M-16 qualification

We spent this week shooting and qualifying with the M-16. The M-16 is fairly easy to handle, although this statement is based on my very limited knowledge and experience with firearms. It's made even easier by our "Close Combat Optic" attached to the gun (I'm going to use gun in this post because that's what most people call it; in the Army, though, if you say "gun", everybody will yell at you because you're supposed to call it a "weapon." Apparently "gun" means an artillery piece). The CCO has a red dot that you use for your sight. It doesn't shoot a laser onto the person like in the movies, but just shows a red dot for you to see. Apparently, if your target is within 150 meters and you put the red dot on the target, you will hit the target. Of course, if you line up the red dot in the middle of your optic, you'll actually hit where you're aiming.
For qualification, they have pop-up targets every 50 meters (yes, meters) starting at 50 and going all the way to 300. The targets pop-up for a certain number of seconds depending on their distance and fall down when you hit them. Sometimes two targets will pop up at the same time. Also, the targets are different depending on where they are. The close targets -- up to 100 meters -- are silhouettes of a head and shoulders and they barely pop up from behind the berms. The farther targets are green silhouettes of a person down to about the knees. To qualify, you have to hit at least 23 of 40 targets with only one shot for each target. In addition, you have to do so from different firing positions. The first 20 shots are from the "prone supported position", which means you lie down on your stomach and put the gun on some sandbags. The next 10 are from the "prone unsupported position", which means you take the gun off the sandbags and just hold it. The final 10 are from the "kneeling unsupported position", which means you balance on one knee and hold the gun without resting it on anything. The kneeling position is the hardest because it's really, really hard to keep the gun still. Your arms are moving all over the place and you basically just have to fire when you think your red dot is about to cross the target.
We did qualifications yesterday and I actually qualified on my first try. In typical Army fashion, however, it didn't go as planned. I was lying on my stomach wrapped in an extremely uncomfortable cocoon of body armor and "flick" vest (the flick vest is a vest that goes over our body armor and has a bunch of pouches for canteens, magazines, etc.) shooting at my targets when, after 10 targets, they stopped coming up. We were all waiting anxiously, looking around, trying to figure out if there was some hidden target we were missing when the control tower announced there was a glitch and we'd be started again in a few seconds. After we shot our 40, we went to the control tower to get our scores. There, we were told that the sensor didn't register our first 10 rounds , that that's sometimes how technology is. Basically, too bad. But not too bad for me! I had still gotten my 23, so I was done for the day. That was sweet. The only downside is it means I probably would've hit at least 30 out of 40, which would've made me a "marksmen" or something like that, but it wasn't worth keeping all that gear on to try again. (It wasn't until later that I realized it wasn't that the sensor didn't pick up our rounds. It was that the control tower messed up and put in the wrong program. That's why the targets stopped after 10.) People who had gotten close to 23 were pretty mad since it meant they had to go again even though they probably actually qualified.
The downside is that we spent the whole day today cleaning our guns. Can't they just let something fun be fun?