Here it is once again, the week that the RNS crew prepares for all year. From points West, East and South we all converge on a grassy knoll in Idaho every year to shoot and socialize in style at Boomershoot.
How better to start it off than with C.S. Forester’s tale about a lone sniper with a bolt-action Mauser wreaking havoc on a battleship?
It was an apt picture of the simultaneous power and helplessness of modern machinery. On the one hand lay Zeithen, with her ten 6-inch guns and her hundreds of crew and her horse-power reckoned in thousands, and on the other a lad of five foot eight, aged twenty, dominating her and enforcing his will upon her.
But Brown was only powerful in consequence of his rifle, the handiest, neatest, most efficient piece of machinery ever devised by man. Not for the first time was the rifle altering the course of history.
Brown was not a marvellously good shot, but to hit four men with four shots at a quarter of a mile when they are entirely exposed and conspicuous in white against a dark background does not call for marvellous shooting. Brown could handle his weapon in good workmanship fashion, and that is all the rifle demands.
He had won the first trick, and he snuggled down into his niche on the saddle of rock to await the next development. A head appeared beyond Zeithen’s foremost funnel, upon the bridge. He fired quickly, missed, and felt annoyed with himself.
–C.S. Forester, Brown on Resolution
Hey, they made a movie out of it! Will have to check it out. The book is very very good and well worth your time.