An Army Of One

Larry Vickers is an army of one, a solo artist who adheres to the classic tradition of the gunsmithing profession by crafting his guns himself, without assistants or assemblers, each by hand, each as if it were the only gun he would ever make.

Pistolsmithing was not Vickers' calling in life. The son of a World War II veteran, Vickers knew from an early age what he wanted to be when he grew up--a soldier. "Like a lot of guys from that era, I was fascinated by the military. When my dad gave me that first .22, a single shot bolt-action rifle, that launched me. I never knew I would end up in the firearms business like this, but I was always very interested in guns," Vickers said.

Prior to graduating from high school, Vickers joined the army on a delayed entry program. When he graduated in 1981, he immediately signed up for the Special Forces Qualification Course, but before he could be admitted to the army's most rigorous training program, he first had to graduate from Airborne School. He entered the school along with 12 classmates who also aspired to SF; only two of them, Vickers and one other, made it through.

Now wearing a green beret, the badge of honor of Army Special Forces, Vickers was a Light Weapons Specialist. Of the Light Weapons class, Vickers said, "That course was kind of underwhelming. You learned how to disassemble all sorts of arms, but you didn't learn how to fix them if they broke. It was all book knowledge," Vickers recalled, his esteem for knowledge-through-experience coming through.

After serving four years, he quit the army and enrolled in a community college, earned a degree as a mechanical engineer and continued soldiering as an SF reservist. After graduating, the call of the wild returned and Vickers decided he would rather break things and blow them up than build them. He went active, rejoining the Special Forces.

This time, however, his assignment was outside our purview. Vickers will only say this about the job for which he was reactivated, a job he still currently holds: "I chose to pursue other avenues in the Special Forces community."

With boyish good looks and a ready smile, Vickers does not come across as a dagger-in-the-teeth killer. Yet he has operational experience in Panama and Desert Storm "and some other places I can't talk about."

Vickers is a shooter. He taught marksmanship in his unit as a firearms instructor and he competes regularly in IDPA. He competed in two USPSA Limited Nationals, '93 and '94, finishing 10th and ninth respectively. More recently, he won the "custom defensive pistol" division at the 2001 IDPA Mid-Winter Nationals at Smith & Wesson. We asked Vickers how relevant match shooting is to the real world:

"Putting a guy under the gun- making him shoot against the clock, with people watching, having to perform under pressure- that's a good thing. The only negative is you can pick up a lot of incredibly bad habits. IDPA is a lot better than IPSC in this regard, although IDPA has its problems too," Vickers said.

Referring to IPSC, Vickers said the two worst habits the sport ingrains are reloading away from cover and shooting totally unrealistic guns. "The triggers are way too light and everyone uses a compensator. The guns are the exact opposite of what you'd really want," Vickers said.

"A real guy showing up with a real gun in real gear doesn't stand a chance against the guys with the fancy guns. They either go home or they start falling into that USPSA swamp- they get sucked down, doing stuff that would get them killed.

"IDPA is much better. They force you to use cover and do it from concealment. But they have their drawbacks. There's no requirement on trigger pulls- you can use a pound and a half trigger and that's not realistic. Also, they use wimp ammo, 165 power factor in .45 ACP."

Vickers worships at the altar of accuracy. "I've always been an accuracy man. I understood sight alignment and trigger control from day one. Whenever I pressed the trigger, I expected something to happen," Vickers said, emphasizing the two fundamentals of markmanship.

Vickers is due to retire in slightly over two years. "Twenty years and 20 seconds," he jokes, referring to how long he will have spent in the army. We expect he'll find no shortage of offers within the firearms industry for his experience, knowledge and skill. In the meantime, he remains the only full-time, active Special Forces operator building custom 1911s- real guns for real guys. Larry Vickers is an army of one.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Publishers' Development Corporation
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group