Long before Marine Staff Sgt. Payton Garcia matched a 66-year-old Marine Corps marksmanship record last month, he was pretty sure he was a good shot.
“I did my first [Marine Corps marksmanship] match in 2021, and I did relatively well. I got a silver pistol badge on my first time,” Garcia told Task & Purpose. “Then I went to a match on the civilian side, thinking that I was, like, ‘The Shooter.’ The best ever.”
He was not.
“I got beat by a 68-year-old man and a 12-year-old little boy,” Garcia remembers. “And that’s when it lit a fire, like, realizing that there’s so much more to marksmanship. I was a Marine who thought that he was a really good marksman, and then getting humbled up in town made me realize how much we don’t know about marksmanship.”
Now a member of the Marine Corps Shooting Team, Garcia may still not be “the best ever,” but his performance in April at the Marine Corps Championships — the top annual marksmanship competition for Marines across the service — was so dominant officials had trouble finding a historic equivalent.
Shooting against 80 Marines and competitors from other services and nations, Garcia won both the rifle and pistol categories, a sweep that no shooter had pulled off since 1959. He also won the competition’s multi-gun contest, an event added in recent years.
“We were curious about that during the actual conduct of the match, and we dug through all of our history books and records,” said Capt. John Bodzoich, the shooting team commander. “And what we found is, in the 124 years the team’s been around, and since the establishment of all these matches, Sgt. Garcia is the second Marine in history to do a clean sweep of the championships. So of the thousands of Marines that have come through, he’s the second one ever to win both high rifle, high pistol, and high overall [score].”
Garcia’s path to the top marksmanship awards in the Marine Corps, he said, traces directly back to getting smoked by a senior citizen and a grade schooler.
“One of the biggest things that went into my improvement was actually learning how to train,” Garcia said. “Actually sitting down and deep-diving into the fundamentals of shooting.”
Shooting against civilians and absorbing non-military training techniques, he said, was different than traditional Marine marksmanship training.
“Just like any other sport, there are build-ups to each one of those fundamentals that you need to do,” he said. “Structuralizing training and isolating skills that I’ve learned from those local matches, and realizing that it’s not all just about shooting. There’s a lot of mental aspects that go into shooting, where you’re competing at any level, realizing that you need to be in the right headspace.”
Trained as a fuel specialist rather than in combat arms like infantry, Garcia says he’s often asked if competition-style shooting is applicable in the field.
“You ask me what my MOS is, and I answer, I’m a bulk fuel specialist,” he said. “I don’t know much about tactics, but I do know that putting rounds as accurately as possible on a target as quickly as possible will translate to the tactical world. ”
The Marine Corps Shooting Team was established in 1899 to bring together top shots who would compete with elite shooters of all kinds, then share what they learned with Marines in the fleet. Based at Quantico, Virginia, the full-time team members spend about half their time training for and sponsoring competitions, and the other half training and working with marksmanship instructors and experts inside the Marines.
And Garcia says his success is a perfect example that marksmanship is a skill that can be taught to almost anyone. Growing up in Lawrence, Kansas, he said, he had virtually no exposure to firearms beyond a few unsupervised moments that would probably terrify a Marine instructor.
“Before I joined the Marines, I had just shot a pistol or a rifle into a dirt berm or the trash with no target,” he remembers. “It was more for fun.”
The annual Marine Corps Championships, held in Quantico, is a culminating event among shooters who advance through qualification competitions at major bases like Camp Pendleton in California and Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
Across 30 events, shooters face scenarios that the shooting team has dreamed up based on their experience in civilian practical shooting competitions. This year’s stations included shooting lanes from boats, from a balance beam, and even with a mandatory bench press set before shooting.
In one event, Garcia said, they created a shooting lane in which Marines had to shoot around a barricade while balancing on one leg with a 45-pound ruck on. In another, shooters arrived on a station that appeared to be a trash pit, with tires, ammo cans, pallets, wheels and other debris. From that, they had to build a barrier up to a preset level to shoot from.
They also shot a wide range of weapons. “We were able to shoot the M1 Garand, the M1014,” Garcia said in a Marine Corps press release. “We shot M16A2s, a lot of iron sights, and it was such a breath of fresh air.”
The competition covered eight days.
“I went into this year with the expectation that I just wanted to make it difficult for someone else to win,” Garcia said. “I’m going to shoot my match and support anybody that I can.”
As the top shooter, Garcia was awarded a historic trophy: his own M-1 Garand rifle, the same kind used by Marines in World War II.
He didn’t keep it and instead gave the rifle to Sgt. Kai Byrom, the highest-scoring first-year competitor, a mortarman and marksmanship coach with Weapons and Field Training Battalion, Parris Island.
“I thought it was more important to isolate and kind of award the next generation of Marines,” Garcia said. “So I thought it was important to spread marksmanship knowledge and to light a fire under some of the newer guys by awarding or deferring the M1 to that Marine. It’s more important for the next generation, and not about us.”
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