Chapter Eleven

(One)

Known Distance Range #2

U.S. Marine Corps Schools

Quantico, Virginia

19 November 1941

Because he'd participated, back in '38, in the troop test of the Garand rifle at Fort Benning, Captain Jack NMI Stecker, USMCR, Assistant S-3 of the School Battalion, U.S. Marine Corps Schools, Quantico, did not share the generally held opinion that the Garand was a piece of shit. The Corps had sent to the Army's infantry school a platoon of Marines, under Master Gunnery Sergeant Jack NMI Stecker, to find out for themselves what this new rifle was all about.

He hadn't liked it at first. It was bulky and heavy, and didn't have the lean lines of the Springfield. And he had found it difficult to accept that as soon as the slam of the butt into the socket of the shoulder was over, the fired cartridge was ejected, another cartridge was chambered, the action was cocked, and the Garand was prepared to fire again.

As a young Marine, Stecker had spent long hours endlessly working his Springfield until the action was as smooth as butter. And he had learned to fire and work the bolt so fast and so smoothly that the Springfield seemed like a machine gun with a slow rate of fire.

He and the other Marines involved in the troop test had been proud of that skill. Most of them. So that the test would not be conducted by forty expert marksmen, the Corps had detailed a dozen kids fresh from Parris Island to the platoon. They weren't experts. It took years to really become an expert with a Springfield.

Stecker went to the infantry school at Benning prepared to dislike the Garand.

But that changed. For one thing, even if this came close to heresy, there was no question that the sights on the Garand were better than the sights on the Springfield. On the other hand, the trigger pull started out really godawful, must have been ten pounds when they gave him the new Garand. But he was able to fix that with a little careful stoning of the sear. And the action was stiff as hell too, but that wore itself in after a couple of hundred rounds. And it actually got pretty slick once he learned, by trial and error, just how much of the yellow lubricant to use, and where.

And then the Doggie armorer loaned him his own Garand. What the hell, even if he was a Doggie, they had things in common. The Doggie armorer was a master sergeant, the same rank as Stecker, and he'd done a hitch with the 15th "Can Do" U.S. Infantry in Tientsin, 1935-38. And they knew about rifles. Stecker and the Doggie armorer had more in common with each other than Stecker had with the kids fresh from Parris Island involved in the troop test.

So first they had a couple of beers together at the NCO Club, and then the Doggie invited him to his quarters for supper, and the next morning, the Doggie armorer handed him a Garand and told him he'd "done a little work on it." What he'd done was a really good job on the trigger, and the action was really smooth, and he'd taken chisels to the stock and cut away all the wood, so the barrel was free floating, and (he wasn't sure if Stecker would like this) he'd replaced the rear sight with one he'd rigged up with an aperture about half as big as issue.

The first time Stecker fired the Doggie's Garand-at two hundred yards-when they marked the target and hauled it up again, there was only one spotter (Bullet holes in rifle targets are marked with circular cardboard disks, white if the hole is in the black of the bull’s-eye, and black for holes elsewhere on the target. A peg in the center of the disk is inserted in the bullet hole. A bullet strike is thus visible from the firing line) on it, a white one, but only one.

"Have them re-mark that goddamned target!" Stecker demanded, angry and embarrassed. He had fired two loose rounds and an eight-round clip at that target, and apparently hit it only once.

The Doggie corporal on the field phone to the pits ordered the target re-marked, and it disappeared into the pits. It came back up a minute later with just the one white spotter, and Stecker felt humiliation sweep through him. "Two and a quarter," the Doggie corporal sang out. "What the hell does that mean?" Stecker asked. There was no such terminology in the Corps.

"That means, Sarge," the corporal said tolerantly, "that you put them all into just over two inches. Not bad!"

Stecker was so pleased (and to tell the truth of it, so relieved) that he'd put ten rounds into an area smaller than a spotter-which was damned near minute of angle (One inch at 100 yards. Two inches at 200 yards, etc)-that he didn't even jump the Doggie corporal's ass for calling him "Sarge."

That would have been good shooting even with Stecker's own personal Springfield, which he privately believed was as accurate as any Springfield in the Corps.

That was when he began to change his evaluation of the Garand. Obviously, when properly tuned, the ugly sonofabitch would shoot. Which was the important thing. And being absolutely fair and objective about it, which is what he was supposed to be as the NCOIC of the Marine Troop Test, you could get back on target after the recoil faster than you could with a Springfield. Like it or not, the gas-operated mechanism of the Garand ejected a round and chambered another faster than even a master gunnery sergeant of the Marine Corps could work the bolt of a Springfield.

And there was more to think about. Not only were the Marine marksmen doing well with the Garand - the sergeants and corporals who knew something about shooting - but the kids from Parris Island, too. They didn't, he realized, have a hell of a lot to unlearn. They just took the Garand and learned how to use it.

He didn't easily give in to admitting that the Garand was actually a fine weapon, though. For instance, he surprised hell out of a squad of the kids by ordering them not to detail strip their pieces when the day's firing was over.

"Just run a couple of patches, first bore cleaner, then oil down the bore. Don't brush the bore. I want to see how much it will take to jam it."

It was three days of firing before the first Garand jammed.

That night, he ordered the squad to detail strip and clean their Garands but not to reassemble them. When all the parts were clean, he ordered the kids to put them all together in a pile on the deck of the barrack.

The kids thought he was really nuts then, and even more so when he stepped up to the pile and stirred the parts around with his toe. One of the claimed merits of the Garand was interchangeability of parts. This was a good way to find out.

"Now put them together," he ordered. He stood watching as the kids assembled rifles.

"I don't want anybody exchanging parts after I'm gone," he said. "I'm trying something."

There was only one malfunction of the squad's Garands the next day, a stovepipe (When the action fails to eject a fired cartridge case properly and jams it in place with the open end erect, it is known as a "stovepipe") he suspected was a freak. He proved this by firing three clips through the rifle as quickly as he could and without further failure to eject.

Master Gunnery Sergeant Stecker returned from Fort Benning one of the few people in the Corps who believed the Garand was the best infantry rifle to come down the pike in a long time. He was worried then not about whether the Garand would be good for the Corps, but when-or even whether- the Corps would get it. The Army would take care of itself first, of course. The Corps would probably wind up with the Army's worn-out Springfields rather than new Garands.

Captain Jack NMI Stecker, USMCR, was therefore pleased when the first Garands were issued to the Corps. There were not enough of them to go around, of course, but the door was open. For the moment, unfortunately, there were only enough of them to equip a few detached units, and for instructional purposes.