Coast Guard boot camp was 13 weeks long, with one full day dedicated to teaching us how to fire the M1 Garand service rifle at a nearby Army shooting range.
There were 100 of us and they divided us, with half shooting and the other half in the pits below the targets, marking the hits and misses. I was an 18-year-old who had spent the morning shooting standing up for a while, then lying on my stomach aiming at the target, which was 200 yards away. My counterpart was in the pit marking my shots by lowering the target, then raising it back up using a long pole with a marker to show where I had hit — or missed. Also included was a “rapid-fire” session where we shot as fast as we could, using two full clips of cartridges.
After a couple of hours, it was time to switch positions. We shooters had to go into the pits to lower and mark the targets for those who had done that for us. Initially it was rather frightening to see the bullets hitting the target just a couple feet above your head, but soon we all got used to hearing the guns fire and then slugs smacking the target, and seeing puffs of dirt kicking up from the embankment behind the targets.
Beneath each target was a small bench allowing us to sit occasionally, and about half of them had a old Army steel helmet stashed underneath. Nobody used the helmets and we were all bare-headed — because the bullets just hit the dirt and posed no threat.
When the “rapid-fire” portion of the session started, hundreds of bullets suddenly headed our way and the noise was almost deafening. For some goofy reason, I reached down for the helmet under my bench and put it on.
Almost instantly, a bullet that had somehow ricocheted off a rock or some hidden piece of metal traveled down the line and smacked me about ear level on my right side. I heard and felt the jolt, then noticed the officer who accompanied us was sitting on a nearby bench — and I saw the bullet that had hit me had then plowed into the wooden floor, missing his shoe by two inches.
Word traveled fast that a ricochet was suddenly a possibility and everybody was scrambling for the remaining helmets. Without the helmet I had donned, that 30 caliber slug might have ensured I’d not have seen age 19. I tried to dig it out of the floor as a keepsake, but the officer who almost lost a toe from it said I couldn’t take “government property off the base.” I sometimes wonder if, after we left, he didn’t do just that.
Occasionally I mull over what prompted me to put that helmet on at that precise moment, when no one else had even touched one that day. All I can come up with is that someone or something was expecting me to do great things someday, and was saving me for it. Otherwise, I was just one incredibly lucky guy.
Although I was lucky to have survived this encounter, I can’t help thinking about the current day-to-day gun violence in our society and the amount of warfare we are exposed to each day. We shouldn’t all need helmets.
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