Lots to catch up on. First week back at work complete.
The following story was brought to my attention by one of my fellow lieutenants: apparently, Trijicon (the company that makes the ACOG sights) has been inscribing Bible verses on their optics, and has been doing so for decades. I was pretty incredulous, but when one of my fellow lieutenants prompted me to look it up on Google, lo and behold, a slew of results popped up.
I've used ACOGs for years now, and not once did I ever suspect the last few digits in the string of characters on the bottom of the optic to be a reference to a Bible verse. I think everyone assumed that it was part of the model number, seeing as how it followed the numbers denoting the magnification factor and field of view of the optic, e.g., 4x32JN8:12 = four-power magnification, with a field of view of 32 degrees. The JN8:12 was just assumed to be some kind of obscure manufacturer's nomenclature. It will be interesting to see what waves this ends up making in the military community, especially for troops that are downrange in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Now that these Bible verse references are public knowledge, there is obviously an IO (information operations) disadvantage to walking around in-sector with an ACOG inscribed with a Bible verse. Nonetheless, Trijicon has provided only 100 kits (yes, you read that right: only 100) to the military to remove the etchings from the tens of thousands of optics that are currently in the inventory.
I suspect that units will probably etch over the verses at the local level. Regardless of the negative atmospherics of having these Bible references on the optics, Trijicon optics are some of the best out there and most widely used, and, barring a command directive, I highly doubt that soldiers or Marines are going to start dismounting ACOGs from their rifles because of bible verse references.
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