by Hap Rocketto

The rich history and engaging characters of the shooting sports is both an ignored and unplumbed sea upon whose surface we cruise as we shape course from one match to another. It has oft been said that man knows more about the surface of the Moon than the floor of Earth’s oceans. It is the same with shooting as we know more about testing ammunition and the mechanics of our firearms than we do those who created or wielded them.

For over 25 years I have been researching the history and recording the present events and then scribbling down my discoveries and observations for the general education and amusement of various segments of the competitive shooting community. Some of my writings are more or less scholarly historical dissertations, replete with footnoted sources and bibliographies, on important events such as the Palma Match, the United States Randle and Dewar teams, or the history of the service firearm Distinguished program and the Presidents Match.

The other side of the coin reveals a less serious, but just as important, string of shooting anecdotes, stories, and jokes. I use these short pieces to amuse and, hopefully, recreate some of the more interesting and bizarre events that I have witnessed, participated in, or have been told to me by what was, in my green and salad days, the elder statesman and greybeards of the sport.

The ancient Romans used to say Tempus fugit, a Latin expression meaning “time flees”, but now more commonly translated as “time flies”. Well, I have come to know that tempus does, indeed, fugit and, as many of my shooting mentors and heroes have passed to the Great Range in the Sky, I find that I have become an elder statesman and greybeard of the sport. It is now my time to pass on the traditions, legends, and myths of the sport.

The Old Man once told me that it was a poor piece of cloth that couldn’t use a little embroidery. He was right; a little colored thread makes a plain white handkerchief a whole lot more interesting, while not affecting its usefulness in the least. Sometimes we emulate the generations that have preceded us by decorating the mundane events of our shooting life to make us feel better about ourselves. Those listening may believe us or, as our old friends the ancient Romans might have done, take our recollection cum grano salis, with a grain of salt.

I do not believe it is my place to question the stories I hear, and I am guilty of not fully checking the tales I pass on for either accuracy or credibility. I don’t do it because these stories are my way of getting to the soul of shooting and its personalities. The anecdotes are a still life of a person or event that is unbridled by detailed fact. Does it matter if it happened at Perry, Benning, or Colorado Springs? No, what matters is that we have shared a little bit about an event or person that we have enjoyed with those unlucky enough to not have had the same experience.

This all came to a head a few weeks ago when during our morning coffee break when a fellow volunteer on a Habitat for Humanity project mentioned that he heard I was involved in competitive shooting and asked how deeply I was involved.

I gave him a rough overview, trying to be modest, for the Old Man often reminded me that I had much to be modest about. He went on to regale me with his memories of his Uncle who said was a great shot in the early post Word War II years. I didn’t recognize the name and so mentioned that my knowledge of pistol and shotgun shooters was not too extensive.

He replied that his uncle shot smallbore and was so good that he made the 1948 Olympic Team, but had to withdraw because of poor health. On that subject I have more than passing knowledge plus I am on a first name basis with three of the shooters, Art Jackson, Art Cook, and the late Walt Tomsen, the latter two along with Harry Cail made up the smallbore contingent. No where in the literature or oral history does a withdrawal such as described to me occur.

As a matter of fact all those eligible for the tryout were informed that they had to be prepared for departure for England immediately after selection and would probably not be allowed to return home. This left many with the dubious excitement of packing for a trip to the Olympics that never materialized.

So there I sat, tenuously balanced between shooting scholarship and shooting mythology. Who is to say which is better?

I don’t know, but I am reminded of a passage from Mark Harris’ baseball novel Bang The Drum Slowly. The protagonist, Henry Wiggen, remarks about old ballplayers, “You see an old fellow at the All Star Game, or at the World Series, or in the South, or hanging around at the winter meetings, and they lie to you, and the next thing you read in the paper that they are dead, old fellows not so many years before slim and fast, with a quick eye and great power, and all of a sudden they are dead and you are glad you did not wreak their story for them with straight facts.”

In the end I decided to nod my head sagely to my friend, as if in agreement, and let the family myth live on, uninhibited, by the straight facts.

by Hap Rocketto 

In what is laughingly known as my military career I was promoted but twice in twenty-two odd years. The first was from Naval Aviation Officer Candidate to Ensign, United States Naval Reserve. After leaving the Navy my commission allowed me to join the Connecticut Army National Guard at the exalted rank of sergeant from which I was eventually promoted to staff sergeant. As you might note rank, or my lack of it, seemed to have little effect upon me. As my only duty for many years was to shoot I was pretty much allowed to do as I wished. Stripes on my sleeve could never mean as much to me as the Distinguished Badge on my pocket flap or the President’s Hundred Tab on my shoulder. I had also grown up in a Navy town and many of my friends’ fathers were captains and admirals so I grown up particularly indifferent to high rank.

As a matter of fact the only time that my rank, or lack of it, really caused me any discomfort was in the spring of 1993. I was sitting at my desk in the training office of my Guard unit, the Connecticut Aviation Reclassification Activity Depot (1109th)-more mercifully known as the AVCRAD, helping a young recruit prepare for departure to basic training. While going over the fledgling soldier’s paperwork I noted his birthday. It was October 17, 1975. The 17 year old kid I was sending off the Fort Jackson was born one year to the day after my last promotion! It was clear to me that my opportunities for advancement had dried up and perhaps it was time for me to leave the rhythm of reveille and taps. As I sat there musing I recalled another day, some two decades earlier, when I was blind to rank.

I was a new shooter on the Connecticut Guard team and was learning the ropes. On that particular day in September it meant watching my team shoot the Rattle Battle at the General Winston P. Wilson Rifle and Pistol Championships. The team captain, Sergeant First Class Dick Scheller, had detailed me to follow the shooters down range and clean up after them as they completed each stage. The Wilson Matches are the National Guard Championships. As such Many State Adjutant Generals and other high-ranking officers often visit them from Washington.

I was hunkered on the grass of the assembly area watching my team gather themselves together and preparing to move from the 600 firing line to the 500-yard line. In turn I was intent on performing my housekeeping chores in a manner that would please Sergeant First Class Scheller when, like Archimedes, I was disturbed by the shadow of a soldier crossing my work. Looking up behind me I saw that I was surrounded by a horde of general officers, including the legendary “Wimpy” Wilson himself, and their high ranking retinues of commissioned dogrobbers and hangers on.

More concerned about Sergeant First Class Scheller’s opinion of my work than the assembly of glitter and braid formed up about me I swiveled back around to attend to my task. The least in rank of the officers present was Colonel Homer Pearson a man who liked things done by the book and who was also the commander of the National Guard Marksmanship Training Unit. This match was his big show and he liked things conducted in a most punctilious manner. The military precise, dark jowlled colonel, hands on hips, bent over toward me and looked down at me sharply. A slight scowl of impatience enveloped his face. With an arching of his eyebrows and a minute inclination of his head towards the assembled big wigs he quietly hinted, “There is a lot of brass around here today, son. Do you know what you are going to do?

He continued to hover over me while I slowly realized that he was trying to tell me something, but what? Like the sudden crack of the rifle fire downrange it dawned upon me what he wanted. Colonels or team captains… they’re all the same. With a scant glance at the star studded officers I quickly scrambled forward to harvest the gleaming cartridge cases. Simultaneously I enthusiastically replied over my shoulder to Colonel Pearson, “Yes, sir! I’m going to police it all up and toss it into that can over there!”

by Hap Rocketto

For a good school teacher learning never ends, be it the subject matter one teaches or how to manage a room full of hormone driven adolescents. To that end a teacher’s life outside of the classroom is filled with self selected course work and the dreaded, administratively inflicted, “professional development” activities. Much like British sailors during the Napoleonic Wars teachers are impressed into professional development by those deemed unsuitable for the classroom and, therefore, promoted to administrative positions in an attempt to blunt any negative impact they might have on young and impressionable minds.

To paraphrase The Bard these mind numbing activities are usually tales told by an idiot, full of jargon and buzzwords, signifying nothing. To give you an idea of how these are viewed by teachers there is an old chestnut that tells of a retired teacher who died and quickly found himself in Heaven. Saint Peter conducted him to a special subdivision of beautiful houses reserved for deserving teachers. When the recently departed asked where his neighbors might be the archangel glanced at his watch, noted it was three o’clock on a Friday afternoon, and replied that they must all still be in Hell at professional development.

This brings me to a course that I took in lieu of professional development. Some years ago I studied Chaucer, a subject of an earlier essay, and last summer it was a seminar on Dante Alighieri’s the Commedia, more popularly known as The Devine Comedy. Dante’s one hundred cantos of hendecasyllabic lines and closely linked rhymes is an allegory of human life, in the form of a vision of the world beyond the grave. By the way, I teach science and took these unrelated courses for my own pleasure. Most school administrators in my experience care only about being able to correctly fill out forms provided by Central Office. That the courses had no relevance to my teaching assignment was of no concern to them, the paper work’s “eyes were dotted” and “tees were crossed” and that was all that mattered.

Soon after the summer session had ended I departed, along with my shooting companions Shawn Carpenter, Jack Santo, Charlie Adams, and my brother for Camp Perry and the National Smallbore Rifle Championships. During a particularly trying 50 meter match certain aspects of Dante’s work kept cropping up in my mind. The Meter Match, as it is known, is the great stumbling block that trips up many a shooter on the way to greatness. The target is the old International target from the early 1950s that has since been replaced several times in international competition, but hangs on in that most hidebound of shooting sports, conventional prone. The target and the distance at which it is shot is such that one usually shoots either a lot of Xs or a lot of nines, with only an occasional ten to break the monotony of success or failure. It is a psychological minefield.

Dante created nine rings of Hell in the Commedia and your particular depravity in life would determine in which ring you would spend eternity. There are few activities in this earthly world that approximate the torment of one of Dante’s rings more than being trussed up in a leather coat on a 90 degree day in 90% humidity, bound to a dead weight of iron and wood by a leather tourniquet, staring into a murky mirage, and shooting nines.

Such was my situation when I realized that the Commedia was not fiction. I was being punished by the shooting gods for my sins of omission and commission committed in the sport that I love. Who among us have not leaned against the bench at least once in off hand, or used our thumb and forefinger to squeeze a bullet hole shut in hopes that the plug would be forced close enough to the ten ring to just be tangent, or cross fired and not gotten caught, or badgered a scorer enough so they just gave up the point? As I am guilty of such heinous crimes I must presume that there must be others who are also culpable, to a greater or lesser degree.

But my punishment was not the heat, or the humidity, or the searing pain in my left elbow, or even the humiliation of the pathetic score. It was more ironic than that for I began to understand that, just as there were nine rings in Dante’s view of Hell, there were only nine rings in my particular version. I was convinced that the gods of shooting had erased the inner most ring, the tenth ring of my target. It was apparent that no matter how hard I tried or how many dollars I placed in the hands of the faceless, and probably heartless, specter hidden behind the dark screen of the challenge window I was doomed to shoot only nines.

A sharp blow on my shoulder startled me. It was my brother’s not to subtle way of telling me that I had dozed off between relays and it was time to post the Meter match targets. My time in Hell had just been a dream but my past sins were fact. I wondered if I had been given a divine reprieve in order to redeem myself before I took to the line. I dearly hoped so because I didn’t want to end up like Tomlinson in Rudyard Kipling’s poem of the same name, knowing that “the sin ye do two and two ye must pay for one by one.”

The answer would come soon enough as I handed my target and backer to my point partner and dragged my mat to the line.