. An Oakley man through and through, McNaughton was wearing his Oakley Whisker sunglasses as eye protection.

Trapped Limbs
“Soon after lunch we went to a new location and started working on a large oak tree that was down in the front yard of one of the houses,” McNaughton says. “I should say ‘what was left of the house’ because most of the roof had been taken off by the storm.

“About twenty minutes into the work I noticed a limb that was bent and trapped by another limb. I stopped my saw and warned another one of the volunteers to step back, and then proceeded to cut the ‘trapped’ limb.”

In The Face
Unfortunately, McNaughton didn’t see a second trapped limb being held in place by the first one. The moment he began sawing the first, the second branch shot out at him like it had been fired from a cannon.

It hit him square in the nose and “was deflected from my eye by my Oakley Whiskers.”

Counting Teeth
“I went through a checklist in my head,” he says. “Were my teeth still there? Was my nose still attached? Was my left eye working? Well, my teeth were still in, my nose was still attached but quite crooked, and my left eye was working but there was a nice cut over my eyebrow.”

The paramedics came to check McNaughton’s condition and suggested he see a doctor.

Saved By Sunglasses
“It was at his office that I realized that my Oakleys probably saved my eye,” he says. “I was told by one person watching that she couldn’t even see the limb (because) it sprung out so quickly. She thought I had just fallen down and dropped my saw.”

McNaughton had surgery to repair his nose about a week later (which he says wasn’t such a big deal given that in the past two years he has also torn a bicep tendon off of its bone and torn his ACL).

“I want to thank you guys at Oakley for making such a great pair of glasses,” he says. “If not for those I might be getting fitted for a glass eye.”

Exhaustive cell phone searches aren’t exactly commonplace today, but they’re growing more and more frequent as law enforcement begins to realize how much incriminating information modern smartphones tend to contain. The rapidly growing digital forensics industry already offers a range of tools to law enforcement designed for pulling data off of mobile phones, and entire books have been written on such topics as the forensic analysis of the iPhone operating system.

Unfortunately, few consumer-grade smartphones support full device encryption. While there are numerous smartphone apps available for encrypting particular types of files, such as emails (i.e. NitroDesk TouchDown), voice calls (i.e. RedPhone), and text messages (i.e. Cypher), these “selective” encryption tools offer insufficient protection unless you’re confident that no incriminating evidence exists anywhere on your smartphone outside of an encrypted container.

Your mind is your most important tool. Gear, supplies? Some good suggestions. Good discussion of Fluidity: always be moving, don’t be stagnant. Building in redundancies – have a backup plan.