How long did it take you to realize you were being shot at?

[sacp81170a]

This question is for anyone who has had rounds coming at them, whether accidentally or in anger:

How long did it take you to realize that you were on the wrong side of a two-way range? :what: What was your first clue?

The reason I'm asking is that so many who have had this experience tend to start their stories with, "I *thought* something strange was happening" or some similar indication that they didn't at first key in to this vital little piece of information. One of my friends who is a Vietnam vet told me that the first time he was being shot at, he couldn't figure out why the dirt was "puffing" up in front of his feet for several seconds. Any similar stories?

(My first time was related in another thread, but briefly, I'd say there was about 5-10 seconds before I related that funny pop, pop, pop-pop noise to the sound of rounds impacting the aircraft I was guarding. I'm sure my reaction would have made America's Funniest Home Videos.) :D

[tater_salad]

I had just come off the roof post of a house my platoon was in in Iraq and had gone down to the first level for a couple hours of rack-ops when we started hearing loud explosions right outside the house (enemy mortars). Right after that, we heard a lot of automatic gunfire open up and heard rounds start hitting the brick walls. Everyone started screaming, and at that point, it was a pretty good indicator we were getting shot at ;)

[Oldtimer]

Shot at countless times while in combat (1967-1968) and during 31 years in law enforcement (1971-2002).
Number of times hit? A bit ZERO!

I can only guess-timate that it took as long as 2 seconds for it to register that I was being shot at, if the shooter was fairly close (within 50 yards). At greater distances, the strike of the bullet as it kicks up dirt, water or hits something solid near you is an indicator, but those "silent" bullet strikes take a bit longer to register that you're being shot at. Quite often, by the time you are proning out, the distant sound of the gun being fired at you will reach your ears....probably up to about a 4 or 5 second reaction time.

One of the strangest that I encountered wasn't someone shooting AT me, and there was absolutely NO sound of a firearm being fired, so it had to have been done from a LONG distance. I was standing on the sidewalk and heard a dull thud in front of me.
I saw the bullet when it bounced off of the concrete. It looked like it was possibly a .45 cailber FMJ bullet, and it wasn't all that deformed after striking the concrete. Probably some jerk getting ready for New Year's Eve!

[JamisJockey]

Immediately. I found myself in the direction of someone's targets once. They weren't using a sufficient backstop, and I was rabbit hunting in a dry wash. I yelled, but that didn't stop the incoming rounds. Stayed low and ran out of there.

[one-shot-one]

when i heard the bullets "whizzing" overhead i was concerned,
when i heard them "thumping" into the ground near by i new that i was in the wrong place at the wrong time!

[Zach S]

It took me a second, maybe two, to realize I got shot at. I actually thought my car backfired, so I was looking at my gauges when I heard the sound of broken safety glass behind me.

I checked my rearveiw to find the back glass of my hotrod shattered, and before I knew it I was in second gear with my foot on the floorboard. I actually dont think I noticed that I had my car wound up until I saw that turn coming at me at a high rate of speed.

And to be perfectly honest, I dont think it sank it until I called 911 to report it.

[Johnny_Yuma]

It was unexpected and accidental - a big fat 12 ga. slug (we later found the empty casings) passed right up the middle of our group. Dad and I ducked for cover while everyone else just stared at us like we were idiots. Dad says, rather calmly, "We're getting shot at" and then everyone hits the dirt.

We heard the "boom" of a shotgun up in front of us and an instant later I could actually see the slug flying toward us. I knew before it ever passed we were being shot at and no matter how hard I tried I couldn't MOVE fast enough to get out of the line of fire. It seemed like a minute passed from the time I heard the report and the time I got behind cover but I know it could not have been more than a couple of seconds.

I was 10.

[El Tejon]

Maybe a second, but seemed a lot longer.

Walking along a ridge (hey, here we are!), hear "pop, crack", thought it was a bottle rocket! Looked up for it, everyone fell down.

I'm standing there, "hey, where did everyone go.":uhoh:

[carebear]

El T,

That's Darwin in action. Stone Age responses to Nuclear Age problems. :evil:

[EddieCoyle]

I've never been shot at in anger, but I have been hit.

Once, while pheasant hunting here in the Commonwealth, I thought one of my buddies threw a handful of gravel at me. When I picked the lead shot out of my hair, I realized that wasn't the case.

There lesson here is: Never go hunting at Bolton Flats (any Mass hunters that have been there will know what I mean).

[cslinger]

I would just like to say how happy I am to NOT have an answer to your question. I would be perfectly happy to go through my entire life without ever having an answer to that question.

For all you folks who do have an answer, thanks for doing what you do because I surely could not.

Chris

[308win]

My younger brother once told me that the most exhilerating feeling in the world is being shot at and missed.

[Doc2005]

The first shot felt like a 20 to 30 bee stings...the second shot felt lie 20 or 30 shotgun pellets nailing my body head-to-toe. They did NOT fully penetrate the skin, but they did break the skin and bled quite a bit. The ones that didn't break the skin left BIG whelts! It took a fellow target shooter to tell me what the heck was happening. Some dork was that the clays range with 3" full loads (hunting loads). :what: If I had not been wearing my Carhartt pants and shirt, I have NO DOUBT that some of those pellets WOULD have penetrated. Edited to add, The pellets that broke the skin DID, DID fully penetrate the Carhartt pants and shirt.

Doc2005

[spacemanspiff]

i heard 'pop pop pop pop' from my left. i think to myself 'hey that sounds like what i hear at the range'.
i hear from left to right in true THX style "HIIIIIISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS".
i think to myself 'hey i've never heard THAT at the range before.'
i hear 'thud thud thud' behind me and to my right.

about then rational thought left my mind. i say 'oh crap!' i see two people walking into the gas station in front of me hesitate. i think 'run for cover!' i hide behind a light pole. my subconscious slaps me in the back of the head: 'thats not cover you dumbass! MOVE!!!!'
i run to the other side of the gas station.

that all happened within about five seconds from 'pops' to 'MOVE!!!!', but it took waaay too long after i thought about it.

[chopinbloc]

never been on the wrong end of small arms fire but every time haji lobs a couple rockets or mortars there are a few seconds spent trying to decide if it was our 105s or 81s or the bad guys. we all look at eachother and probably about five seconds later we realize it's not ours. i'm not particularly sure about the time it takes but one thing i know is that no matter how quickly you react it's never fast enough.

[Rovi]

Does getting 'rained on' with No. 7 1/2 birdshot count?
Many years ago, a buddy and I were out decoying for pigeons over a wheat field. We were in 2 hides maybe 200 yards apart and were getting an occasional pigeon, when I discovered that if I fired into the air at just the correct angle, I could rain birdshot on him :evil:
Needless to say, after the second or third 'accident,' fire was returned :D

For the rest of the day, every bird got at least 1 more cartridge than was strictly necessary. Amazingly enough, that last shot was ALWAYS in the direction of the other hide :evil:

7 1/2 shot really does sound like rain in the field around you, and is pretty harmless provided you shield you eyes and don't look up with your mouth open.

.

[308win]

I can tell you that a 12ga slug going past sounds a lot different than a .22 going overhead. In the first instance I was in a tree stand and a group of hunters were below me at the bottom of a hill when they jumped a doe. I seriously thought about returning fire then maturity prevailed.

In the second instance neighbor kids were shooting at birds in a tree and the bullets were going over the machine shed I was hiding behind. I believe their father got a chat from the land owner I was shooting on.

[gloucestergarand]

Two short stories for y'all:
a. Inbound rockets and mortar fire at Mosul...tended to sound like the 4th of July...you could clearly hear the whoosh and explosion, whereas Anaconda was so big, all you could hear was the rocket explosions, then the mourn of the siren!
b. Many moons ago in Korea, we participated in a live fire on one of the old 600 meter bermed ranges. Anyhow, the object was for the platoon to lie on the downrange side of the final berm, and then strategically placed gunners fired grazing fire over your heads...object was to attempt to identify what type weapon, caliber and direction....it was all the same from the whizzing overhead, until the M2's opened up....that and the old M3 grease guns...because they were so slow shooting! Learned to respect the sound of incoming at a young age!

[det.pat]

severe burning pain in my right leg.
pat

[William P.]

severe burning pain in my right leg.
pat

you win.

[pete f]

about a half of a nano second after i watched the hammer fall on the dirt wads cheap 38. I still remember that at night. watching the hammer fall.



thank goodness for crappy RG handguns, his gun just blew up, and the bullet hit me with only about 1/3 of the force it might have had, went thru three layers of leather, hit my chest, broke my sternum.


latter getting hit with bird shot another time i watched it coming. just a grey cloud of bird shot. i was ducking and turning. ended up getting lots of pellets in my back, shoulders, and neck.

[QuarterBoreGunner]

308win...uhm I hate to be an ass but was your younger brother Winston Churchill?

[Atticus]

I was out walking in the woods one day, along the edge of a lake, when mud flew up a few feet in front of me, then I heard the report. I was sure it was an accident, so I yelled loudly in the direction of the shot. Then mud flew up all over me and I saw a gaping hole in the mud about a six inches in front of me. I ran in a crouched zig zag pattern for about two minutes in the opposite direction. I just went home and never mentioned it to anyone - I rarely called the police in those days - never even crossed my mind for some reason.

[JohnKSa]

I still haven't--are you sure they're shooting at me??? :confused:

[308win]

308win...uhm I hate to be an ass but was your younger brother Winston Churchill?
No, and he isn't above using a good quote either. But you have a good day anyway.:neener:

[redneck2]

First one's easy. I was fox hunting, holding at the end of some standing corn. Fox is visible from the other end and the guys there open up with 12 ga #4 buckshot. The shot coming thru the corn sounded like paper shredding. I hit the frozen ground instantly

I was cutting firewood when a dipstick kid that was rabbit hunting opened up at a rabbit that ran between me and him. One .22 went just to the right of my head and one to the left. Kind of a tearing/zinging sound

[epijunkie67]

Several seconds. While I was active duty I was doing radio duty on a foot patrol exercise near our base. My squad leader took a wrong turn and we started hearing what sounded like bees buzzing past us. As we kept walking we eventually noticed dirting spitting up from the ground. A closer look revealed a lot of spent rounds all over the ground.

Turns out he had walked us right into the downrange path of the local shooting club. Bullets were coming over the back berm and landing all around us. We ended up ditching behind a piece of natural cover to check the map and high tailing it out of there on foot.

[sacp81170a]

My squad leader took a wrong turn and we started hearing what sounded like bees buzzing past us.

LOL! Reminds me of the Daffy Duck cartoon where he's a salesman walking up to the house where the mobsters are holed up. "Darn pesky mosquitoes...":p

[Oldnamvet]

First time, I was leaning against the outside of my bunker having a smoke (daytime) and heard/felt a slight thump in the sandbag next to me and some sand trickeled out. Next thing I knew someone had jerked me down yelling "sniper". I never heard the shot. That was week 2 in RVN.

[mnrivrat]

When a small tree branch exploded over my head and I heard the noise a nano second later . :cuss:

[Ralph]

When I saw the perp reach over the car and start shooting.:cuss:

[JMusic]

First time not till it started cutting leaves in a tree. Last time I knew something was up prior to the shot. I had actually slipped up the trail some and got behind a tree. As soon as the shot I was down the trail like a star running back.
Jim

[beerslurpy]

felt a slight thump in the sandbag next to me

Sounds like you nearly caught it. Thank god for wind.

[rero360]

hmm... the first time was my first day of deer hunting I was 16, I was standing in a middle of a field and about 6 deer ran right in front of me, I shot at them getting one, but according to my cousin my grandfather was shooting at them too, the deer were 50 yards infront of me and my grandfather was about a 100 yards behind me, I don't know if he flagged me or not, I never heard the rounds, heck I don't remeber hearing my own shotgun going off

second time I was in basic, we were doing live fire movements, anyone who was 11B will know, the "I'm up, he sees me, I'm down" movements, three to five second rushes. anyways I was up and running and the target 20 yards infront of me dropped, I did too, in a training environment thats close enough. real world i don't care but training it ain't too cool.

[Beren]

Heh. I went hiking in the state gamelands one sunny afternoon and got myself lost.

I finally figured out where I was when I heard "crack crack crack" on one side followed by the sound of a branch breaking nearby.

I was on the far side of the gamelands pistol range, and some idiot had let at least one round go over the berm. Well, I was the idiot behind the range.

Needless to say I have never moved quite so fast in my life. It was like running downhill - only I was running UP the hill!

[marley]

It did not take long. I was standing beside the road in my appt complex talking to a man. His son was petting my dog. I heard to car slow down and heard pop pop pop pop or so. I was turning around to see the gun in the window and the car speeding off. It was 30 seconds before the other guy said that I had blood on my shirt. That's when I knew it was a pellet gun. It looked real and sounded real. If they had not been speeding off I would have shot them. I did not draw. I did have a hand on my M66. Patrick

[nvrquit]

Had shot rained on me in the field while hunting small game by an unobservant ya-hoo in the next field when I was 15. Year before that, while posted about 3/4 the way upslope during deer season, a bullet impacted some 10 to 12 feet to my right.

I didn't appreciate either events. Dad, uncle and two cousins let the first know that we didn't appreciate the lead downfall. On the second, I immediately popped around the tree I was sitting in front of and stayed there until the shooting from downhill stopped. I never really felt comfortable hunting on public open land since those days.

[Old NFO]

Incoming Mortar rounds sound like quail flushing... I remember thinking there probably aren't a lot of quail at Cam Rahn...:banghead:

In helo's or airplanes taking fire, you hear a "static" sound over the ICS, that's a clue to sit on your flak jacket:D

Second time was at Camp Blanding, walking across a tank trail, heard the "buzz" and a report. We looked up the trail and saw a guy about 200x away with a rifle at his shoulder. We yelled, took a second round close, and jumped off the trail. Reported it to the MP's and left the base.

[fjolnirsson]

How long did it take you to realize that you were on the wrong side of a two-way range? What was your first clue?


Well, less than 2 seconds, but it felt a lot longer.

Bullets tearing through the leaves above me was a clue, as were the screams and running people.

[DRZinn]

Do grenades count? About the time the second one hit the ground two feet in front of me.

(Iraqi grenades have virtually no shrapnel - as I discovered after taking two long running strides in the opposite direction.)

[Huntzman]

Walking out of a housing project, middle of July, about 2100 and hot as hell, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why the car windows were exploding around me and my partner........:what: Can you say "Moron"........:eek:

Oh, and I would beg to differ with the earlier post about a lamp post not being cover..... Trust me, when your taking rounds you'd be surprised what you can squeeze your "behind" behind !!!!

[scout26]

Approximately .00000001th of a second after seeing the muzzleflash of the gun pointed at me from about 15 ft.

He missed.

[geekWithA.45]

After my sister, who had tackled me and pushed me onto the floor, explained why the car's window had shattered.

I was 4 years old.

[armedandsafe]

After I had disarmed him, gathered my group and went to pick up my point man. I noticed that my right thumb didn't work right.

Pops

[Cousin Mike]

Instantly for me, but I knew it was coming all 3 times.

Once leaving a get-together, while inside my car. Had a confrontation in a nightclub, left, was followed, and shot at from a distance as I approached my car. Hid behind cars until shooting stopped and I heard a car speed off, and drove home so spooked by what just happened that I never even turned on my headlights.

Once in a pretty rough area of town visiting friends... Someone they knew approached the front yard in a car and started a confrontation with a few relatives and friends who were standing outside. We yelled back a few unkind words, and they started shooting from the car. I think they shot in the air, but I didnt stick around to find out... No one was hit. Both times I had no pistol or CCW (was under 21, CCW just passed in Ohio recently)

Once at work as a security guard in a local retail store. Wasnt supposed to carry at the job. Most employees did anyway due to store location and the type of business it was. Had an altercation with a customer who left and came back shooting at us in the parking lot from a vehicle. Another employee returned fire at the car, and they sped away before anyone else could get a shot off. Quit that job soon after, quit working 3rd shift, and stopped wasting time in nightclubs and bars.

Nothing to report since.

[beerslurpy]

stopped wasting time in nightclubs and bars

That is the key to avoiding 70 percent of the "unexpected" asswhoopings and emergency room visits that life can throw at you. No one ever goes to a dive bar expecting to get into a drunken brawl with a bunch of bikers, but when such a fight invenitably happens, you will be there to be hit by the broken glass. Which is of course the main reason that being there is a bad idea.

The other 30 percent involve working late at night in bad parts of town.

[musher]

When I was a kid, about jr high, my dad was stationed in gulfport ms. We lived on base and commuted to a school conveniently located in one of the poorer sections of town.

At one end of the base was a big park set up for unit picnics and the like. It was near the fence marking the base boundary. Across the fence were the neighborhoods that our school serviced.

One summer we had a big picnic there just before my dad's Seabee unit was to be deployed to Diego Garcia. There was a LOT of folks there. All the families of all the guys.

My friend, Mike and I decided to split the shindig for a bit and look for snakes and turtles. The whole park was surrounded by these concrete drainage ditches shaped like big V's about 8-10' across at the top. They were 4' deep or so. Many of them had silt buildups at the bottom that held pools of water and attracted the kind of critters we were looking for.

As we worked our way along the ditches, we came to a section close to the fence. We were standing at the top of the ditch when we heard a sound we'd heard in just about every western. Smack-wheeewwww. We just stood there for a second looking at each other when we heard it again. Mike hollered that someone was shooting at us, so we jumped into the ditch. Sure enough, someone across the fence was popping rounds off. We sat down there in the ditch while whoever it was shot a couple more times (that we heard). We could never hear the report of the shot, just the impacts and ricochets when the shots hit the concrete of the ditch.

We crouched down and ran the ditchline back to the trees, then went back to the main picnic and found our dads.

Nobody ever believed us.