Walter “Jim” Hosey’s funeral featured a standard rifle salute with a twist. Instead of being laid to rest in the ground or having his ashes inturned, Hosey asked to have his ashes scattered via shotgun.

The Vietnam War veteran passed away on Jan. 2 and was cremated on Jan. 5. His ashes were split into two halves–one half that would be kept in an urn for a private family memorial at a later date, and one half that would be loaded into 50, 12 gauge shotgun shells and fired off by his relatives and friends. The shells were loaded by his son Clint and his daughters Emerald and Heidi.

The memorial took place Saturday at the Southern Utah Practical Shooting Range in Hurricane, and it was attended by more than 100 people. Hosey was a gun aficionado who enjoyed visiting the shooting range with friends and family.

“He was one of those kind of guys that, if you was having a bad day shooting and he was shooting with you, he would just cheer you right up,” his longtime friend Kenny Canfield said. “And if he was shooting good and you were shooting bad, he would start shooting bad. … He was a character.”

Spilsbury funeral director Mark Heiner said that he had never seen a military memorial quite like Hosey’s.

“It’s the first time for me that a veteran’s or an individual’s ashes were made into ammunition and then fired through a shotgun,” Spilsbury said. “But it’s a fitting tribute to the way he lived.”