Aiming and firing: You will be taught to shoot better in your advanced training. Basic shooting is simply a matter of lining up the front and back sites with the target then squeezing the trigger smoothly while holding the butt of the rifle firmly into your shoulder. A book is not the place for advanced shooting skills but I can give you some useful pointers.
Carrying your rifle: When on any type of patrol or guard duty your rifle must be available for instant use. There is no point in carrying it on a sling over your shoulder. However easy and comfortable that may seem, the delay in bringing the rifle into use can be deadly. You must remember that warfare is 99% boredom and 1% adrenaline. The time you are hit WILL be the time you have slung your rifle over your shoulder and your mind is elsewhere. Then you are dead. Anyone caught resting with their rifle out of reach should be either beaten or fined a payment towards the beer fund.
On patrol your rifle should be held so that your trigger hand is near the trigger and your other hand on the fore-stock. Some units teach soldiers to carry the rifle with the butt at the shoulder but pointing down at all times. This is good for quick shooting but tiring to maintain and a soldier will stop doing this if he is not watched. I think lowering the stock to the hip is acceptable as it is the work of a moment to fire from the hip or bring the rifle to the shoulder. If you are in such a hurry then accuracy is probably a secondary concern. I don’t want to teach any idle or bad habits here but if leaders make SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) too much of a pain the soldiers will stop following them. Just carry your rifle so you can get a few rounds off quickly in an emergency. Otherwise, eventually, you will die.
Conservation of ammunition: When you go out on a patrol for several days on foot you will have to carry all your own rifle ammunition, probably ammunition for the machine gun and mortar bombs, grenades, explosives, flares, water, food, medical supplies, sleeping kit and spare socks. You may have to carry the machine gun itself or a rocket launcher or a piece of the mortar or a radio and possibly a kitchen sink too. This is when the weight of your ammunition counts for a great deal.
The infantry soldier is more like a pack mule than anything else. Special Forces are expected to carry more weight, further. The fitter you are the further you can walk carrying all this kit and still keep your mind clear and active. If your attention wanders because you are tired you may be dead before you rest. The loss of attention when tired is probably the best argument for fitness in the infantry soldier. Even if you are on a local patrol for a few hours or a day you still have to carry ammunition and water at the very least. On a longer patrol you are likely to need more rifle ammunition to see you through a number of contacts. Especially if you are cut off from re-supply. From the above you will understand that the amount of ammunition you can carry is limited by the total weight you can carry and still function. To put it simply – the way to carry more ammunition is to carry lighter ammunition. Hence the assault rifle.
Roy Mobsby, left, and Alan Ash (both ex-Parachute Regiment): bodyguards in Iraq carrying M4s (a variant of the M16), Glock 17 9mm pistols and plenty of ammunition. (Photo courtesy Sergeant Roy Mobsby)
On a short patrol you might be carrying 300 rounds. At 5lb weight this is not much to walk down the street with but wait until you are running around all day in the heat while wearing body armour. On a longer patrol you might be loaded up like a mule and be carrying 1,000 rounds or more. On patrols of 5–7 days I have always tried to carry mainly ammunition and water. You don’t need a lot of food in hot weather and a pot noodle weighs nothing dry anyway.
Running out of ammunition on the two-way range is like running out of air. You don’t miss it until it happens. Imagine facing a mob of rioters or charging, drug-crazed fanatics or whatever is your own personal nightmare. And your rifle clicks as the firing pin comes home into an empty chamber. You feel in your pouch or jacket and there is no more. Though bayonets have many positive qualities they perform poorly against concentrated automatic fire.
Mobs are the worst in my opinion. Apparently ordinary people go crazy and will literally tear you apart. I once saw a young British soldier, working in plain clothes, dragged out of his unmarked car by a mob of Irish rioters, blinded with screwdrivers then beaten to death with iron bars – after his pistol jammed. Once a teenage soldier was castrated by a gang of Irish women. And these were ordinary decent people to all intents and purposes. They had families, children they loved and they went to church but the mob mentality turned them into monsters. Mobs still make me nervous and I’ve been in a good few riots so it’s not just the novelty factor.
My point is that a rifle can use up ammunition at great speed if you hold that trigger down. The cyclic rate of fire on most rifles is around 650 rounds per minute so do the maths and forget the movies. When you are being shot at it is natural to want to shoot back, but a magazine of 20 rounds is gone in less than 2 seconds if you hold that trigger down. Aside from spraying bullets in the direction of the enemy when you are ambushed, try to stick to single, aimed shots.
The first time you are in a ‘contact’, or shooting match, you feel under more pressure as it is an unusual experience. Breathe deeply and stay calm. Fire off aimed shots and count your rounds if you have the self-control. The first time you make a kill is an even more significant experience. By my observation, soldiers all want to be by themselves for a day or so while they come to terms with the first one. After that it seems no more than turning off a light and you will be able to think a bit more clearly in the middle of a shooting match.
REMEMBER:
Use all the ammunition you need to get out of an ambush. Use what you have to use when keeping their heads down. Use aimed shots or bursts of 2 or 3 to make single kills and always, always keep some in reserve. As your ammunition gets lower then get more careful. Running out of ammunition can be much, much worse than getting killed; it can mean you get captured...
So, to fight a battle you have to strike a balance between defending yourself by suppressing enemy fire, which is where most of your ammunition will go, and keeping some for later to actually shoot the enemy. It is much less often that you will get an aimed shot at an enemy. Most kills will be obtained by all your team firing into the bushes that are firing at you – at night.
Types of rifle
There are a number of common rifle types available to the soldier today but basically they can be split into two types defined by what ammunition they fire. This is because a rifle, indeed any firearm, is built around the cartridge it fires. Clearly, it helps if everyone on your side fires the same ammunition so you can resupply each other.
Rifle ammunition: The range, accuracy and hitting power you require of your weapon determines the type of bullet you will fire and how fast it must travel. The bullet calibre and weight and the velocity required determine the design and weight of the round which propels that bullet. The size and power of the entire round determines the design and weight of the rifle which fires that round.
There are only two features which require consideration in the selection of ammunition because ammunition reliability (as opposed to weapon reliability) is now more or less 100%. The first is its accuracy/hitting power and the second is its weight. Generally, to make ammunition more accurate and powerful you have to make it heavier – by using a heavier bullet and more propellant – but to make ammunition easier to carry you want it as light as possible. The heavier the round, the heavier the weapon has to be which fires it so as to withstand the pressure and recoil. This is why snipers always use large calibre weapons – they don’t use much ammo and generally don’t have to carry their rifle far. So ammunition design is always a trade-off between weight and hitting power.