An Irony during the Cold War

Keep in mind that Gary had to teach himself how to shoot and he recognized that he had to learn a lot more about shooting techniques to reach his goals.  This kind of technical information simply was not available in the United States at that time.   The timeline was during the height of the Cold War when the best shooters in the world were from the USSR.  They were also the ones who had the most advanced coaching information.   The only publication he found to be useful in the beginning was the article in the American Rifleman by Anatoli Bogdanov, the great champion from the USSR (see "An Article from the Archives").

Once Gary was on the International Rifle Team at the Army Marksmanship Unit in Ft. Benning, he was eager to learn from his new teammates, but mostly he was blown off.     The culture then was not to share what you knew with other shooters because they might use it to beat you.  However, he remembers three great teammates who were willing to share what they knew in spite of the culture:  Bill Krilling, Martin Gunnarsson, and pistol shooter Bill Blankenship.


When Gary was an alternate on the Olympic Team, Rome, 1960, he used much of his time to photograph Russian shooters and talk to them.    He found them helpful and willing to answer his questions.  He found that cold war enmity did not carry over into sports.

A great breakthrough in his quest for advanced marksmanship knowledge occurred when Army leaders brought back a copy of a Soviet shooting text that Army Intelligence translated for AMU.  Each member of Army International Rifle and Pistol Teams were given an English translation of a 300-page book on advanced technique titled "Sportivnaya Strel'ba Iz Vintovki" by A. A. Jur'yev, with the English title "Competitive Marksmanship with Rifle and Carbine".   Gary studied the book meticulously and underlined in pencil much of the Russian advice.    Later he loaned his copy to another shooter and it was never returned, but we recently acquired another English copy from AMU's Bob Alyward.


It is ironic that during the height of the cold war, Gary found the shooters and coaches of the USSR to be his best and most open sources of information.  He readily attributes much of the shooting knowledge that aided his rise to the top to what he learned from the Russians.  


Interestingly, a copy of "Sportivnaya Strel'ba Iz Vintovki" by Yur'yev (in Russian, first edition, published in 1957) was given to Gary many years later by Yur'yev's daughter, a KGB agent who defected to the US.     She heard Gary was editing the third edition of a translation of the book, and presented him with an original 1957 edition, autographed by her father.    How all of that came together will be in a forthcoming blog.

Dry Firing Through the Kitchen

The Anderson farmhouse around the time the Anderson children, Gary and Karen, were born.

Gary's childhood was spent in a typical Nebraska farmland house, standing on 160 acres of family land.   Two of the three bedrooms upstairs had no heat;  on a cold, wintry night frost would accumulate on the inside of the single-pane windows.    Gary and his sister Karen had the unheated bedrooms upstairs.  The heat for the lower floors came from the furnace in the crawl space through a large grate on the floor, measuring about 3' by 3'.   It was half in the kitchen and half in the living room.  Electricity was added by the Rural Electrification Act in 1948 when Gary was 9 years old and indoor plumbing was added when Gary was 15 years old.  During the hot summer months, Gary would sleep outdoors every night.

There was a large "mudroom/laundryroom" where Gary and his dad would reload.   This was a relatively warm room because of a space heater on the north wall.   Gary's sister remembers taking a bath in a round galvanized bathtub in this room before the house had electricity to heat water.  On the east wall there was a white metal medicine cabinet that became a storage place for Gary's meager ammunition supply.     On adhesive tape, he wrote "Warning AMMO" and stuck it on the medicine cabinet.     It stayed there for 40 years.

Gary spent hours dry firing by standing, kneeling, or lying in a corner of the living room and dry firing diagonally through the kitchen into the back room.      His sister, Karen, remembers this as a "pain the the neck" sometimes.     Every apartment we have rented or house we have purchased must have the required 10 meters (even if at a diagonal) for dry firing.    When Gary was in seminary, the couple living next to us (Dick and Evelyn Headen) knew us a long time before they realized Gary was dry firing just behind our common wall.

The farmhouse laundry room will become a significant story for my blog the day Gary won his second Gold Medal.     

An Article from the Archives

When Gary talks about getting his start in shooting, he always mentions an article in the American Rifleman by Anatoli Bogdanov of the USSR.  That was a time when USSR shooters were dominating international shooting competitions.  

We were able to find the article in an archive,  published in April 1955, entitled "The Training of the Target Shot."     The article was originally published in the Deutsche Schuetzenzeitung and translated by Col. E. H. Harrison USA (Ret'd) of the NRA staff.     The article was published about a year before Gary started any serious training, but when he did this became his primary inspiration and source of information about how much training was required to be a world class shooter.

In Gary's words:  The Bogdanov article is important because he became the only hero I have ever had.  He won two Olympic Gold medals and six World Championships in the 1950s.  He was the best rifle shooter in the world at that time and my goal was to better his record.  It is probably important to note that I began my serious training during my last year of high school and that Bogdanov was my inspiration and his record became my objective.  


I've never been back to Axtell HS to confirm this, but my memory is that towards the end of our senior year we (all 12 of us) were asked to list our ambitions, etc., for the school paper.  By then I had been training seriously for about a year.  I said my ambition was to become the "best rifle shooter in the world."  Clearly, no one took it seriously at the time, but....

It should also be noted that the Army Marksmanship Unit was formed in 1956.   Col. Tom Sharpe (reference "No Coach, No Team, No Money") and other officers provided the impetus to form the unit to bring America back to international shooting prominence, something that had not happened since the 1920s.