Bullseye

As many of you know, I am a KY National Guardsman. While to some this conjures up images like the one below (photo to be posted shortly), the National Guard has changed significantly since my early days of military service. But I digress....

This weekend my unit went to the range for weapons qualification. I must admit that I surprised myself. While I have always done well with my M16A2 rifle, I outdid myself on the zeroing range. Zeroing is the process of setting the weapon's sights correctly so that the firer can put rounds on the target consistently. You zero your weapon by firing three rounds at the target while trying to place those rounds as closely together as possible. This is called a shot group. You then adjust your weapon's sights in an attempt to move the center of your shot grouping to the center of the target silhouette. So your first priority is a good, tight shot group -- about the size of a half dollar or less.

This would be the first time I fired this particular weapon so, not unexpectedly, my first shot group was a little erratic. However my second shot group was the size of a dime. I was surprised. But what surprised me even more was that my third shot group was directly on top of the first. I had put six rounds on target within less than the size of a nickel! I don't mean to brag but that's tight!

After you zero your weapon, you can then move on to the qualification range. There are two primary types of ranges on which you can qualify with your weapon. The first is a range where targets pop up from the ground at distances of 50, 100, 150, 200, 250 and 300 meters from your firing position. They pop up and you have a limited amount of time to fire at them. You also only have 40 rounds to engage 40 targets. The second type of range is where you one paper target affixed to a frame that is 25 meters away from your firing position. There are 10 different silhouettes printed on the paper target to simulate targets at the distances previously mentioned. Once again, you have 40 rounds for 40 targets.

When I fired, I was doing great. I fully expected to get near a perfect score. But at the end of my second magazine of ammunition I experienced a jam. There was gravel in my magazine that kept the last three rounds from feeding into the weapon properly. So, while I was move from one firing position (from prone to kneeling), I loaded those last three rounds into my last magazine. On my last magazine, I now had only 60 seconds to fire 13 rounds instead of 10 rounds. I also had to remember which targets at which I had not yet fired. When the smoke cleared, I had "dropped" 35 targets out of 40 -- Sharpshooter classification. This is still a good score, but I had been hoping to make Expert. Maybe next time.