The Rifle, the Lesson, the Legacy

Age and experience matter. The years may pile up, but skill, once learned, never really leaves you. I’m not as quick as I once was, but I’ve still got enough in me to be as good once as I ever was.

My son-in-law had been talking about buying a rifle. One weekend, as we worked side by side laying hardwood floors in my house, the subject came up again. He’s the kind of man who never hesitates to show up when he’s needed, and I’ve always respected him for that.

On Sunday afternoon, when we finally sat down to take a break, I slipped away for a few minutes. When I came back, I was carrying a hard case. Inside was my Winchester .30-06 with a Leupold scope, the rifle I’d kept in perfect condition all

these years. He opened the case, and his eyes widened. I could see the admiration in his face as he ran his hand along the stock.

Then I said, “It’s yours now.”

At first he thought I was joking. But when he realized I wasn’t, he was speechless. The truth was, it gave me just as much joy to hand it over as it gave him to receive it.

The following Sunday, we went to the range. Before we started, I reminded him to always call it a rifle, not a gun. Marines know the answer to that test, and I wasn’t about to let him slip.

It had been years since I’d fired that Winchester, not since moving to Pennsylvania. My son-in-law, on the other hand, had never fired a rifle before. I enjoyed walking him through the basics—safety first, then stance, breathing, and the slow squeeze of the trigger.

We waited patiently for our turn while two self-proclaimed “experts” shot at the line ahead of us. They strutted, bragged, and even gave us a little grief for taking too long. My son-in-law just smiled and said, “I think he knows what he’s doing—he’s a Marine.”

When it was finally my turn, I settled in, breathed deep, and fired three rounds. The sound cracked across the range, sharp and clean. We walked the hundred yards to check the targets. My three shots were buried in the bullseye, tight in a perfect triangle, one nearly stacked on top of the other.

The “experts”? Their shots were scattered high and right, several clicks off.

One of them looked at me and asked, “Hey, Marine—what do you think?”

Without missing a beat, I said, “Drop it six clicks and come four to the left.”

They blinked. “How do you know?”

“Just trust me,” I said with a grin.

That was ten years ago. My son-in-law and I went to the range many times after that day. And just last Sunday, I found myself in the same place once again—this time with my grandson, who had just turned ten. He sat beside me as we sighted in his brand-new Savage .243, the excitement practically glowing in his eyes.

It struck me then how much of what the Corps taught me has stayed with me all these years. In the Marines, we trained with open sights—the same way my father first taught me to shoot.

The Corps drilled into me the fundamentals: rest the weapon, control your breathing, squeeze, don’t jerk the trigger. Those lessons never left me. Later, it was my dad who showed me how to master a scope.

And now, here I was, passing those lessons down once more. First to my son-in-law. Now to my grandson.

The moral is simple: anything you truly learn is never lost. I had no idea, all those years ago, that what I learned in the Corps would one day find its way into the hands of my son-in-law, and then into the hands of his son. A rifle may pass from one generation to the next—but the knowledge, the discipline, and the pride are the real inheritance.