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Old May 6, 2018, 07:48 AM   #18
Spats McGee
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Join Date: July 28, 2010
Location: Arkansas
Posts: 8,819
Appleseed: After Action Report

So I went to my Appleseed event. Things did not go as planned. Here's the good and the bad.

The Good: This history lesson was good. I knew most of it in broad strokes, but there was some fine detail that I was unaware of, and I enjoyed hearing about it.

I shot decent groups and avoided perforating anyone else. That was good.

The company was good. Very nice bunch to deal with.

The Bad: Let me start by saying that the bad things that happened were not the fault of the Appleseed people. They were a combination of 90* weather, my poor preparation &/or poor physical condition on my part. (I'm almost 50 and overweight.) I'm going to lay out The Bad in more detail than The Good, not to beat up on the Appleseed people, but in the hopes that someone reading this later will prepare better than I did.

I thought I had my equipment together, but that wasn't quite the case. I thought, perhaps mistakenly, that I remembered reading in one of the preparation documents that "you can't earn the rifleman badge without a sling." I thought that was fine, and that I could get by without a sling. I really wasn't all that interested in a badge to begin with. Unfortunately, whatever it was that I read should have said was, "a sling is mandatory because every last shooting exercise will involve the sling."

I took a blanket to lay on, because I'm cheap and didn't want to shell out the $ for a shooting mat. I don't have anywhere else to use a shooting mat, so it would have been a one-use expenditure until I either join a gun club, or the next Appleseed. In any event, I wound up borrowing a mat. That was good, as we were set up in a gravel pit, and laying on the blanket was not going to work well. What was bad was that the mat had a dark-colored band across it, which got extremely hot by mid-day. I knew it was going to be hot, so I'd worn a T-shirt. That led to having my elbows scalded every time we got in the prone position. And we got in the prone position a lot. My elbows were burned and sore for several days.

In fact, we started shooting about 10. By 2, I was considering bailing out. I mentioned to an instructor that I'd done just about all of the lying on the ground that I really wanted to do. He encouraged me to stay, and said that we'd be moving to sitting or standing shooting positions. Unfortunately, that meant transitioning from prone to sitting, and then shooting. He didn't tell me that part. By that point, I'd already had my fill of laying on the ground and scalding my elbows.

I shot one or two more exercises, but by 3, I'd laid in the gravel pit all I wanted to for a 90* day. I bailed and did not return for Day 2.
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