Vickers Tactical
www.vickerstactical.com
Grey Group Training:
www.greygrouptraining.com
Vickers Tactical Home Defense
US Training Center
Moyock, NC
For those of you who haven’t attended the Derek Zoolander School for Kids who want to read good and want to do other stuff good too; this class was awesome. I classify this class as much an adventure as it was a great training opportunity. So for those brave souls that don’t mind a rather long and wordy documentation of said class I say turn back now.
Back in November of last year I remember getting a call from my buddy Patrick (D90KING) asking me if I wanted to participate in the Vickers Tactical Home Defense class. This was the same class, a year prior that Jon (M4Guru / Danger Close) asked me if I wanted to attend. Back when Jon asked me it was a situation of, “hey man, there’s a waiting list for this class, but if you want in I’ll let you know.” Of course a few weeks before class began he emails me, “We have a space, you want it?” 3 weeks to get the money together for class, buying frangible, airfare, hotel, rental car, etc, just wasn’t possible. I did however ask myself honestly if I was ready for a class with that kind of material. I thought to myself that I wasn’t ready; that I knew enough to know I didn’t know enough.
So when the opportunity came up again I jumped on it. And thus began 11 months of preparation for this class. I thought ahead and signed up for one of Larry’s 2-day Carbine classes (in Kansas City) in May, to provide me with insight into Larry’s teaching style and his expectations. I put much more of a focus during that time into handgun work, and low-light skill building. Essentially my goal was to spool up the skills I knew we’d be tapping for time spent in this class.
Fast forward 11 months and I found myself sitting in the Delta Terminal at Portland International Airport at close to midnight, nursing my third beer while waiting for my late flight to Atlanta. After struggling to get my giant Storm 2950 case under the 50lb limit and a conversation with the regional TSA manager I ended up carrying my armor plates through security. If you do a lot of flying you know that airports basically become ghost towns after 9-9:30pm. So here I am basically putting my shoes, toiletries, and armor plates in a plastic bin and shuffling them through the X-Ray machine. Since everyone was in a good mood they invited me behind the machine to actually look at the plates. This being the first time I’ve had the chance to verify through X-rays that they looked clean and good to go.
After getting to my gate, and finding that my flight is 2 hours delayed I decided that as long as I was sober enough to get into my seat then it was time to pound a few beers. The guy next to me took this to an extreme and drank so much that when the flight started boarding they couldn’t even wake him up.
8 hours later, with guns, fellow students, and gear in tow, we arrived at US Training Center. Due to some verbal miscommunication on the part of the Black Bear Inn, my friend Seth and I were stuck in the bunkhouse. Basically about the standards of a 2nd rate college dorm we were only greeted by one small roach, which was snuffed out before I even had the chance to say hello. Gear unpacking commenced, grub was rustled up, and we prepared for training.
Training Day 1: Pistol Skill Building
The weather in Moyock was a cruel joke, 70-degree weather all week up until Friday, and then as soon as class begins it’s raining, cold, and windy. You know what they say about raining in regards to class.
Just like Grant pointed out last year, everyone in attendance was a solid shooter, with a class count of around 18-20 shooters. With almost all of the students having gone through one of Larry’s classes beforehand, some even having taken the Home Defense class last year. With everyone rallying at Range T1, Larry greeted us, told us just to grab our handguns, and to line up on the 15yd line on the adjacent T2 range.
With bull’s-eye targets up, Larry had us fire 10 rounds at our own speed. This served just to see where the students were at skill-wise. Targets looked quite good, to which Larry then emphasized how 10 yds may have been our longest shot in the houses, and even at those distances due to the stress we would very likely shank shots into the white, and that getting our shit in order ON THE FLAT RANGE was critical before we risked fucking up in the house.
To identify El Snatcho we broke into pairs and did the shell casing/dime on the front sight drill. Each time we dry fired, with a clean pull of the trigger resulting on the casing or dime not falling off the front sight. At this point I should mention I decided to be a retard and was shooting my Nighthawk FLX, “Holmes, you’re gonna really hate life when we get into the house with that fiber optic front sight…” “I’m sorry, Larry…”
Next was the Ball and Dummy drill, which we worked as partners, randomly loading each other’s guns to reveal when the shooter was anticipating recoil. If you snatched the trigger you did 5 clean dry fires, set the gun up again with a partner, and then swapped positions with your partner to assist them. With the refresher in trigger pull covered we split into two relays, and performed a modified group walkback drill. Starting at 5 yards, where we’d fire two shots, then 3, then 4, and then step back to 7yds, repeating the shot cadence, then back to 10yds, 15, and finally 20yds. The goal was to keep all shots within the 10 ring, again, as Larry said, because even up close we would be prone to throwing shots off the bull’s-eye just due to the situation if we weren’t careful.
After hauling out barricades we broke into a line, with 4 stations; a tall vertical barricade on the left, a stepped barricade in the middle, and another tall barricade on the right. Because of the nature of the class, and the caliber of students, we were expected to know how to deal with barricades already, specifically movement, footwork, and weapon handling. We ran this setup twice, once right-handed, then left-handed.
With our pistol refresher completed Larry brought us in to the entrance of Shoothouse T1. At this point Larry echoed some of the possible scenarios we might find ourselves in, such as entering a house alone, leaving a house alone, getting from one part of the house to another (getting to our kids, etc), and the practical and logistical challenges of moving and clearing each room.
Larry then split the groups in half, with Larry handling the group entering into to the hallways on the left side of the range, and Jon handling the group entering from the front. Immediately you get to the door and Larry just says, “okay, whenever you’re ready…” Whenever I’m ready? Okay, so I just open the door? That’s it?! This wasn’t a handholding class, which meant that Larry didn’t brief all of us as to how do clear a room step by step, but rather we figured it out as we went, and at any time we could stop, and ask Larry how best to approach the situation. However this meant that for a lot of us we would go through our runs, stop, and then ask, “Okay, so what did I fuck up and how terrible was that, Larry?” Doors, even shit as simple as knobs you learned to open from the side closest to the knob. Students would reach across the entire doorway to hear LAV stop the student, “Holmes, you considered trying it from the other side?” “Uhhh…nope.”
Experience gained on even that first run was invaluable. Square range mentality is to move with pistols and rifles in the SUL position. But once you start to pie corners you find that you can’t do that, in fact what bit me on my first run was that I had the gun crunched up way too close to my face (“That shit is gonna come back and smack you in the head if you fire, Bro.”), and I was moving my head, and the gun wasn’t tracking with my eyes. This meant I would identify the target, bring the gun up to fire, make a controlled pair, and then search and assess. For most people movement and just treating each room like that chess was the biggest challenge to overcome. Each room was just a simple game of geometry. I need to go there, but there’s a door so I move left to a certain point, then swing right before making a judgment call. And not only that I need to move through the room in such a way that I don’t look like a geriatric retard. BUT don’t move so fast that I can’t process the room.
In addition to that you still need to put your rounds in the bulls. Which when you’re surprised by a ‘boogie man’ target (one that’s JUST around the corner) your shots can miss the black completely, and this was from just 2yds! The common thread for the class was “Yo, you’re moving too fast for your brain to process.” And that alone sums up the biggest hurdle, being smooth, perceiving the hand you’re dealt, and deciding on that plan of action, and executing it with as little wasted movement as possible.
Our group then moved to Jon’s side of the house to run another set of rooms. The biggest nugget for that first day came from the feedback given to me by Jon, when I was shooting around corners in a cramped up manner, “Isaac, just take a step back, okay, punch out. See how you’ve made full extension and you’re still getting the same view of the room? Do that.” This came into play when running a rifle over the next few days, especially in tight quarters. Another key point of thinking through the situation was that if you need to work a malfunction, or a reload, just step back behind cover. I, and other shooters, would sometimes just stand there rather than just taking one step over to square their shit away. My FLX double fed, okay, lock, strip, rack, re-insert, powerstroke, go, all while standing in the doorway like a dipshit. Okay, don’t do that again, learning occurred.
Back out and over to Larry’s side of the house, where we essentially started where the first run ended, by engaging targets at the bottom and top of stairs. These stairs were triple wide, and steep, as Jon later said, “Okay guys, these stairs are huge, so if your house has stairs this big call me, because I wanna move in with you!”
One of the things that go me was focusing on the target at the top of the stairs, but not scanning right above me to search for a possible landing or overhang. And to pie around the corners meant moving left and right, and up and down the staircase like a swoop, all of which required solid footwork and constant scanning.
At this point the question of optics came up, what was the best? “Aim Fucking Motherfucking Point!” – LAV.
Simple as that.
