Battle Belt

I was standing in my gear room and realized that I purchased an HSGI battle belt back in December of 2013 and never did anything with it. I  also had been given a Ka-Bar GI knife that my wife bought me for deployment sitting on a shelf unused.  So all this stuff was kind of sitting all in one place the gear room. Idle minds.

So I got to thinking, knife? belt? knife? belt? (create a visual in your mind of a man standing there with a belt in one hand and a knife in the other). Cue the AC/DC music, You’ve been Thunderstruck!

I pulled about 4 ft. of para cord off the spool and sat down in the front room with my pile of toys to formulate a plan on how to setup the belt, the knife and misc. molle pouches all together.

Below is the end result. Taking the para cord (or 550 cord) I wove through the pals webbing and the slots on the sheath pulling the cord tight enough to hold everything in place but not so tight to pucker the belt and cause it to bunch up underneath. The knife kind of falls about where my right kidney is. Easy to reach, doesn’t poke me in the back or the butt when I sit down. I am not a knife fighter, or have had any training with a knife so the intent is just to have a sturdy knife available if needed or maybe just to scare the hell out of someone. I look at it this way, if I am pulling a knife on you, I am out of ammo, and I can’t use my rifle as a club. That means I messed up big time and probably should be dead anyway.

When I went through Naval Aircrew School I was issued a Ka-Bar. It has long since been lost or forgotten someplace. Wish I still had it. I carried that thing all over Southeast, and Southwest Asia including the extreme North Pacific (Like above the Arctic Circle) in my survival vest. Which no one carried much in our “survival vests”. We were always told, you have 48 hours to survive before pickup. After that you are on your own. 48 hours? shit, no problem! I can sleep 48 hours and I will have a helicopter hovering over me before I wake up.

In hindsight? a Ka-Bar, no food, no water (Ok we did have a pint bottle of water tied to the inside of the vest), a signal mirror, a couple of flares while wearing a thin flight suit and boots. Going down over the Kamchatka Peninsula during the height of the Cold War a Ka-Bar wouldn’t have saved me then either. But, when you are 20 something no Soviet, or Mother Nature was going to kill me. Let alone the act of getting shot down and crashing an airplane. I refer to that period of my 20’s and part of my 30’s as my dumbass decades.

Sorry I digressed with a personal story.

This little project kind of falls into the tier 1, tier 2, tier 3 levels of gear that Mason Dixon Tactical talked about that I linked to in a previous post.

 

Granted I will probably only ever use the knife to open a MRE pack (sad I know) but it is available for use if need.

Have you ever read the history of KaBar? This is via Wikipedia:

The owner of the KA-BAR trademark, the Union Cutlery Co. of Olean, New York, began using the name on its knives and in its advertising in 1923 after receiving a testimonial letter from a fur trapper, who used the knife to kill a wounded bear that attacked him after his rifle jammed. According to company records, the letter was only partially legible, with “ka bar” readable as fragments of the phrase “kill a bear”. In 1923, the company adopted the name KA-BAR from the “bear story” as their trademark. Beginning in 1923, the KA-BAR trademark was used as a ricasso stamp by Union Cutlery Co. on its line of automatic switchblade pocket knives, including the KA-BAR Grizzly, KA-BAR Baby Grizzly, and KA-BAR Model 6110 Lever Release knives.

The rest of the article can be found here, Ka-Bar.