Military Training : Facing Live Fire

About military service: Whether you're one of today's high school seniors thinking about joining the Marines after graduation or one of yesteryear's inductees into Uncle Sam's Army (as I was), the prospect of facing live fire during training (let alone possible combat later on) is worth a bit of discussion.

Why?

One example: When he was seventeen years of age, my younger brother-in-law decided to join the Marines. I'd done my obligatory two years in the Army by then. His Dad had been classified 4-F due to a congenital heart defect and been excused from service altogether, but he'd been around the block. Knowing his son was totally unsuited to military life, we both did our best to dissuade Jacob from enlisting...to no avail.

He was, after all, seventeen. What cocky young buck listens to his elders when he's seventeen? I know I didn't.

But a fellow really ought to pay attention once in a while; a whole lotta misery could be avoided that way. Jacob had only been in Marine Boot Camp a few weeks when he first wrote to his parents...expressing utter shock and dismay at his horrendous discovery: The Marine Corps was actually training him to kill people!

No s**t, Sherlock.

He somehow survived Boot Camp...but was booted out of the Corps a few months later.

Thankfully, it wasn't that way for me. When I was drafted, I knew exactly what the job of being a soldier entailed--and I appreciated every bit of training the Army threw at us.

As it turned out, I was never actually sent into combat during my time in service, but a bunch of us (mostly draftees from Montana plus a couple from Washington state) understood quite clearly that we could be sent at any time to shoot at people who would definitely be shooting back. Because of this and even scarier information that a high percentage of Army troops won't shoot to kill the first time they see an enemy, we had already--before we even graduated from Basic Training--settled on foxhole partners so we'd be ready to have each other's backs at a moment's notice.

One evening, we all headed out for the obstacle course at Fort Ord, California. It was a pretty simple setup: You climbed up from a big pit over a wall at one end, where we all gathered first, and then bellied ahead for a couple hundred yards or so, and you were done.

They had a few "mortar pits" here and there along the way with explosions going off randomly, just to give a little sense of reality, and one set of barbed wire (not concertina) you had to go under on your back, but not much else.

However, it was our first live fire exercise. The cadre sergeant told us there were three M60 machine guns set up at the far end, all firing live rounds, but only the center gun traversed--the other two, one at each outer edge, were fixed, just shooting straight ahead. He also explained that the bullets would be moving at a height of 40 inches from the ground--and that one kid, while going through the course a few months earlier, had panicked. Jumped right up in the middle of the thing and died on the spot.

That last was most likely B.S. designed to keep some idiot from doing just that, but who knows. True or not true, the story made his point.

We had to wait a while in formation while the platoon ahead of us went through the course, so I had time to ask a question.

"Sergeant, you said the bullets are traveling 40 inches above the ground, right?"

"Right."

"Well...what good does that do? You could go through the course on hands and knees and never get that high! Why don't they drop the live fire down to where it would actually require you to pay attention?"

He looked at me like I was out of my mind. "Do you realize how hard it is to get some of these people to even go up over this wall even the way it is?!"

Um...no. I didn't have a clue.

Now, about bayonet training....