The Rifle: Andrew Biggio, Bud Gahs, and the 288th Signature

Erin with Andy Biggio and The Rifle © Erin Faith Allen

Andrew Biggio carried an M1 rifle into homes of WWII veterans across America, and he asked them to sign it, and he listened to their stories.

That is the premise of his acclaimed book The Rifle, and it is one of the most quietly powerful acts of documentation I have encountered. Biggio is a combat veteran himself, an infantry rifleman who served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the United States Marine Corps, the founder of the Boston Wounded Vet Run, a police officer, and an advocate for combat wounded veterans coming home from war. He understands, from the inside, what it costs a person to serve. The rifle is his way of making sure the men who carried one before him are not forgotten.

By the time my friend Bud Gahs, a 42nd Division veteran sat down with Andrew Biggio at the American Veterans Center Gala, the rifle already carried 287 signatures.

Bud became the 288th veteran to sign it. He was also the first veteran from the Rainbow Division to add his name to that barrel.

I watched his hands move across the rifle with the same steadiness they must have held one eighty years ago, and I thought about what it means to have a name on an object like that, not a record and not a file. A physical thing that other hands will hold.

Then Andy handed the rifle to me.

I have spent years inside the documentation of this war. I have held morning reports and personnel files and letters written by men who did not survive to see them answered. I know what primary source material feels like in your hands, the weight of it, the specific responsibility it carries.

This was totally different. Nearly 300 names. Nearly 300 men who said yes when someone asked them to be remembered in this particular way, and who said yes to duty all those years ago when they were called into service.