The Chauchat is a machine gun with a reputation for being unreliable - a reputation that is only partially deserved. But what the Chauchat does completely deserve is its reputation for being notoriously difficult to shoot well. The grip design, stock design, sight placement, trigger, and the dynamics of its long recoil system all combine to make it both challenging and quite different from almost anything else out there.

We thought it would be fun to introduce a variety of people in the firearms community to the exciting world of running the Chauchat. No matter how much shooting a person has done, they have almost certainly not fired a Chauchat - and definitely not extensively. Nobody comes into this with prior experience, and so we should have some fun watching people discover just what the automatic riflemen of the American Expeditionary Force (as well as the French Army) had to work with during the Great War!

In our second episode, we have Neil Vermillion joining us. Neil is a US Army vet who spent time fighting ISIS as a volunteer in Kurdistan. More recently he was in Ukraine training Ukrainian special forces with Sons of Liberty International.