Foxholes and Dogtags

Basic Rifle Marksmanship

There are a lot of acronyms in the Army, if you haven't figured that out yet. BRM is one of the ones in Basic Training that you get to know really quick.

When one joins the fabulous organization we call the US Army, there is a chance that, whether male or female, you will face combat one day. Everyone needs to be able to protect themselves if such an even were to arise. The basic defense weapon of the Army is the M16-A2 Automatic Rifle.

A lot of Basic Training is centered on the familiarization of this weapon. You get to know your weapon. Really Well. Almost to well. In fact, at some point of your military career, you will sleep with your weapon in your arms.

Although this is not Full Metal Jacket, you may even give your weapon a name. In basic training, mine was Jake. For a while after Basic Training, every weapon I got was called Jake. Now I call my current weapon Ralph, but that's beside the point. Jake turned out to be my best friend. Because in real combat, your best friend is your rifle. It may one day save your life.

Well, I might as well get it over with. There are certain rules and regulations regarding your rifle. For one thing, it is a rifle, a weapon, an M16, Jake even, BUT it is NOT a Gun. Never ever EVER call your rifle a gun with a drill sergeant in hearing distance. You will suddenly find yourself doing weapons PT with your rifle. And weapons PT is not fun.

BRM was one of my favorite things about BCT. It consisted of marching around with a weapon, called Weapon Drill & Ceremony, low crawling with it, cleaning it, and of course, best of all, shooting it!

We took the rifles to the ranges to qualify on them, which consisted of hitting a target target anywhere from 50 to 300 meters away. We called these baddies Pop Up Joes. They would pop up, if we hit them, they went down. We qualified on these bad boys by tearing them up. I love qualifying on the weapon.

Building up to qualification, however, takes a lot of time. First we go to the range and practice shooting at targets, without really shooting at them. More of a bang bang kind of deal. I thought this was kind of cheesy myself. Then we go to this big building where we work on trigger squeeze, breathing, aiming so that we hit the target and don't jerk the rifle around. This is called the dime and socket method, or some such name, where you balance a dime on the end of your rifle and try to aim and pull the trigger without knocking it off. It's kind of tough. We also go to the weaponeer which is a lot of fun, and also shadow targeting, to see how well our groupings are.

Now we are ready for the real thing. We are given live rounds, moved onto the range like cattle, and told step by step what exactly we are expected to do. If we don't follow the guy in the control tower, well, there are a good 7 or 8 drill sergeants watching our every move and ready to take us out if we try to do anything funny. Like shoot somebody. That would be suicidal. You have a lot of people with live rounds.

The first thing we go over is grouping. We try to get groups of three within a certain area, which tells us that our aim is together and we aren't all over the place. Then we zero the weapon, which brings the groups to the center of the target so that we actually hit what we aim at. And then we go to the ranges. And get lots and lots and lots of practice.

And once we qualify, we do a lot of other fun stuff on ranges with weapons. Like the 3 to 5 second rush, where idiots like me bash their faces on the carrying handle of the M16.

There is something very army about the smell of firing a fully loaded M16. The gun
powder, the smoke stinging your eyes, the kick from the round. Whenever I get a weapon in my hands, I always reminisc about the good old days of basic training. Ah, those were the best times!

Basic Rifle Marksmanship

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