So its been a few days since I have been able to talk/write but we finally have a good chunk of personal time. We have had basic rifle marksmanship this week in preparation for the qualification on Monday. I have never fired a weapon before but I was pleasantly surprised. Today we had our first prequalification for BRM. It is very important to qualify because if you don’t you will not graduate and you will be restarted.
You don’t have to worry about me though. Today at the range I shot 30 out of 40 and you only need a 23 to qualify. Some of the men have some problems though because they shot really badly. One of them only shot a 5. Good news for them though is that on the day of qualification they can have almost as many tries as they want. Hopefully I will be able to shoot a 36 so I can have an expert BRM. As it is I am shooting a sharpshooter.
So a couple days ago we went to the M203 range which is the grenade launcher range. It was kind of fun. We did not get to use live rounds just chalk rounds. Basically when they hit something they send up a big puff of chalk to mark where you hit. A couple of the men get to use live rounds which was kind of cool to watch but it was not nearly as impressive as the AT-4 anti tank rocket.
We also did combatives on Wednesday which was interesting. You will be happy to know that I did not lose a match. One of my opponents went to a stalemate but the other one I choked out every single time. The same day we also got issued the platoon SAWs (Squad Automatic Weapon) as well as the optics for our weapons. We got stuff like thermal scopes and red dot sights for our weapons. There was not enough for the whole squad so I am pretty sure when we get them issued individually the people that shoot the best will get the optics.