The V Spot: Warrior Day

In early July Chelsea and I trooped down to Quantico, VA to the Marine Base to spend Warrior Day with Mike Seymour and his parents. Warrior Day is a day when all of the families come out and spend a day on base with their Marine, experiencing a day in the life.

Basically, you get to shoot a bunch of guns and learn about what your Marine does on a daily basis - where he lives, what he eats, who he spends his days with, etc.

At the end of the day there is a large graduation ceremony (which I unfortunately was unable to stay for, I had a flight to California to catch!).

Chelsea and I got up SUPER early. We hit the road shortly at 6am in order to arrive before 8:30am. There was a LONG line of cars waiting to enter the base. Because the Quantico Marine base is so large, and parts of it are shared with other federal agencies (FBI, etc.) you can only enter it via certain gates depending on what you are there for.

Once we arrived we checked in and caught up with Mike. While we waited for Mike's parents Chuck and Cathy, Mike took us on a tour of part of the base. We got a chance to see where he lived for the last 6+ months (the barracks); we trooped through the grounds, and saw where they like to hang out when they have free time.

One of our stops on this brief tour was the obstacle course. Which of course Mike had to demonstrate for us! It may look like an over-sized jungle gym, but it is hard work!

We had to take a bus out to the shooting range. While we waited in the host sun we took a break to check out an amphibious tank that was out on display in a nearby field. The engineers showing off the tank told us that they aren't used much anymore because they can be picked off in the water too easily.

The shoot range was a LARGE field broken into three segments - one for each type of gun - along with three corresponding segments for you to shoot towards/at.

Our first stop on the shoot range, after receiving basic safety instructions, was the M-16 rifle station. This is a semi-automatic rifle and boy does it ever give a KICK!

We each got to shoot 5 bullets. Our target was various points out in the shooting range field, and far off was an old tank to take aim at.

The second stop in the gun rotation was getting to shoot a grenade launcher (essentially an M-16 with a grenade modification attached). This time we each got to shoot one blank. These are large, blue and white shells that explode orange powder stuff upon impact to mark where it landed.

Our third and final stop out on the gun range was getting to shoot the M-249 automatic rifle. Only Chuck and I shot this gun, mostly because everyone else was hot and you had to lay down on your stomach and get pretty dirty in order to shoot the gun.

At first we only had five bullets each for Chuck and myself. When my instructor saw this (they loaded the gun for me) he went off and found me a full 20+ rounds to shoot. Boy was that fun!

For lunch we decided to stay on base and ate at the mess hall where Mike eats most of his meals. The food was good and it was great to sit inside with the air conditioning blasting!