by Hap Rocketto
From time to time I wonder what course my shooting career might have taken if I were born a few years later.
When I began shooting the Army Marksmanship Unit was just five years old and only beginning develop the seminal training methods and great shooters which would dominate the international scene in the 1960s and 70s. After a blaze of glory in the mid 20s with the likes of Morris Fisher, Sydney Hines, Carl Osburn, Willis Lee, Lloyd Spooner, and Walter Stokes and a brief flare up in the late 1940s with Art Cook, Walt Tomsen, and Art Jackson the United States was almost a laughing stock in the international shooting arena for the next 20 years.
My first year of competitive shooting was in 1961 with the New London High School Rifle Team and at that time international rifle competition was dominated by Soviet riflemen such as Anatoli Bogdanov, Viktor Shamburkin, Marat Nijasov, and Boris Andreyev. Four years later, when I managed to graduate-much to the surprise and relief of my parents, the faculty, and myself, the US shooting steamroller of Jim Hill, Lones Wigger, Gary Anderson, Tommy Pool, Jack Writer, Lanny Basham, Margaret Thompson Murdock, and Martin Gunnarsson had reclaimed the United States’ prominence in international rifle shooting.
The resurgence was due, in part, to President Dwight Eisenhower who established the Army marksmanship Training Unit on March 1, 1956 in order to raise the standards of marksmanship throughout the US Army. The rest may have been due to the efforts of Distinguished Marksman Lieutenant Colonel Bill Pullum who served as coach of the USAMU’s International Rifle Section and was instrumental in forming the concept of today’s national team/development team.
My coach was George Gregory, who was not a shooter but had a love of kids, taught himself enough about shooting from the few publications of the day to give a start to those who were interested in the sport. He taught metal shop for over 40 years and built a rifle range in both the old New London High and in the new one. While not on the level of shooting knowledge of Pullum, Coach Gregory was his equal as an educator and motivator.
Had the equipment and training methods common today been available in the early 1960s perhaps my shooting might have developed faster. Coach Gregory did his best but he had precious little to work with, including me. But, it is a really a waste to think too much about it for, as L.P. Hartley wrote in the opening lines of his novel, The Go-Between, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
Those of us who learned shooting under Coach Gregory did it with rifles, ammunition, and targets issued by the National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice (NBPRP) through the Director of Civilian Marksmanship, pretty basic stuff-some might say primitive now a days. We started with Springfield 1922s and Remington 513Ts and later got a few Remington 40Xs and Winchester 52s, all rifles really designed for prone shooting, not the position work we were doing.
We shot standard velocity 22 caliber long rifle ball ammunition which was usually Remington “Kleenbore” with the dog bone logo or the dark green box or Winchester “Leader” in a yellow box with a big red X on the front. Once we got some produced by Canadian Industries Limited called “Canuck.” This stuff came in yellow and blue boxes with the ammunition packed in plastic trays, not the pasteboard we were used to seeing. The ammunition was also, to put it mildly, heavily lubricated. It was possible to tip over a tray on the range table, tap the bottom sharply, and watch all 50 rounds slide out in one clump. It could be picked up whole, like a brick, without losing a round.
We called them “pig bullets,” after the tallow lubricated cartridges issued by the British to native Indian troops for their New Pattern 1853 Enfield Rifles. If the tallow was made from pork it would offend Muslims and if made from beef offend the Hindus. It was just a short step from there to mutiny, the sieges and the atrocities at Delhi, Cawnpore, and Lucknow and having unfortunate captured rebels tied over the mouths of cannons to be blown to pieces when the guns were fired. But, I digress.
In the range was a stack of cubic foot buff colored cardboard boxes set against the wall like a load of building blocks. I came to learn that each was filled with 500 ten bull A-17 targets. It seemed the DCM issued one target for each ten rounds of ammunition a club was authorized. However, we shot sighters and one shot per bull in matches, in practice it was sighters and two shots per bull, and beginners fired five shots per bull. Simple arithmetic will explain the obvious; we never consumed our yearly allotment of targets. We had surplus targets each year and the excess supply grew annually.
The heap of boxes grew so large that Coach Gregory would gladly give us boxes of them so we could practice on our own. The surplus was so great that it wasn’t until years after the NBPRP became the Corporation for the Promotion of Rifle Practice and Firearms Safety, in 1996, that the laid up supplies were exhausted.
I was almost 60 by the time I had to buy an A-17 target. I had grown up thinking that an unlimited supply of free A-17 targets was simply the birthright of every US citizen.
Maybe kids today have fancy gear and great training but, unlike me in my early days of shooting, they have to buy targets. But, as I said earlier, “The past is a foreign country.”
