Half a Range Day

The plan was to spend the whole day at the local shooting range, which in reality is nothing more than a hillside in the desert. I gathered two boxes full of different ammunition from the stores. We would need all kinds, because we brought the Remington, the Heckler & Koch and the PKM as well as all the Sakos and Sig Sauers. Not to mention the smoke- and flash-bang grenades. But alas, as soon as we had arrived, patrolled the area for IEDs, called OCCP and put up our targets, a Ford Ranger with 8 ANP men arrived. They were about to have a training day, not just the eight of them but two whole police districts, over 50 men! This is unheard of - the ANP practises shooting only about two times each year (mainly due to the lack of ammunition, but also because of a multitude of other reasons), and never before at this location. And that they would want to do it here, today, just as we were about to begin shooting - well, the propability of that is just infinitesimal.

But we agreed that we could stay there an practise for a while. They went to another pit to shoot and come back in the afternoon. We practised for about two hours and did not stay for lunch like we had planned, but drove back home instead. Weapons cleaning and other usual duties filled the rest of my day, to the point that I didn't get to go to the gym today either. (That's almost a week without exercise - I need to do something about that.) Oh, and it did rain today for almost fifteen minutes and the rain almost managed to make dry surfaces look wet.


M put his hand into the picture to show the size of the beetle hurrying around the range, but put it down on some sheep droppings.