By Caleb Giddings
“Hey Master Sergeant, you got a minute?” I looked up from my desk as my 2IC stuck his head in the door. Blake McCoy is a self-described “Appalachian-American,” and from the grin on his face I could tell he was up to something.
“Sure, what’s up?”
Grinning ear to ear, he looks around and whispers, “do you want to go shoot some pigeons?” Now, you’ve got to understand that at the very moment he said this, I’m sitting in my office in what the Air Force in its press releases likes to refer to as “an undisclosed location in Southwest Asia,” but now that the deployment is over I can say was definitely Al Udeid in Qatar. Hunting in Qatar is basically illegal for foreigners (I looked), and even airguns are highly regulated. So to say I was curious was putting it mildly.
“What kind of redneck shit have you gotten into, Blake?” I was wracking my brain to try and figure out where or how he had figured out a way to shoot something in this lousy country, and I kept coming up with dead ends. It turns out that those dead ends were because while I was stuck in an office, Blake had been out making friends.
As an aside, whenever you’re reading Blake’s dialog it really helps if you’re reading it in the most hillbilly-ass accent you can imagine, but anyway.
So Blake says to me, “Well, Master Sergeant, you know all those pigeons all over the base? And you know those CE boys whose job it is to do pest control? Turns out they’re more than happy to loan us a few air rifles and let us shoot pigeons for them.”
The Hunt is Afoot
It’s really hard to not smile when you’re presented with an opportunity to run around with an air rifle on an Air Force base and commit pigeon mass murder. Of course I said I was in, and a few days later I found myself on the roof of our barracks, leaning out over a four-story drop with no railing because there were three pigeons in a drain. The only way to get them was to lean out over the edge of the roof with my foot hooked under an AC unit to keep from falling, but goddammit our business was killing pigeons, and brother, business was good.
Hanging backwards off the roof I of course missed my shot on the birds, but on the bright side I didn’t fall off the roof. I got back to the center of the roof in time to see Blake slowly switch his air rifle to his support side, turn, and blast a pigeon into pigeon hell in what felt like slow motion. That remains one of the finest pieces of marksmanship I’ve ever seen.
Our day was winding down, and we had a bag full of rotting pigeons. Thanks to the spring heat, a balmy 95 F, the smell is difficult to describe, but regardless we were feeling good. Sitting under a shaded smoke pit, I looked up at the roof of the building next to us and saw a local grey dove. The pest control guys were back with us, having left us to our shenanigans, and I asked “can we shoot doves too?” They said “we shoot ‘em all.”
I dropped the scope on the dove, about 20 yards away, let out a small breath, and pressed the air rifle’s trigger. I saw a puff of feathers and heard the “whump” of a body hitting the ground. All told that day we bagged over 40 pigeons, helping eliminate disease carrying animals that present a real danger to the airmen stationed there.
To this day, Blake McCoy is one of the finest NCOs I’ve ever served with, and his penchant for shenanigans remains unmatched.
