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This Olympian Is No. 1 With a Bullet

It is late morning on Handgun Range No. 2 at the Lorton Correctional Facility, and Sergeant Libby Callahan is at least a head shorter than the row of men standing in eye protectors and sound-diffusing headsets, clutching machine guns and waiting for her orders.

The men are wearing navy blue combat-style pants and navy blue T-shirts with the letters "E.R.T." -- for "Emergency Response Team" -- stenciled in white across their broad backs. In this particular drill, they are supposed to come through the narrow doorway to the range at a dead run, pull up quickly, and empty their clips into the black silhouettes that serve as targets about 25 yards away. It is nearly 100 degrees and heavily humid. They are slow.

"You run like old women!" Callahan hollers, and the guys grin sheepishly at the sound of the big voice from the small woman with the tightly bound blonde bun. There is the acrid smell of smoke in the air, an odor Callahan barely notices anymore. Empty bullet casings litter the cement floor.

With less than a month remaining until the 1996 Olympics open in Atlanta, Libby Callahan is doing what she does when she is not preparing for the Games: She is serving the D.C. police force as an expert on crowd control, riots, and, most particularly, guns. Under normal circumstances, Callahan almost certainly would be deployed to RFK Stadium next month to help organize security for the Olympic soccer matches to be played there. Instead, she will be headed to Atlanta, one of two women who will represent the United States in the sport pistol competition.

"The guys who come in here," Callahan says, nodding toward the men, who are taking a breather, "they hear about the fact that I compete and they hear things like `She's a pretty good shot,' and it adds to my credibility. They don't question me anymore."

They know better. A two-time Olympian -- Callahan also represented the United States in Barcelona, in air pistol competition -- and the winner of more police and international shooting competitions than can be tallied, Callahan's exploits are frequently chronicled in the in-house officers' newsletter. Mostly, though, the men know her from their trips to the firing range at Lorton, a place that can be considered Callahan's second home.

The training facility, located near the Lorton prison, is for officers already at work somewhere in the District, all of them members of the Civil Disturbance Unit. Every three to six months, they must report to Callahan and her colleagues for recertification in everything from pistols to sub-machine guns.

As members of the Emergency Response Team, the men here on this day are required to undergo the most frequent and comprehensive recertification programs: They must appear at Lorton at least every three months, but many come even more often than that. Callahan supervises, advises -- and sometimes teases -- them as they work their way through pistols, rifles, shotguns, sub-machine guns, you name it. When one officer's gun jams, she takes it from him, takes it apart, and has it back in working order in barely more than a blink.

"She does it all," said Frank Edwards, a colleague at the facility. "She cuts the grass, she unloads the ammo. She's the first one here and the last to leave. If you could see her hauling ammo on a hot day . . .

"Look at that," Edwards continues, nodding to Callahan as she bends over and jams the gun back together. "She even fixes the guns."

And, at the end of her work day -- which runs from 6 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. -- she practices. The range here is 25 yards, a little shy of the 25 meters that is standard for international competition, so she takes a step or so back before aiming for the target. Her vision is perfect, her arm steady, her concentration remarkable. That was what everyone noticed from the very beginning, back when she joined the police academy in 1975.

"I think the key ingredient to successful shooting is just the fierce determination that carries you through," said Connie Petracek, Callahan's U.S. teammate for the Olympics. "There's this determination to focus, to be precise in every movement."

On the surface, Petracek and Callahan are as different as can be imagined: Petracek is the wife of a surgeon and the mother of three. She got involved in the sport when her husband sat next to a physician for the U.S. national team on a flight to a medical conference and bragged about his wife's marksmanship. For Callahan, who is single, it was her buddies on the police force who introduced her to the sport in 1980.

"They saw that I could shoot and they encouraged me to start going to police revolver competitions," said Callahan, 44, who likes to joke about the fact that she and Petracek (who has become her close friend) are "the oldest women on the Olympic team."

Callahan joined the Army Reserve in 1985, and it was there that she learned about international, or Olympic-style, shooting, and she gradually began to enter more competitions. By 1988, she had made the U.S. shooting team. In 1992, she qualified for the Barcelona Olympics.

In Barcelona, Callahan competed in the air pistol division -- air pistols shoot pellets, rather than the bullets, and the range is 10 meters, rather than sport pistol's 25. She finished a disappointing 37th.

"I was trying too hard in Barcelona," Callahan said. "I have to reach a happy medium in competition. The experience, especially, will help me."

She is nervous about Atlanta -- nervous and excited, at the same time. She has taken her "vacation," so to speak, from the force for the competition, and traveled to Atlanta last week to get acclimated to the Olympic shooting range. One of her sisters lives there, not too far from where she will be competing, but that doesn't mean she'll be moving out of the Olympic village and into more comfortable quarters. "Her house is booked, of course," Callahan said. "I do have seven brothers and sisters."

No matter how many times she watched her brothers go off hunting while growing up in Columbia, S.C., Callahan never fired a gun until she went to the police academy. And, she's happy to say, in the hundreds of thousands of times she's fired a weapon in the past 21 years, she never has been forced to fire in the line of duty -- not even when she walked the beat in the Fourth District, her first job on the D.C. police force.

From the Fourth District, she was assigned to a training division, where she became an instructor. After transferring to the Special Operations Division of the force, she was promoted to sergeant in 1990 and has been assigned to this facility ever since.

"I always thought I wanted to get into the investigative part of [police work], but I never did. Other things just kept getting in the way."

It now has gone quiet out on Handgun Range No. 2, Callahan's trainees called away on a barricade somewhere in the District, right in the middle of their recertification. Callahan shrugs. These things happen. All it means is that she will have a little more time to trim the grass between the cement walkways in the range, check the inventory, do some maintenance work. Or perhaps get in some extra practice time.

At her own home in Upper Marlboro, it is exactly 10 meters from the spot inside Callahan's front door to the door leading out to her patio. This is where she practices with her air pistol, a pellet trap attached to the door. "If I miss, I'm going to put a hole in my patio door, and I wouldn't be too happy about that," she said. "But if I ever get that bad, maybe I'll figure it's time to put away the gun."