The Doctor is In...

Still surgical.

Still lethal.

If I wanted someone dead, it'd happen.

Well, 35/40 times.

Of course, the actual qualification shooting is tomorrow, but I have a feeling it's gonna be more of the same.

To be honest, today was probably the best day of actual training I've had that wasn't a Saturday. We woke up at whatever time we felt like—the first official muster was at 7:15 AM—and then got our crap together to go. Donning our body armour and anything else we wanted to put on to combat the cold, we got issued our MRE's for the day before we got on the bus, because there'd be no delivery of them to the range today.

Got to the range, and it was straight-forward. The guy who was in front of me was shooting horribly wrong, even for my "no real method of shooting" standards. For the prone supported, he rested the weapon itself on the sandbags, which is a no go for one primary reason: you lose control of the weapon. Not in the "oh my gawd, he's shooting everyone with his uncontrolled recoil!" kinda way, but in the "having to pivot his weapon on a central point instead of moving the entire thing as a whole to transition from target to target" kinda way.

And because of that, he didn't qualify.

Throughout the first magazine of rounds he was doing it, the Drill Sergeant for our section of the range was back there telling me how not to do it like the other guy was doing it. And when it was all said and done, the other guy comes back and asks, "Was that guy telling you what I was doing wrong?"

"Er, uh," I replied, "No, Chief... he was telling me how to improve on your methods."

And with that, he stormed off, and I took my place. It was exactly as before with whether I hit or miss: I knew immediately if I'd hit or missed it, not because the targets either would or wouldn't fall down, but because I'm fully aware of where each shot is going, and unfortunately, there's no way to correct it once it's outta the death tube.

But in the end, I got my score. As I said at the beginning, it was 35/40, which is one under the required score count for Expert marksman.

But still, for practice... I'm a sharpshooter.

It was because of my score as compared with the rest of my platoon, though, that got me chewed out.

"You got a 35?" Drill Sergeant Jarvis asked.
"Hooah," I replied, giving in to the Army way of doing things.
"Do you love me?" he asked.
"Yes," I replied, without missing a beat.
"Then you need to get out there and teach your team what you're doing and how to improve, hooah? I pride myself on getting 100% qualification on the first time out with each of my platoons, and this is no exception. That's the first thing you should've done when you got off the range, hooah?"
"Hooah," I replied again.

That's the closest thing I've ever gotten to being chewed out by our Drill Sergeant, and to be honest, there's no way to fix it to make sure that it doesn't happen again. Because if I go and tell everyone that the way that I got my score was a healthy regimen of video games and holding my breath, and just being attentive, he's gonna tell me that...

a) I need to employ the fundamentals to get my score to 40, guaranteed.
b) The reason I got what I did was because I didn't use the fundamentals.

So it's pretty much a lose, lose situation. But, I dun care, really. I just need to make it through another week of this, then it'll be on to Kuwait.