Day 60: I Smell Like Chordite
I went shooting today with my dad at one his friend’s house out in the country today in preparation for this weekend’s trip to Knob Creek for the annual machine gun shoot.
I got to fire a military and civilian M-4s, an AR-15, Colt .45 1911, an AK-47, and a MAC-10, and those were all a lot of fun, and rest assured, the world is safe from many, many, many evil jugs of water, but few things on this earth make you want to pull out and double check your man card like a Desert Eagle and guns from WWII.
I was a natural with the automatic weapons, but Jesus Christ, nothing humbles you like your wrists contorting and forcing you to miss the paper target wide like the Desert Eagle. I could never see where my shots landed because the gun would be forced up into my line of sight.
Then, to add insult to injury, I’m a huge history dweeb, particularly the ancient world and WWII; years of watching movies and documentaries, reading books, and even playing video games have made just holding these guns a (lame) dream of mine. I mentioned that, at Knob Creek, my number one priority was to fire a Thompson sub-machine gun, and anything else on top of that was just gravy. They mentioned that they had some guns from that era on site and, if I was interested, they’d be more than happy to load them up and let me shoot.
Oh, baby.
So imagine my joy to discover that I can’t fire these guns for shit. No fancy stock designs or cushioned butts, just wood and steel coupled with one hell of a recoil. Water jug from forty plus yards with an M-4? Doable. It took me a couple of shots, but I got it zeroed in. Water jug from fifteen feet away with an M-1 Garand? Let’s just say I made sure that the ground and trees around it were no longer a threat to world peace. Same goes for an M-14 that saw action in the Korean War. Especially humbling because that mother fucker was set on a bi-pod. That’s right, on a table, with a bi-pod, at stationary targets.
The real find was a Lee Enfield rifle. You pull that slide back, “KLICK-KLACK,” that’s the sound of history. That gun is the tool with which you build an empire.
And I’m ashamed to admit that I would never be able to defend Britannia from the ravages of ungrateful indigenous rabble-rousers.
Our grandparents were some tough cusses. They spent their adolescence and formative years in the Depression and their twenties fighting Hitler and Tojo. They were the first to fight a new kind of war, with new kinds of weapons, and frankly they saved the world.
Adding to this, they fired some mean goddamn guns. The weapons were loud as hell, and man, what a kick. You could never dial in on a target because you’d have to shift to chamber a new bullet (which makes you feel really fucking cool) and fire anew. I found a whole new level of respect for anyone who went into battle against Germany’s automatic weapons with this old warhorse.
Of course if you weren’t chickenshit, and thus, able to hit something, then the gun is formidable because that bullet would annihilate a human being.
ANNIHILATE.
I realize that’s sort of a “duh” statement, but a lot of modern guns fire relatively small bullets, and we loaded this thing with bullets that were only trumped by the shells we loaded into the elephant gun. Did I mention there was an elephant gun?
ELEPHANT GUN.
The ammo was named after Hemingway.
You would not believe the hole that thing leaves in a log.
Matt