It was a busy weekend, I'll say that. Friday I headed down to Fitzsimons USARC, and through the morning we got our TA-50 field gear and our rifles. We got settled in at Ft. Carson, and after lunch chow we headed to the zeroing range. The object of zeroing is to set the sights according to the way a person aims. I had a little trouble with this. By convention, we would always shoot 3 rounds and then check where they went. A prerequisite of this method is that all 3 rounds hit in the same general area. Usually, I'd have 2 rounds pretty close together, and then one that was jerked way off. Needless to say, after 6 or 7 iterations of this, I was a bit frustrated. I did eventually zero the rifle to myself, but it felt like an ordeal.
Saturday was our day to qualify. We drove back to the zero range to move all of our gear over 400 yards to the qualification range. A few of us privates were tasked with moving a good-sized tent to the new site. Someone had the brilliant idea of just carrying the whole damn thing whole instead of breaking it down. It worked like a charm. They got the range ready and went hot pretty early, and I went up for the first firing order. I qualified the same as basic, Marksman with 24 of 40 pop-up targets. After that, I just sat around with a few buddies while the rest of the company qualified. By noon we were done. They drove us over to a driving course for some people to get experience with driving Humvees. I hadn't taken the classroom portion, so I was left sitting on some rickety old bleachers listening to the colonel talk about retirement and our unit's mission statements. I learned what our unit actually does in the Army, but other than that it was thoroughly boring.
This morning we cleaned up the barracks, cleaned weapons, and headed home. We had a goodbye for our commander, Col. Evenson. Long weekend, but productive in places.
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