Very well said, Bob, on behalf of us all.

Cal, thanks so very much for taking the time to let us know this history. And while you may be a Canuck, I hope you make it to a 4th of July party in Mexico with some of your US buddies. I am sure we'll all be thinking of you and the two Phils as we celebrate our national holiday, wherever we are.

Yes, happy 4th of July to everyone of you.

I have nothing to add to this rather long thread, except for (perhaps) one thing; in 2002 just after Susan Roettinger told me to come and pick up her dad's gun, I came back with it here to the store and in my excitement wrote a rather long email to all my Canadian shooting buddies detailing the whole experience and how happy I was to have the gun sitting there in front of me. Included with the email was a photo I have of Phil on my office wall, taken 1947 or so, when he won his National Championship. Also included was a small blurb from our local English Language Newspaper "Atencion" about Phil, just after his death.
I no longer have that email in my computer system (which has had it's poor struggling memory wiped clean about 5 times since 2002 by any number of viruses abounding the Internet here in Mexico) and I no longer even have a copy of the Atencion article. I don't even have the scanned copy of my Office Wall photo anymore within my computer memory.
I have sent out an email to all my Canadian shooting buddies -- many of them very anal about keeping things years and years on their hard-drives -- in the hopes that one or two of them may still have this email that they could send back to me. For many of them, I was their first IPSC Director and their introduction to the joy of shooting and my personal vanity would like to think they would hold onto everything I send them as if it were the "cherished word", although reality is probably a bit more bitter I am afraid.
As with most things I write, it is rather long-winded, but will be interesting to read (even for me) as it was written immediately after the event. If I can get a copy of it, we will see how well my memory of specific instances is after the passage of time.
Should I get the email returned to me -- with the photos -- I will send it FORWARD to friend Onomea (who is mainly responsible for all this anyways for having taken the time to write me requesting more info on the gun in the first instance after reading a small blurb I wrote in another section of this forum) and hopefully he can find a way of posting it in it's entirety as sort of a "finale" to this thread with the picture of Phil and the short article about him from the local paper.
If I can get the email, you will find it here then. If not, well, you still all pretty much know what I know about the revolver in any case.
Keep the faith.
Cheers!
Cal

Thanks, Cal, I know we all look forward to reading it if it surfaces.

I too have been following this thread. It is one of the most interesting threads I have read on this forum.

I look forward to reading the orginal email Cal sent to his friends, as well as seeing the old photos.

Thanks again for providing not only an interesting "read" but some insight into history!

Cal,

I just stumbled across this great thread and it really resonates with me. My father just passed away a few weeks ago, and he was a Marine in the 50s and 60s.

I have a good friend who was a Marine in WWII and is about to turn 81. There is a nearly fifty year difference in our ages but like you and Phil, we really hit it off and he tells me things that he probably doesn't feel comfortable talking about with many other people.

After my father passed away, my friend sent me a little present to just distract me a bit he said. It was DCM sales Remington 03A3, minty, with its paperwork from DCM where it had been sold in 1963 for $14.50 including shipping. Just an amazing and correct specimen. My friend said he knew how much I had admired it when I last visited. I was pretty speechless, but thanked him and assured him it would have a good home.

Thanks for sharing your story about a great gun, a fine man who led a fascinating life, and a unique friendship.

Clyde;
You have a very unique opportunity having made a friend who was in World War II. That War was a defining moment in Human History and to be able to talk and correspond with someone who was "there" is something very few people now have the chance to do.
Make sure you talk to him as much as you get a chance to do so, and remember; if he doesn't tell you things, then perhaps much of what he knows and saw will die with him -- and perhaps he has never told anyone.
I always went into my discussions with my father or with the two Phils or with some of my father's friends with the attitude that I should not be "pushy", but at the same time if I did not "hang in there" to hear what they might have to say then perhaps some vital snippet of their lives would pass on with them and NOBODY would ever know what that snippet had been.
The people who fought World War II saw and did some pretty incredible things -- much of it never recorded -- and now they are passing on at a rapid rate and soon there will be none left. As I said, talk to your friend as much as you can -- be understanding -- and I am sure he will appreciate it. If he tells you something neat you think you can share, come back and tell us. You might be the only person left to draw some vitally unrecorded piece of human-interest-history from the mind and mouth of your distinguished vet. Don't screw up and don't piss him off.
Not having a digital camera myself, I cannot easily get more photos of Phil's gun, but I will when I get the chance. That aside, I'd like to see a photo or two of your 1903 if you can take some. I realize it's not a S&W but I think you could post it here anyway as it is story related. Someone will let us know if they don't think that's cool but I have a feeling everyone reading this thread would probably be interested in seeing it too.

I have not yet found the original email I intend to post if I can get my hands on it, but do not dispair, I continue to look and someone somewhere might have it. Also, one my Store's old computers now belongs to one of my employees, and I intend to ask her if I can pop by her house to check the hard-drive; it is probably there because it would have been THAT computer I used to send the original email.
So I continue to look. Don't give up hope just because it takes time!
Cheers!
Cal

Cal,

I will get some pictures of the 03A3 uploaded and post them for you. It is really a beautiful rifle, with the correct and pleasing mix of blued parts with parkerized receiver and barrel that original 03A3s came with. I'm sure they looked like hell to the oldtimers used to the finely machined pre-war 1903s, but its gorgeous to me.

My friend said he took it to the range and put some rounds in it, but just couldn't bring himself to fire it since it had probably survived over sixty years without being fired since leaving the Remington plant. I can certainly understand that and I will probably not shoot it myself. I have a good "shooter" 03A3 for that.

You're right about it being a unique opportunity to have a friend who served in WWII. They are getting fewer every day. When I visited Hawaii two years ago with my wife, I visited the Punchbowl cemetery for my friend. His friend and squad leader is buried there, KIA on Okinawa May 10, 1945 while serving with the 1st Marine Division. We took some pictures of the grave for him. It was very surreal, and very humbling, standing at the grave of a man dead for so long, a stranger to me, but a good friend to a good friend of mine and someone who is still remembered by an old man in Texas. Now he is remembered by me, too.

My friend gave me something else, too, when he gave me the rifle. My Dad had served in the 1st Marine Division in Vietnam- my friend's old outfit in WWII- and my friend gave me a 1st Division patch with the number one with "Guadalcanal" on it. That was just as meaningful to me as the rifle.

Best Regards,
Clyde

Say, is this a great thread or what?!

Cal, if you find that email and pics, I’d be happy to post for you.

Clyde, my dad was with the 1st Marine Division, too, as a 1st lieutenant and interpreter of Japanese. Here’s the patch you’re talking about. This is from my dad's uniform:



Not sure where this next one was taken. Somewhere out there in the Pacific in 1944. My dad is the tallest guy in the back row.



In 2005, on the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Okinawa, I published the following letter in the Japan Times:

Recently I have read articles and editorials about the Battle of Okinawa in The Japan Times and other newspapers. I have noted how some writers tie the battle to modern-day unhappiness with the American military presence on the island or to the war in Iraq. My late father's experience might be of interest.

A U.S. Marine Corps officer, he participated in the battle, serving as a Japanese-language interpreter for the U.S. forces. When I was a little boy half a century ago, he told me how the Japanese Imperial Army troops drove civilians on Okinawa between themselves and the American guns. He told of a young woman who held scissors to her throat in terror as he approached but whom he was able to convince to surrender. He spoke of a soldier he encountered in a cave, armed with a "bomb on a stick," to whom he said, "You don't want to die . . . I don't want to die." Somehow they both emerged alive into the sunlight.

My father went on to a long career with the CIA in Asia and Europe. He lived to see -- much to his satisfaction -- the Berlin Wall fall. On his deathbed in 1995, though, he looked to Okinawa in 1945 and said the most worthwhile thing he had ever done in his life was to convince Japanese civilians and soldiers to surrender rather than kill themselves.

In a letter to my eldest son, who is half Japanese, he once wrote: "We did not hate the Japanese soldiers. They were doing their job just as we were doing ours. We respected the ordinary Japanese soldier -- and he was a very good soldier. . . . We were mad at the people who started the war and wouldn't stop it even after all chances of winning were gone."

Few things are black and white. I would like to say to those who resent the U.S. military presence on Okinawa, and to those who think badly of the U.S. military in general, to remember what one proud U.S. Marine thought was the most worthwhile accomplishment of his life.

I also had a couple of sentences in there about how my dad believed that the atomic bombing of Japan had saved his life, as well as that of many other American soldiers and Japanese soldiers and civilians. The editors cut that out. Still a bit too raw, perhaps.

It’s been 12 years now, but I continue to miss my dad a lot. As Cal has written, there are so many things that I wish I had thought to ask him. The men and women of that generation were, indeed, the Greatest Generation.

I think I know what your father meant when he said the dropping of the atomic bomb saved his life.
At Stan Levine's Birthday party, as the two Phil's and I looked on, Stan Levine talked about the dropping of the atomic bomb.
He said, "I had invaded Tarawa, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. The day they dropped the bomb, I was in a landing craft off of Okinawa practising to invade Japan. I had survived three landings, and I knew that I would not survive another. I thanked God the day they dropped that bomb because it meant I wasn't going to have to go."
That may not be an exact-to-the-word quote because of the passing of years, but it is pretty damned close.
Great photo of that patch, by the way. I continue searching for my original email, but as I said, this may take a bit of time.
Cal

Yesterday on the way to do my bank deposit I saw Holly Sawyer, formerly Holly Roettinger (Phil's ex-wife mentioned throughout this thread) on the street. Holly lives in San Antonio, Texas these days. She is a cancer survivor and I must say she is still looking great -- and she has to be in her 70's now. She is here visiting old friends for another week.
Anyway, I stopped to talk to her for about half and hour and I told her all about this thread and this forum. She asked a lot of questions (I have sent her via email the entire thread so far) and at one point she actually started to sniffle when I told her how well received the stories of her husband and her husband's gun had been by the readers of this forum.
"You're not supposed to cry!" I told her.
"It's a happy cry," she responded. "I'm just so happy that people out there want to remember these guys and what they did."
Holly told me when her cancer was detected -- before Phil's death -- that she had gotten a direct offer from Cuba and the Fidel Government to come to Cuba for Cancer treatments. She told me that this had surprised her, but that she had no doubt that the offer was genuine and that it had stemmed from Phil's involvement in getting Fidel released from a Mexican Jail back in the times when Phil was "the man". Anyway, she said she did not go to Cuba but opted for some alternative treatments in the U.S. which appear to be working well because she is in good health.
Anyway, I asked her to read the forum thread and if she had something to add, to send it along for posting. We'll see if she does or not. I asked her if she had a copy of the original email I sent out when I got the gun (because I had sent it to her at the time) and she said she doubted it because she had switched computers about 3 years ago. This would make sense because that is about the last time I heard from her, so I suspect she "lost" a lot of stuff at that point from the way she talked about it.
If Holly elects to write either me or the forum directly about Phil, she could really fill in a lot of details of his C.I.A. service because she was his wife and was there for most of it. I am not trying to dangle carrots here, I am just stating that I ran into her and hopefully we might hear something from her. I certainly can't add much, but perhaps she has a gem to two she might decide to share.
Cal

Cal, Holly should be rightly proud of her husband's service. I think it's great that you've sent her the comments here and she can see the interest her husband and his pistol have generated.

Best regards to Holly and to a continued clean bill of health .

calmex: Thank you for sharing your story with us. You have been blessed in your friendship with those two heroes, and you have shared that blessing with us.

Last night I was going through this thread with my girlfriend, who doesn't speak English all that well, nor does she read it. So, I spent more than an hour translating it all for her while we sat in front of the computer with Phil's gun laying there on the computer table. (She has actually fired it, about a year or so ago when we took it out with us to go shooting.)
At the end of having the forum translated for her, she asked me; "Why didn't you ever talk to Phil more about Cuba and Guatemala?" She's Mexican, so obviously more interested in the idea of CIA Intervention in Latin American affairs than in the history of any war that Mexico really had no part of.
I replied that, at the time, I was much more interested in Guadalcanal and the Island Campaigns and the fighting against the Japanese and there's only so much time in life, right? Phil and I just never got around to talking that much about Cuba or Guatemala, and I always felt that if there was something Phil wanted to tell me, he'd tell me. I know he felt that the U.S. went into the Guatemala thing way too heavy handed, and that he felt sure that innocent people had been killed who hadn't needed to be killed -- he testified about that late in his life.
"As to Cuba and Fidel," I told her, "he really only ever said something to me about it on one occasion."
"Oh?" she replied. "What did he say?"
With a grin I repeated what Phil had told me about the Fidel relationship once. He said to me, I told her, "THAT one didn't turn out quite the way I had planned."
Cal

Hi Cal,

Sorry its taken me this long to reply again, but you said you'd like to see some images of the 03A3 I was recently gifted by my Marine WWII friend. Hopefully, as you said, it will be cool to post a few pics of it here.

This rifle came to me with its original DCM sales paperwork from 1963. Sales price then including shipping was $14.50. All original and correct, a really nice old 03A3.