Weapons Training

The next few days we were real busy people, having our equipment issued out to us, that included our rifles, which were GARANDS semi-automatic, packs, web belt, steel helmets, a few extra clothes, we were then all fixed up as far as an infantry soldier was concerned, without the necessary training of course, and that had already started, we were going to get hikes galore. About the first thing we had to do was tear that rifle down clean it, put it back together, and we did that about 50 times a day until they had it figured we had it pretty well mastered. CPL. Andrews our squad leader had the patient privilege of showing us guys how. Well he had us field strip those rifles the first time, then he turned around and had us detail strip them. What a mess that was in that tent of ours. He had us down on the floor with them and you should of seen the parts we had scattered all over the squad room floor. It didn't look much like a floor after we had about two pounds of cosmoline smeared on it. We almost had to use a tooth brush to get it loose. My there were a lot of parts to a gun of this nature we thought, but we hadn't even begun to touch upon what we were going to learn about all sorts of weapons in the infantry, and they weren't woofing any either. They gave us just a couple of days to learn that weapon. The nomenclature of all the parts had to be learned, how it operated, and just what made it tick. There were driving rods, followers, bullet guide, lands and grooves in the barrel, stacking swivels, upper and lower hand guards, cartridge ejector, front and rear sight, chamber, bolt, and heel, muzzle velocity, size of cartridge. Then came operation of said weapon, also stoppages. By this time we had all this stuff mastered we thought. We were then put on the rifle range for two days, did we ever get some headaches while on it. The Shelby range was out of camp seven miles, they took us out in trucks, and came back every night, but we put in some mighty long days and even nights. Each group of men fired in relays so many to a relay, and we had to coach each other on the target. We had to note carefully trigger squeeze, watch if the guy flinched when he fired his rifle, see to it that he always had his gun pointed down range when not firing, as this could cause a hell of a lot of trouble. If you wanted the company commander to jump your ass, all you had to do was point it in a different direction. After we had been out on the range with the rifle, the next time we took the machine guns out there, that was four hectic days of shooting. We took our tents out there with us including the kitchen unit. We ate our meals right out there on the field. We had eight machine guns a going’ at one time, you never heard such a darn racket in your life, talking about headaches the next few days, we had them The range looked pretty leafy and grassy before we started firing, but when we were through, it looked pretty darn bare, we had everything mowed down to a crisp. We started on the 1000 inch range first, then to the 300 yard. Our individual targets had to be pasted, put up, and these in turn were checked by our company commander himself. If he thought you weren't shooting good enough you’d dam soon hear about it, in fact you were dealing with him personally. A fellow had to have a pretty good excuse of not hitting that target at 300 yards. We had quite a few dry runs on this stuff before we began firing these weapons, dry runs and more dry runs. We came back from the ordeal in good style but very tired, but not too tired to hit the PX for a few rounds of beer, and ice cream that we devoured with gusto. Next day we spent cleaning and oiling the machine guns, they were in pretty bad shape, all gummed up with carbon. We washed those barrels with strong soap water, polished them until you could see yourself in them Those weapons had to be cleaned for three consecutive days, and they were also cleaned if they were not fired. Our squad was always on the ball as far as these details was concerned.