Perry Is Special

What makes Camp Perry special is the intense focus on one thing: accurate shooting.

Mud, rain, strong winds, standing water, blinding heat, choking humidity, billions of mayflies don’t matter.

Shoot your target and get your score.

Age, skill, sex, weight, race don’t matter.

You shoot the same target as everyone else and follow the same rules and then you get your score, from 0-0X to 100-10X.

More is better.

Nothing else matters.

Accommodations are spartan in the huts left over from World War II when they housed Italian prisoners of war. The roof may have an alarming sag. It may leak in the lightest rain. Flooding may gurgle up through the floor and into the room where it will wick up into bedsheets left hanging an inch off the floor. The door probably won’t close all the way.

The available food will keep you alive – for a while. The catered “Shooters Mess” will get you through the day without making you sick. (Usually.) Hot dogs, chips and similar junk food snacks at the Base eXchange (BX) fill-in when a snack is needed. But the food vendors at the far end of Commercial Row will eradicate any vestige of healthy eating you might have found elsewhere.

The schedule is imperious – “07/12/13: rng 1, fp 171, rly 3” (range 1, firing point 171, relay 3 listed elsewhere as 1:00PM) – until they change it.

“Shooters, box your guns and pack your equipment. Range #1 is closing. Move to Range #2. Go now!”

Ready again on the next range after dragging your heavily laden, hastily packed geezer cart through 200 yards of mud, you shoot your next target and get your score.

75-1X? 88-2X? 98-7X?

It is what it is.

Perry is all about the holes you put in the target that day, at that time, on that firing point and nothing else.

Move on.

What you shoot is what you get.

Focus, focus, focus.