Photo By Gunnery Sgt. Marcin Platek | Sergeant Tanner Grace, a native of Troy, Pennsylvania, and an armorer for the Marine...... read more read more
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PUCKAPUNYAL MILITARY AREA, VICTORIA, Australia — The typical duty day of an armorer can vary greatly from day to day. From reporting to work in middle of the night before the rifle range shooters show up at dawn to draw their weapons, to working until dusk to account for all the weapons on hand. On any given day, armorers put in long hours of sweat and stress.
Other aspects of their specialty do not change much however.
M16’s, M4’s, M9’s, M249’s, M27’s, M240B’s, M2’s, M19’s, M1014s, M110’s, M40’s, and 1911’s. It might seem like a lethally extensive list of weapons systems, but that is about it where armorers can get to rule their realm of expertise.
However one armorer, Sgt. Tanner Grace, a native of Troy, Pennsylvania, received a chance to expand his list of weapons he works on by supporting the Marine Corps Shooting Team and other international teams during the Australian Army Skill at Arms Meeting 2015, May 6-22, at the Puckapunyal Military Area, Victoria, Australia.
The opportunity came as a surprise to Grace, who said he was the only armorer in his shop when his leadership was looking for Marines to go support the MCST in Australia. Regularly, Grace falls under the Precision Weapons Section, Weapons Training Battalion, at the Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia.
An avid gun enthusiast who built his own rifles before enlisting, Grace joined the Marine Corps as a small arms repairer and technician. Recently, he has earned the additional military occupational specialty a precision weapon repairer and technician, by attending the Precision Weapons Repair Course. He became one of 54 Marines with that secondary MOS in the Marine Corps. This enabled him to work at the PWS and gain extensive weapons knowledge by experiencing working on weapon systems regularly out of his area of responsibility. His newly acquired skills came to a test during AASAM.
“I’ve talked to the guy who came down last year,” said Grace. “He covered that you could be helping Australians out and fixing their weapon systems, like you would be there just for availability. If something goes down, it doesn’t matter what country it is, they might come to you to repair it.”
Being available when needed was not something that Grace was aspiring for, because he knew he wanted to do more than that. Upon the team’s arrival at Puckapunyal, he sought out the armory like a dog on a scent trail. There he met the only official armorer of the shooting competition, Australian Army Pvt. Gareth Mulraney. For Mulraney, Grace could not come by at a better time.
“As I started one job and I kept getting calls for other jobs,” said Mulraney, an Australian reservist who also works as an armorer for a police department in his off-duty time. “There were periods of time where I did not stop for eight hours to do anything else. So I needed two more of me and then I would’ve been good. That’s when Sgt. Grace came with me and helped me work with any work I couldn’t handle.”
Mulraney formally introduced Grace to the Australian Steyer AUG service rifle, and showed him everything about it from top to bottom and how to properly service it. Grace said he bounced off of what he already knew from about it from his extensive weapon systems knowledge and incorporated it with the hip-pocket classes he received from Mulraney. He accustomed himself pretty well with it, as well as some other rifles he could be working on.
“If he was working on something already, I take a hold of it, or if he wasn’t around I would fix it really quick and get it over with,” said Grace. “Most of the stuff that we saw were little stoppages or springs broken or whatnot.”
But behind every weapon, there was a shooter. The augmentation not only allowed him to have face time with some new weapon system, but also allowed him to open up new doors and get to know the international shooters, to include Australian, Canadian and French competitors.
“It was good to see all the different countries, and it was cool to see their reactions and compare their rifles to ours,” said Grace. “I learned a lot about different weapons systems that different countries use and it’s always good to know to see what our allies around us are using.”
As importantly, the competition presented possibilities for ally communication and networking, which allowed free sharing of concepts and foster interoperability that is ever so often seen in today’s conflicts and collaborations.
“We did a lot of swapping of ideas back and forth,” said Grace. “Procedures and maintenance for machine guns and small arms, and how to report those up through service requests, and different types of worksheets that you would use to report the maintenance and everything you have done to a weapon. It was a good experience.”
Grace plans to incorporate some of the things he saw and learned at AASAM and try them out at PWS and other armories to streamline certain processes and improve productivity.
“For example, some of their procedures that show that the weapon is functional are just a tag that they actually put on a weapon, and it’s a great idea because it costs pennies on a dollar,” said Grace. “I would like to see it start getting implemented in the Marine Corps. It’s a quick and easier way.”
According to Mulraney, this was a testament about what kind of a person and a Marine he was able to collaborate with throughout AASAM.
“He’s a very professional Marine,” said Mulraney. “He wants to make the Marine Corps better in various ways where he sees there are problems. He wants to make the Marine Corps better for the next generation and be a good role model for the junior Marines. I couldn’t ask for someone better here.”
Grace and Mulraney worked together for three-weeks, side-by-side, day-by-day, and weapon-by-weapon. They tagged along together from match to match or split-up between three to four different matches on six different ranges. Grace did not only help repair weapons during the competition, he also helped out the Mulraney, who was responsible for officiating the competition, and checking if the equipment shot fell under the regulations of the competition. They conducted random trigger pulls on all competitors to make sure everyone was compliant with minimal weight required to pull the trigger. Rifles with lighter trigger pulls than that in the rule book would allow shooters to squeeze the trigger easier, allowing them to keep the sight picture alignment with less disturbance from the pressure of the finger and hand on the rifle.
If they couldn’t accomplish a task, they brought their heads together and showed each other how to do various things their own particular way and talked the problems through to finish the task at hand.
“Some weapons we both haven’t ever worked on so we worked off each other and shared knowledge to figure out what was wrong,” said Mulraney. “He’s very knowledgeable and skilled armorer. There’s various things that can go wrong with a weapon, and you have to use your gut feeling with what you think might be wrong. He had the feeling to figure out what was wrong.”
Even though the jobs got hectic at times or calls repair requests came in more frequently, Mulraney said Grace brought something that made the days easier – humor.
Besides English, these two armorers from opposite side of the world shared another language, the language of laughter, which helped them tackle any task they faced together and learn valuable lessons from each other.
| Date Taken: | 07.08.2015 |
| Date Posted: | 07.08.2015 13:01 |
| Story ID: | 169400 |
| Location: | PUCKAPUNYAL, VICTORIA, AU |
| Hometown: | TROY, PENNSYLVANIA, US |
| Web Views: | 382 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
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