Safe Ranges, Dangerous Illusions

Range Day

I don’t know where I picked it up, but I have “test anxiety.” Whether it’s a blood test for a cholesterol check or a general knowledge assessment on a topic I instinctively know, it doesn’t seem to matter. The word test makes me nervous. I can exceed the minimum required PFT scores for the 30-and-under crowd as a 40-year-old without much effort, but every six months when that damn assessment rolls around, I can feel my cortisol levels ramping up.

So, it comes as no surprise that on range day I get stuck overthinking and manage to avoid earning the pistol Expert rating, yet again.

We started late because CGIS (Coast Guard Investigative Service) was double booked for our time slot. The Puddle Feds got priority as warrant officers and took their sweet time in the cool of the morning while we went through the motions of a range safety course we’d memorized years ago. It’s a four-hour course that can be compressed to about 90 minutes of “show-and-tell then do.” Galveston, Texas is a crap shoot for weather in November when it can be a balmy 80 with a light breeze one day and a blustery, damp 40 the next. We lucked out and got a warm day, so the only real problem was mosquitoes.

I’d gotten enough sleep for once, I felt alert and on point. I was eager to see if I could earn the little silver E on my pistol ribbon. I’d forgotten that the Coast Guard pistol course of fire is not an intuitive process.

There are two courses of fire. The first is the Basic Pistol Course that determines if you can safely operate the weapon, take instruction, and not shoot yourself or your neighbor. The second is the Firearms Training and Evaluation–Pistol (FT&E-P) and is more about clearing malfunctions and misfires while putting rounds inside the “bowling pin” – the gray center portion of the human silhouette target. First-timers, or folks who’ve gone too long since their last assessment, must go through the basic course again. So long as you continue to qualify on FT&E-P you don’t have to shoot the basic course again.

While waiting for CGIS to finish up, we got on the topic of late ’90s, early ’00s rock. On a whim I pulled up a playlist on my phone and stuck it in the front pouch of my armor. We bobbed our heads and sang along to “Plowed” by Sponge and “Pepper” by Butthole Surfers. Eventually the Range Safety Officer was ready and we headed down to be briefed. “Inside Out” by Eve 6 accompanied us on our walk. Down at the range we listened to the GMs (Gunner’s Mates) go over the order of fire and what our magazine loadout should be.

Despite the imminent violence of gunfire, it was quite relaxing.

“Two mags of twelve, three mags four, two mags of six, one mag of fifteen…” or “nine mags total, three of three, three of two, three of one…” and so on and so forth. Some strings of fire had dummy rounds mixed in to see if we knew our intermediate and remedial action procedures. Bang, bang, click – tap rack reassess – bang, bang, mag change, bang…

I never thought I’d get numb to the violent motion of the pistol jerking in my hand or the physical sensation of the muzzle blast brushing my face as the noise of the discharge reached my ears. I was so damn busy counting bullets and trying to keep from “turtling,” dipping my head and hunching my shoulders to make my eyes meet my sight picture, that I rarely noticed the report of the gun. There were times when I didn’t notice I’d run empty.

As usual, I was in the zone for my first 50 rounds. They were all in a baseball-sized cluster just below the jugular notch, where the clavicle meets the sternum. Most body armor is thin there or doesn’t offer any coverage at all if poorly fitted. It’s also where the huge blood vessels running to and from the heart are located; the vena cava and aorta. It’s a crowded and complex region of the body that’s easy to damage.

I thought through my anatomy lessons from EMT class as I looked at my shipmates’ targets, assessing shot placement with survival estimates and trying to remember the tips and tricks for specific regions. Liver shots can bleed deceptively fast and it’s all internal, too deep to quickly pack. Lung shots can set off a hemothorax and/or pneumothorax trauma, which requires special tools to address on-site, which we don’t carry in our IFAK (Individual First Aid Kits).

The sun cast an angular grid of shadows on the cracked and soot-stained concrete of the range floor. The overhead bullet-catching walls and supporting structure formed an industrial-looking wooden pergola that only a veteran would find comforting in its stark, spartan utility. The supporting columns were old, repurposed telephone poles, pocked and scarred from decades of small arms fire. I leaned against one and could just barely smell the creosote leaking out of a fresh bullet strike. The metallic tang of smokeless gunpowder and CLP cooking off the barrels overrode all other odors. Even the salt air of the cruise ship channel just behind the range couldn’t push through the familiar nasal sting of the range.

Somewhere in the process of loading magazines for the next round of practice shots, I got hung up on a minor point of technique and stumbled out of the zone. My second string of fire was quite a bit sloppier. All inside the bowling pin but spread out and inconsistent. At the 25-yard line I was high and to the left, completely out of the silhouette by a quarter inch. Which was frustrating because at FLETC in Charleston I could ring an eight-inch plate at fifty yards all day long with the pistol. Granted we were also shooting an average of 900 rounds a week, under much more intensive instruction, for three months straight. It’s hard not to improve with that kind of range time.

It warmed as we moved into the afternoon, and as I got further from the zone I started to notice the ten thousand distracting things that happen to shooters as they move through the day. The body armor started to itch, my shirt came untucked in the back, and my hearing protection was making my ears sweat. On a boarding when you’re on mission and your head is on a swivel, you never notice the little things. Hell, in high-stress situations it can be tough to notice severe injuries. Somehow the real-life danger and threats are less stressful than the test.

By the time the third string of fire rolled around, I wasn’t confident I’d qualify. I could feel my sunglasses resting on my nose when I normally forget I’m wearing them. I couldn’t keep my mind on task. After the first mag change I realized I had gotten the magazine order wrong and had to request a pause while Senior Chief helped me sort my magazines out. The qualifying string of fire calls for a full magazine of fifteen, then twelve, nine, and fourteen, in that specific order for a total of fifty rounds.

There are single-hand stances, kneeling, point blank, and transitions from one to the next with mag changes in between, all important techniques. Most police and military training teaches shooters to be on the move as they shoot, to reload in cover, and to maintain situational awareness… not standing there with a static target.

Across the board, the chief complaint about the Coast Guard pistol course of fire is that it’s more about having a safe gun range than teaching useful law enforcement weapon tactics. Though I’m not a cop I have to agree. I spend more time worrying about which magazine I have in my front pouch than I do about technique.

After the last magazine change and clear gun procedure at twenty-five yards, I hung my head as I walked through the telephone pole columns and spent brass to my target. The bullet casings chimed as they were kicked down range by our combat boots. A quick glance showed four holes outside the scoring zone. At two points apiece, that put me at ninety-two, a qualifying score… barely.

I was relieved because it meant I wouldn’t be holding everyone up from getting to a late lunch, and disappointed that I still hadn’t earned the Expert ribbon. At the end of the day, I don’t put in enough time at the range to really be mad at myself about it. I can’t expect perfection if I don’t practice.

We managed to get clear of the range at a decent time and grabbed some tourist food on the beachfront. By the time I got back to my hotel room I was fighting off a food coma.

Long-gun day was blessedly short. The M4 carbine and 870 shotgun are about as utilitarian as you can get and I truly enjoy shooting them where I can be tested. Twenty-five yards at a static target with red dot sights is not a test. There’s almost no recoil to the M4 and the red dot makes it as easy as a video game. We don’t even test on the backup iron sights or do a walking line of fire where we shoot as we advance.

The shotgun is, well, a 12-gauge pump shotgun; aim center mass and watch the bad guy go down. A Remington 12-ga 00-buck shell has eight or nine .32 caliber pellets, so I can put more lead down range by mass with the shotgun in three trigger pulls than I can with the M4 on full auto. You can’t slam-fire the 870 but it will shoot as fast as you can cycle the action. If you can’t put all your pellets in a man-sized silhouette at 15 yards with a 12 gauge, then you are either legally blind or missing on purpose.

The four of us that had to qualify with long guns did so without issue. My groupings were tight enough on the M4 we didn’t realize I’d miscounted my shots halfway through and left five rounds in my second magazine. Counting vs technique.

Assessment passed, we broke down the weapons and spent the better part of an hour cleaning out two days of soot and grime left behind by the cheap training ammo. As much as I enjoy shooting and the camaraderie that comes with it, it’s hard to feel a sense of accomplishment with the CG course of fire. And as “easy” as the course is I really don’t have an excuse for not being better at it.

We attempted a pub crawl to celebrate passing and started at The Poop Deck, a must-visit spot on Galveston Island. It’s the quintessential beachfront dive bar complete with a wall of fame covered in faded Polaroids of women pulling their shirt over their heads to flash the camera. It’s the kind of place that relies on frequent storms out of the gulf to wash it out. $4.75 for a Shiner Bock was a bit steep, so we left to hit a classic New York Italian pizza place and ate till we hurt. With an average age of 37 between the four of us, a carb coma quickly overtook our ambitions of crawling pubs. Also, our wives can see our debit card histories. Instead, we opted for the hotel and crawled into bed. We’re all dads as well and will not pass up an opportunity for eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.

I woke up around 2300. It took me a minute to put the world in context as I stared at the black stains on the meat of my hand between my thumb and forefinger. Despite the lead cleaning soap and obscenely hot shower I could still smell the range and feel the tingle of recoil in my palm. I wondered about those first 50 rounds when I was fresh on the line, and about my time at FLETC where my partner and I mag dumped in the shoot house. We put every round center mass on the suspect like we’d been doing it for years.

Shooting is a perishable fine motor skill that takes regular upkeep. Upkeep that I admittedly don’t make time for. That’s one advantage my shipmates who are police have over me, they are required to spend quite a bit more time at the range. Even then, I have to wonder if I spent a day a week at the range, would my test anxiety still cause me to choke after the first 50 rounds?

There is a saying in the Coast Guard, “Policy changes are written in blood.” I worry that someone is going to get hurt before the Coast Guard decides it’s time to start taking our firearms training more seriously. Until then, I will keep playing the game and qualifying on our safe ranges, hoping that when the time comes I will “pass the test.”

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K.C. Aud has made a career of being lucky and has managed to find something positive in nearly every poor decision he’s ever made, even if it was only a new perspective on how not to do something.

Enlisting in the U.S. Coast Guard in 2010 he became an Operations Specialist (radio and navigation) and did his first tour in Georgia guarding submarines from drunk fishermen. In 2014, tired of the heat and the bugs he transferred to a 210-foot medium endurance cutter in Washington state. The cutter then regularly deployed to the hot and buggy west coast of Central America to hunt down drug runners. Aboard USCGC Active he traveled 94,194 miles and personally handled enough cocaine to keep a small country high for a decade. Somewhere in there, he learned to write, if not spell.  

Three years later, daunted by the prospect of spending the rest of his career in a windowless command center, he separated from active duty. After 13 different jobs ranging from beer brewer to dairy farmhand, to machinist, to Navy civilian contractor, he reenlisted in 2020 as a Coast Guard reservist, changing rates to Maritime Law Enforcement Specialist. When not helping the Navy assets in the Puget Sound troubleshoot radios, he’s on drill in Seattle doing water cop stuff and or flailing away at his keyboard. Though married and now a father, he misses the mission. 

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.