By CJ Schweigert
Our buddy “T” was out on an early season mule deer scout and happened upon Dell, a 5th generation cattle rancher who was standing alongside the rural Oregon road adjacent to his property looking at a flat on his farm truck. Of course, T offered to help with the inconvenience and the two became friends. As a sign of appreciation, Dell invited our whole group to help cull rabbits on his cattle ranch in southeastern Oregon during the blistering summers when the rabbits had procreated to numbers only rabbits could.
The invitation for our group (SWAT cops and former action guys) to shoot rabbits, sounded fun enough to get our attention but we were a bit naïve to the difference between cute cottontails and mangy jackrabbits in the desert. We’d learn that Eastern Oregon jacks were often infected with diseases, some displaying visible cyst-like growths and even having worms growing on their exterior. In a year, nine jackrabbits consume the water needed for a beef cow, and eat a similarly frightening amount of grass away from the cattle. We were happy to burn some vacation days helping a rancher by whacking a few rabbits.
Camp was established in a rock pit centrally located on Dell’s property where we pitched an old canvas Army tent for cover and shade from the 100-degree days. One of the Team guys asked how much property Dell owned and T responded: “He owns most of page 86 … in the state atlas. His family homesteaded here when they came over on the Oregon Trail, and have been ranching this ever since.”
Wanting to be prepared, most of us brought our standard work kits to include rifles, shotguns, and pistols. We valued shooting in gear so plate carriers, helmets with ear-pro, comms, DBAL laser designators, and PVS-31’s were all included—we actually viewed this outing as a legit training opportunity.
Hunting would be done at night when rabbits were active, so daytime would be spent doing short walkabouts with suppressed .22s or 9mm carbines and evading direct sunlight by hiding under quick shades. Snipers planned to use a 1400 yard basin for running long gun evolutions on steel with .308s and .338s. By 10 a.m., wind and mirage here were fucking terrible, but this would be the place to figure it out. The plan felt solid … until we punched in and realized the nighttime hunting was unlike anything we expected.
Our first night in the hay pivots found us quickly surrounded and running guns dry. Between reloading shotguns, dipping ZYN, and giggling hysterically, any onlooker would’ve sworn they were watching Tom Cruise in the window scene of Taps with the M-60—“It’s a beautiful man! It’s beautiful!” A quick trip to town the following morning produced hand-held tally clickers to accurately report our good deeds. By the end of the fourth night aggregate body count was 3247 dead rabbits confirmed. The rancher, Dell, stopped by rock pit camp and thanked us for our contribution. He also asked that we not run shotguns in the pivots anymore since his combine had become clogged with spent shotgun hulls after night three. For those not familiar enough with modern farm machinery to know how many shotgun hulls it takes to clog up a combine—it’s a metric shit-ton.
The “Hate Trucks,” as they were named by one of the party who had recently returned from an Africa deployment with 19th Special Forces Group, generally held three shooters in the open back, a front gunner in the passenger seat, and driver who was equipped to fire from his own window in the event they found themselves being overrun. All rigs were unique and owner-built to accommodate this specific trip, mostly modeled after a Toyota or Nissan midsize truck or side-by-side UTV, with a fabricated roll-tube cage encircling the open bed and high output lights illuminating all sectors. Some had fold-down or removable windshields for better forward blasting. Shooters stood in the back, leaning on the roll-bar cage for support, and called out contact direction when rabbits were spotted. Drivers would slow or stop on contact and sometimes shooters would dismount after communicating their intent to dispatch any wounded bunnies or those playing possum. One such stop entailed a sniper from the group chasing down a wounded foe and finishing it with a samurai sword; it seemed the honorable thing to do.
On more than one occasion, wake-ups in rock pit camp proved to be a bit more rugged than those at home. I’d been content to blame it on the abnormally dry heat while avoiding eye contact with the empty Elijah Craig bottles in the firepit, but our team medics knew exactly what kind of poor decision makers we were and took care of us, as always. At 6:15 a.m. on day 3, sprawled uncomfortably in somebody else’s camp chair, I heard Doc K standing alongside me say, “Quit making promises to God that you won’t keep, and just give me your damn arm.” I gave him my damn arm. Apparently, IVs with extra B-12 do well to mitigate a hangover. God bless medics.
The Rabbit Trip repeated each year, and grew to legendary status. Operators from other teams, feds, and assorted military friends all came along at one point or another. It became a part of many guys’ August itinerary, both for recreation and training value. One year, T trucked in a 40 foot long, single-piece flag pole for the Stars and Stripes to permanently oversee the camp at rock pit. The lieutenant who’d come up in the team from sniper to team leader to team commander, was skilled enough navigating agency bureaucracy that he got the entire trip sanctioned as an official training venture; ammunition was provided and all the boys got training credit for doing bad things to bad bunnies. And although a deficit of DEI curriculum might have caused concern for some in the glass house, nobody could deny that engaging fast-moving targets the size of a shoe, either from a vehicle or dismounted, on NVG’s and often while others fired on a different sector, was unequivocally some of the most valuable real training available. Case in point: During a subsequent live operation in the northern Oregon forest, a search element of our team came under ambush from a fugitive in an elevated position, and while two members of the team were hit—one severely in his throat by a shotgun round—the element leader, T, was able to put two hits on the running suspect who was maneuvering to their flank. That snap-shot accuracy was partly attributed to experience gained shooting rabbits the years prior.
Steve is a regular at Rabbit Camp and one of the team’s primary assaulters. Unfortunately, he resembles the offspring of an angry night between Chelsea Clinton and any member of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Leaving Missouri for the military right after high school and becoming a cop in Oregon after that, Steve spent time in narcotics, SWAT, and the U.S. Marshall’s Fugitive Task Force. Always quick to volunteer for an op, solidly committed to the mission and the guy next to him; Steve is never sick at sea. Everybody loves Steve. So it’s not surprising that he gets away with the most asinine bullshittery you could ever imagine anybody getting away with.
One morning in rock pit camp, while some were sleeping late and others were heading up to the commode over the dirt berm for their morning glory, Steve broke out a new Chinese single burner stove and placed a full pot of coffee water on it. At $20 retail, these single burner death traps were absolutely guaranteed to shit the bed when lit—of course Steve had one.
Unfortunately nobody in rock pit camp recognized the need for intervention before foggy-eyed Steve lit the stove and turned around to brush his teeth. A few seconds later, from inside a mummy bag 20 feet away, one of the guys calmly said, “Hey Stevie…. your shit’s on fire.” Steve turned back to look at the magic show he’d created and immediately started dancing around like the chubby chess club president at his first high school homecoming. The new Chinese Bunsen Burner was fully engulfed and starting to melt the rotomolded cooler underneath it. Before anybody could get close enough to do something prudent, Steve kicked the fireball off the cooler… directly underneath my UTV. Marvelous. As several of us transitioned from observer to subconscious reactor and closed on the problem, a loaded Mossberg 930 miraculously found its way into Steve’s hands and he used it to shoot the flaming stove from under my rig out onto open ground in the rock pit. A second later, while we were trying to figure out if that had really just happened, Steve effectively extinguished the flames with remnants of a warm Miller Lite he’d apparently been cupping the entire time. Problem solved. Steve got away with another one.
That night, as punishment for almost torching my rig and initiating what we were confident would have been an impressive Eastern Oregon wildfire, Steve had to ride forward gun on the top of the last rig out of camp on the dustiest night of hunting. Stevie returned with moon dust in every orifice and a week’s worth of gear and gun cleaning ahead of him. The following morning in camp, which consequently was our last that year, it was 92 degrees by 8 a.m., four days without a shower or flushing toilet and Steve coolly inquired, “Who’s in for next year? I’ll grab another stove for coffee.”
