Perhaps no piece of equipment is so anachronistic on the battlefield as the bayonet. Mention fixing bayonets and you think of Gettysburg and the battle of Little Round Top, with Joshua Chamberlin and the 20th Maine executing a right hand wheel formation… well, OK, that is what I think of, anyway.Bayonets are seldom used anymore in actual conflict, with war being a much more hands off sort of business these days. The Marines, however, are always a very hands on group, so I was tickled to see their latest version of the bayonet.

Perhaps no knife has so entered into the American mystique as the Bowie Knife.

Colonel James Bowie was a soldier and pioneer who had a huge role in the battle for Texan independence from Mexico, and died at the battle of the Alamo. However, millions of people around the world know of him only because of his knife.

In 1830, Bowie went to Arkansas blacksmith James Black and presented him with a wooden model of a knife and asked Black to make it for him. Black did, and the result was the first real Bowie knife. That first knife is lost to history, but because of all the copies that were made, we have some idea of what it looked like.