We started the week with weapons qualification. Every MiTT team member is armed with an M4 carbine and an M9 pistol, and some members also carry the M203 grenade launcher. Throw in our grenades and crew-served weapons and we're remarkably well-armed for our size, but since we travel on our own most of the time, we've got to be ready to take out anyone who decides to come after us alone until another force can come to our aid. It's therefore incumbent on each of us to learn as much as possible about our weapons and how to use them, even though if we do our jobs right, we won't ever have to fire a shot in anger.
Monday was the M4 range. It was a challenge for me because I hadn't shot an M4 in more than eight years. The first step for M4 qualification is zeroing your weapon, which is a miserable process. Zeroing involves moving your sights to the strike of the round. In other words, you fire the weapon, see where your shots are hitting, and move the sights so that when you aim at something, that's where the bullet goes. It isn't difficult in theory, but if you haven't fired in a long time, you may screw up and fail to maintain your sight picture, which means that your adjustments will be countered by aiming the weapon differently between rounds. Add to that the problem of firing in full body armor, something I'd never before done, and zeroing took a lot longer for me than it should have. Still, I got the job done and moved over to the qualification range.
That wasn't much more fun, as I still hadn't mastered the techniques of firing while wearing body armor. I did qualify, but only barely, and I didn't have a lot of confidence in my ability to reach out and touch the enemy at long ranges. Fortunately, a lot of my team members shot much better than I did, so at least I know that they're capable of getting the job done if we see a triggerman in the distance.
That evening we fired the night tables. These were actually easier than the day tables, first of all because our night sight was already zeroed so you could go right into the table. It also helped that you can fire the night tables from a seated position, which was far more comfortable and stable for me. I failed to qualify the first time because I fired from the kneeling position and because it took me some time to get used to the technique (it's markedly different from day fire). My second time I shot 36 of 40 targets, though, so I feel pretty comfortable with my ability to reach out and touch someone in the dark, particularly as we'll have better night vision equipment in country than we have here in training.
We got back from the range around 0100 Tuesday morning after offloading our vehicles and performing some maintenance, so it was less than four hours later we were getting up to head to the pistol range. Firing pistols is a lot easier than firing rifles for several reasons. They're lighter, so the fatigue factor is much less, and you don't try to engage anyone further away than perhaps 25 meters with a pistol, so the targets are much, much closer. (The Army's furthest target on the rifle range is 300 meters, and the Marines shoot out to 500 meters.) I hit 26 of 30 targets on the pistol range, and just about all of my guys did well with their pistols, including one of my Navy guys who shot 30 for 30.
Next up was the M203 range. The M203 fires 40mm grenades and is a huge force multiplier for a small team, as it allows us to engage targets who are difficult or impossible to engage with direct fire. Having the ability to rain high explosive grenades on enemies several hundred meters away is a big help. While my M203 gunners engaged their targets, the rest of us went back to the rifle range to get some more practice with our M4s. That was a very good idea, as we fired 80 more rounds, this time from more difficult positions, but shot better than we had the day before. As with anything, the more you do, the better you get, so we'll do a lot of weapons fire en route to Iraq to ensure we're as proficient as possible before we ever have to fire a shot in anger.
Thankfully, we closed out the M203 range around 1500, so we were able to get back to our barracks at a decent hour and get some good sleep that evening, recharging our batteries for the rest of the week's training.