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by Hap Rocketto

While not quite at the level of Galahad’s quest for the Holy Grail, Jason’s search for the Golden Fleece, Rama’s mission to recover his wife Sita, or Dr. Henry Walton Jones, Junior’s hunt for the Lost Ark of the Covenant I have also set out on a quest from time to time.

On a January day a decade ago, my 55^th birthday, I became eligible to vie for the Intermediate Smallbore Rifle Senior Three Position title. Perhaps biting off more than I could chew I rather cavalierly publically announced that I would shoot the match until I won the championship. As luck, and it was certainly more luck than skill, would have it I managed to sneak off with the prize that very year.

Ten years later to the day, and certainly no wiser, I made the same imprudent proclamation for the senior crown. Margaret, my ever patient and wearily indulgent wife, rolled her eyes as I wrote a check with my mouth that she was uncertain my body would be able to cash. In response to me she quoted Marion Ravenwood from the aforementioned Raiders of the Lost Ark saying that, “You’re not the man I knew ten years ago.” “So much for true love,” thought I and to whit I replied ala “Indiana” Jones, “It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage.”

There followed the purchase, against the better advice of my favorite Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau who wrote in Walden, “…beware of all enterprises that require new clothes…”of a new set of shooting garments, both a jacket and trousers, ammunition testing, and the writing of a training program.

I was accompanied on this journey by Ernie Mellor who had made a few trips to Perry to shoot Three P and, at 70 years of age, was willing to be my training partner. Tom McGurl, who shoots with us on our winter league team, would also accompany us on this, his first trip to Perry for smallbore.

Charlie Adams, another winter league companion, signed on as our Cornerman. We would also link up with Len Remaly, another senior, who agreed to shoot the team matches with us. With five guys, none younger than 65, it was suggested, perhaps unkindly, by our shooting coterie that we give more consideration to the selection of a defibrillator than to our ammunition.

After ten weeks of hard summer training we arrived at Camp Perry, moved into out hut and readied ourselves for the matches.

The first day opened under an overcast sky and in the middle of the first relay a thunderstorm rolled in causing a range evacuation. After a delay we resumed shooting only to have a quick rain storm rip through during the second relay. Conditions settled for the standing and kneeling match

After day one Remaly was standing tall in the senior category with an 1158-51X. Trailing close behind was Mellor, four points back, at 1154-52X. With a miss in the standing match I was well back carding an 1141-41X. It looked as if I was going to be hoist by my own petard and have to return in 2013 unless I had an outstanding performance with any sights. It would not be an easy task against so talented a duo holding such a lead.

Overnight the tenor of the match changed suddenly. A violent wind storm roared in from Canada like an out of control freight train. Competitors came to the line in the morning to find the numerous tents and easy ups used for shelter little more than scraps of torn nylon and bent aluminum tubing. The 30 mile per hour one o’clock wind was gusting as much as ten miles per hour more and it would last all day. It was a leader’s nightmare.

In prone the winds, and some light rain, buffeted the shooters making it nearly impossible to hold the crosshairs within the ten ring. Having a low center of gravity I managed to pick up a few points on the lean and sinewy Len and the tall Ernie.

Standing would be no cake walk. Just holding the sights on the frame was a Herculean task, never mind in the center of the bull. The wind was so wild that there were whitecaps in my bladder! My 304-3X, even with two misses, stood 40^th in the field of nearly 300 shooters and allowed me to make up some of the distance between Len and gain a little on Ernie.

It would, as it always seems to, come down to kneeling.

The senior title was settled in the any sight kneeling match. Len and I went hammer and tongs knowing that the results of the match would determine the winner. In the end I built on the small surplus I had squirreled away in standing and my 355-3X against Len’s 354-5X gave me the edge. The ever gracious Len and Ernie offered me firm handshakes and smiles.

As soon as the final bulletin was posted I called my wife to tell her the good news, reclaim her true love, and tell her that I was, mileage or not, indeed, the man I was ten years ago.

by Hap Rocketto

Each Friday morning a group of we gray bearded rifle shooters meet at the club to shoot a postal match. Ernie Mellor, Charlie Adams, Dave Vinkler, Steve Rocketto, and I spend the morning blasting away at the NRA/USA 50 target and then repair to Steve’s home, just a short distance from the club, for lunch.

As you might expect with such a varied group the conversation wanders considerably afield but is always, in some way, related to shooting. A few weeks ago we were debating what characteristic was most important to the success of a shooter. One suggested the mental game, another the ability to build a position, another calm under stress, and I thought it might be the ability to call a shot.

I based my argument on the fact that to successfully call a shot one must be aware of all aspects of the release of the shot. From the acquisition of the target until the follow through is complete after the release of the shot, if a shooter is paying attention then he will know almost exactly where the bullet will pierce the target. By doing so one will perfect hold, squeeze, breath control and follow through.

At my pontification Steve had an “A Ha!” moment and quickly turned from the table to grab a volume from one of the many book cases that line the walls of his aviation themed kitchen. It was a copy of Dick Halvorsen’s Steeds in the Sky in which the author discusses what he thinks were the nine most fabulous World War II fighters. Steve leafed through the book to a section about the “Falcon of Malta,” George Frederick “Buzz” Beurling DSO, DFC, DFM & Bar. Beurling was the most successful Canadian fighter pilot of the Second World War, with 31 confirmed kills.

It was the British practice in those days to ‘harmonize” the machineguns and cannons on its fighters. This meant that the guns were so aimed by bore sighting that their combined firepower would converge at 250 yards. While having four Browning 50 caliber machine guns and two 20mm Hispano cannons pointed to meet at the same point was a pretty good idea it did have a down side. If an attacking pilot was either too close or two far away rounds would fly past the target on either side and the tracers would warn the quarry of the attack.

Halvorsen commented that Beurling never had this problem as he had had mastered the art of shooting either one of his two cannon, rarely both and with his fantastic vision and deflection shooting he could, and Steve added with emphasis as he read, call his shots and could tell within a few feet of where they’d hit.

It was written of him that, “He only fired when he thought he could destroy. Two hundred and fifty yards was the distance from which he liked best to fire. A couple of short, hard burst from there and that was usually it. He picked his targets off cleanly and decisively, swinging his sight smoothly through them as a first-class shot strokes driven partridges out of the sky. It was a fluent and calculated exercise… For Beurling the confirmed kill was the thing.”

Like many of his contemporaries Beurling had had a strong enough taste of the exhilaration of aerial combat that it became an addiction. With the war behind him Beurling had to find a way to satisfy his craving. It soon came along when, in the 1948, he was recruited by the infant Israeli Air Force to fly P-51s. Beurling joined some other legendary aviators such a Chalmers “Slick” Goodlin who was scheduled to take the Bell X-1 through the sound barrier until the Air Force took over the project and installed Chuck Yeager. Others were the likes of Bill Pomerance, who downed four enemy planes in one day during World War II and Leon Frankel who flew torpedo bombers in the Pacific and was awarded the Navy Cross for helping to sink the Japanese light cruiser HIJMS Yahagi.

Tragedy overtook Beurling and he never reached Israel. Beurling, who had survived nine previous crashes, did not survive his tenth when the Noorduyn Norseman he was piloting crashed and burned in a failed landing attempt at Aeroporto dell’Urbe in Rome. He is interred in the Israeli Defense Forces’ military cemetery at the foot of Mount Carmel in a grave marked, like all others, simply with his name, rank, and serial number.

One story on Beurling’s uncanny ability to call his shots relates that once he shot down a plane which he saw crumple after a forced landing on an island near Malta. He wanted the confirmation of victory, and alerted the ground to make the claim. He told them in which numbers on the fuselage markings the bullets would be found-and that is exactly where they were.”

Now there is calling a shot and then there is calling a shot. Most of us can accurately call a shot on an NRA.USA 50 target from standing but to call a shot, even within a few feet of the point of impact, at 250 yards when sucking oxygen through a rubber mask while flying at 300 miles per hour, pulling a few Gs, as adrenaline is pulsing through your veins, is a whole other matter.

by Hap Rocketto 

Quite often seemingly harmless individual events occur in just the right order and place in time and geography to create catastrophe. This condition serves well for the definition of an accident-a string of incidents when taken individually are harmless but when combined cause a larger event to occur. For example, on September 8, 1900, the greatest natural disaster ever to strike the United States swept away Galveston, Texas. In the early evening hours of that day, a hurricane struck Galveston bringing with it a great storm surge that inundated most of the low lying Galveston Island and the city of Galveston. A combination of a category four hurricane, a huge storm surge, and a population that simply would not believe the warnings of the Weather Bureau’s station chief Issac Cline stood by to watch the pounding waves. In just a few hours the lives of 8,000 people, including Clines’s wife, would be snuffed out.

Almost a century later, in late October 1991, the “Perfect Storm” occurred in the North Atlantic. This nor’easter was created by so rare a combination of factors that they happen but once a century – a deteriorating hurricane suddenly regained strength and joined with two other late season storms. Flogging the seas into waves ten stories high and driven by winds of 120 miles an hour, the storm bore down on the doomed commercial fishing boat ‘Andrea Gail’ and its crew.

On Veteran’s Day 2000 three such great natural forces came into convergence at the Quaker Hill Rod and Gun Club. The not unexpected results, when one knows the participants of this confluence, created a shooting disaster of epic proportion. Force one was Steve Schady who was conducting his annual Veteran’s Day Obsolete Service Rifle Match. The second force was Shawn Carpenter, a shooter of high quality with a penchant for inadvertently destroying any firearm loaned him. The final leg of this wobbly three-legged stool was Steve Rocketto, another shooter of high quality given to an occasional lapse in good judgment.

In preparation for this tournament Rocketto and Carpenter repaired to the range on the day before with Steve’s “United States Rifle Caliber 30 Ml 1917” to sight it in for the big match. In just a few minutes they had the rifle zeroed in for 200 yards and were prepared for the next day’s contest. In his heart of hearts Steve, who has a well hidden romantic turn to his soul, truly believes that his rifle is the actual Enfield used by Sergeant Alvin York during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive when he captured 132 Huns and was awarded with the Congressional Medal of Honor for the deed. He knows it to be true because the guy who sold the rifle to him to him at Ye Connecticut Gun Guild’s annual show told him so. He also owns a piece of the True Cross as well as three “magic” beans he once swapped for a cow, The deed to the Brooklyn Bridge rests comfortably in his safe deposit box. How he obtained these rarities are stories best told at a more opportune time.

On the morning of the match Shawn, at Steve’s gentlemanly insistence, shot first and tallied up strings of 92, 95, and 89 for an aggregate score of 276. In the end he would win the match and place in the second two sub aggregates with this fine display of the manly art of marksmanship. Steve was next up and started with a passable 89 in the first stage, which was slow fire prone at 200 yards. He followed up with a 38 and backed that up with a 35 for an aggregate score of 102, placing 25th in the field of 28.

The rifle, claimed Shawn, was working just fine when he handed it to Steve. His score lends credence to his story but, after all, he is Shawn and perhaps his innate ability to destroy rifles was just lying dormant until some unsuspecting pawn in this story picked up the rifle. Steve, the pawn, says the rifle sights seemed loose and he just might have tightened the sight lock screw in anticipation of ‘The Curse of Shawn’. The slightly lower first stage score gives his story validity, but did he tighten or loosen the thumbscrew? The lower scores in the last two stages make the later scenario seem valid. And, who in his right mind would set up a match such as that created by the fertile mind of Schady? Three strings of ten shots, fired from ancient rifles by ancient shooters, at a distance of 200 yards from a veritable potpourri of positions and times was, without doubt, the catalyst for this disaster.

The setting was ripe for a shooting catastrophe of monumental proportions and that is what happened. In retrospect it is impossible to determine the direct cause and lay responsibility at anyone’s feet for the calamity. All that is known is that the Marx brothers of shooting created a situation that made them as helpless before events on the range as was Galveston and the ‘Andrea Gail’ before the onslaught of lesser natural forces than Schady, Rocketto, and Carpenter.