A More Perfect Past and the History of the P660 and Marathon SAR
In a more perfect past...
with the US version of the Marathon SAR still in development, the Blakjak was the watch that saw service alongside the Timex, Casio, and Suunto watches in the opening days of the war in Afghanistan.
SSGT Highrock, one of the Tornek-Rayville team’s contacts at Fort Campbell, had relayed details about the trouble within the development program for the Type 6 P660. In addition to the technical and vendor’s financial problems Highrock had given them a list of the features he would have preferred to see on the P660. Supplied with one of the P660 prototypes the Tornek-Rayville team went to their archives. The archive included additional details about the SandY bid’s design as well as their own rejected bid to supply a modern TR-900, which was deemed “too much watch” in the years after the fall of the Iron Curtain. There were no guarantees that a replacement P660 would be requisitioned by the DoD but Highrock, who had a knack for working the supply system to get his team what they needed, assured them that with his guidance they’d be able to figure something out. With all of the talk of “Peace Dividends” driving smaller budgets, Highrock had advised the TR team to use the P660 as a starting point and refine the design, upgraded the components, tighten the tolerances, increase the water resistance, add an optional 12-hr GMT bezel, build the watch around the tried and tested NH36 automatic movement and incorporate that other new cutting-edge technology non-radioactive SuperLumiNova, which debuted in 1994. The TR design team would call their version the Type 7B which would be a dive capable field watch compatible with radioactivity sensitive environments. They would champion the watch's ability to fill multiple roles and between the use of the NH36 movement and the SuperLumiNova the watches would require less maintenance. The TR team felt confident that the watch was tailored to the global low-intensity conflicts that the think tanks foresaw and that Highrock's teammates specialized in.
The history…
It appears that the company behind the P660 went bankrupt before it could deliver the watches to the US government. We have only ever seen New-Old-Stock watches for sale on the secondary market and never seen a P660 that was issued to a member of the US military. It may have been just as well since the P660 felt like an unfinished but promising collage of design ideas. Instead, the parts left over from the failed Sandy P660 ended up as the raw materials for the development of the Marathon SAR and the first watches to enter the Global War on Terror (GWOT) were digital watches by Timex, Casio and Suunto. While the Marathon SAR was not based on the Sandy P660’s design the development of the SAR was tied to the P660. What would eventually become the Marathon SAR was developed by a small team of watch enthusiasts in the San Francisco Bay area of California. Using parts from the Sandy P660 the team mocked up their own original design; the parts served as a shortcut around the more complicated machining while they tested design concepts. The first SARs entered the US inventory in 2002 and in 2005 the GSAR would close the design loop, featuring tritium gas tubes, an optional bracelet, and the US milspec 12/24 hour dial that bears a familial resemblance to the P660 and a long line of US milspec timepieces.
