Wadcutters are Paper Perfect – An Ode to Military Humor

I was on leave in between duty stations and decided to spend a week or so at my parents’ house in North Dakota.  As luck would have it, I was traveling in early November, right around the start of the hunting season.  A few of my brothers had drawn hunting tags for deer, and they were forming a hunting party with some of their friends.  My brothers heading out on the hunting party were Jed, Ron, and Dave.  Dave was my youngest brother.  One other brother, Craig, didn’t get drawn for the deer hunt, but he was going to go along to be a ‘dog’.  So, my brothers asked me if I wanted to be a ‘dog’ as well.  I said what the hell, I may as well.  The way hunting works in North Dakota is that the hunters hunt for deer in shelterbelts.  The hunters go to the end of a shelterbelt, and the ‘dogs’ (in this case, my brother Craig and me) start from the other end of the shelterbelt and walk down through the shelterbelt to scare up any deer that might be bedded down within the shelterbelt.  The idea being that the ‘dogs’ would scare the deer toward the hunters who were waiting to ambush them.  Sounds pretty simple, right?  Nine times out of 10, that is a foolproof plan.  However, when you have two hunters carrying 30.30 caliber lever action rifles using open sites and shooting those 30.30’s like the rifleman on that Western TV show back in the 60s, you’re bound to kill as many deer as they did Cowboys on those Western TV shows.  Absolutely zero.  That’s right.  None.  Even the guys with the scoped rifles couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn five feet in front of them.  I’m not sure if it was because they were blind or if they were using blank ammunition.  But seriously, I killed more bad guys with my cap pistols as a kid than these guys were killing with their real rifles.  Before you say anything, I know that they weren’t trying to shoot people.  They were trying to shoot deer.  My point is that I shot as many people with my toy guns as they shot deer with their real guns.  None.  Zero.  Zilch.  Nada.  After about three hours of walking through shelterbelts, I looked at my brother Craig and said, “I don’t know about you, but I think this shit is getting old.  These sons of bitches just cannot shoot worth shit.”  My brother Craig replied, “I heard you man.  You got Ron and Jim Brauton down there shooting those 30.30’s like they got an endless supply of bullets.”  “Yeah.  But the thing is that those sons of bitches ain’t hitting a damn thing.  I don’t know what in the hell they’re aiming at, or if they’re even aiming at all.”  “Yeah.  And I’ve been hunting with Dave and Jed before.  It’s not like them to miss shit like this.”  “That cuts it.  We gotta talk to those guys.  So, around noon we had a powwow with the hunters and explained to them what we saw.  We explained that it didn’t seem like anybody was aiming at shit.  There were times that Craig and I had great shots at deer, but we weren’t carrying guns.  Carmen Broughton, Jim’s brother, mentioned that he could loan me a .44 Magnum.  I asked, “Carmen, what kinda loads are these in this hand cannon?”  He replied, “I loaded those myself.  They are wadcutters.”  “Wadcutters?  Normally, those are used for target shooting and for people learning how to shoot.  They shoot at extremely low velocity to reduce the recoil for people that are learning how to shoot.  What kinda powder did you use?”  “I don’t remember, why?”  “Well, it probably ain’t gonna matter because I probably ain’t going to get a shot.  But if I do get a shot, this hand cannon ain’t going to hit shit.”  “No.  That’s not true.  Those are good loads.”  “Okay.  We’ll see.”  We didn’t see another deer until about 4 o’clock in the afternoon.  Carmen Brauton was the first person to shoot a deer.  When he tagged the deer, Craig, and I both yelled, “Finally!”  Somebody yelled back, “What do you mean, finally?”  As the sun started to set, the deer started to get up to move and to feed.  Soon, my brother Ron shot another deer and tagged it.  Then, Ron shot a second deer and he had Dave tag it.  Technically, you’re not supposed to do that.  Shoot a deer for another person.  But it was getting close to dark, and this was the only day that Dave could hunt.  A deer ran out of the shelterbelt right in front of me.  I took a shot at it with the hand cannon.  The deer was only 15 or 20 yards away and running parallel to me.  When the deer was broadside, I took aim and fired.  But I watched the muzzle flash as the gun fired, and I could literally see the bullet launch out of the barrel and fall into the dirt a few feet short of the deer.  Craig looked at me and said, “What the hell man?!?”  The deer stopped and froze.  So, I fired again.  And again, I watched the muzzle flash as the gun fired, and the bullet kind of launched out of the barrel and just fizzled into the dirt in front of the deer.  I looked at my brother and shrugged my shoulders and said, “It wasn’t me man.  It was this damn gun and these sorry ass bullets.  Mostly, it was these sorry ass bullets.  Did you see how they just kinda rolled out of the barrel and fizzled into the dirt?  It was like there was no powder to give the bullet the kick it needed to launch.  I knew these were target loads.  They are great for paper but not worth shit for anything else.  Then it was dark.  When I saw Carmen Brauton, I walked up to him and threw his .44 Magnum at him.  I said, “Thanks a lot for nothing.  Those wadcutters were just like I thought.  They were target rounds.  They shot slow as shit out of the gun.  You didn’t use gunpowder to load those rounds.  You used baby powder.  They would work great on paper but nothing else.  The problem is that we weren’t shooting at paper.  Thanks again for letting me borrow the hand cannon.”  We loaded up the vehicles and headed back to town.  Our final tally was three deer taken.  However, everybody could have filled their tags If they had practiced the basic fundamentals of rifle marksmanship.  A perfectly good hunting trip was transformed into just another exercise in futility.

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