Man and Rifle Reaching
It was near the end of our three weeks at Camp Matthews, the rifle range. Our drill instructors had behaved like blacksmiths, sticking us and our M14 rifles into a fire until everything in every boy-man of us that did not have to do with rifle was burned away, then hammering what remained of each of us, together with his rifle, until a new, unified instrument was forged. This is pretty literal: in the sitting position, for example, the rifle's sling pulled the left elbow in toward the body's centerline in an attitude which muscles and tendons aren't really designed to adopt. After ankles were crossed in the dirt so that each knee was supported by the opposite booted foot, the spine had to curl forward until each elbow reached past the supporting knee.
At the beginning, few of us could get even near this position. As Marine Corps drill instructors always had, ours simply kicked us into it: it was a boot to the back, a knee to the neck, a kick to the elbow, all amid a whirlwind of shouted curses and warnings that failure to get it right could result not only in the individual Marine's death, but in the deaths of his comrades as well. That was against regulations. In fact, it was the ultimate crime, not because the Marine Corps loved us, but because such a death would end that Marine's contribution to his unit's victory and because it would necessitate writing letters to our mothers, whose usefulness on the planet had ended once they had turned their sons over to the men who would temper all that softness out of us.
One of Gunny Rogers' favorite exercises was for the purpose of preparing the muscles of the right shoulder to hold the rifle steady in the offhand position. The M14 weighed over nine pounds unloaded, closer to eleven charged with a 20-round magazine, more yet with a bayonet fixed on the end. Accuracy could mean your life, or someone else's. Accuracy required holding the rifle steady. Holding the rifle steady required strong shoulder muscles. This was what Marines did.
The exercise started by turning your body ninety degrees, so that your left shoulder, instead of your chest, pointed downrange. Then you put the rifle to your shoulder for the offhand position. They taught us a special way of doing this. First you brought the rifle up in front of your chest, with the muzzle pointed downrange. But instead of holding it in the normal firing position with the sights and top of the weapon pointed at the sky, you rotated the rifle ninety degrees away from your body so that the bolt handle pointed toward the ground, and the sights away from you.
Then you curled your head and chest out over the rifle, the way you would lean over to pick up a baby from a crib. This made a nice hollow at the base of the shoulder for the toe, or bottom, of the butt plate. With the rifle still flatways to the ground, you tucked the toe of the buttplate into that nice little pocket you'd made, snugged it in tight, then rolled your head and upper body and rifle upright all in one motion, at the same time rotating your right elbow clear up past the horizontal until it was nearly vertical. That put your upper arm in the most efficient biomechanical position for supporting the rifle's weight, with the right arm making a vertical triangle like a section of bridge truss, from the shoulder up to the elbow and back down to the hand at the rifle's grip. The left arm made a triangle supporting the rifle from below, with the left hand cradling the stock at its balance point.
The Gunny would have the whole platoon spread out with double spacing between the four squads and our rifles raised in this position, then order us to drop our left hands. He ranged in front of us, scowling and taunting those who wavered with the usual insults: pussies, girls, non-hackers, pukes. The contest was to see who was the last to lower his rifle. One time, I remember, that was me.
So we lived Rifle. Not gun. Rifle. In boot camp, to call your rifle a gun was a sacrilege the penance for which was to stand in a place where the rest of your platoon could see you but the outside world could not, with your penis in one hand and your rifle in the other, reciting:
This is my rifle,
This is my gun.
This is for fighting,
This is for fun.
We cleaned our rifles and fired them and cleaned them again. We cleaned our rifles and did calisthenics with them and cleaned them again. We became rifles: the Marine Corps expression for grabbing a man by the shirt front and bracing him up against a wall was to "grab him by the stacking swivel," which is that little metal hook near the end of the forearm on many military rifles, used to engage three rifles with one another to form a freestanding tripod on a parade ground or bivouac area.
Each of us was forcefully laminated around his own rifle, like the blades of the Japanese katana swords that had been faced in their youth by some of those who were now training us. And, though all our rifles would have looked alike to an outsider's eye, each of us was so familiar with his own as to be able to recognize it from a few feet away as easily as one could pick out his own brother or sister on a playground full of kids. We caressed their walnut stocks with linseed oil, and scrubbed their machined steel parts with Hoppe's #9 solvent, then wiped that off and oiled them lightly. Then we snuggled our boys' cheeks and noses down alongside them again, to store forever in our synapses the remembered smells of linseed oil and Hoppe's #9 and burnt powder.
One day, as we were getting ready to go back to the firing line after noon chow, I stepped to the corner of our tent and reached for my rifle, which was leaning there. Something happened, a quick small thing which I will remember when I have forgotten most of the rest of my life. As I reached for the rifle, and my hand came near it, the rifle itself seemed to move, to tip itself out from the corner of the tent, taking a little hop into my hand as if it were impatient with the slowness of my reach. The rifle seemed to have had the same intentionality forged into it that had by then been forged into me, and was leaping from the corner of the tent, into my ready hand, in its eagerness to get back to work.
