by Hap Rocketto

There is probably no subject that occupies shooters thoughts and conversations more than wind; it is the most common ground connecting all disciplines. While ammunition is of a particular high interest to the smallbore crowd, the wind is a concern in how it effects the bullet. For a pistol shooter the effect of the wind on the bullet is minimal and so the concern in this discipline is how to construct a position that can best withstand the gusts. Highpower people talk of barrel life but they have concerns about wind because off hand shooting at 200 yards combines both the smallbore and pistol concerns.

There have been many words written about the wind. Literary and historical references to the wind are just as common as theories about shooting in a quartering tailwind and just as entertaining. William Butler Yeats writes of the “Assault and battery of the wind” a subject with which all riflemen are familiar. William Blake penned the lines about conditions that all shooters fear, “the gentle wind does move, silently, invisibly…” James Dickey tells us a shooter’s truth, “The wind changes round, and I stir…” Had Dickey been a shooter the last words might have been followed with “ And I go to the sighter” or “And I click.”

The Wright brothers telegraphed home a report of a few lines from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on the 17^th of December 1903 to their father, Bishop Milton Wright. It might just as well reflect a tough and well earned prone victory at Camp Perry, “Success…All against twenty-one mile wind.” Of a poor score one might repeat a line borrowed from Ernest Dowson by Margaret Mitchell when she titled her Civil War epoch, “Gone With The Wind.”

If you go into a match with your mind at loose ends and don’t keep track of the changes the Biblical injunction, “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.” shall certainly predict your fate.

But Stanley Kunitz best tells the battle with the wind and our cranking of the sights in his poem, “The Layers” where in he asks us …

“How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
The manic dust of my friends,
Those who fell along the way,
Bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn.”

In the end the final words on the wind and shooting come from a tale, perhaps apocryphal, related by an old gaffer from the hey days of the Springfield ’03 in the middle to late 1930s. The old man, then a young lad approached his firing point at Camp Perry for the first time, his heart as full of apprehension and his hands were with his rifle, ammunition, scope, scorebook, and O’Hare micrometer. An old leathery Marine was just arising from the prone position and gathering up his gear while the youngster was gathering up his courage.

The intensive instruction and practice during the week of Small Arms Firing School had prepared him for everything except the “Buck Fever” that effects all of us at one time or another. The wind flags were standing straight out and the lad was having trouble computing its value. He was fast approaching panic and his mind was going blank except for visions of countless “Maggie’s Drawers” being vigorously waved in front of his target by a highly amused pit crew.

In desperation he looked up into the hard face shaded by a battered campaign hat. “Sarge,” he squeaked, “I am new at this. How much wind should I take?”

The veteran’s blue eyes twinkled. The Marine Team sought blue-eyed shooters, as the Leatherneck coaches believed, as an article of faith, that blue eyes adjusted to light changes more readily than brown. The crows’ feet about his eyes deepened as his mouth slowly curved up into a smile. He cocked his head slightly as he thought for a moment and looked down into the expectant, nay, pleading, face of the youth.

Waving his free hand down range at the flags and the distant butts he kindly said, “Kid, take as much as you want, there’s plenty there.”