I'm officially in training for the 2008 National Matches.

There was a time when I was a pretty good competitive rifle shooter. I shot Hi-Power service rifles, and could hold my own with any U.S. military rifle, from the 1903 Springfield up through the M-1 Garand and carbine, to the M-14/M-1A and the M-16A2/AR-15 rifles. I enjoyed regular matches and climaxed my shooting with a trip to the National Matches at Camp Perry near Port Clinton, Ohio every year. Of course it got harder to compete when I moved to the east coast because Northern Virginia where I lived for a bit doesn't have ranges sufficient for rifle practice unless you join one of the upscale hunt clubs and pay thousands of dollars per year. Without the ability to practice regularly, my shooting ability degraded to the point where my last visit to the Nationals was, to be frank, an embarrassing display of poor technique.

And of course there was last year's little accident. The loss of a foot tends to affect one's ability to get into the required shooting positions necessary for Hi-Power shooting. For a while, I was pretty down and spent many an hour looking at my rack of service rifles and remembering the matches that I'd shot with them. Honestly I didn't think that I'd ever shoot any of them again for anything other than casual plinking and I began making plans to sell some of them off.

But then last week I picked up a book from my library that changed my way of thinking on this. The book is called: Marine Sniper by Charles Henderson. It's the biography of United States Marine Corp. Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, a Marine who brought back a record of 93 confirmed kills from his tours of Vietnam. (His actual score was much higher--maybe twice as high--as only kills actually witnessed by someone else were counted as "confirmed".) Hathcock was an accomplished marksman who also shot at Perry during the Nationals, and he set some records there that still stand today. He went on to set up and run a scout/sniper school in Vietnam and taught his craft to many other shooters. Tragically he was badly burned when the armored vehicle he was riding on one day hit a mine and caught fire. He nearly died, and everyone was sure that he was done shooting. But he stayed in the Marine Corps. and became an instructor and coach for the USMC shooting team--arguably the best military rifle team in the world. He was hurt much worse than I was, and he came back, fighting through his disabilities until finally Multiple Sclerosis brought him down and ended his service career just 55 days shy of his twenty year mark.

A classy tribute to Gunny Hathcock

I figure that if he can come back, I can too. That's why I'm officially beginning training for the 2008 National Matches today. I can still pull a trigger but it's going to take a while to re-learn my shooting positions and develop new stances that take my new condition into account. The 2007 Nationals are ongoing right now and I regret missing them, but I've already made plans to attend at least one day, if only to walk the ranges, watch a bit of the shooting, and stock up on supplies that I'll need to get ready for next year. I've even offered my father breakfast at Camp Perry if he'll meet me down there on that day and he's accepted, so I'm planning on enjoying part of the day there with him. There was a time when I could take medals home from Camp Perry. Come 2008, I plan to bring a few new ones home.



Left to right: Smith-Corona 1903A3 Springfield, International Harvester M-1 Garand, General Motors Inland Division M-1 Carbine, Springfield Armory M-1A, Bushmaster AR-15A2.
104 years of military heritage