Much of the week was spent refining our marksmanship skills and learning a few cultural does and don't about life in Iraq - i.e. Never ask an Iraqi to take off his head gear or show him your shoe. In addition we learned about the subservient role of women in the Middle East - navigating that will be an internal challenge. Perhaps I will have a chance to write about more on that in the coming months ...
But for today the main message is learning to shoot. As a teacher I am quite impressed with the weapons training that we've received. The Navy's stance on personal weapon training is quite sterile. Our guns are cleaned by others, our targets are always bright white and neither the targets nor the shoots move vary much (if at all). Not so in the Army. The targets move, the shooters move, we clear our one jams and clean our own weapons. Making that shift and doing it safely is the word for this week. In the words of students at St. Joe, I would like to give a shout out to all of our Army Drill Instructors in this blog as they helped me and 200 other fine Navy sailors (some of whom never shot until this week) make the transition.
To get us to the point of moving and shooting with a loaded weapon, we started our mornings between 3:30 and 5:30 am everyday. The only plus to that was being able to watch the sun come up in SC, which by the way is quite beautiful. During the week we each shot about 720 rounds of ammunition. Here I am on one of the ranges getting ready to shoot. If you notice the dirt on my gear, that is from laying in the wet mud/clay/sand mixture during a shoot (and the rain) the previous day.
Now learning to shoot also requires some interesting classes, so in addition to spending time on the range we went to class. Here is a friend of mine during one of those fine classes :-). Actually here is a friend of mine waiting for classes to start.
And speaking of waiting, we spend a lot of time waiting in lines to accomplish just about everything. In the Navy we say that we do more before 9 AM than most people do all day. In the Narmy we say that we waste more time before 9 AM that most people do all day. For those of you now me even moderately well, you can imagine how much I enjoy that aspect of this training.
One of the things I DO enjoy though is meeting several fine sailors. Below is one of those fine sailors ... I think he's Popeye's younger brother.
Just so you can appreciate the level of training I included two videos from the week. Here is the M-16 qual range. Notice the targets moving up and down. I shot a 29 out of 40 (qualing required that hit 23 of 40 targets). It is quite a challenge given that we are wearing about 60 lbs of gear while shooting.
This next shoot is wear the Drill Sergeants make all of their money. The guns are loaded with live ammo that entire time. Their job here is to stress us out with running and yelling and then get us to shoot DOWN range at the targets. We had no issues during this class, but in classes past there have been some close calls.
I don't know if I will be able to write next week as I will be traveling through Kuwait. Standing by to see how that goes.
Peace and Merry Christmas (should I not be able to write),
Chris Culver
