Back in uniform

Disclaimer:This thread has very little black powder related content (none in fact) It's just me bragging I guess, but I never posted anywhere but in BP shooting on THR so here goes.
Edit: Moved to the Rifle country, thanks mod!

This weekend I joined Sweden's national guard, the Homeguard, after persistent nagging by a colleague. My memories of the Homeguard is from my grandfather, he and some other old stooges in old gray wollen uniforms and m/98 Mausers who sat around shooting the breeze so I expected a laidback weekend with plenty of coffee and exchanging stories about our army days.
Turns out it was me and a friend and bunch of twenty-something year old kids straight out of boot camp... The youngest was born in 92, that's the year I left the army.

Today I'm so sore I could hardly get out of bed, but military lessons sits deep.
The HG are issued modernized G3s, the weapon I was originally trained on, instead of the FN FNC the kids had trained with, and the procedures were embedded somewhere in my hind brain so I had an advantage.

Sitting in a hole in the ground in the middle of the night I was the first to produce the firing pin for inspection and the first to declare "locked and loaded" after reassembly.

Next morning we went to the range and started shooting, to my amazement I shot better than most of the kids from bootcamp and was asked for advice about stance and firing technique.
That was weird!

The gunnery sergeant's face was priceless when he asked if I was one of the new sharpshooters they had recruited and I told him I was to be a signalist with the battalion HQ


Here's the rifle..


and here's the best group of the day, they weren't all as good as this

I promised to bring the 1815 musket to the range sometime to try out the exercises.
There! I knew I could get some BP into the post!
/A

No he was in the army up north, close to the Finnish border during the war, not the happiest place.
He was transfered to the Homeguard after the war ended. He told me that in his days as a recruit, he had a blue uniform with gold trimmings and a tricorn. That had to be somewhere in the 1920's, a far cry from the fatigues of today.

Sweden didn't have a standing army (until last year) but all men between 16-47 were conscripted and did a year in the military services. In the sixties we had 950 000 people in the Armed Forces out of a population of 8 million.

During the war we weren't really neutral. We transported german troops on our railroads and flew steel ball bearings by Mosquitoes to England, I guess we played both sides just to survive.

Shadow 7D said:

Not bad
remember
or at least in the US army
it's more about being able to hit than being able to shoot accurately

I learned more about ballistics and accuracy since I left the army (quite a bit from this board) than I did in the army.

Click to expand...

When I did my tour we were told that accuracy were everything, you were supposed to hit the bullseye on 300m or keep trying while the rest of the platoon did pushups until you made it. No pressure, right?

Now it's more like "poke as many hole as you can in different places as fast as you can" no real need for accuracy as long as you hit something. It's going to take a while to adjust.

Speaking of ballistics, I got my gramps weapons handbook from 1912 in front of me and it starts of with this:

Chapter 1
The projectiles trajectory in empty space
- The free fall movement

And then it goes on to explain aerodynamic drag and retardation and the vertical projection of the projectile.
Makes me feel like I've been exposed to some retardation myself

4v50 Gary said:

Lucky you to have a G-3 to play with.

Click to expand...

Going full auto is a BLAST!

Oh yeah, it climbs like a mountain goat!
It takes some getting used to.

The sight is a Aimpoint red dot,couldn't find in on Aimpoints home page so I guess its specially made for the Crown.
The modernized version of the rifle, AK4B, has the fixed sights milled away and a Piccatinny rail welded on. There are emergency sights on top of the Aimpoint (a sight radius if 4" ).
I'd have liked it a whole lot better if they'd kept the old peep sights in case the optics goes on the fritz, they were good sights, but then I guess they'd have to train the recruits on those as well...
A red dot sight is so much easier to use for a beginner.

Thanks guys!
Some further info on the red dot sight.
It's an Aimpont CS, specially made for the Swedish Armed Forces. It wasn't even available to other Mil customers so it's unique.
Midland apparently bought the surplus.