Range Day

 

This weapon is illegal in three different ways in Missouri.  All kinds of awesome.

There are certain perks to being deployed to Afghanistan.  You get paid a lot.  Movies are cheap.  And no one questions when a civilian wants to shoot automatic weapons.

Back home it took multiple months of planning and permission granting to get a group of civilians from my home office to a range.  Body armor had to be issued.  Ammo had to be ordered.  Every round had to be fired, and every shell picked up to be counted, lest an investigation into the fate of unfired ammo be initiated.  It was a massive pain in the butt for 45 minutes of play time on the range.  

Afghanistan ranges are so much easier.

As with many things in life, it's not what you know, it's who you know.  One of our buddies works with a guy who was roommates with the guy that runs the range when they served in Ranger battalion together.  A quick phone call between roommates was all that was needed to get a group of seven of us a reservation.  We brought the weapons (well, most of them, more on that in a bit), they brought the targets and the ammo, and we were cleared until we ran out of time or bullets, whichever came first.  (Unfortunately, it was time.  Running out of bullets would have been a lot more fun.)

After a long and arduous SUV ride, detoured by protesting Kabulites and lazy traffic police, we arrived at Darul Aman, on the south side of the city.  The area was pretty interesting.  On one section of the base were ruins of a palace built by Genghis Khan.  Nearby were the King and Queen's Palaces, built in the 1920s to house, presumably, the king and queen of whatever monarchy ruled Afghanistan during that era.  And near the entrance to the base was a new construction site where an Afghan Government building is being built.  Four separate buildings home to three different ruling parties from three different centuries.  The one time in my life I wished I was a history major.  

The King's Palace on the right, flanked by the new Government building on the left, 

with the city of Kabul in the background.

The Queen's Palace with spy blimp on overwatch.

Up the mountain from these buildings and the surrounding camp was the range.  Upon a arrival we were introduced to the crew in charge, a British corporal, an Australian naval officer, and an American Marine gunnery sergeant.  The gave an abbreviated safety brief, crushing our hopes of shooting without having to wear body armor in the process.  As they set up new targets for us and broke out the ammo, we loaded magazines and prepped the weapons.  And one in particular attracted more interest than the others.

Everyone (minus myself) brought a Beretta M9 pistol, the basic weapon for senior enlisted and officers assigned at Camp Eggers.  We'd also secured three M4 assault rifles.  One of these was special (I'm holding it the picture at the beginning of this post), as it was equipped with a shortened barrel, a holographic red dot sight, and a detachable suppressor, aka silencer.  It had been issued to one of our resident officers by a Special Forces team at his home base.  I have no idea why they issued such a weapon to someone that was going to be working a desk job.  I also don't care.  I'm just so happy that it happened to someone that was willing to lend it to us to put through it's paces.

Seeing the suppressed rifle, the range crew felt compelled to make a trade.  If we would let them shoot the suppressed rifle, they would let us shoot their fully automatic rifles.  Needless to say, that wasn't a difficult decision.  So to our pool of available armaments was added the British L85A2 Carbine, a shortened version of the full rifle made for vehicle crews to carry in tight quarters, and the Australian's Steyr Aug.  (They also intended for us to be able to shoot an AK-47, but the guy that was supposed to be bringing the ammo for that gun flaked out and never showed up.)

 The British L85A2 Carbine.  A short little weapon with great sights 

and little recoil, but LOUD.  You knew when someone was shooting this.

The Steyr Aug.  Fun to shoot, but much trickier than the other weapons.

I can see quite a bit of training being needed to use this weapon effectively.

Commence the entertainment.

Besides the silencer, each of the three M4s had a different optical sight attached.  One had an ACOG, and the others had two different types of red dot sights.  These weapons were stationed at one end of the range and were free for whoever wanted to fire them to do so.  The Brit and the Aussie each ran a station for their weapon, helping the user understand the proper way to compensate for each rifle's quirks.  The Carbine was the most odd.  Besides pulling the trigger, everything was done with the left hand.  This even required reaching over the top of the stock to the right side of the weapon to draw back the bolt and chamber a round.  Lefties would HATE it.  It felt a little odd to me, as I was only using my left hand to hold the weapon when I was shooting the M4, but I was getting used to it by the time I ran out of ammo.  The Aug's special quirk was it's method of selecting how many rounds to fire.  You could either fire on semi automatic, or one round at a time, or on fully automatic, or rounds fire until you stop holding the trigger.  Most weapons have a switch on the side that lets you choose one or the other.  The Aug had a two-stop trigger.  Pull back to the first stop, and you fire one round.  Pull back to the second stop, and you fire many rounds.  This was very strange to adjust to, and I don't think I ever hit the target more than once when I was firing on automatic.  For one the kick was much greater on this gun than the others, but I was also consciously thinking about how far I depressed the trigger, wondering if I was going to get one shot or several.  This would be a hard weapon to get used to.

 

From near to far, A2 Carbine, M4 rifle, and M9 pistol.

In stark contrast was the silenced M4.  Lightweight, low recoil, large, bright, clear sights, and quiet.  It sounded like a nail gun instead of a rifle.  It wasn't quiet enough to be completely stealthy in a quiet environment, but outside from more than 50 meters, or in a large building from more than a few rooms away, I don't think the gun would be audible.  This thing was an absolute blast to shoot.  Dealing with the ammo magazine, on the other hand, was irritating.  We had a couple of cheaper plastic magazines that kept trying to give the rifle more than one bullet at a time when firing on three round burst mode.  I quickly learned how to clear the breach on my own, but after getting rounds jammed on three straight trigger pulls, I switched back to single shot mode and didn't have any more problems. 

After we were done shooting we policed the range for our brass.  I had to laugh at the difference between this range and the one I had been on back home.  At home we had one person shooting at a time with everyone else far behind the line, to the point we couldn't even see the target being shot at.  Here we had multiple people shooting, swapping weapons, shooting again, only pausing to let some soldiers at the far end that were adjusting their sights walk down and check their targets.  Back home we knew exactly how much ammo we had, we fired every round, we picked up every spent shell, and the empty cartridges were weighed.  The scale was sensitive enough to detect a difference of 100 rounds out of pallet load of spent ammunition.  Here we weren't even sure how much ammo we started with, had no idea how many rounds had been fired, picked up the brass we could find but didn't fret over every single one, and certainly didn't worry about counting them afterwards.  The fact that we were in a combat zone and that weapons training was an expected part of that freed the range officers from many of the annoying restrictions we put up with in the States.  This experience was a lot more enjoyable.

The palace and it's outbuildings have all fallen into extreme dis-repair.

Being occupied by the Russians didn't help anything, as evidenced by all the bullet holes.

Before heading home, we decided to drive up to the Queen's Palace and have a look around.  Like any good castle, it was built in a defensible position at the top of a decently sized hill, with no other major terrain features for a mile in any direction.  This arrangement offered a spectacular view of the city and surrounding mountains.  

The beginnings of the Afghan countryside on the outskirts of Southern Kabul.

 

The end of the Queen's Palace, and currently the only  

entrance not sealed off by concertina (razor) wire.

Inside the palace was quite amazing.  The damage done to the structure was significant enough that you really had to imagine what it looked like in it's hey day, but the potential for greatness was readily apparent.  The most striking architectural feature were the large columns running the entire height of the three-story structure, and tiled in green marble.  

Marble columns in the Queen's Palace, Darul Aman, Afghanistan.

As I walked through, I thought to myself that if this palace and it's larger companion across the way were ever to be refurbished, that would be a day when we would no longer be needed in this country.  When the Afghans can put together the planning, technical expertise, and funding to pull off a restoration project of this magnitude, it will be long after the conflict currently underway.  If I ever come back to Afghanistan in the future, I hope that this will be the case.  

As I write this I am less than two weeks from the end of my tour and departing Afghanistan.  There's not going to be a lot I miss about this place.  But experiences like these are going to be one of them.

All for tonight.  Out here.