AnAmericanVeteran.com

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Preparedness and Training – Preparedness

An Army veteran’s field-guide to stability, aim, control, and the shot process that never went out of style.

The Truth We Learned on the Firing Line

Every generation of Soldiers thinks it invented shooting. We did not. The Army has been teaching the same hard lesson since before most of us laced up a pair of boots: the rifle does what you tell it to do. If the muzzle moves when the hammer falls, the target does not care how motivated you were. If the sights are wrong by a hair at the eye, they are wrong by feet downrange. That is not philosophy. That is geometry.

For decades, Basic Rifle Marksmanship boiled the job down to four fundamentals: Steady Position, Aiming, Breath Control, and Trigger Squeeze. Those four still work. They still explain why a private groups tight on Monday and throws rounds into the berm on Thursday. They still explain why a veteran who has not fired in ten years can pick up a rifle, settle in, and print a respectable group if the old habits are still in the hands.

Current doctrine in TC 3-22.9 did not throw those fundamentals in the dumpster. It organized them into a shot process with four functional elements: Stability, Aim, Control, and Movement. Same fight, cleaner language. Pre-shot, you build the platform and refine the aim. During the shot, you manage breath and trigger. After the shot, you follow through, recover from recoil, reset the trigger, and assess. The names changed. The physics did not.

This article is written the way a veteran talks on the range, not the way a staff officer writes a manual. We will walk the four fundamentals first, then dig into the language that makes them useful: supported and unsupported positions, stability, iron sights, sight alignment, sight picture, point of aim, point of impact, range, hold, grouping, battlesight zero, confirmation at distance, control, breathing, trigger squeeze, trigger reset, the shot itself, follow-through, the recoil cycle, recoil recovery, assessment, and the Dime Drill that still exposes a sloppy finger faster than any lecture.

The Four Fundamentals, the Way the Army Taught Them

FM 3-22.9 put it plainly. Before a Soldier ever steps to the firing line, he has to understand four things. He must build a steady position that lets him observe the target. He must aim the rifle by aligning the sight system. He must fire without wrecking that alignment with bad breathing or a jerked trigger. Applied together, rapidly and consistently, those skills are the integrated act of firing.

Fundamental	What it actually means
1. Steady Position	Build a platform so the rifle can sit still. Bone support beats muscle. Lower to the ground is steadier. Supported is steadier than unsupported.
2. Aiming	Sight alignment first, then sight picture. Focus on the front sight. Place the aligned sights on the correct point of aim for that range.
3. Breath Control	Stop the chest from heaving the muzzle. Fire in the natural respiratory pause, or hold just long enough to finish a short-exposure shot.
4. Trigger Squeeze	Press straight to the rear so the shot surprises you. Do not dip, jerk, or snatch. After the shot, reset and recover without quitting the sights.

If you remember nothing else from this article, remember this: three of the four fundamentals exist to protect the fourth moment that matters. You can have a beautiful position and a perfect sight picture and still miss if you punch the trigger like you owe it money. You can also have a decent wobble and still hit if you press the shot while the sights are acceptable. Marksmen do not freeze the rifle in space. They control the rifle well enough that the bullet leaves during a good moment.

Stability: Supported and Unsupported Positions

Stability is the first functional element in the modern shot process, and it is the old Steady Position wearing a new nametape. The job is simple to say and hard to live: stabilize the weapon so it provides a consistent base from the moment you decide to shoot until the recoil pulse is done.

The ground is your friend. The farther you get from it, the more the rifle moves. Prone is the most stable common position because most of the body contacts the earth and most of the frame sits behind the rifle to eat recoil. Kneeling gives you a better field of view and a faster get-up. Standing gives you the most observation and the least stability. That trade is not a suggestion. It is the reason qualification tables still force you to shoot from more than one posture.

Supported positions

Supported means you let something else share the weight: a sandbag, a berm, a window sill, a barricade, a ruck, a wall, the corner of a fighting position. In the old individual foxhole supported position, the nonfiring hand rested on the material to the front, the handguard sat in the V of that hand, the buttstock lived in the shoulder pocket, and the firer stayed as low as the target picture allowed. Today’s barricade work is the same idea with different lumber.

A few rules veterans already know and still violate when they get sloppy:

• Do not rest the barrel directly on a hard surface if you can help it. Let the hand, bag, or a soft interface take the load so the barrel is not thrown off by recoil or heat.
• Bone support beats muscle. Stack bone over bone. Muscle trembles. Bone does not get tired in the same way.
• Build the position so the rifle points at the target when you relax, not when you strain. That is natural point of aim. If you have to muscle the muzzle onto the target, you will drift as soon as the shot breaks.
• Keep the same stock weld, the same cheek pressure, and the same eye relief from shot to shot. Consistency is the whole game.

Unsupported positions

Unsupported means the body is the bipod. Prone unsupported is still a good platform if the elbows, magazine well or support hand, and torso are built correctly. Kneeling unsupported is the one that separates people who dry-fire from people who only show up on qualification day. Standing unsupported is a combat necessity and a humility exercise.

In prone unsupported, the firing hand takes a firm handshake grip on the pistol grip. The trigger finger falls where it naturally falls. The nonfiring hand gets under the handguard where it can support without choking the rifle to death. Legs may be spread or the firing-side knee drawn up, depending on the body and the kit. The magazine can touch the ground in some builds; the point is repeatability, not a beauty contest.

Kneeling unsupported usually puts the firing-side knee down and the support-side foot forward, or the reverse depending on how you were taught and what your joints will still tolerate. The support elbow braces over the support knee if you can get bone-on-bone without cutting off circulation. If the position pulses with your heartbeat, you are using muscle where you should be using structure.

What stability feels like

A stable position does not feel locked like a statue. It feels settled. The sights will still move. That movement is the wobble area, or arc of movement. It may look like a small figure-eight, a W, or a lazy oval. Fighting the wobble makes it worse. Accepting a small wobble and pressing the shot when the sights are in the acceptable zone is how adults shoot.

If the rifle comes off target after recoil and will not return, the position was never stable. Recoil recovery is the grade the position earns. A good platform comes back to the same sight picture. That is how you shoot a second shot without rebuilding the world.

Aim: Iron Sights, Alignment, Picture, and Hold

Aim is not a single snapshot. Doctrine calls it a continuous process: orient the weapon, align the sights, place those sights on the target, and apply the correct lead and elevation. Pre-shot, during the shot, and after the shot, you are still aiming. The veterans who quit the sights the instant the gun goes bang are the same veterans who cannot call their shot.

Iron sights still teach the truth

Optics are faster. Iron sights are honest. If you can run iron sights, you can run anything, because irons force you to manage the two relationships that actually matter: the relationship between the sights, and the relationship between the aligned sights and the target.

On the M16- and M4-series backup iron sights, correct sight alignment means the tip of the front sight post sits in the center of the rear aperture. Equal light, equal height. The front sight is centered left and right. The top of the post is centered up and down. Your firing eye is behind that stack at a consistent eye relief. If the rear aperture is a ghost ring and the front post is a crisp post, you are doing it right. Focus lives on the front sight. The target will be a little soft. That bothers new shooters and it should not bother you.

Sight alignment versus sight picture

Sight alignment is front sight to rear sight. Sight picture is that aligned pair placed on the target. People mix the two up and then wonder why a “pretty picture” still prints left. Alignment errors multiply with distance. The old manuals used a brutal example: a small error at the sights becomes feet of miss at 300 meters. A sight-picture error—sights aligned but placed a little high or a little left on the target—is usually a smaller miss at combat ranges. That is why instructors hammer alignment first. A bad picture with good alignment still has a chance. A perfect picture with crooked alignment is a lie.

Point of aim, point of impact, and range

Point of aim is where you put the sights. Point of impact is where the bullet lands. Zero is the range at which those two agree, or agree close enough for the standard you were given. Outside that zero distance, gravity and the trajectory take over. The round climbs, then drops. Wind pushes. Your job is to know what your rifle and ammunition do at the range in front of you. That is the business of grouping, battlesight zero, and confirmation.

Center of visible mass is the Army’s default point of aim on a man-sized target when you do not have a reason to do something smarter. If all you can see is a head over a wall, center of visible mass is the head, not the imaginary chest behind the bricks. If the target is moving, point of aim includes lead. If the target is beyond zero, point of aim includes hold.

Hold

A hold is a deliberate offset of point of aim so point of impact lands where you want it. Holdover for drop. Hold-off for wind. Lead for movement. You do not always have time to dial a turret. You often do not have a turret. You hold.

Holds only work if the rest of the shot is clean. A six-o’clock hold with a jerked trigger is not a hold. It is a miss with an excuse. Confirm your zero. Know your battlesight. Then use the hold as a tool, not as a superstition.

Zeroing: Make the Rifle Tell the Truth

Fundamentals put the bullet in a tight cluster. Zeroing puts that cluster where you meant it to go. If the sights are lying, you can run a perfect shot process all day and still print beautiful groups in the wrong zip code. That is why the Army always taught grouping first and zeroing second. One answers, Can I repeat the shot? The other answers, Does the rifle agree with my aim?

Here is the first correction a lot of veterans still need: you do not have a 25-meter zero. You have a 300-meter battlesight zero that you apply on a 25-meter range. The round crosses your line of sight twice. Once close in, again out near 300 meters. The 25-meter line is a convenient place to put the sights on that trajectory. It is not the range the Army actually cares about.

TC 3-22.9 is blunt about the rest. A 25-meter zero does not guarantee a center hit at 300 meters. The most important step in the whole process is confirmation at true distance.

What a battlesight zero actually buys you

The purpose of battlesight zeroing is to align the sights with the barrel, using standard-issue ammunition, so point of aim and point of impact meet at a chosen combat range. For the M16A2/A3/A4 and the M4-series, that range is 300 meters. The older M16A1 used 250. With a proper battlesight zero, a Soldier can hold center of visible mass from about 25 meters to 300 meters and still have a fighting chance of a hit without spinning elevation knobs in a gunfight.

That is the whole point of a battlesight. Not a match zero. Not a 50-yard pet zero from the internet. A setting that covers the ranges where most rifle fights actually happen, with the smallest amount of thinking under stress.

The Army zeroing process

Doctrine lays out a sequence on purpose. Skip a step and you spend the rest of the day chasing ghosts.

1. Mechanical zero. A factory-style starting point so the first groups land on paper. Front sight and rear windage near center. This is a start point, not a zero. Do not mechanically zero a rifle that already has a confirmed live-fire zero just because the range schedule says “zero day.”
2. Boresight or laser borelight. Gets you on the paper and saves ammunition. It is still not a zero. A laser does not know your cheek weld, your ammunition, or your trigger.
3. 25-meter grouping. Prove you can put rounds in the same place before you touch a knob.
4. 25-meter zeroing. Move that tight group to the designated strike point for your sight system.
5. Confirmation out to 300 meters. The only way to know the 300-meter zero is real. Refine a click or two if the impacts tell you to.

Grouping comes first. Always.

Grouping is not zeroing. During grouping you aim at the same point every shot—usually center of the silhouette—and you do not chase holes with the sights. The location of the group does not matter yet. Size and repeatability do.

The classic standard was simple enough that even a tired private could remember it: put consecutive shot groups inside a 4-centimeter circle on the 25-meter zero target. That circle is roughly six minutes of angle. Three rounds inside 4 centimeters was the old minimum; two centimeters was the goal. Later tables talk in MOA and five-round groups. Same idea. If you cannot group, you have a fundamentals problem. Turning knobs will only move the mess.

The drill looks like this. Fire a three-round or five-round group from a solid prone supported position. Clear the line. Walk down. Triangulate the group. Mark the center with a 1. Come back. Fire another. Mark it 2. If both groups live in the same neighborhood and fit the circle, you are ready to zero. If the groups walk around the paper, get off the line and fix the shooter, not the sights.

A coach who only stares at holes is half a coach. Watch the firer. A tight group that is high-right can be a sight issue. A vertical string is often breathing or a changing stock weld. A horizontal spray is often trigger or a support hand that shoves. Scattered is everything changing at once.

How the 25-meter zero is applied

Once you can group, you move the group. The 25-meter zero target is printed with a silhouette, a circle, a grid, and arrows that tell you which way to turn the front sight and the rear windage. Follow the target. The target was written for people who were going to argue with the arrows.

For iron sights on an M4-series carbine, the usual battlesight method is: set the rear elevation to the 300-meter setting—the 6/3 on a carrying-handle rear sight, or the 300-meter mark on a backup iron sight cam. Do not use the Z mark on the M4 elevation knob. Aim center. Adjust the sights until the center of the shot group sits as close as possible to the designated aiming/strike point, often the white dot in the center of the circle. When that 25-meter work is done correctly, the weapon is set for 300 meters.

M16A2-series rifles often used a mechanical offset: one click past the 8/3 for the 25-meter fire, then return the elevation knob to 8/3 after the groups are in the circle. Backup iron sights have their own cam marks. M16A4 commonly zeros with the cam on the line between 300 and 400. Read the TM and the target for the weapon in your hands. The principle does not change. Use the prescribed 25-meter setting, put the group on the prescribed point, then restore the battlesight elevation for combat.

Front sight post is elevation. Rear windage knob is left and right. Move the sights so the bullet goes to the point of aim. Each square on the old M4 25-meter target is a click language of its own—M16A2 squares and M4 squares are not the same size—so count the squares from the center of your group to the strike point and apply the clicks the target tells you. Make small corrections. One or two clicks. Then fire another group. Do not spin the post like a radio dial because one round landed fat.

Optics, offsets, and the white lie of “same point of aim”

A close-combat optic, an RCO/ACOG, a thermal, or a laser does not always strike at the same 25-meter point as iron sights. Many aiming devices need a 25-meter offset—a marked strike zone a square or two from silhouette center—because the sight sits above the bore and the trajectory is being married to 300 meters, not 25. If you zero a CCO by stacking every hole on the same white dot you used with irons, you may have a pretty target and a rifle that prints high or low when it counts.

Use the offset for that weapon and that sight. Aim where the procedure says to aim. Put the group where the procedure says the group should live. Then confirm at distance. That last part does not become optional because you bought a better glass.

Confirmation at 300 meters

This is the step units skip when the buses are waiting and the range tower wants the next serial. It is also the step that makes the zero real. Small errors you cannot see at 25 meters grow up at 300. A half-inch miss on the little paper is well on its way to missing a man-sized silhouette downrange.

Confirm on a known-distance range, a modified field-fire range, or any range where you can actually see impacts. Fire at 300. Read the strikes. Refine a click if you must. If you cannot get 300 meters, get as much distance as you can and understand you still have an approximation. Doctrine’s line is the one to remember: the only way to rely on a 300-meter hit is to confirm a 300-meter zero.

After confirmation, record the zero. Clicks of elevation. Clicks of windage. Which aperture. Which optic setting. Which ammunition. Write it down like an adult. A zero that lives only in your memory will evaporate the first time the armorer rotates a sight or a private “helps.”

When to re-zero, and when to leave it alone

Re-zero when the rifle, the sight, or the ammunition changes. New optic. Sight removed and reinstalled. Dropped weapon. Barrel or rail work. Different lot of ammo if you actually care. Confirm after a long stretch in the arms room. Do not mechanically zero a rifle that was already confirmed just to satisfy a checklist, and do not chase weather with the front sight every Saturday.

Zero from a consistent position. Prone supported is the Army’s grouping and zeroing home because it is the steadiest platform most Soldiers can repeat. If you only ever zero from a bench with a lead sled and then fight from kneeling in kit, do not be shocked when the group moves. Same stock weld. Same cheek pressure. Same ammunition. Same hold on the handguard. The zero is married to the way you built the shot.

Veteran mistakes that waste a zero day

• Zeroing before grouping. You cannot adjust a group you do not have.
• Chasing single shots. One flyer is a story. The center of a group is data.
• Calling 25 meters “done.” If you never confirmed at distance, you have a hope, not a zero.
• Resting the barrel on a hard bag for zero, then holding the handguard in the field. The group will move.
• Changing optics or cheek weld after the last group and calling it good.
• Blaming the zero for a jerked trigger. If the group opened up, the rifle did not forget how to shoot. You did.

A clean zero does not replace the fundamentals. It rewards them. Get the group first. Move it second. Confirm it third. Then go back to the four fundamentals and make that zero earn its keep.

Control: Breathing, Trigger, and the Decision to Fire

Control is everything you consciously do before, during, and after the shot. Safety lives here. The decision to fire lives here. Breath lives here. The trigger lives here. If stability is the platform and aim is the direction, control is the moment you refuse to snatch defeat from a good setup.

Breathing control

Your chest is a bellows attached to the rifle. If it heaves, the muzzle heaves. The classic precision method is simple: breathe normally, exhale, and fire during the natural respiratory pause before the body demands air again. You do not turn blue. You do not lock down like you are trying to win a breath-holding contest. You use the quiet second that already exists in a normal breathing cycle.

There is a second method for short-exposure targets. When the silhouette only stays up for a moment, you cannot wait for the perfect pause. You hold the breath you have, finish the press, and get the hit. That is combat breathing, not match breathing. Both are legal. Both are trained. The mistake is mixing them without knowing which one you are using.

A useful veteran correction: do not treat breath control as equal to trigger control. A slightly imperfect breath with a clean press will outshoot a perfect pause and a flinch. Slow the breathing down so the wobble shrinks. Then do the real work on the trigger.

Trigger control, trigger squeeze, and trigger reset

Trigger control is the act of firing the weapon while keeping the aim and the position intact until the bullet is gone. Trigger squeeze is the physical method: a smooth, increasing press straight to the rear. The shot should be a surprise in the sense that you did not lunge at the instant you thought the break would happen. Surprise does not mean you are startled. It means you did not jerk.

Three pieces matter:

1. Finger placement. The finger falls naturally on the trigger. For most shooters that is the pad, not the joint jammed in to the first knuckle. Whatever placement you use, it must not push the rifle left or right.
2. Squeeze. Take up the slack. Meet the wall. Press through without a dip of the muzzle and without a death grip that turns the whole hand into a claw. Speed is allowed. Smooth is required.
3. Reset. After the shot, ease the trigger forward only far enough to feel or hear the reset, then be ready to press again. Slapping the trigger all the way out and punching it a second time is how double-feed stories and wild second shots get born.

If you want a diagnostic, watch the front sight at the break. If it dips, you are pulling. If it jumps right, the finger is dragging. If it flinches low-left for a right-handed shooter, you are anticipating recoil. The target is the report card. The front sight is the teacher.

The Shot, Follow-Through, and the Recoil Cycle

The shot is not the bang. The shot is the whole sequence that starts when you accept the sight picture and ends when the bullet has left the barrel and the rifle has been allowed to finish its work. A lot of veterans mentally quit at the sound. That is early. The bullet is still in the tube for a moment after the primer pops. If you raise your head to admire your work, you just coached the muzzle off the target.

Follow-through

Follow-through means you keep doing what was working. Hold the stock weld. Keep the eyes in the sights. Finish the press. Stay in the position through the recoil pulse. Call the shot—meaning you notice where the sights were when the gun fired. If you can call it, you can correct it. If you cannot call it, you are guessing, and guessing is how groups turn into constellations.

Recoil cycle and recoil recovery

Recoil is not an insult. It is a cycle. The rifle moves, the sights lift or blur, and a good position brings them back. Recoil management is built before the shot: body behind the gun, stock in the pocket, support hand doing work, chest and shoulders not perched on tiptoes. Recoil recovery is what you do after: ride it, do not fight it, and let the sights settle on the next acceptable picture.

If you have to rebuild the entire position after every round, you did not have a position. You had a pose. That shows up in qualification when the first round of a mag looks fine and the next two walk. It shows up in combat when the second shot takes a year.

Assessment: Call the Shot, Then Read the Target

Assessment is the adult part of shooting. After the recoil settles you ask two questions. What did I see? What did the target say?

Calling the shot is internal. You saw the front sight a shade right at the break, so you expect a right miss. Reading the target is external. The hole is high-left, so the call and the result do not match, which means you blinked, flinched, or lied to yourself. Grouping is assessment with a pattern. One flyer is a story. Four rounds in the same wrong place is a diagnosis.

A practical way to assess, the way a good NCO used to do it on the 25-meter line:

• Tight group, wrong place: sights or zero, or a consistent hold error. Do not chase it with a different mistake.
• Vertical string: breathing, or a changing stock weld, or a front sight that lifts as you press.
• Horizontal string: trigger drag, a support hand that pushes, or a natural point of aim that was never built.
• Scattered group: you are changing something every shot. Position, sight focus, or trigger. Pick one problem and kill it.

Assessment also includes the tactical question. Did I hit? Is the target still a threat? Do I need a second shot? Do I need to move? Doctrine puts Movement in the shot process for a reason. On a square range you recover and fire again. In the world, you recover, assess, and decide whether the next action is another press or a change of position.

The Dime Drill: Cheap Medicine for a Bad Trigger

The Dime Drill, also called the dime-and-washer exercise, is one of the oldest honest tools in the Army kit bag. It does not require a simulator, a laser box, or a contractor. It requires an unloaded rifle, a dime or a washer, and enough pride to hate watching that coin fall.

The classic rifle version is done in a firing position, often prone unsupported, because unsupported tells the truth. A partner or the firer balances a dime or washer on the barrel—commonly on a cleaning rod seated in the muzzle, or on a flat spot on the barrel or handguard depending on the weapon and local SOP. The firer aims, breathes, and squeezes. If the coin stays, the press did not disturb the rifle. If the coin drops, the firer flinched, jerked, or heaved.

There is a pistol cousin of the same drill, with the dime balanced on the front sight or slide, but the Army rifle lesson is the one most of us remember from PMI. Dry fire. No live ammunition in the weapon, the magazine, or the immediate area. Treat the rifle with the same respect you would on a hot range. Then do repetitions until the click is boring and the dime is still there.

What the drill actually trains:

• A press that does not dip the muzzle.
• A position quiet enough that breathing and trigger can happen without a rebuild.
• Follow-through, because quitting the gun after the click will drop the coin just like a live flinch will.
• Confidence that the wobble you see in the sights is smaller than the panic in your head.

A good standard from older training support packages was simple: several consecutive dry-fire repetitions without dropping the dime. Do not turn it into a circus trick. The coin is feedback, not a trophy. When the dime stays and the sights stay, take that same press to live fire. If live fire then falls apart, you do not have a trigger problem anymore. You have an anticipation problem, and the fix is more dry fire plus a few ball-and-dummy magazines so the flinch has nowhere to hide.

Putting It Together: One Clean Shot Process

Here is the whole article in the order your hands should run it.

1. Build the position. Supported if you can. Unsupported if you must. Check natural point of aim. Relax what can relax.
2. Orient the rifle. Get the sights up. Confirm alignment. Front sight sharp.
3. Build the picture. Point of aim on center of visible mass, or on the hold that range, wind, and your confirmed zero require.
4. Settle the breath. Use the natural pause if you have time. Hold what you have if the target is leaving.
5. Squeeze. Straight to the rear. Accept a small wobble. Do not chase a perfect sight picture with a violent hand.
6. Follow through. Stay in the sights through the recoil cycle.
7. Recover. Let the rifle come home. Reset the trigger.
8. Assess. Call the shot. Read the impact. Decide if the next act is another round, a correction, or movement.

That is the integrated act of firing. It is not glamorous. It does not care about the color of your optic or the brand of your sling. It cares whether you can repeat the same quiet sequence when you are cold, tired, rushed, or being watched by people you do not want to disappoint.

A Note to Veterans Who Think They Already Know This

Most of us do know this. That is not the same as being able to do it on demand. The rust shows up in small places. The support hand crawls. The head floats. The breath gets locked in the throat. The trigger finger becomes a switch instead of a tool. We start blaming the zero, the ammo, the wind, the range, the kid in the tower. Sometimes those things are guilty. Usually we are.

The good news is that fundamentals do not require a government contract to maintain. Clear the weapon. Dry-fire in the prone. Do the Dime Drill against a wall aiming point. Practice kneeling until the bones stack. Confirm zero at distance when you get range time, and do not call a 25-meter group a finished zero. Keep the four fundamentals in the same order the Army gave us, and let the modern shot process tell you where each piece lives: stability before the shot, aim all the way through it, control at the moment of truth, assessment after the recoil.

A rifle is a simple machine. The complicated part is the person holding it. That was true in Basic. It is true now. The veterans who stay dangerous are not the ones with the most gear. They are the ones who can still build a position, see a front sight, and press a trigger without lying to themselves.

Sources and Notes

This article is a veteran training narrative based on long-standing U.S. Army marksmanship instruction. The four fundamentals—Steady Position, Aiming, Breath Control, and Trigger Squeeze—are drawn from FM 3-22.9, Rifle Marksmanship, M16-/M4-Series. The shot process, functional elements—Stability, Aim, Control, and Movement—and the zeroing sequence of mechanical zero, boresight, 25-meter grouping and zero, and confirmation out to 300 meters are drawn from TC 3-22.9, Rifle and Carbine. Position details, dime-and-washer dry-fire practice, and coaching language reflect those publications and common Preliminary Marksmanship Instruction. It is not a substitute for current unit SOP, range safety, or live instruction. Clear the weapon. Follow the tower. Stay off the trigger until the sights and the decision are both ready.

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