Weapons of mass distraction

Swords, guns and arrowheads fill Henderson collector's home

"I've wanted a Gatling gun since I saw War Wagon with John Wayne," says Jim Hrisoulas. "I missed one by 10 minutes at a Soldier of Fortune convention a few years back. I was making good money at the convention. I probably had $18,000 in my pocket. The guy wanted $9,000 for a really nice one. I thought about it, I thought about it, I thought about it. Then my wife said, 'Get it. You've wanted one as long as I've known you.' I went back to buy it and he was filling out the paperwork for another buyer. But I just lucked into this one."

There it stands, a gleaming, brass-and-hardwood lead-slinging beasty, in the corner of the kitchen of his Henderson home.

Hrisoulas is a master bladesmith, and the author of three books on the subject. A fourth is in the works. Much of the space not taken up with antique weapons is filled with his own work. He forges working blades, sturdy, sharp and solid. In an impromptu demonstration, he grasps an unfinished blade in his bare hands and shaves off delicate spirals of metal from a chunk of angle iron.

He walks down the hallway of his house, casually ticking off the weapons hung on the wall. "Masai, Persian, Greek. Greek, Moro, Chinese, Persian, Bronze Age Chinese." The walls are festooned with a wicked assortment of spears, knives and bronze arrowheads. The first antique weapon he bought, a kris knife, is there. He got it at an antique store in Philadelphia when he was 10 or 12, beginning a collecting mania that continues to this day.

Hrisoulas says there are literally hundreds of antique edged weapons in the house. "Especially when you figure in the arrowheads," he says. He opens a drawer and pulls out a box of centuries-old bronze arrowheads and begins casually flicking through them, like a kid looking for a beloved flavor of jelly bean.

He owns several bronze Chinese pieces dating from 2,800 to 2,000 years old. "Those are getting hard to find," he says. As well as being his oldest pieces, they're his most monetarily valuable--a distinction he makes clear. His most valuable piece sentimentally is a modern sword from Southeast Asia. It's a tribal blade from somewhere in the region of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. It was used to execute prisoners. There is no denying the striking, spooky beauty of the blade. It has an elegant curve and fine inlays of red and yellow gold. It's light and sharp with the balance of the weight toward the tip. It feels like it could chop through six inches of neck with no problem at all.

"It was given to me during the pull-out from the embassy in '75," says Hrisoulas. A simple sentence that implies a lot of narrative. When asked how close he was to the last helicopters leaving Vietnam, he laughs. "Too close...too close."

Asked if he's ever felt there were times when rather than owning the collection, the collection owned him, he replied, "Oh yeah. I'm going to have to build a room just for the Gatling gun and the cannons."--F. Andrew Taylor