A saw these fellas hunting doves on the Outdoor Channel.
They are somewhere in Africa, They have seats on the hood of a jeep or land rover and they are blazing away at the birds flushed by the vehicle. As if firing from a moving car doesn’t seem dangerous enough, there is another car beside them.
Doesn’t this sound like a setup for * The Short Happy Life Of Francis MacComber*?
There’s a road near here that you can drive down on the first day of dove season and see guys in lawn chairs with ice chests full of beer. A seat on the hood of a jeep sounds safer to me.
My mom is convinced that the windshield of her jeep folds down so you can shoot from it while driving. It makes me glad she doesn’t hunt!
She might be right. I’ve never actually heard an explanation for why jeep windshields fold down, but every picture I have ever seen of a WWII jeep (Willys MB or Ford GPW) that has a machine gun mounted on the back also has the windshield folded down.
Jeeps (small “J” – they didn’t become Jeeps until Willys-Overland got the right to the trademark) were designed to military specifications. IIRC, one of the specs was that the scout car should not be more than three feet in height. (If I did remember that correctly, I don’t know how the steering wheel fit into the specs.) I assume this is to make it easier to hide in a combat situation. Also, glass is reflective. Military jeeps would have their windscreens folded down and there was a canvas cover for it. This prevented the sun from giving away their positions.
Many people think that windscreens on newer Jeeps (the YJ and the TJ) don’t fold. From the Willys MB through the Jeep CJ-7 it could be folded by simply unlatching it. Nowadays I think you need to remove a couple of screws and also the fore-and-aft roll cage tubes – but it can be folded on the Wranglers.
I run The CJ2A Page. There’s a link there called “Books” where you can see various books about the Jeep. One ofthe best references I’ve seen for the history of the Jeep is Jeep: Illustrated Buyer’s Guide by Jim Allen. It covers the development from their inception through 1999.
You can read about the CJ3A and CJ3B jeeps at The CJ3B Page, which is run by a fine gentleman from Canada. (His page was the inspiration for my site.)
Now if only someone would make “The CJ-5 Page”, “The CJ-7 Page”, “The Wrangler Page” and “The Cherokee Page”, we could have a nice little Jeep ring!
Disclaimer
Oh – I should point out that while my site is not commercial, I do get a kickback from Amazon.com if you buy a book from my page. I say as much on the “Books” page. You can always go directly to Amazon or do a google search to find the book.
Except for that one page, The CJ2A Page is not commercial in nature, and I like to think you can get a lot of free information (old advertising, the entire owner’s manual, colour chips, etc.) if you’re interested in the model.
As a boy I was instructed that any hunter who discharges a firearm from a motor vehicle is an unsportmanlike shitheel, but it’s not my place to say that the standards we observed in Wisconsin should apply in Africa.
However, I once had to perform typesetting and printing for a convention of African big-game guides (mostly price lists - wildebeast $1350.00, springbok 1100.00 etc). and I can relate that most of them were indeed shitheels.