That is a deeply wonderful thing. I had a similar experience when as a 13-year-old I told my Dad I wanted to start shooting. He was immediately agreeable and right there a lifelong mutual passion for skill and performance was born between us.
He'd been a Royal Horse Guards officer in the Household Cavalry just after the war in Occupied Germany. Didn't see combat but had some interesting stories about meeting up with the advancing Russians on the bridges.
I remember watching him shoot. Only man I'd ever seen benchrest with a .375 H&H and consider it comfortable... and group at .10 MOA. Anything less than a one-hole group was considered a slightly embarrassing event - you put that target away and didn't talk about it. On reading his private memoirs it was clear that it ran in the family. He'd been captain of the rifle team at his English public school. His father had been captain before him. And so had been his grandfather, who was also a musketry instructor in the British Army and eventually commandant of the Machine Gun School.
Sometimes family knowledge trickles down nicely.
He put his shoulder to the flat steel buttplate and grasped the smooth grip with his right hand. The left thumb and forefinger pressed the sides of the buttstock, urging it to the exact spot. Collins placed the officer's throat equidistant between the man's heel and the center dot of the reticle. Then he moved the dot over two head-widths. Too far. Ease it back some. Fourteen inches? Collins willed his head closer to the eyepiece, straining for that last bit of definition with which to measure the fourteen inch space. He was glad that he never failed to fire a fouling shot with commercial, non-corrosive ammo after cleaning his rifle. The first shot from a clean, dry bore never went into the same place as subsequent ones. Let's stick this one in his ear.
Urged on by the gradually increasing pressure of his index finger, the sear released and the rifle bucked, taking him just a little by surprise. A good letoff he instantly realized as the steel eyepiece at the back of the scope met his forehead and left a crescent-shaped gash on top of a half-dozen tiny white scars of the same shape. Crowded it too close again he thought with the small part of his brain that wasn't filled with more important issues.
As the blast rang off the ceiling of the bell tower, Max Collins' flushed all the concerns of the last three hours from his mind, and replaced them with an entirely new set. He had fired the only shot he was going to get. He had to get down and away immediately. And for one absurd, sickening moment, he had the irrational fear that he had found the wrong town, and the rest of the 82nd Airborne was miles away, about to storm the real Ste. Mere Eglise. He dismissed this nightmarish thought and scrambled down the ladder.
The barometric pressure had been a bit higher than Max had estimated, and the range thirty yards farther. The bullet struck several inches lower than Collins' calculations had predicted. The general had been standing in profile at attention addressing his men, and the bullet struck him on the point of his shoulder. It deflected off the underlying bone and assumed a banana shape, as engineers a generation before had designed it to do. Yawing slightly, the slug ranged upwards, exited out the trapezius muscle, and immediately slammed sideways into the German's neck. The tumbling bullet severed the General's spine, leaving his head attached only by a few muscles in the left front of his neck, before burying itself in a door frame thirty meters beyond.
The quick commands stopped in mid-sentence with a noise that sounded like a leather bag bursting. Several enlisted men were sprayed with the dead officer's blood as he fell on his chest, struck down as if by a thunderbolt. His face bounced off the granite cobblestones with a sickening sound, breaking off both the front teeth. The force of the impact twisted the head around so that the corpse's face stared sightlessly to the side. One-and-a-quarter seconds later came the distant roar of the rifle.
By the time the German soldiers realized what had happened, Max Collins was at ground level, exiting the church. By the time the shocked Major realized that he was now the senior officer and began issuing commands, Max was halfway to the relative safety of the woods. There, he knew he stood a chance of holding his own by silently removing his pursuers one at a time. I can stay alive at least for a day or two, and by that time it will all be decided, one way or the other.
John Ross
As for the Guards, they do know how to shoot:
Confirmed by GPS, Craig Harrison (UK) of the UK’s Household Cavalry killed two Taliban insurgents from a distance of 2,474 m/2.47 km (8,120 ft, or 1.54 miles) in November 2009. It took the 8.59 mm rounds almost three seconds to hit their targets, which were 914 m (3,000 ft) beyond the L115A3 sniper rifle’s recommended range. A third shot took out the insurgent’s machine gun. The rifle used was by Accuracy International.
Longest Confirmed Sniper Kill
There are, statistically speaking, several tens of thousands of American males with similar innate and practiced skills.
Just sayin'. I'm no revolutionary. Just an