Army champ’s third crown

All hail the king: Army’s Champion Shot Sgt Andrew Munn is carried by his peers. Photo by Bill Cunneen

By Cpl Damian Shovell

SGT Andrew Munn has defeated the Army’s top 100 marksmen to be crowned Army’s Champion Shot for the third time.

In the competition that precursors the Australian Army Skill at Arms Meeting (AASAM), the instructor from LWC-SQ defeated Army’s top 100 shooters who each fired a standard F88 Steyr in serials between 50 and 300m.

Surprisingly, the expert marksman said that when he enlisted in 1989, he was in fact an average shot and it wasn’t until later in his career that through tuition he realised his talent.

“I did a course in 1993 called AIMS – Australian International Marksmanship Squad – in Balmain, which taught me how to shoot,” he said.

“It was ran by Phil Oakford who’s won the Queens Medal and Champion Shot seven times.”

From there he said his results improved dramatically, since winning Army’s Champion Shot in 2000 and 2002, and again this year with a score of 649, which put him just seven points ahead of second place winner Capt Joe Kelly.

Capt Robert Brown, the assistant competition director for AASAM, held high praise for Sgt Munn’s achievement.

“It’s basically the highest level of shooting that you can attain, considering that we only select the top 100 shooters, and out of those we whittle that down to only one person,” he said.

He said the top 100 marksmen were restricted to those who could score 210 or better in LF18 (the marksmanship shoot), and through a series of shoots, the top 20 were left to compete for the Champion Shot.

Day one of competition was the Champion Shot Powder Horn trophy, which was shot from different ranges, at different targets, using different firing positions.

On day two, firers conducted the Champion Shot Rothmans practice, which was again a series of shoots that tested their marksmanship capabilities at varying ranges and in different firing positions, with snap, deliberate and rapid serials.
And on day three, the top 20 firers fired for the Champion Shot Weatherby Trophy, which dictated who the Champion Shot was.

The Champion Shot is decided on the aggregate score from the Powder Horn, Rothmans, and Weatherby.

Additionally, visiting international shooters who were readying for the upcoming AASAM, competed for the Champion Shot – International. This was won by British Army Combat Shooting Team member LCpl James Slater.

Fired in a parallel competition, it contained the exact same practices as the Army competition, and allowed the 13 international teams from 11 nations an opportunity to get a taste for competition ahead of AASAM.

Teams competing in AASAM 2006 have come from the US Army and Marine Corps, French New Caledonia, New Zealand, British Army Combat Shooting Team and Royal Navy Royal Marines, Timor-Leste, PNG, Indonesia, Fiji, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines.