LtCol Jeff Cooper, R.I.P.

John Dean Cooper, Lieutenant Colonel, USMC, died yesterday at his home in Arizona. Known far and wide as “Jeff”– I just called him “colonel”– he was a Marine, a hunter, a marksman, and an author.

Cooper the Marine was Old Corps. Commissioned before Pearl Harbor, he attended The Basic School not at Quantico, but at the Philadelphia Navy Yard! Assigned to the Marine Detachment on the battleship Pennsylvania, he saw action aboard her through most of WWII. He later returned to active duty for the Korean War.

For his service alone he, like all the others of his generation, are worthy of praise and remembrance. However, the military today and the nation as a whole owe him a debt of gratitude for his singular contribution to firearms training. Along with a small group of friends in southern California, he developed what has come to be called the modern technique– the codified method of fast, accurate and effective pistol shooting and the mental conditioning for self-defense. He later founded Gunsite as a place where that technique could be taught to upstanding citizens from all walks of life, not just military and police, and the instruction was broadened to cover the rifle, the shotgun and other weapons.

Students of his carried this message far and wide into the police and military realms, where true practical marksmanship was perversely missing. Clint Smith, Pat Rogers, John Farnam, Pat Goodale and others are all Gunsite veterans, and through their own efforts have contributed mightily to the vast improvement in the field shooting capabilties of our men and women in uniform. (It is indicative of Cooper as a perfectionist that even as his last days were dawning, he decried the lax state of gunhandling skills in the military! If you were to point out that it was much worse before his doctrine began to circulate, he wouldn’t have stood for it. He had no use for relativism.)

Cooper the man was also “Old Corps.” A great believer in liberty, he was no egalitarian and saw no merit in anything “common.” He saw merit in achievement and in grace and refinement, which he was pleased to recognize in all people when he saw it. He cast a scornful eye on silliness but had a great sense of humor. One of his best quips ran like this: “In 1492 we threw the Moors out of Spain. Apparently, we didn’t throw them far enough.” He also had no patience with half-measures in wartime. “They don’t love us, and if they can’t be made to respect us,” he wrote, “they must be taught to fear us.” Too bad for us that L. Paul Bremer wasn’t a Gunsite graduate or a reader of Cooper’s Commentaries.

I am priviliged to have met him twice, although on both occasions he had long since retired from active instruction. On the first, I spent a most enjoyable morning with him and his wife in their truly wonderful home at Gunsite. I had been told beforehand that he was a great conversationalist but had no time for small talk. This proved to be true! Would that I had days or weeks, not hours, to sit and listen and learn.

So I salute you, LtCol Cooper. I am sure that after a long life lived to the fullest, you are seated with Hanneken, McBride, Puller, Rudel, Roosevelt, Churchill and the other greats of western civilization, enjoying the game just taken and the wine just uncorked, and discussing matters of great importance.