A Bullet Here or There

I spent twenty-two years in the Air Force.  From basic training, until the very end....you had to maintain a proficiency in firearms.  For the Air Force, this typically meant you spent three hours in a class, then practiced with fifty rounds, and then shot around forty to fifty to 'qualify'.  You did that every two years generally.  So I fired around 1,100 total rounds in my Air Force career.

A Marine today....getting ready for his deployment to Afghanistan or some distant land....will fire at least a thousand rounds.  Some, with the heavy duty machine guns (M2HB) might fire a couple thousand rounds easily.  If they stuck around for twenty years....they might fire twenty-five thousand easily, as a minimum.

I was sitting there and discussing this new directive from the Marines to their young men and ladies....to save on ammo as much as possible.  My co-worker, an Army guy for twenty-odd years, will often tease me on Air Force short-comings.  I usually take it in stride.

The truth is that some folks just won't ever be on the frontline operations....like ninety-eight percent of Air Force folks.  That hundred-odd rounds we fired....were enough.

The other truth here is that if I was a Marine....I'd probably ask to fire three hundred rounds a week for at least six weeks before I deployed anywhere....to ensure I felt up to the task.

But there's a historical point of curiosity   If you went back to 1860....you signed up with a Confederate unit or a Union unit.  You might have spent two weeks in camp and going through some practice....mostly marching and forming up in columns.  Total rounds fired over that two weeks?  Maybe  twenty to fifty shots.  After that, you were considered proficient, and probably met the enemy within a few days.  You lived or died, based on how quickly you could reload or your ability to stay in the back of the column.

We've changed a great deal in a hundred years.