One was hiding in a herd of others and just had to keep moving at the Drill Sergeant's pace to graduation. When I was looking to buy a semi automatic rifle I thought about the M14 (currently known as the M1A) the one I had carried in Basic, Leadership Preparation Course, Advanced Individual Training, Officer Candidate School (Fort Benning's School for Boys) and then to my first overseas tour, Korea. Hmm, when did the M16 creep into my military life? Vietnam for sure, but weren't we still armed with M14s for the funeral details in Oklahoma and Texas in 1969? Not sure, maybe it will come to me - tomorrow, when it won't be fleeing furiously.
I could have purchased the M1A Springfield, but I have the DVDs Band of Brothers, Finding Private Ryan and Flags of Our Fathers, and the real kicker was Billy Jack had one in one of his movies (no I don't remember which). If you had asked the real reason, it wasn't particularly romantic - I was never a fan of shoot and spray - having never met hordes of the Kahn's Mongol Pony Soldiers and Chinese Red Army folk in mass attacks. And I was convinced that the twenty round box magazine was always in my way when I wanted to get close to the ground and still shoot my rifle, it was always in the way and I do like to hug the ground when fired upon... until I had to fix bayonet and charge, screaming a rebel yell (like that ever happened in this lifetime). So I did everything to get a fine M1 from the CMP folks, with bullets and instructions.
They didn't ship a Drill Sergeant to teach me properly, and so until recently I have had the most terrible time loading two cartridges into the clip for placing in the rifle. In military training, the assumption is you don't know anything and fear will set your mind free for filling with the finer points of military madness. Yep, it does work, I have been on both sides of the training. You have over a week of weapon training without bullets, carrying it everywhere, learning how to keep from hitting the soldier next to you with the rifle while marching forward and rear, right flank and left (and obliques for the Marines - so old school). You do exercises to sweat with it, you do tear down and assembly and name all the parts, and find the ones you think you can't put in upside-down (most you can't but some are made so you can but shouldn't). Any way I had fired on several ranges and over a couple hundred rounds and still didn't KNOW how to load two rounds, so I went back to the books. In the fine little pamphlet that came with my rifle, U.S. Rifle, Caliber .30, M1 : READ THIS FIRST! was, on page 14, was TO LOAD A PARTIAL CLIP, and I read it and went and got the rifle and two dummy rounds and a clip, and practiced - something a Drill Sergeant would have had me do long before those first round down range on the twenty-five yard range... ah, I can do it well now, especially since I didn't have to invent a way to make it happen it really does work. Thank you, Mister Garand, another easy step on the way to becoming a much better American Rifleman.
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