..having grown weary of wall-to-wall political blogging as well as the shenanigans perpetrated on the citizenry by asshole Democrats and incompetent, complicit Republicans, I seek refuge in another blog.
The purpose of this site will be to document my miscellaneous amateur radio (and related) projects. I also might throw in some commentary on my guns, reloading, and black powder shooting escapades.
I frankly do not care who visits or comments; this is for my enjoyment. If any of this is of interest to you, feel free to make comments or ask questions.
Otherwise enjoy!
-73-
Zod:
ReplyDeleteI used to love to shoot guns, any kind, if it had bullets, let me at it and look out down range.
Then I joined the army. Rose to the rank of staff sergeant, and got assigned ordinance duty. Towards the end of the year in 1985, our battalion did not shoot up its issuance of ordinance, owing to various lapses of judgement and mismanagement on part of the battalion leadership. If we didn't use up our annual allotment of ammo, the battalion would get LESS the following year, and command would not hear of that.
So hapless me, I was in charge of making sure we used up our ammo before the end of the year. We loaded it all up, headed out to the gunnery range, had almost an entire 2.5 ton truck load of .556 ball rounds (for M-16s), 7.62mm rounds for the M-60 (with tracers every third round), M-203 grenades and a bunch of .45 pistol ammo.
We had to shoot it all. Me and about 5 other guys shot this stuff down range for nearly 12 hours, dawn to dusk. After the first hour, the fun was gone. After the second hour, we were starting to get blisters on our firing hands. After 6 hours we were sore, tired, and both firing and non-firing hands were bleeding profusely.
We considered just burying the rest of it, but that would eventually be found and we would be screwed. No, we just toughed it out and shot it all up, so that we would come back with an empty duece and a half, and our mission complete. I believe that me and those other 5 guys shot more rounds down range than anybody should ever have the pleasure (or in our case, displeasure) to do in their entire lives.
I haven't shot another round since then. Not one. I do have a 357 Magnum (brand new), never fired, which I bought for home protection. It's going on 15 years since I bought it, and God willing I will never fire it.
Yeah, Zod. I used to love firing guns. Not so much, now.
Fredd,
ReplyDelete..jeez! I can run but I can't hide!
What an amazing story on so many levels! And typical of the military and government. Cannot imagine that they would not have coordinated some marksmanship practice to discard the extra ammo!
*sigh*
Anyway, I got into black powder pistols and am awaiting my third one since August. (God bless Cabela's!) If my posts on that - and my new foray into reloading bore the heck out of you, I suggest you get your amateur radio license. (That certainly will!)
Happy Holidays and thanks for stopping by at the new digs!
~TWP
I be stopping around to my friend, I am sick of it too, be sure to visit me, still hotties daily ...;-)
ReplyDeleteWP:
ReplyDeleteDuring my misspent youth in Oregon (I was actually in my 30s', but never really reached maturity until last week), we would head up to the upper reaches of logging roads to overlook the Cascade mountain valleys, where nobody bothered us. We took a 3" diameter steel pipe of about 3 feet long, plugged one end with packed newspaper wadding, drilled a fuse hole about 1' up, to allow about maybe 20 ounces of 'Pyrodex,' a slower burning black powder, packed another wad of newspaper above the Pyrodex, and loaded rocks, scrap iron and other crap into the 'cannon.' Aim it across the canyon, light the fuse, and.....
Then we would leave, since every revenooer within 25 miles of this site would hear the blast.
Ah, the good ol' days...