Crack-crack-crack-crack-crack.
A flock of geese leaped out of the frosty grass into the chilly Chilcotin air, startled by the sudden rasp of gunfire.
Pastoral fields, forested hills and a few small placid lakes hardly seemed like the place for outbursts of automatic rifles, but gun smoke and the smell of burnt powder crept across this postcard and stayed for the better part of three days.
In the 1960s the Department of National Defence bought this parcel of land about an hour west of Williams Lake. It's about 20 kilometres by 20 kilometres, and shaped like a saucer - fields and forest recessed into surrounding hills. Bullets can cruise this campus and not hit anything of human value.
It has been infrequently utilized at times, by with the Rocky Mountain Rangers opening up Company B in Prince George to match their Company A in Kamloops, this live-fire training base in between is about to get unprecedented use.
This is where part-time reservists and regular members of the army - for both are equal in the eyes of their commanding officers and in the cross-hairs of the enemy - certify for the
various weapons they use.
On this trip the focus was the standard-issue C7 Canadian army assault rifle (a sibling of the M16), the C9 machine gun (belt-fed ammunition, 200 rounds per belt) and the M203
grenade launcher (a 40 mm grenade fired from a C7 barrel attachment).
About 30 men were on this Rocky Mountain Rangers training mission. Most were
reservists based in Kamloops with leadership from the regular forces. Three were based in Prince George: Sgt. Daniel Mack, Master Cpl. Cody Attewell, and Cpl. Craig Disher.
Those from Prince George arrived later than the Kamloops contingent on the initial Friday night. They had already unloaded the military cargo trucks and set up the long personnel tents.
One of these canvas cabins had a wood stove for the officers, medical staff and training leaders; the other had no stove and was for the workaday soldiers.
Everyone at the site was dressed in camouflage battle fatigues, black boots, with toques and helmets nearby.
Everyone had a backpack containing their sleeping gear and all else they might need in a field mission. The smell of gun oil and gas lamps bit through the scene.
There was a lot of chatter amongst the soldiers. They laughed easily and hard, with verbal play-fighting. It was much like a locker room but with a clear edge. The business they were attending to was as serious as life and death.
Even part-time soldiers on a B.C. field trip knew that this was preparation for hostility on foreign soil, bullets and bombs with their names on them.
Some of the ones giving orders were only in their 20s.
It was a cold sleep. The next morning many made mention (never a complaint) of shivering in their sleeping bags, but nobody was backing down from the day's tasks. Everyone hustled into their clothes, assembled their gear, checked their weapons, and ate their breakfast.
Senior soldiers reiterated the instructions given last night and helped with everyone's food. They were loud and jovial. It wasn't an act. The handful of veterans here relished the uniform and the protocols of camping under the Canadian flag.
Most had been overseas, some to conflict zones like Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Afghanistan.
Their lightheartedness was the doorway of respect open to each of the up-and-coming soldiers in the tent.
Behind that demeanor, everyone trusted, was a highly skilled defender of freedom. Orders were given with warm authority, and taken with easy acknowledgment.
Disobey and the attitude would be instantly different.
The tasks were simple enough. The company hiked from the camp to the gun field. There, targets had been set up in various formations and at various distances. For the next eight hours, small groups took turns walking, crawling, crouching and always laying down streams of bullets at the targets.
Timing and accuracy were closely counted.
The air never really warmed all day, although the sun was pleasant some rain fell. The grass was tall and wet which added a cold shiver to moments of inactivity. Most of the day was inactivity. Waiting and waiting. It was commonly referenced that pilots have no idea, as the old flying cliche goes, of what it means to have a job of mostly boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror.
A few asides kept the day interesting, as if popping off hundreds of rounds of gunfire didn't perk up your senses. One was lunch.
Another was an exercise set up by the medical staff simulating wounded comrades in the field and covering their safe removal from the scene.
"We call this 'concurrent activity,'" said Dr. Paul Farrell, a medical doctor and reservist based in Kamloops but an international expert in mass casualty response and military medical scenarios.
He glued and painted grotesquely realistic fake wounds onto volunteers in order that the soldiers there that day could do some theatre designed to give them context for the real battlefield.
A third distraction was a visit by retired Brig.-Gen. Jerry Silva, the Rocky Mountain Rangers' honorary commanding officer, along with RCMP member Const. Adolf Friesen who came along with him to observe and take part in some of the shooting.
In turn, each soldier took his or her shots. The superior officers scored the results. Tips were given, orders were made, and it moved along with military precision.
The C7 has almost no kick, they are relatively quiet.
One of the senior personnel said these were reliable guns in the field but had an ammunition problem.
The C7 and the C9 each shoots Nato-issue .556 caliber bullets.
"It's known that the bullet will pass clean through 17 people in a line, if it hits no bone on the way," he said. "That means it has no stopping power. It will kill with certainty, but it sometimes takes quite a while for the guy to fall, because it is such a high-velocity shot."
Soldiers lay flat on the ground, gripped the C9 with both hands, squinting into the failing light, hearing the hiss-hiss-hiss of raindrops hitting the smoking barrel, and pulling that explosive trigger.
Every fifth round in the C9 chain was tipped with a tracer - a light charge that provides the viewer with a red streak indicating exactly where your shots are going.
"That is what we call a short burst," said the field supervisor.
"This time I want a long burst into the machine gun nest at 400 metres."
The tracers flew, some of them ricocheting off rocks and into the sky at odd angles, as he watched through powerful binoculars and reported hits and misses.
Shortly after the march back to the tents, word came down some of the officers favoured a patrol simulation that night.
The soldiers all had "bivvy bags" to keep relatively cozy on the ground outside.
Since the sun went down the air was sharp and poked little fingers through the layers of clothing that had staved off most of the shivers during the day.
After rehearsing in the personnel tent, the soldiers were now going to carry out shooting exercises in the darkness.
"We are not doing the patrol simulation," announced the lead field officer once we were back at camp. "That is a specialized situation, I want you to learn it correctly and we do not have the resources here tonight to properly instruct you. There is a proper way to set up and carry out an overnight patrol and I want you to only learn the correct way to do this, so for tonight we are staying here."
Everyone got an extra sleeping bag, one tucked inside the other, and slept until the 5:30 a.m. wake-up call. The glint of morning sun revealed a quarter-inch of hoar frost on every inch of grass and ground outside.
Sunday was more shooting, especially with the grenade launchers. The soldiers enjoyed making fun of them. "The most anticlimactic weapon you'll ever use," they said.
Firing the rifle attachments sounded like a child's pop-gun and the grenades (these ones loaded in chalk for training observation) went off nothing like a Hollywood hand-bomb.
There was a comical "poof" when they landed, paradoxical to their lethal effects in battle.
Everyone got to witness commanding officer Lt. Col. Kevin Tyler who waited until the end to do his own certification on
the weapon.
"Ideally you want to land the grenade a foot or two in front of the target," he said.
Pop went his launcher. Plop went his grenade, less than a metre in front of the cardboard figure in the distance.
Everyone applauded.
Pop went his launcher again.
Smack went the target as the grenade took off its two-dimensional head. The applause turned to "ooooohs" and "awwwwws."
Tyler then set up some incentive games to clean up the sight.
For more than an hour the entire field was ransacked by the soldiers picking up every spent round and fragmented grenade we could find on the range.
The winners got to engage in more advanced shooting activities with the others as an audience.
There was also a selection process for cleaning the winners' guns.
Not that this was much of a hardship. Every one of these privates could - and did - disassemble these weapons down to an orderly pile of rods and pins and then snap it all back together again clean and accounted for.
They could also strip a camp like the 4077th bugging out of the last episode of M*A*S*H - which happened to be the next task.
Breaking camp was done with a lot of the customary laughter but some heaviness.
These young men and women - boys and girls, really - were not only capable of handling the call of military duty, they were good at it.
To prove it, eight Rocky Mountain Rangers are in Afghanistan today engaged in the next phase of Canada's military duties there (mostly training the new Afghan army and police force).
An estimated 50 Rocky Mountain Rangers reservists have voluntarily done tours of duty in Afghanistan over the 10 years of combat there.
Not all have come home alive, which gave everyone involved in these training exercises a clear view from these gentle meadows to the fields and trees only a day's plane ride away where people are shooting back. Or shooting first.
The Rocky Mountain Rangers are on another field training mission this weekend near Kamloops.
