PMI round 2
I spoke before what PMI was as we did it for our pistols last week. Today was a PMI for our rifles. Normally this means a day of disassembling and reassembling weapons, doing action drills and “dime and washer” exercises where you get down in a shooting position and someone puts a dime or a washer on your barrel. You then proceed to pull the trigger and try to make sure the dime or washer doesn’t fall off. It teaches you good trigger pull technique, although it’s pretty monotonous when they give you an hour to perform this task.
The Army surprised me today with a new tool they use to help soldiers get ready to go to the range and qualify on their assigned weapon. They call it the EST 2000 (electric shooting trainer) and it’s like a full size video game for soldiers, complete with actual rifles equipped with fancy laser beams. It lets you work out bugs in your technique before you head to the range, like the placement of your cheek on the rifle, your sight picture, and your breathing. The thing I learned the most from this trainer was that I’ve never shot a rifle before with 45 lbs of armor on. The IBA (individual ballistic armor) is a bit cumbersome and it takes a lot of adjusting to make sure that you are in a comfortable shooting position. Plus, the new helmet also has more adjustment points that one has to play with before you can set yourself up to take a good shot. Overall, I did well (even out shot my commander), but we’ll see how well I do on the range on Monday. All I know is that if I don’t do well, there will be a lot of fellow shooters at home who will be very disappointed in me and they would most likely pawn my weapons off before I come home.
I spoke before what PMI was as we did it for our pistols last week. Today was a PMI for our rifles. Normally this means a day of disassembling and reassembling weapons, doing action drills and “dime and washer” exercises where you get down in a shooting position and someone puts a dime or a washer on your barrel. You then proceed to pull the trigger and try to make sure the dime or washer doesn’t fall off. It teaches you good trigger pull technique, although it’s pretty monotonous when they give you an hour to perform this task.
The Army surprised me today with a new tool they use to help soldiers get ready to go to the range and qualify on their assigned weapon. They call it the EST 2000 (electric shooting trainer) and it’s like a full size video game for soldiers, complete with actual rifles equipped with fancy laser beams. It lets you work out bugs in your technique before you head to the range, like the placement of your cheek on the rifle, your sight picture, and your breathing. The thing I learned the most from this trainer was that I’ve never shot a rifle before with 45 lbs of armor on. The IBA (individual ballistic armor) is a bit cumbersome and it takes a lot of adjusting to make sure that you are in a comfortable shooting position. Plus, the new helmet also has more adjustment points that one has to play with before you can set yourself up to take a good shot. Overall, I did well (even out shot my commander), but we’ll see how well I do on the range on Monday. All I know is that if I don’t do well, there will be a lot of fellow shooters at home who will be very disappointed in me and they would most likely pawn my weapons off before I come home.
Picture of the Army's advanced version of Duck Hunt
1 comment:
Hehe...I must of had a subconscious thought of you the other day, I played Duck Hunt!
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