Another Fire Mission

This Time as a Gunner

A clip of my gun sec­tion con­duct­ing a fire mis­sion with the M777 how­itzer in the deserts of Twentynine Palms, California.

I was the gun­ner dur­ing this mis­sion and unlike the other gun sec­tions, I was actu­ally gun­ning. That is, we were using the iron sights instead of the DFCS (dig­i­tal fire con­trol sys­tem) with its three-axis gyro­scope and fancy self-location. The M777A2’s very expen­sive elec­tron­ics have a propen­sity to fail spec­tac­u­larly dur­ing oper­a­tion. Marine artillery might be the rex belli (king of bat­tle), but this ver­sion of the light­weight how­itzer must be treated like a princess.

“Close-Up.” Christopher in the Philippines. He was amused at my attempts to repeat­edly cap­ture a close-up.

I do not remem­ber exactly how I ended up in Christopher’s sec­tion, but he was my sec­tion chief for this field oper­a­tion (he is the one ver­i­fy­ing every­thing and yelling “Fire!”). It must have been right after my pre­vi­ous sec­tion chief sep­a­rated from the Marine Corps. It would explain why I was gun­ning instead of being the recorder and ammu­ni­tion team chief, which were my usual billets.

Now, a gun­ner is some­one who man­u­ally aims the mas­sive weapon towards the direc­tion the FDC (fire direc­tion and con­trol) sec­tion relays to the gun sec­tion. Usually, with the DFCS in oper­a­tional, it is a sim­ple mat­ter of turn­ing the wheel until the gunner’s dis­play returns a solid cir­cle. With the DFCS out-of-commission, I actu­ally had to do some actual gun­ning by using the pan­tel (panoramic tele­scope). There was some knob-twisting, wheel-turning, and scope-peeking involved. It took me a while to under­stand how look­ing into a col­li­ma­tor that is a mere four feet away through the pan­tel some­how aims the weapon to be able to deliver an explo­sive pro­jec­tile to a tar­get up to fif­teen miles away. It even­tu­ally makes sense, though.