“EXPLODING   SPARROW”

 

In previous missives I have mentioned Tim’s uncanny ability with a rifle. He has a real gift of being a crack shot! Unfortunately, among my many gifts and talents, great marksmanship has never been among them. In Navy boot camp I barely qualified with the absolute minimum score on the M-1 and M-16 rifles. As a matter of fact, “NOW IT CAN BE TOLD”… I think the only reason I did qualify was due to our friendly score taker who happened to be in my own company 341!!! All I remember is his first name was Tim and that he was from Pennsylvania. I remember the first time I fired an M-16 on full automatic (“Rock and Roll” as it was called) that the barrel “climbed up in the air”! No one told us to hold the top of the rifle in front of the breech with our left hand. Typical evil of the instructors on the firing range! I guess they wanted us to learn through our mistakes, or on the other hand, they may have mentioned this, but I somehow missed it. Which was more than likely since my attention span has never been that long. Hmmm, I thought it strange that they didn’t have to do that in the movies. Of course in Hollywood, the firearms never run out of ammunition and never have any “kick” and horses never “drop any road apples”, etc. etc. Tim from Pennsylvania was also the scorekeeper for the physical tests too and I know he embellished my score here too so I could graduate from boot camp! I wish I could locate him because I owe him a real debt of gratitude! If not for him, I might still be in boot camp in an endless recycling due to failure to pass the basic rifle and physical tests! I’m sure Tim’s (my brother) scores were among the highest in the company when he went through Navy boot camp. I know in High School he just missed the all-time state high score by one or two shots in skeet shooting at FFA Camp. He was even a crack shot with a BB gun when we were kids. He used to shoot at (and hit 99% of the time) individual electric and/or phone wires hanging from the poles along the road! The sound was a high-pitched “pinggggg” that seemed to reverberate down the wire! One time when a whole flock of blackbirds were flying over us, Tim fired up in the air at them with his patented “rapid pump fire” with his BB gun. Suddenly a blackbird “folded its wings” and dropped to the ground stone dead! I shall now relate the thesis of this missive, which to me was his “finest moment” in marksmanship. When we were hunting or “messing around” with our .22 rifles, we usually used either “long rifle” or hollow point ammo. The advantages of “hollow points” are that they have a small hole in front of the projectile so they flatten out upon impact, resulting in a larger exit hole. One day Tim, Tom, and I were walking out of Riverside Cemetery with our .22’s, which were filled with “hollow points”.  This was one of the places around the area we bird hunted in. We were walking down the exit driveway and were about 200 feet from Rt. 61 when a sparrow suddenly flew toward us parallel to our path to the right of us. When it was about 20 feet from us, Tim quickly aimed and shot. (In those days we rarely if ever considered what was down range of our shooting direction!). Be that as it may, Tim shot with the hollow point at the moving target and the sparrow suddenly “exploded in a large ball of feathers! After we got up from the ground from “rolling with hilarious laughter”, I realized what a “one in a million” shot that was! Of course to this day Tim maintains he merely just hit what he was aiming at! The more I think about it, the more I am convinced he indeed did just that!