by Dick Culver

     OK Kiddies gather round and Ol’ Dad will give you a little historical background on right versus left handed firing, why things developed as they did and why we shoot prone slow fire.

     I cannot answer for the U.S. Army of course, because my experience lies strictly within the confines of the Corps, but here goes:

     The left handed versus right handed shooting debate started with the first issued "bolt action rifle" (as opposed to such things as Trapdoor Springfields, etc.). The (military) bolt action rifle was obviously designed for a right-handed shooter. Since 90% of all shooters are right handed, it made sense to make the bolt guns in a right hand only configuration. In combat a bolt action Krag, ’03 Springfield or 1917 Enfield would have been very awkward to manipulate in a fashion necessary to lay down a convincing base of fire. The powers-that-be simply did the only honorable thing and decreed that all shooters WOULD learn to shoot right handed, and of course they did!

     The holdover of the attitude of the Rifle Coaches and Drill Instructors suddenly being required to teach the new semi-automatic Garand was more of a residual of old bolt action attitude than a safety factor. "By Gawd, if the Marine Corps wanted you to shoot left handed, he’d have put the Operating Rod handle on the other side of the piece!" if you catch the drift!   By the mid ‘60s there were several rather excellent shooters using their M1s from the wrong shoulder and nothing was ever said. D.I. Boyd won both the National Championship, and the Service Rifle Championship with the same rifle, which happened to be a heavy barreled, heavy stocked M14 – AND he did this shooting the dangerous thing LEFT HANDED.

     Drill Instructors, being heavily steeped in tradition and slow to change their ways, always required their charges to do things the Marine Corps Way – translated, that meant "you WILL do it when I tell you to do it, and the WAY I tell you to do it!  Conventional wisdom was that the M1 (and later the M14) was more efficiently fired from the right shoulder. If asked why by some Boot (lord forbid!), they might well have cited the possibility of the op rod dismounting and skewering the shooter like a sish-ka-bob through the left eyeball. In actual fact as long as you are using issue ammo, there is very little likelihood of doing so, but it WAS a good story. When we have gentlemen insisting on using powder other than versions of 4895 (or powders of similar burning characteristics), the likelihood of dismounting an op rod riseth, but still, the chances of catching an op rod in the face are rather small. Much of these stories were old wives tales, but old legends die hard.

     Before you laugh, remember in those far off days, the Marines were teaching something called "Water Discipline". You WOULD train your body to make do on one canteen of water a day (and later on two when it became fashionable to issue two canteens). You were not allowed to drink unless your platoon sergeant gave the word, and that sometimes seemed like a lifetime! I think that the idea was to train your body to store water like a camel – needless to say, this didn’t work, and the practice was abandoned by the time we got to Vietnam. We had a lot of cases of heat stroke pursuing that particular madness, but it took a lot of years to convince the Corps their Marines were not in fact, camels! Old habits die hard as I said, and this one had roots in the fact that prior to Vietnam, resupply of anything was not a sure and certain thing. Resupply was usually accomplished by truck or para-drop. Helicopters didn’t come into general resupply usage until our foray into the old French Indochina scene.

     Now to the slow fire, one round at a time routine. This is a more traditional than required course of fire. However precision fire has always been a sacred cow, and since firing rapid fire at 600 yards was not considered traditional, nor conducive to pinpoint accuracy,  we have clung to it over the years. In the old days we never had any problems with "slam fires" (at least as far as I can remember), we simply "single loaded" each round into the chamber. The idea of only loading only one round was to avoid (over) heating your ammunition by requiring the ammunition to remain in the receiver of the rifle, either in 8 round clips or a twenty round box magazine. There are some who claim that allowing the round to feed out of the clip or magazine might "ding up" the bullet tips and detract from the inherent accuracy capability of the rifle. Since they had (have) already tested your ability to shoot rapid fire at 200 and 300 yards, the 600 is (was) designed to test your ability to shoot well under ideal conditions at longer ranges.

     The old 10 round strings of fire (or multiples thereof) are a holdover from the old 5 shot stripper clip days. It made eminent since to use multiples of 5 since the ammunition was issued in this fashion. After WWII, the Marine Corps experimented with multiples of 8 in the requalification course, but it never caught on.  By shooting 2 + 8, you still got the experience of reloading, and scores on the requalification course would come out in multiples of 10, which seemed to be easier to add and to score (you could always take off your shoes for prone slow!).  ...And besides, multiples of 10 were more traditional – as I've said several times before, old traditions and habits die hard.

     As far as long range rapid fire goes, that too has been tried in the past with some success. The Infantry Trophy Match is ALL rapid fire starting at 600 yards and going forward. Some of the scores fired on the NITT match would lead you to believe that perhaps there is some merit in the idea.

     In the mid to late ‘60s the Marine Corps came up with a requalification course known as the "C" course. I’m sure some of you old timers remember that one. While Boot Camp shooting still used the standard "A" course with 10 rds slow fire standing, 10 rds rapid sitting, 10 rds rapid prone at 300 and 20 rds slow at 500, subsequent qualification was to be conducted on the "C" course. Actually this was a rather clever course. It was all rapid fire including standing. The entire thing was based on the kneeling "E" silhouette target (40" tall by 20" wide) cut into different variations and shapes. Every shooter had three targets (pasted onto a single target frame) to shoot at from all ranges. All firing was based on the 20 rd. magazine capacity of the M14. The course as I remember it required 20 shots rapid fire standing, 20 shots rapid fire sitting, 20 shots rapid fire prone at 300 and 20 shots rapid at 500 yards. Needless to say the course could be fired in a very short period of time. Unlike the Infantry Trophy Course, you started at 200 and moved to the rear. You were awarded one point per hit, and the course was designed to teach "center-hold", as the targets were cut to different configurations and dimensions, effectively precluding a "6 o’clock hold". The targets were never the same configuration from day to day, which kept you on your toes, but of course presented no problem since you were shooting center. You had to practice "fire distribution". For every range that you got a number of multiple hits (X number per each target - as I recall, the minimum number of hits to get your bonus points was at least 4 per target) you were allowed to square the number of targets (with 4 or more hits) and add the bonus points to your score. In essence, it was an individual Infantry Trophy Course, and great fun to shoot. I liked it tremendously, and would have been most pleased if it had been left in place. Every so many years, you were required to go back and shoot on the "A" Course to demonstrate your proficiency on a KD course using standard sigh alignment and trigger control. It would have been the perfect course if only they had cranked a "field firing course" into the equation (in addition to the "C" Course) requiring the shooter to engage targets at unknown distances.

     Now down to the crux of the current hate and discontent with the M16. Please understand, the purpose of the National Trophy Matches has been (at least in part) to encourage "product improvement" with the current service rifle. This is the reason that I have not been too vocal about the use of handloaded and non-standard ammunition with the M16 – I figured that they were simply allowing the water to seek its own level and perhaps the final "shake out" would be a more efficient "service round". I was not aware of the ridiculous .22/.30 scoring plugs and I sure as hell didn’t realize that the 80 grain loads wouldn’t function through the M16 magazine. This of course, borders on the ridiculous! I am all for experimenting with ammunition and loads until the ideal combination is found – BUT, whatever they come up with MUST function satisfactorily through the issue magazine. If it doesn’t, we’re only kidding ourselves.

     If the "mouse gun" won’t perform satisfactorily using ammunition that will function through issue magazines, something is drastically wrong! Competition is not an end in itself, improvement of our "go to war rifle" is! If the damned thing won’t perform at 600 yards with ammunition that will load in the magazine in a normal way, it’s time someone in the chain of command realized that, and either changed the course, or figured out a load that will. Whatever load works best at ALL ranges (200 – 600 yds.) should be adopted to be used as our standard service cartridge, anything else is a travesty. Pure accuracy isn’t the answer, practical accuracy is! Ladies and gentlemen, we’d better get hot and get our sierra in one bag, or we stand the definite possibility of having our fannies handed to us in the next war...