Chapter 49: Training

October 2007 - December 2007

Mid-October, about when it became obvious that I was going to stick it out and go to the academy, Tim Hungerford showed up at the rickety-bench-with-delusions-of-grandeur that I called my desk. He had a packet of paperwork with him. “Take a break,” he ordered. “You need to look this stuff over.”

I looked at him. “Why? What is it?”

“It’s the packet from the academy.”

“Ah!” I nodded at that. “Let’s take a look. You’ve been through this, right?”

Tim nodded. “Everybody has to go through this, unless they transfer in from some other state. Even then they have to have records.” He motioned me over to a table and plopped it down, and we started sorting through it. “First things first. You need to take the entrance exam. They offer that at a lot of state colleges and junior colleges, so here’s the info on that.”

I took the pages on that, and one of them was a list of colleges the test was offered at. M-Triple-C was on the list. “I can take that at M-Triple-C.”

“Good, you can fill out the application and send them the check. Next, assuming you are smart enough to know that water is wet, and you shouldn’t touch a hot stove, you’ll pass the test. Then you can go to the academy. Any idea which one you want to attend?”

“Where are they? I know there are several.”

He pulled out some more paperwork, including an application to the academy. One page had a map of Georgia with some flags highlighting locations. “I trained down at Tifton, but that’s only because I’m from down there. There’re several a lot closer to Matucket. South of us is Columbus, then we have Cherokee, Forsyth...”

“Athens!” I interrupted, tapping the map. “That’s the place. Kelly goes to UGA, so I can probably see her at times. Do the academies have dorms, or do you have to rent a room someplace? Could I stay with her?”

“Athens does not have a dorm. You’ll need to find a place to live in the city itself. There’s usually a nearby motel that is cheap and can do a long-term rental, but it might be kind of crappy. Otherwise, if you can room with your girlfriend, try that,” he replied.

“I’ll call her tonight.” That actually sounded pretty interesting. I could split the rent with her and Megs, which ought to get them to agree.

“Classes start at eight in the morning, and you can’t be late. There are no classes on weekends.”

“What do I need to take with me?”

“They have a list right here.” He dug through the pile and pulled out a page with a long list. “A bunch of this is clothing and uniforms. There’re a few different places you can buy this stuff in Atlanta ... and Athens it looks like,” he told me, looking down a list of vendors. “You’ll need to pick this stuff up ahead of time. Buy some extra stuff and keep a spare set around.”

I nodded at that. It sounded a lot like the military. I looked down the list. Aside from the clothing, there was a lot of police gear. “A baton? Handcuffs? A pistol?” I looked at Tim. “I have to take that with me? Where do I get that stuff? What if I get the wrong type?” That could really screw me over. Pistols weren’t cheap. What if I got the wrong type?

Tim leaned back and nodded. “Well, there’s a list of different choices, but you want to use gear that is legal in Matucket.”

“Legal in Matucket? Explain that.”

“Sure. For example, I am sure that you know there are a lot of different handguns, pistols and revolvers, in all sorts of calibers.” I nodded in agreement. “You were in the Army like I was, so you got at least some training on the M-9 Beretta, right?”

“Sure. I carried one as a sidearm in Iraq. You were in the Army?” Tim was a few years older than I was, but he never had asked me much about my service in Iraq.

“Yeah, as an MP. I did three years in Germany, then got out a few years ago. It wasn’t much of a stretch to go from MP to police officer. Anyway, that’s on the approved list, but it’s not what we use here. The Matucket Police Department uses as its primary weapon the Glock 22 in .40 caliber, which is also on the list.” He tapped further down the page.

“So, I have to buy my own gun? I don’t even own a weapon.”

“Yeah, not everybody does. No, the list is for somebody who might have their own weapons at home. You can bring anything on the list, get trained and qualified, and then when you get on a police force, you can get one of their assigned weapons.” He tapped his holstered pistol. “This isn’t mine, but the property of the MPD. Same with the holster, cuffs, yadda yadda yadda. I have some of this stuff of my own, but not for during duty hours. You don’t have any guns?”

“Nope. Any chance I can borrow this stuff from the department?”

“Yeah, probably. You can ask, at least. If you flunk out you have to give it all back, I’m sure.”

“Yeah, of course,” I agreed.

“Listen, I need to requalify in a couple of weeks. I’m going to the range this weekend to practice. Want to come? We can shoot up some Q targets; give you a feel for the course.”

I thought about it, but only for a second. I was originally planning to head to Athens, but Kelly and I could switch off. “Yeah, okay. I’ll need to borrow your gun, though.”

“Let me look into that. I’ll also check on the other gear you’ll need. You start checking on this other stuff and start filling out your application.”

“Thanks, Tim.” He took off and I bundled the paperwork up and set it aside for later. I’d fill it out at the apartment that night.

I called Kelly that night and asked her about staying with her while going to the academy in Athens. She was all for it but needed to check with Megs. I told her I would pay my third of the rent while I was there, along with my share of the groceries, and Kelly admitted that would probably sway her roommate. Kelly’s father might be wealthy, but she and Megan had to make do on whatever grad students could afford. She called me the next night to tell me that Megs had given her blessing.

Saturday morning, Tim drove over to the apartment and picked me up. The firing range was at the West Springs Gun Club, which was about a mile north of the feed mill. I felt odd as we drove past the sign; it reminded me an awful lot of the ‘Camp Custer Gun Club.’ “Creighton is meeting us out here. He needs to requalify, too.” Everybody had to requalify every year to stay current, but they staggered it out so that you didn’t get a couple of hundred cops all trying to do it at once.

Creighton was waiting for us in the parking lot when we got there. “Morning, Creighton,” I said.

“Grim, Tim.”

“Think you can beat me?” asked Tim.

Creighton laughed. “Man, I am every cracker’s worst nightmare, a spook with a gun and a badge.”

“Yeah, Creighton, we’ll take you down to Tifton and let you see the real meaning of coon hunting,” laughed Tim. I just rolled my eyes. Tim went around to the trunk of his car and popped it open. “Come on; let’s see what Grim remembers from basic training.”

In the trunk of Tim’s car was a cardboard carton with a few pistols and holsters. One was the standard duty belt and duty holster carrying his Glock. “Do you carry when not in uniform?” I asked.

Both Creighton and Tim opened their jackets and showed me they were carrying weapons. Tim said, “I carry an Officer’s Model .45. It’s a cut-down version of the standard M1911A1.” He was carrying his in a shoulder holster.

Creighton had his weapon in a small belt holster. “It’s a compact version of a Beretta 9mm.”

“I carried the full size in the Army,” I replied.

“Any good with it?” he asked.

“It’s been a while since I shot anything. I’ll probably drop it on my foot,” I replied. Then I thought back to the last time I had fired a pistol. It was at Whiskey when I had to pull the pilot out of that Apache; he had been fumbling with a pistol and I took it from him to shoot some hajjis. A chill ran up my back. What if I froze when I had a gun in my hands again?

Neither of the other two noticed my wool-gathering. Instead, both guys grabbed their weapons and headed towards the building. The West Springs Gun Club was not a private club as it was also open to the public. You could join the club, but you could also pay by the hour or day. The MPD didn’t have its own range, so they paid an annual fee, and any officer could use the place, though they had to pay for their own bullets and targets, and there was a reduced per-day charge. There was a 25-yard indoor range, with eight individual lanes and motorized target pulleys, and a 200-yard outside range out back. You could bring your own eye and ear protectors or rent them from the pro shop.

We stopped there first. I needed eye and ear protection. I could understand the ear protection since handguns inside a building could be pretty noisy. The eye protection was in case something went wrong, and a round exploded. I’d never heard of that happening, but Creighton said he knew of people who did their own hand loads.

Both guys hung their jackets up on a hook, took off their off-duty holsters, and put on their duty holsters and weapons. “What’d you use? Standard PALS thigh rig?” asked Tim.

“You got it,” I replied. “How come we use Glocks? Why not Berettas or Sig Sauers?”

“Probably because they are made at a factory in Smyrna and they give a hell of a discount to police departments in Georgia,” said Creighton.

I let Creighton and Tim go first. Both were okay, but it was obvious they needed some practice to qualify. “I do okay on the closer targets, but I can’t hit for shit at distance,” admitted Tim.

“The real test is done out at the outdoor range out back,” added Creighton. “The distance isn’t greater, but there are different shooting positions and situations, and some of it is timed. One Saturday morning a month they do qualifying and shut down the range.”

“Your turn,” said Tim. “Borrow mine. You can pay me for the cartridges later.”

‘Okay.” I stepped into the booth and Tim laid his pistol on the counter and then undid his duty belt, handing it to me. I fumbled it at first until I got the hang of it, and then picked up the Glock. Creighton pointed out some of the finer points of the weapon, and then Tim handed me ear protectors and glasses.

“Okay, try not to shoot me or Creighton. It won’t look good on the application,” commented Tim.

“Yeah, most of the guys you’ll meet at the academy won’t know shit about weapons. If you manage to not shoot yourself in the foot, you’ll be doing better than average in that bunch,” added Creighton.

I smiled at that. I stepped forward into the booth and pointed the weapon downrange. It felt comfortable in my hands. I could feel it almost willing itself to shoot. I took a shallow breath, let it half out, raised the Glock into position and let off a round. It tore through the paper target center mass. I smiled to myself and fired the rest of the magazine as fast as I could pull the trigger.

“Holy fuck!” exclaimed Creighton, staring downrange.

“Jesus Christ, Reaper!” added Tim. He hit the switch on the pulley and brought it in.

The ragged edges of the bullet holes fluttered in the motion-induced breeze. The center of the Q target had been shredded. You couldn’t really count the bullet holes since they were overlapping.

“Who the fuck are you, Reaper? Wyatt Earp Junior?” asked Creighton.

“Guys! Give me a break!”

“No, Reaper, you give us a break! I couldn’t do that without a scope and a rifle, and even then, I’m not sure it would be that tight,” argued Tim.

“Listen, forget it. Just tell me what the qualification test involves,” I replied.

“It involves shooting targets,” he replied. “There’s a bunch of Q targets and you need to get thirty rounds into them. They’re at different ranges and different angles. It’s supposed to be realistic, but that’s total bullshit anyway.”

Creighton added, “You get ten points a shot inside the line and eight points outside the line. Thirty shots times ten points is a maximum of 300 points. You need a minimum of 240 points to qualify. Now, since we already know you can ace the test, you want to explain that?”

“Creighton, I swear, I haven’t picked up a weapon in months.”

“Right. Do it again.” He put another target on the clip and sent it back downrange.

I muttered under my breath as Tim put another magazine into the pistol. I simply rolled my eyes and adjusted my ear protectors. They stepped away and I looked downrange. I brought the pistol up and put a round through the head portion of the target, right in the center. It went into what would have been the nose, and I smiled. I suddenly remembered Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon and decided to imitate him. Two more shots made the eyes, and then I made a smile with another half-dozen. I hit the switch for the pulley and retrieved the target.

I pulled the target down and handed it to Tim. “Do me a favor and keep this to yourself. I don’t need the reputation.”

“Fuck me!”

“Uh, you ever did, uh, you know ... in the Army?” stammered Creighton.

I looked away for a second, but then turned back. “Listen, didn’t you need to practice for qualifying?”

I refused to answer their questions but did wait while they both worked on their shooting. They weren’t great, but they weren’t terrible, either. The odds were that they would both requalify, but at the low end of the range. The guys practiced some more, and I familiarized myself with their personal weapons. Whatever my problems with PTSD were, they obviously didn’t have any effect on my shooting. Of course, that was just on a range. I didn’t really want to learn if things were the same out in the real world.

By lunchtime, we had shot up a bunch of targets and Tim and Creighton had done well enough to qualify. They’d have to do it for real the next time the MPD ran a qualifying test. As we left the range, Tim looked over at Creighton and asked, “The Cherokee Grill?”

“Works for me.” Creighton headed towards his car and I followed Tim to his.

It seemed lunch had been decided on. The Cherokee Grill was the closest thing Matucket had to an ‘official’ police bar. It was about three blocks from the police station and the owner was an ex-MPD lieutenant. You could usually find members of Matucket’s Finest hanging out there, along with their wives or girlfriends, and civilian employees down at the station were also welcome. Occasionally other people would enter; civilians were tolerated although good-looking women were greeted warmly, Matucket’s Bravest, the fire department, were loudly booed when they showed up, Georgia State Troopers were greeted even less cordially. I had been there once, right after I started working as an admin. The food was decent, although the menu was mostly limited to burgers and anything that could be deep-fried, and the cockroaches stayed in the back, where nobody was likely to shoot them.

I followed Tim in, and we found Creighton had grabbed a large booth in the back. We sat down and a top-heavy middle-aged waitress came over with menus. “Afternoon, fellows.”

“Margie, how you doing? Your husband in the back grinding up roadkill again?” asked Creighton.

“He would be if you weren’t always stopping on the side of the road to poach it first,” she replied. That got Tim and me to laughing. She continued, “You boys looking for a meal or just planning to drown your sorrows?”

“Maybe both,” answered Tim. “Three beers and three burgers.”

The waitress took our orders, including fries, and headed towards the back. Tim looked at me and said, “That’s Margie Waterhouse. Her husband is Mack Waterhouse, and he owns the place. That’s him over at the bar.”

I looked over and saw a tall white-haired guy behind the bar. “He’s a little older than Margie, I’m guessing,” I said.

“Yeah, Margie’s his second wife. His first wife bit the big one, cancer, a few years before he retired. Mack pretty much lost interest in everything until Margie came along. That was almost ten years ago, at least that’s the way I heard it.” Creighton nodded in agreement.

“So, you never served under him?”

Creighton replied, “No way. Probably none of us have, though you’ll probably find an old fart who’ll say he was a rookie then. Not sure I’d believe him, but it’s possible.”

A couple of minutes later Mack Waterhouse brought over three mugs of foamy wonder. “Here you go, boys, straight from the outhouse. Ignore the little brown things floating in the foam.”

I smiled. Unless Budweiser was adding brown stuff to the beer, we were fine. Tim asked, “Mack, this is our newest admin, Graham Reaper. Graham’s going to be going to the academy after the New Year.”

“Nice to meet you, Mister Waterhouse,” I said, reaching out to shake his hand.

“Call me Mack.” He looked at me funny. “Reaper, Reaper ... why do I know that name?”

“Don’t know, sir. My dad works for the County as the Chief Engineer, and my grandfather owns the feed mill.”

He was shaking his head. “Yeah, I mean, that’s not it. I know both of them, just in passing anyway ... no...” He stopped for a second and looked at me hard. “You’re the fellow who rescued that singer over in Iraq! I remember that was on the news! It was a local boy. That’s you, right?”

Oh, shit! I should have known that no good deed goes unpunished. “That was a long time ago, Mister Waterhouse.”

He ignored that. “Not that long ago. What was her name again? She wrote that song about you boys, too.”

I took a deep drink of my beer. “Tolley Hunter. Nice lady. She did a nice concert for us, and I wasn’t the only one there, not by a long shot.”

I was saved when the bell on the front door tinkled and another couple of guys entered. Mack went back behind the bar and waved to them. I looked at Creighton and Tim, both of whom were staring at me. “What?”

“Just who the hell are you?” asked Tim. “What were you over there? Some sort of sniper or SEAL or something?”

“Guys!”

“Come on, give!” ordered Creighton.

I sighed. “Listen it’s not like that. I was just one more soldier, an Eleven Bravo. You know what that means, Tim. You were in the Army.”

“You don’t shoot like any Eleven Bravo I ever met! You want to tell us the truth, or do you want me to Google Tolley Hunter when I get home?”

“Okay, okay. Just keep it to yourselves. I do not need this all over the station. I’ve already got half the old-timers on my case about Dubois. I don’t need the rest of them thinking I’m some damn Rambo who’s not safe to be around!” I told them. Both statements were true. More than a few of the police officers in the station blamed me for getting Dubois fired, even though they knew he was a shitty cop. Likewise, I had heard the old saying about never sharing a foxhole with anybody braver than you were, and the same thing applied to police cars.

They both agreed.

“Okay, first, the shooting. I can’t explain it. I’d never even picked up a gun until I went to Basic. Nobody in my family even owns a gun. It’s just ... I can’t miss! I have no explanation. Maybe it’s great eyesight or perfect eye-hand coordination. I don’t know why. I just can’t miss. I’ve been hitting targets like that since I first picked up my training M-16.”

“What’d you get assigned to when you left AIT?” Tim turned to Creighton. “That’s Advanced Infantry Training.”

“Fourth of the Fourth. It’s a regular infantry battalion with the Second Brigade Combat Team. I was just one more dumbass newbie. I was an automatic rifleman, that’s all,” I told them.

“So, you had a rifle?” asked Creighton. He had obviously never served.

“No,” answered Tim. “In the Army, an automatic rifleman actually runs a machine gun. Don’t ask why they call them that.” Tim turned to me. “Right?”

“Right. I was assigned an M-249 light machine gun. I carried that all through my first tour.”