No Hero, Part 3

The next morning, after getting cleaned up and dressed, you collected the gear you’d left in a pile on the floor next to your door and made for the Arms Room. The light of the dawn had just begun to break over the horizon, making things outside of the building look fuzzy and indistinct. It reminded you of hunting with your dad in the early morning and in the evening when the light was weak or failing, when the animals were as vulnerable as humans who hunted them.

You drove out to the Black Hills National Forest in eastern South Dakota, about twenty miles from Mount Rushmore. Dad dropped his four point white tail with a single shot on the very first day. You had been encouraged by your dad to shoot the same deer, had your rifle raised and sighted on the animal and were actually squeezing the trigger when he fired. After he crumbled to the ground you ran to the fallen animal. His heart and lungs were punctured. He breathed slowly in, shuddered as he released his breath for a moment and became very still. You watched the shiny black marble of his eyes cloud over with death.

At the rifle range you went through the normal routines: the rifle held up and down range at all times, clearing your rifle and placing it on "safe," locking the bolt to the rear, dribbling lubricant on the bolt and in the chamber, working the bolt back and forth and then relocking it. Squishing your foam earplugs into your ears, feeling them expand and squeeze until it sounded like being underwater. The ammo detail handed out twenty round magazines, the target detail stapled paper man silhouettes to the target frames. The range safety sergeant ran a thick copper wire down the barrel of the rifle, tapped hard enough on the bolt to send it snapping shut with a greasy metallic snicker. Then three steps up into the sand pit, you laid down and waited for the order to lock and load.

Looking at the man shaped targets reminded you of watching your dad’s deer die. Hunting has always held an exalted place in your life. Your father had been doing it for as long as you could remember. For you, it wasn’t a big deal to see a dead buck hanging upside down in the garage by its legs. It was accepted that you killed deer for food, and seeing dead animals has never really affected you. Watching the big animal take its final breath was the first time you’d seen something so big end so quickly. You were awed, not by the body of the buck stretched out on the pine needled floor of the forest, but by the act of seeing life fade out of those big dark eyes. You remembered how you walked in the forest for a little while and tried to wrap your mind around what exactly it was that you had seen while your dad gutted and tagged the buck.

"Lock and load one twenty round magazine," the range safety sergeant barked in a crisp military monotone, and you did, careful to keep the sand out. The sound of ten other magazines slipping into rifles was clearly audible through the earplugs. You set the stock of the rifle against your shoulder, sighted your target.

"Flip your selector lever from ‘Safe’ to ‘Semi’ and fire when ready."

You had noticed on previous days at the range that you had difficulty pulling the trigger at first. Your mind resisted giving the order and your finger resisted obeying, like a hand hovering nervously above an electric fence, once you’ve been shocked it’s easier to go on; you know what to expect. So after all the selector levers had been flipped it took a moment before the first shot went off. The soldier right next to you fired first, and it sent a jolt through your whole body, the surprise of the sudden noise, the way you felt the tremor in the sand from the contained explosion inside the chamber of the rifle. It was a relief from the tension. Other people began to fire, and with all of the ruckus it was easy for you to squeeze off your rounds.

In fact, once you got started, you went quickly and finished before the others. You dropped the spent magazine from the weapon, returned the selector lever to ‘Safe,’ and laid your weapon in the v notched stake hammered into the sand. You watched a target, Hillcrest’s target, fall from the stand it had been stapled to and flutter gently to the ground. It was a trick shot that Hillcrest had perfected; he was such a deadeye that he could shoot out the staples holding his target up.

"God damn it, Hillcrest," the range safety sergeant said, "you are not going to fuck around at my range. This is serious training."

"Sarn’t, if I can shoot the staples off the target, you think I can hit the man on the target?" Hillcrest said with an audile smirk.

"Do it right or you’ll do pushups until you push Fort Leavenworth into the sea, understand?"

"Roger, Sarn’t."

The breeze tugged at the fallen target. As the last few straggling shots were fired at their targets, you remembered your pathetic and pain wracked first buck, his futile charge. How time seemed to slow to a stop. You thought something was odd about the way the buck was running, and picked it out almost immediately. He was running at you on three legs. When you had fired, the kick from the shot jerked the rifle slightly and screwed up your aim so instead of hitting him in the rump, you hit just above his knee, nearly severing the leg, which was only attached by a thin piece of his fur covered skin. He was tearing down the hill right at you, and distantly, you heard your dad yell at you to shoot. Everything moved so slowly. Arms raised the rifle; finger squeezed the trigger and fired. There was no sound; you didn’t even notice the recoil. The animal reared up on its hind legs as the bullet tore a path across his chest, turning slightly to the left to miss you as he continued to haul ass. You pivoted smoothly, followed his movement as he ran around you and down the hill. You kicked out the spent shell and snickering metal slammed another round into the chamber. You raised the rifle, and as the cross hairs found his shoulder you pulled the trigger. In the split second it took the bullet to travel down the barrel, the buck moved just enough to have the shot hit and shatter his hips, and send the bullet, shattering into infinitesimal bits that tore through his guts, out the other side of his body.

The crippled animal fell to the ground; his momentum sent his speeding body hurtling across the logging trail and even further down the hill. You were breathing heavily as you walked to the dying creature. The pain crazed animal was trying to raise himself up on his shattered limbs, trying to drag itself forward by digging its nose into the snow, pulling with it’s undamaged front legs. None of the rounds had inflicted quick death on the buck. You kicked out the spent casing in your rifle, but didn’t have any bullets left in the magazine. The animal struggled fruitlessly on, panicked and delirious with pain as you ran to your dad to grab one last shot.

"Clear left? Clear right?" the range safety sergeant asked. "Firers, head downrange and check your targets." You stood up and sand ran from the crevices and folds of your uniform, turned it from dark green to a dusty tan. You stood in front of your target and counted the holes. Twenty, and all where you’d directed them to go. The range safety sergeant congratulated you on your fine shooting.

"Fuckin’ A, crackerjack," he said with a smile. Turn your target in and relieve someone on the ammo detail." You nodded at his instruction, but your mind was elsewhere.

You had frantically repeated "Jesus" over and over again as the adrenaline sank in. You grabbed the bullet out of your dad’s waiting hand, quickly loaded it into you rifle, and ran sobbing to the stricken beast. Aiming through the sight at his shoulder in the cross hairs, his heart behind it somewhere, you fired one last time, not feeling the recoil, just the thunderous sound of the shot. Steam came from the last bullet hole, his ragged breath escaping through his punctured lung. His large eyes were glazing and bugged out of his head and still the buck struggled to get away, digging with his nose even as his heart slowed and stopped beating and for a second or two after that.

You pulled down your target, scrawled your name across the top of it and walked back to the sand pit. You put your target on a stack of other targets that had been shot and made for the ammo shed to load