Elements of a Soldier

Home, Home on the Firing Range

I asked David to write up a blog that detailed what he does when he works with his unit on the firing range. For me, it was fun to read because I did the very same thing when I was in the Army. Each soldier's weapon must be personalized to match the eyesight of its "owner." Periodic fine tuning is also critical.

So Mom and Stepdad came up to visit on Monday and stayed the night. I had to get up around 3 in the morning the following day but it was no biggie, beings it is something I have done time and time again. So why did I have to get up so early?

My Troop had to go and shoot our guns. We call it "Going to the range." Every few months you have to take your rifle out and qualify with it. So how do you qualify? Well you have 40 pop up targets that you have to knock down. 23 out of 40 is passing. But this is no easy task. First of all, every weapon has adjustments on them. These adjustments are there to help each person, as all our eyes focus differently. So you first have to do what we call ZERO your weapon. This is where we take a 25 meter paper target that has squares on them and a tiny silouette of person. You aim with your weapon and fire three rounds as best as you can. Based off your 3 holes in the paper, you adjust your rifle so the next rounds get closer and closer to the so called bullseye.

Once you reach that point your weapon will be ZEROED good for qualification and for combat. You then move over to a different range which is right next to it where the pop up targets are at. You have 16 lanes for people to use and fire down. Each one has a foxhole and sandbags. There is a tower in the middle that us Sergeants use to control and command the range.

We give the soldiers a safety brief and tell them how the qualification is going to go. Once that is complete and all the soldiers have their ammo, we move them forward to the foxholes. They get 2 magazines with 20 rounds in each one. 20 pop ups will appear for the foxhole portion. The firer will shoot and try to hit all 20. Then after everyone shoots 20. They will exit the foxhole and lay down on the ground next to it where they will fire 10 rounds. Then after that they will go up on one knee and fire 10 rounds.

We have roughly 80 soldiers to get through this task. Not as easy as it sounds and there are more technicalities then I wrote. After the firing is finished we all wait till dark and repeat the process but use 80 rounds, 3 magazines. We let each firer shoot as fast as he can to simulate real combat. This is also motivating to the soldiers as they do not get to fire weapons like this as often as they would like.

Once that is complete we pick up all the shells and clean up the range. We then head back to our headquarters, lock up the weapons and make sure everything is accounted for. Then we all head home to pass out from a long days work.

Started day at 3am ended day 9:30 pm.