BOLC II - Week 4 - Day 2

Another glorious morning. It was a bit cold (mid-40's) and we ran to the PT field and did a combo of pushups and situps (different variations). Then it was time to gear up and hit the range.

A bunch of waiting around (this is the Army after all). Then we had quick mini classes on the weapon that we would shoot immediately afterward. Below you can see the first on deck, the M2 Machine Gun. This weapon shoots 50 calibre rounds and is awesome. Too bad I only got to shoot 15 rounds, its kind of fun. As you can see they mounted the weapons on HMMV's to give us a more realistic fire.

And above of course is me, ready to rock and roll. This weapon is awesome and fun to shoot.

Then it was on to the other weapons, the M249 Machine Gun (often called the SAW, Squad Automatic Weapon). Its the standard weapon and you will find that almost all infantry squads have 2 of these. Then it was the M240B, the bigger brother of the 249. It fires a larger round than the 249 (7.62mm vs 5.56mm) but is fairly comparable.

We also got to shoot the M203. This is the weapon that you see slung underneath M16/M4's that fires a 40mm grenade. We fired what amounts to be paintball rounds, though they have the same kick and ballistic profile of a live round. You get a nice splash of paint when it hits the target. Normally we also can fire the M19, which is an automatic grenade launcher but because of range restrictions we couldn't. I really wish we could since it looks fun.

After we cleared the range we then had a class on convoy operations. We will be doing that next week so we definitely paid attention, since this is a serious operational class (lots of experience being in/running them in the classroom so you got lots of useful anecdotes). We got off around 1630.