On Sand Hill in Fort Benning, Georgia, every recruit training company has its own armory with its own gun safes where rifles are stowed. Back in the early 1990s, the Army’s block of Basic Rifle Marksmanship (BRM) instruction generally didn’t take place until the fifth week of Basic Combat Training (BCT), so none of us recruits even knew that behind the nondescript door across from company headquarters lay the firearms we were all so looking forward to finally holding.
No, probably not even the gun safes could have kept those weapons from our hands had we known! That’s how eager we all were to do the very thing we had truly signed up for, blasting away at targets.
Some people like Drill and Ceremony (identified as “D&C”) and there may even be those who actually like Physical Training (PT), but there will never be anyone who gripes about firing rifles, pistols, and the like. It’s the one thing everyone loves about the Military, blowing stuff up!
The gun safes are just an extra safety measure, actually. There are no munitions in the training armory, and of course, the armory itself, such as it is, being comprised of one small nondescript room the same as any other on the premises with its cookie-cutter layout, is locked, behind dead-bolt bars and the like, no doubt.
And within real rifles share space with dummies issued for D&C; our first acquaintance with the armory was tempered with the realization that we were getting fakes, to be used for the endless parade-ground drills some found so tedious.
It was as astonishing a surprise as first realizing we had an armory on the premises when instead of dummies we were issued real rifles for BRM. And since the start of BRM, any further D&C, which occurred much less frequently but was still present every so often, was conducted with real weaponry.
