During our holiday in Texas last June we also visited a small town called Jefferson, an old place where time seems to have stopped.
In one of the old town buildings was a bookstore, and since i'm always on a quest for knife related literature (
) i took a peek inside.
Inside the shop i didn't find any books about knives, but what i did find was a short elderly gentleman, and we got into a conversation.
The gentleman turned out to be a Vietnam veteran, and among other things he told me that he still had his fixed blade from the Vietnam days.
Since the end of the war he had kept it in storage, but on my request he walked home (he lived very nearby) and got the knife for me to take a look at.
This is the actual knife, which i photographed inside a cafe across the street;
As you can see it's a Model 14 Attack with O1 carbon steel blade, complete with the name of the owner on the blade done by Randall.
Mr. Tidwell told me he had bought the knife in 1967 straight from Randall for about 70,00 dollars, just when he was about to enter the service.
For him it was a very expensive knife and he had to wait about 3 months (!) to get it, but it turned out to be money well spent as well as worth the wait.
The knife was used for literally everything; from cutting food and opening boxes to building shelters.
The back of the blade still shows the dents from heavy batonning and the blade has quite a bit of black corrosion spots, but it's still reasonably sharp (just under shaving) considering Paul had sharpened it for the last time in 1970, just before it went into storage.
Only once the knife was used in a combat situation, and this was at the time of the Tet fights.
During these events Paul was a radioman in a forward post, and during the actions he managed to temporarily lose his M16 rifle.
So for a short period his Randall was all he had, and it was what he used on a Vietcong soldier who got a little bit too close to him.
I told Paul his Vietnam era Randall was considered to be quite valuable nowadays, so i suggested to send it back to Randall for a check-up.
In my opinion it would be a real shame if such an heirloom would perish from corrosion in some cardboard box.
In the end he agreed with me, and also said that after the spa visit he would arrange for a nice display case for the knife instead of the storagebox it had been in all these years.
Now the story doesn't end here;
These days Paul Tidwell is the owner of a company which does research after the locations of sunken ships.
In the recent past he was involved in finding the Titanic as well as filming it.
At the moment however he is very busy with his next project: salvaging the Japanese WWII submarine I-52, which was sunk by the Americans in 1944.
The story itself was headline news in the US as well as in Japan, not only because of the human remains which could still be on board, but also because of a huge amount of gold bars and a few other things that Paul doesn't want to disclose at this moment.
National Geographic already did a documentary on Paul and his quest for the I-52, and Hollywood already started negotiations with him for the making of a movie, with some wellknown American and Japanese actors involved.
On YouTube there are several clips about the I-52 project, and in this one the man himself talks:
Me and my girlfriend spent the entire day with mr. Tidwell, we even got to handle some of the artifacts that were retrieved from the submarine during the first dive, and in the evening had dinner with him and his Hollywood representative.
I would say it was indeed a special day,
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