hombre, it is an easy thing to forget! I think we have all probably moved a front sight or rear sight the wrong way over the years. I know I have! The only thing worse would be if you had corrected an Army Veteran (that would be me!). Lastly, but certainly not least, thank you for your service!
I know what you mean about the rear sight thing. I always got that...lucky I guess. I picture in my mind me sighting down the pipe, and ...what do I do with the front sight if the rear sight goes down? I bring down the front sight...What do I do if the rear sight goes up? bring the front sight up into alignment. It is a mental picture I have plastered inside my eyelids.
The scope is a different story. I was never sure whether the arrow on the adjustment turret was saying that the bullet will go this way or that...right or left or that the crosshair would just move in that direction. Of course after watching the cross hair move to the right or left...that didn't answer my question either. It just confused me more so....If the group s to the right you do not move the cross hairs left, you move them right.
I managed to amuse myself as well as confuse myself trying to figure all that out. Then someone told me about shooting a small group, and then anchoring the rifle down right on the exact aim point...and then twisting the adjustment so the cross hair centers on the group. What didn't make sense was...why move the cross hair right if I was shooting right?
The cross hair must be thought of as a front sight. Simple. Move the
cross hair opposite the direction you want to
move the bullet. Of course the easy way for me now is to remember that the little arrows on the dial indicate the corrected bullet direction, not the direction the cross hair will move. THAT took me a long time to figure out.
Some things come easy...some things not. Just like the 11 year old straightening out the 16 year old. Sometimes a concept is natural to one person and not others.
Here is something else that was hard for me to grasp, and it took my Jarhead buddy to get the kink out of my think. Trajectory. I was always picturing in my head what trajectory is. It is an arc.
The concept that was hard for me to grasp was that that arc that the bullet flew in towards the target is only possible if the barrel is tilted up a proper amount to create the arc(h). My brain was seeing a bullet leaving the muzzle in a tall arching trajectory when the barrel was parallel to the ground...which it does not do.
As my friend pointed out, if you drop a bullet of the same weight, (from your hand), from the same height as the bore, at the same time you fired the gun parallel to the ground, both bullets would hit the ground at the same time, though several hundred or thousand feet apart.
After I realized that he was correct, a lot of sighting in problems began to correct themselves because now I have a better mental picture of a bullet in flight.
And I learned, or relearned this after being a shooter for over 40 years. It seems that when one has done something so many times that it becomes natural, the think part hides itself and we have to un-bury it somehow so we (I) can make sense of a concept that was once so simple.
Well, I am glad I got that out of my system. I think I will print this out so I don't forget it again.