Growing up with guns

I remember the first time my father taught me how to shoot in the basement of our house. I was twelve. He took out an RWS pellet rifle with a six-power scope, and when he pulled it from the case, I felt like I was taking a big step toward becoming a man.

While other kids were home doing homework, my father was passing down skills that would last a lifetime. Anytime I wanted, we went to the basement, and while I was shooting, he was reading. My father knew what he had been taught, but shooting was not a way of life for him. He was an engineer who spent his days making seemingly impossible things possible for dozens of companies.
After a few days, my skills seemed to level off, so I went to the library to find anything I could about marksmanship. I found a book on high-powered rifle competition that I must have read a dozen times in a month. Every other day I was down in the basement, converting what I had read into reality. My groups were shrinking. I was trying many of the different shooting positions in the book. From that point on, I was hooked.
After a while, shooting with the scope became too easy. That winter I went from knocking tin cans over to shooting dime-sized groups in almost any position with iron sights.
As spring came on — and with it, the birds — I decided to start hunting. I didn't want the neighbors to see what I was doing, since being in the communist state of Massachusetts meant they would probably call the police if they saw me with a squirt gun. So I had to take my prey from inside the house. I learned how to set up positions all around it so that if anyone looked through a window, nothing could be seen. The only telltale signs were the bottom corners of the screens being peeled back just enough to allow a clear field of view into whatever tree I was watching.
By mid-summer there was a no-fly zone around the house. Birds wouldn't land on any of the trees. Squirrels wouldn't venture into the yard. It got boring. I thought all there was to hunting was sitting and waiting in the right spot for an opportunity. I was wrong.
At the middle school I went to, there was a man called "Psycho Janitor" whom kids and teachers seemed to avoid. The rumors said he had been shot in the head, had a bomb shelter in his back yard, and was generally bat-shit crazy. One day when I was leaving school late wearing a BDU coat, I saw him out of the corner of my eye and did my best not to make eye contact. As I walked by, I could tell he was staring at me. Then I heard him say, "Hey, kid." I thought I was about to get my ass beat. He asked what I was wearing the coat for and just told me I was out of uniform. The Psycho Janitor did not seem so mean after all.
The next day I stayed late again, and when he saw me out of uniform a second time, I was stopped once more. This time, before he could chew my ass, I asked him what the difference between an M21 and an M25 was. I think it caught him off guard. He introduced himself, gave me a detailed answer, and then went back to work. I started stopping by after school every few days to learn more.
A few weeks in, I asked if he would help me improve my shooting if I helped him with his work. Tom — that was his name — asked my father to come meet him first, and it turned out the two of them had met years prior.
My father gave him the green light, and I started helping my new mentor clear brush on his property on weekends. After my first day working for him, we went to the local gun club, where he broke out his sniper rifle. Once again, I felt like I was about to get one more step closer to becoming a man. Out of the case came a highly customized Remington 700. He gave me a detailed class on the rifle, on how it worked, on how and why the scope functioned, and then handed it to me.
As I settled in behind the glass, I felt at home. I applied pressure to the trigger, and like a glass rod snapping, the trigger let loose. A round departed the barrel and found its way to my aiming point 100 yards away. The next few rounds were all over the place. Tom told me not to be a pussy, not to be afraid of the recoil or muzzle blast. He told me to disregard the outside world once I was behind the glass and "get the job done." I tried, but the blast overpressure was too much at the time. Every time I pulled the trigger, I felt as if a bomb were going off in front of me.
I helped Tom at least twice a month, and in return he shared his knowledge with me. Working with him, I learned he had been an Army sniper and had attended several great schools during active duty and a few more in the reserves. When I finally asked Tom if he could teach me how to put rounds on distant targets from concealed positions, he laughed — but he also saw I was serious. It turned serious for him too. In the years that followed, he tried to impart everything he knew. One session at a time, I learned from one of the best.
By the time I was in ninth grade, I was old enough to get my firearms license, so I bought my own rifle — a Savage 110FP that I still have. I did my own bedding and camo job and took pride in what I had worked hard all summer to obtain. I was getting proficient at 100 yards and wanted to shoot farther. The only problem was that I only had access to a 100-yard range. There were a few places in town where I could reach out to 800 yards, but doing so was against the law.
That's when I began to carefully plan how I could gradually shoot farther. Some of these locations required me to set up near houses to thread my round out of my position, across the river, and through the open fields into targets at the base of the hills. The hard part was getting out of the area after sending the round downrange. People would call the cops and report someone shooting nearby, so there would be an officer in the area looking for a hunter or the like. After stalking out of the tree line, I became quite adept at hiding things in plain sight. Who would think anything of a kid riding a bike with a large backpack and the obvious end of a fishing rod sticking out of it?
My mother had also taken up the shooting sports, primarily for self-defense while working in downtown Boston. She took the required safety course to get her concealed carry permit, but the training did not stop there. She wanted to become an NRA pistol instructor, and she did. We spent many days on the pistol range together.
By the end of that fall, I had reached my goal and made an 800-yard shot in a neighboring town. Hunting season was starting, and for the first time, I could go off into the woods with my own firearm and hunt alone. That season I learned that hunting with an accurate firearm in Massachusetts didn't require much skill. It was all about watching patterns over time and getting undetected into an area that gave me the best chances of success.
That winter I purchased my first bow and applied most of the fundamentals I had learned on the rifle to archery. I could practice with my bow in my backyard, so within two or three weeks I was making good hits out to fifty yards — a long way for a bow. Shortly after, I started bowhunting. Rifles and shotguns let me take game out to a few hundred yards if I had the distance available, but it was a different story with a bow. Bowhunting forced me to focus on patterns, to read light and terrain, and to be aware of all my surroundings. These skills would end up saving several of my friends' lives many years later. Tom had taught me how to read terrain and plan stalk routes. That knowledge really helped when moving into areas. The downside of hunting with a bow was that I was often too close to my prey, and it seemed that if I blinked, the animal would bolt. Prepping for a shot requires moving major body parts, which is hard under observation from animals whose senses are ten times sharper than the hunter's.
By the time I was a junior in high school, I had taken up NRA high-power rifle competition. There were not many matches in Massachusetts, but my father's friend often let me borrow his AR-15, or joined me, during matches. I would take the time to ask the top shooters and the military shooting teams to share their knowledge. In one match, I had a national champion all to myself. The data dump I got from him in eight hours is still ingrained in me. From shooting pellets at 25 yards in my basement, I had moved on to hitting targets at 600 yards with iron sights. I had come a long way in a few years.
During my senior year, I spent inordinate amounts of time bowhunting in fall and winter. I often skipped out of school early — around twelve — or didn't go at all if I wanted to get into a great hunting area. Now and then I was caught skipping and given a one- or two-day suspension. That was fine with me — more time in the woods.
From the first time my father took me down into the basement with that RWS until I was seventeen and getting ready to join the Marines, I never stopped learning about marksmanship and fieldcraft. In the summer of 1998, I found myself on the rifle range at Parris Island, South Carolina. For three weeks, the Marine Corps Primary Marksmanship Instructors dumped their knowledge onto us recruits. I came out of boot camp as the company high shooter, and I would be the company or battalion high shooter in every unit I went to after that.
For two years after boot camp, I was stationed at Twentynine Palms, California. It surprised me how little firearms training the Marine infantry actually did. During my first year, I was promoted to corporal — nothing major — but being an NCO meant I could sign out the base rifle range on weekends. That's why I spent most of my weekends on the range at Twentynine Palms.
The wind conditions on that range are probably the worst out of all the Marine Corps ranges. After a few weekends of shooting, I realized my Savage 110FP and Simmons scope had their limitations. That's when I purchased a rifle from a custom gunsmith and put quality glass on top. I also started running handloads as I had done in high school. The combination made for a great long-range rifle.
One of the only downsides of the range at Twentynine Palms was that it was a known-distance range. Once I knew the dope for a certain distance, it would only change with the weather. My friends and I started hunting coyotes off base. We would park the truck on top of a hill and set up positions. Spotting a coyote at distance takes tremendous observation skill. It is easier if they are moving, but if they are hanging around an area and lying low, it requires work to find them. Once we did, we had to do old-school range estimation — no laser rangefinders. The farther out the prey, the more precise we had to be. Coyotes are small, so any error in range at distance means a miss. To this day, I miss my time out there dropping coyotes at distance.
That summer, I purchased my first .50 caliber rifle. The rifle was a classic single-shot bolt-action developed for the SF community in the early 1980s. I bought it from an older man who lived out near Fort McCoy. He was a strange cat who had pioneered low-drag monolithic projectiles. He got me set up with the correct loads for the rifle and took the time on many weekends to teach me the finer points of extreme long-range shooting. A few of my paychecks went directly to buying .50 cal ammunition.
In 2000, I was sent to Pakistan, where I spent a year with one of the Department of State's most respected agents — one of the men who stood up their mobile security division. We didn't go to the range often, but I had access to an electronic firearms simulator that was somewhat realistic. Since there was very little to do up until 9/11, I spent hundreds of hours running through simulator scenarios under his watchful eye. It wasn't until 2003, after returning to the United States, that I could begin shooting regularly again.
When I moved to Jacksonville, North Carolina, I lived right down the street from Norm Chandler Jr. and Sr., whom I had known for years. I immediately started assisting them at Iron Brigade Armory on weekends. My duty was to break in and zero all the rifles leaving the shop for customers. I'd show up on the weekends, load up all the rifles that needed work, and spend the day at the range. I learned a tremendous amount from the guys at IBA.
At twenty-three, my primary job was as an infantry platoon sergeant. I was promoted to staff sergeant in four years, so when I went back to the fleet, I had over thirty Marines to train for war. Some of the corporals were older than I was. I spent as much time as possible imparting my knowledge onto them. If we were not running battalion- or company-level training operations, I had my Marines out doing weapons-manipulation drills. Some of them thought it was overly repetitive, but they later thanked me after using those same skills to save their lives overseas.
While in Iraq, I had a loaner M40A3 I borrowed from the SSP and kept close by while on patrol or on the road. There were several instances when we took fire from a distance, and the only rounds effectively impacting our attackers were coming out of my bolt rifle. I was glad I had spent so much time on that windy range at Twentynine Palms, because most of the areas my platoon found itself in were wide-open and rather windy.
On April 9, 2004, I covered one of my squads — and later the platoon and company — as insurgents heavily engaged them from many city blocks away. Even though my spotter and I were under heavy machine-gun fire from fellow Marines in addition to the fire we were taking from the insurgents, I just remembered Tom saying, "Block it out. Get the job done." The long-range precision fire from our position thwarted several flanking attempts by the insurgents and kept two Marines from becoming POWs. I was hit by an IED that summer, which ended my third trip into a combat zone.
When I got back to the United States, I had a lot of time off to recover, but I didn't want to sit around. By the time I arrived at Bethesda, Maryland, Norm Chandler was running a sniper class at Blackwater and asked me to come down and brief the guys on the area of operations they would be working in. So two days after getting out of the hospital, I was at Blackwater. The nice thing about that place was the vast amount of knowledge walking around the ranges. There was a SEAL sniper-instructor cell there those two weeks, so each evening after the Marines were done training, I'd park myself on the range with the SEAL cadre and fill the brain housing group with more information.
During the rest of 2004 and 2005, I made at least six trips to Blackwater. It was mostly to teach, but my primary focus was to learn all I could after hours from some of the finest warriors the Navy had. During my time moonlighting at Blackwater, I was able to spend quality time with MGySgt Ken Roxburgh. Rox, as people call him, was a supply Marine by trade who spent about half his Marine Corps time on the rifle and pistol teams. He held a national record at 1,000 yards that stood for more than twenty years. The skills and techniques Rox imparted over the next eight years made me a better shooter and a better person.
After getting back to Camp Lejeune, the division gunner — the head chief warrant officer in the division, in charge of all infantry weapons training and tactic development — called me into his office. He needed an SNCO to start a new section at the Division Training Center (DTC). Getting a squared-away SNCO to fill that billet was hard at the time. Most were busy with their respective units. Since I was in the process of being medically retired, the division had no issue following the gunner's direction to get me orders to the DTC.
The mission at the DTC was to stand up a new pre-sniper course to give Marines new to their sniper platoons a three-week crash course focused on stalking and long-range shooting. Other skills — detailed mission planning, non-VHF communication, hide construction, small-unit tactics, sniper employment, precision aerial gunnery, fire support, target detection and selection, observational skills, land navigation, surveillance, and more — would be woven in between the stalk lanes and the range. I knew a great deal about most of the skills we were asked to teach, thanks to experiences in the Corps and those that reached back to my days bowhunting as a kid.
During my two years as SNCOIC, I had about ten sniper instructors working at various times. The information and individual experiences we shared with each other — and most importantly with our students — made everyone better. Years later, some of my instructors had moved up to become SNCOICs of several Marine Corps sniper schools. Some of my former students are now instructors. Another plus about that job was all the schools our cadre were able to attend. From counter-terrorism driving courses to advanced sniper courses, if we had time, the CWO would endorse and cut orders, and off we went.
By the time I retired from the Marines, I had already set my own training company in motion. I thought I knew a lot at that time, but the more schools I went to, the more I realized education is a lifelong endeavor. I started Tier 1 Group in 2006, and within five years my staff and I had more SOF guys running through our facility than our biggest competitor.

To this day, I still seek knowledge anywhere I can find it, and I always remember Tom saying, "Keep your mouth shut and your eyes open, and you'll go far in life, kid." Looking back, I was fortunate not to have tree-hugging anti-gun parents, but parents who taught firearms responsibility and sent me down a rather fun road in life.
Semper Fi
Steve