Police Defensive Firearms Training

He was the first man off the boat.
That was his assignment at Anzio. Someone had to walk into the water first — had to wade out and gauge the depth and make sure the men coming behind him could get to shore. James Arness was twenty years old. He was six feet seven inches tall, which made him the logical choice for a job that required wading through surf and not drowning. He stepped off the landing craft on January 22, 1944, and walked into the cold water of the Italian coast.
He made it to shore.
The battle that followed was one of the longest and most brutal of the Italian campaign. The Allied forces landed at Anzio expecting to break through German lines quickly and push toward Rome. Instead they were pinned down for four months in a grinding, costly stalemate. The Germans had the high ground. The killing was methodical and relentless.
On a moonless night in February, Arness was walking point on a night patrol through a vineyard when he heard voices and a scream. The Germans opened up. Machine gun fire tore through the dark and found him — shattering the bone in his lower right leg, splintering it in ways that would require multiple surgeries to repair and would never quite be repaired. A concussion gr***de lifted him off the ground. He went down in a vineyard in Italy at twenty years old and lay there while the battle went on around him.
He survived. He was evacuated. He spent months in a military hospital in Clinton, Iowa, undergoing surgeries. His brother Peter — who would later become actor Peter Graves — came to visit him and told him not to worry. He said he could probably find work in radio.
Arness was discharged on January 29, 1945, with a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and a $56-a-month disability pension. His right leg was now 5/8 of an inch shorter than his left. The doctors had done what they could. It was not enough to give him back what the vineyard in Anzio had taken.
He hitchhiked to Hollywood.
He had no plan except that he needed to do something and he had always liked performing. He worked as a radio announcer in Minneapolis first. Then he made the drive to California and started making the rounds. He was six feet seven and moved like a man who had learned to compensate for something — which was exactly what he was. He got small parts. Then slightly larger parts. Then he befriended a man named John Wayne.
Wayne recognized something in him. Not just the size, though the size helped — Arness was the only man in Hollywood who could stand beside Wayne without looking small. He signed Arness to his production company. He put him in films. And when a CBS radio drama called Gunsmoke was being adapted for television in 1955 and the producers needed a Marshal for Dodge City, Wayne made a call.
He told them: I know who your Matt Dillon is.
He was not wrong.
Gunsmoke premiered on September 10, 1955. It ran for twenty years and 635 episodes — the longest run by any actor in the same dramatic role in American television history. Forty million people watched it every week at its peak. For twenty years, every time James Arness walked toward the camera in that dusty main street, he walked with the specific gait of a man whose right leg was 5/8 of an inch shorter than his left — the consequence of a German machine gun in an Italian vineyard thirty years before.
Nobody watching thought it was a character choice.
Nobody thought about it at all.
They thought it was Matt Dillon. That was who they saw. And in a way they were right — because the man who had been the first off the boat at Anzio, who had walked into cold water so the men behind him could follow, who had spent months in a military hospital and then hitchhiked across the country and knocked on every door he could find — that man was exactly what Matt Dillon was supposed to be.
Wayne recorded the introduction to the first episode himself. He looked into the camera and told America who James Arness was.
He said: I think he'll be a big star.
He was right about that too.

“I cried the whole drive home. Not quiet tears. The kind that hit you in waves. I just needed to hold my own kids.”

Then you pull into your driveway. Your wife is there. Your kids are there. The dogs are losing their minds because you’re home. They had a peaceful night. You were in the trenches.

You want to be present. You really do. But your mind is still back on that call.”

Read: The box inside every cop https://trib.al/OiZm2sj