11/01/2022
VDARE.com writer and friend Hugh McInnish died at the age of 88 in August. His obituary is here, and he’s buried in Maple Hill Cemetery in Huntsville, AL. McInnish was literally a rocket scientist (he’d say “engineer”) who worked on the missiles that General Dynamics supplied to the Strategic Air Command during the Cold War, and the much smaller TOW rockets that were used in Vietnam to kill North Vietnamese tanks [Germany Tests Airborne TOW. Ft Rucker, AL: US Army Aviation Digest, by Hughie J. Mclnnish, Jr., March 1972, pp. 10-13]
McInnish was active in his local Republican Party, until they cancelled him for Noticing publicly, in a 2011 letter to the DOJ, that differential rates of discipline for black students were caused by differential crime rates. See my Hugh McInnish’s Hate Facts, Disparate Impact, And The Law, or for the opposite view, this: Alabama GOP Official Explains Racial Disparities In Schools: ’Blacks Misbehave,’ by Tanya Somanader, ThinkProgress.org, March 2, 2011.
In a 2018 column written after the Parkdale mass murder, argued for arming teachers, McInnish stated that, while a normal Southerner, and a member, on Second Amendment principle, of the NRA, he was not part of today’s Gun Culture 2.0, with its Glocks, IWB holsters, and “modern sporting rifles” aka AR-15s.
He wrote
I own no handguns, no semi-automatic rifles, nor have I fired one this side of Vietnam, where I was a tech rep with the TOW program — a very small guided missile, which killed enemy tanks, like the one pictured…
I added the picture of the tank, and this note:
VDARE.com note: That’s McInnish himself pictured with a CAR-15.
That was because I’d happened to be reading ATGMs Go to War, Vietnam, Weaponsman.com, 1972, February 4, 2015, by the late Kevin R. C. O’Brien and recognized a familiar name, not because McInnish had boasted about it himself.
A tech rep is a guy who works for the company that makes military hardware, and goes to visit the troops, usually at places like Fort Benning or Fort Rucker, to explain how they work. It doesn’t usually involve getting close enough to the combat that you can climb on a burnt-out tank killed with your employer’s missile, while carrying a loaded carbine, but for Hugh McInnish it did:
Meeting McInnish at a conference once, I asked him if his civilian employer had required him (38 years old in 1972) to go to Vietnam, or if he was a volunteer.
He said, “I didn’t volunteer — I insisted.”
That was Hugh McInnish. At age 77, he skydived over Alabama, just for the hell of it.
His obituary says
Hugh lived the lives of ten men — he was an American Patriot, he volunteered to go to Vietnam to train soldiers on the use of the TOW Missile System, he wrote two books, went skydiving, and the Beaujolais parties he hosted into his 80s were an annual spectacle, but to his family, he was Pops.
Rest in peace.
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