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Rio shifts position and tries to exclude Jack from her peripheral vision.
“An even simpler way is to raise your arm to level, which is ninety degrees. Then divide that into five segments. Imagine a clock hand jumping from minute to minute. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Each click, each segment, is five miles per hour.
“With this bit of information you can set the windage screw on the rear sight, so that even as you continue to aim the sights straight at your target, the muzzle will actually be aimed to the left or right of the Jap or Kraut. Then the wind will simply blow your bullet sideways until it hits.”
A chest. A neck. A face.
After an hour of this, and an hour of rehearsing the four firing positions—prone, seated, kneeling, and standing—they pile aboard trucks for the three-mile trip to the firing range.
“I’m amazed they don’t have us run there,” Jack says. “This is luxury!”
“We are truly being treated like movie stars,” Jenou agrees wryly, waving a hand around the open truck as it bounces with bone-jarring force over some dried-mud tire tracks.
They are split into two groups. One will stand in the deep trench beneath the targets and mark hits and misses while the other shoots. Then they’ll switch.
Additional instructors await, one for every three shooters, acting as spotters and offering helpful tips.
On command, Rio loads her rifle. Eight long brass cartridges lined up two-by-two in the metal clip, which she thumbs into the chamber.
“Check safeties!”
There follows some clicking and sheepish looks and everything is checked by the range instructors, who buzz around like capable bees, often physically manipulating soldiers into the right grip, the right stance.
Rio gathers a small handful of dirt as there are no handy blades of grass. She lets it fall and watches where the lightest bits land. Feeling ridiculous and self-conscious, she points with her whole arm to the spot. Rio does a rough calculation and decides on three clicks left windage.
“Take a prone position!”
This they have practiced many times. Rio lies flat, with her legs spread medium-wide and cocked to the left, making her body into a lazy L. The fr
ont sight has three elements: a left and right side, each about half an inch high and curved outward, a bit like goat horns. Between them is a simple square post half as tall as the sides.
The rear sight is a stubby steel cylinder with a hole in the center. It is this hole that must be adjusted for altitude and windage. Click, click, click.
Two hundred yards, that’s the range. But they’ve been taught to take a ranging shot first and see where the bullet strikes before adjusting for altitude on the range.
“Ready. Aim. Fire when ready.”
Rio lines the sights up. The target bull’s-eye appears to sit just on top of the center post of the front sight as seen through the hole in the rear sight.
Don’t jerk, squeeze.
BANG!
The rifle punches her shoulder and almost tears loose of her grip.
Shots ring out to her left and right, much louder than she’d imagined. Painfully loud. There’s a ringing in her right ear, and her left ear’s not much better off.
The target is lowered. A minute later it rises back into view again, and a black disc is placed over the spot where the bullet struck. It was low, almost off the paper, and to one side.
Rio adjusts her sight. She backs off a click on windage and raises the rear sight by four clicks.
Her second shot is just above the bull’s-eye. One click less altitude.
BANG!
The third round clips the edge of the bull’s-eye. The fourth does as well.
“Not bad,” an instructor says. “You’re jerking the trigger just a little. And firm up your firing position.” He lifts her legs by the ankles and shifts them left. “Get that strap seated just right around your arm, and I think we better loosen it just a notch and give you more play.”
