Life at C/D Can Be Weird, Like That Time I Was Pulled Over in a RHD Wagon with a 48-Inch Machine Gun in the Back

From the May 2017 issue

When I joined C/D, I had no idea how many peculiar situations it would foist upon me. Here’s one: I wrote a story about a $105,000 SVI Raptor [August 1996]—not the Ford truck but a Chevrolet Suburban with a 420-hp supercharged 454-cubic-inch V-8.

The engine didn’t make the Suburban interesting. Here’s what made the Suburban interesting: Where the rear seats used to be was a General Electric product that wasn’t a dishwasher. In fact, it was a GE GAU-17, which is a 48-inch swiveling machine gun capable of firing 3000 7.62-millimeter NATO rounds per minute. The weapon hung on a spring-loaded thingy that caused it to perform a jack-in-the-box through a custom sunroof.

SVI Raptor.

Harrison eventually went on to build 17 Raptors, including a version intended for the U.S. Secret Service. “But in the demo, the feeder/delinker malfunctioned,” he recalls. “We sent a helicopter that returned with the part. Now back together, the ­Raptor burst into flames. It’s funny now.”

He told me that the major hurdle in Raptor production had been GM, which kept losing his Suburbans. “I was notified that a dozen had been shipped,” he remembers, “and I’d paid for them. And then the Suburbans disappeared. GM couldn’t find them for 10 weeks. Finally I got a call. The cars were in Denver and would be shipped by truck to me. They didn’t arrive. Instead, they were put on a train to Chicago. I was later told that GM used me as a case study in how not to ship cars.”

Back in those days, Harrison was also assembling some 20 supercharged and intercooled C5 Corvettes and Impala SSs—“the one that looked like a suppository,” he says, “but in stock form was considerably slower acting.”

So, we’ve stayed friends. You never know when you’ll need a diplomat. Plus, Harrison is the only man I know who was asked to leave Elon Musk’s SpaceX offices in California. “Elon said that his goal was to colonize Mars, which he would subdivide into parcels to be sold off. I told him my choice would be a parcel to locate a travel agency selling tickets back to Earth. Elon cut me off, asked what I wanted. To invite him to a conference, I said. He didn’t do things like that, he said. He was a rocket engineer. Plus, he didn’t go anywhere he couldn’t make money, and if there was nothing else . . . Well, he left. And so I contented myself wishing for the failure of all of his enterprises.”

Harrison is now 73, 61 days older than Mick Jagger, as he likes to say, and is a professor emeritus at the Air Force Academy, where Mick is not. During his three years in Jordan, two assassination plots unfolded against him. On a beach in Aqaba, he taught Queen Noor to play blackjack. He is the only man I know who met Charles Lindbergh. He is the only man I know who worked on the White House staff. And he is the only man I know who fabricated a baby seat “from steel piping covered in vinyl and kept in place by friction.”

Readers sometimes write to ask why life at C/D seems weird. That’s why.