Basic Training Journal: Tuesday, September 2nd

We marched to the dry fire range after getting up today. The march was about 6 miles but it wasn't that bad. It was still dark out for most of the march and there weren't any big hills. I thought the 2 mile march to and from the land nav course was worse, maybe I've gotten used to road marches now.

At the dry fire range, we are breakfast, then we learned the proper procedures on a firing range like always pointing your rifle downrange and how to get a comfortable fighting position inside a foxhole. You'll have a fellow soldier be your coach when you are the firer. They'll lay down at the side of the foxhole and give you ammo and check to make sure you do things right.

After that, we had lunch, then started using shadow boxes to see if we were aiming the same way each time we looked through the sights. You basically put your M16 in a box to secure it, look through the sights at a piece of paper, and you direct someone to move a target until it's in your line of fire. It started to rain though...hard. The rest of the range activities for the day were canceled because it started to thunder. They'll call off any outdoor training if they see lightning or hear thunder. We got on buses back to the barracks and cleaned our M16s before dinner.