Eh, yes and no.
While having the leadership on side gives us time and money, it does not solve a different and nasty problem.
Right now we have lots of guys that have done multiple tours, and most have been in at least one gunfight. There is a distinct problem with many of these guys now thinking that they are some kind of gunfight-guru because they shot a few rounds back at a few dudes and kicked in a few doors. It isn’t the E-1 that is the problem, it’s the E-3/E-4 (and in the really bad cases E-5 through E-7) that thinks he knows the game when he barely knows how to fill a magazine. It’s the toxic drivel that they spout to others in their unit/class that makes everything harder. They are the ones bitching about spending time doing basic manipulation drills, despite the fact that they suck, only to sit in front of their TV/computer. If they are not quickly identified and harshly dealt with they will infect others with their attitude and lack of discipline. And frankly, there have been too many of them poisoning those with less aware leadership.
Without violating OPSEC (not that you would ;)) can you give some additional examples of some of this “toxic drivel” that gets tossed around?
FS2-
I see where you are going with your point, and I don’t disagree. I would submit that what you are talking about could be classified as general ignorance. When you say “quickly identified and harshly dealt with” I think you are talking about leadership. Which was where I was going.
I believe that part of what you are describing is moron syndrome. Something that effects a large percentage of the population. The military is no exception. I submit that no matter how many times you tell the dumb ones that they, in fact, don’t know shit… they will not learn anyway. Which is where the leadership comes in… and the harshly dealt with part.
E
Well said and in total agreement F2S. That has been the main problem from over the ages. If you don’t square the “bad seed” away with extremely harsh, one way dialog, they will not snap out of their “coma”.
You know it is funny that you say this. I know that you remember, but when I was an E-4 and had been in a few gunfights, that was when I really realized that I really needed to learn allot. It was before I had done anything that I felt that I had a good handle on things. Once I had a few engagements under my belt I realized that I had a long way to go, but the path that I need to follow was much clearer.
Spot on…
What we call this is “Institutional Inertia” This is exactly the problem with all communities: military, LE, Govt Agencies, training companies, Instructors, etc… they get sucked in to their own drama/ego/training.
In-sti-tu-tion:
an organization, establishment, foundation, society, or the like, devoted to the promotion of a particular cause or program, esp. one of a public, educational, or charitable character.
In-er-tia
The property of matter by which it retains its state of rest or its velocity along a straight line so long as it is not acted upon by an external force.
This is why we live the words “Absolutely-not” We should never become absolute to one technique, one tactic, one curriculum, instructor, unit, agency, etc…There is no one “WAY” to train. Dynamic environments are never absolute. They are living; breathing, responsive entities that are shaped by our interactions and experiences with THEM, not shaped around some made up training regimen of training curriculum or because your Cpl, Sgt, Gunny, or training manual told you so.
Failure points
The other very big problem is our society is so messed up when it comes to our egos: Being too proud to admit a mistake or that we have anything to learn is not just vanity. It’s life threatening.
It’s not enough to identify failure. Failure points must be broken down, scrutinized and critically studied without ego so that every nuance, mechanic and intent is understood. It’s not only essential to fail sometimes but it is critical to an individual’s growth and maturity, on the range or off.
On the range, it’s time to push till we fail. Shoot as fast as we can till we miss. Move as hard as we can till we drop. When a student isn’t pushing to their failure point, they are not training.
This is the ladder TO excellence.
Ladder of excellence
Pushing to failure points and riding their threshold until they become “easy” is not a comfortable process. Truly learning something new never is. No matter how gifted someone is at a particular task, talent doesn’t equal mastery and everyone has something to learn.
Putting aside one’s ego and understanding when to reach for that next failure point is the only way to climb the rungs on the ladder of excellence.
One Percent
For those of us that carry, protect and serve or defend our nation; only one percent of our lives may involve actually pulling a trigger on another human being. The other 99 percent could be everything from taking your family out to dinner and all the way up to almost pulling the trigger on a battlefield in a far away country…
Why do we care about training for that one percent so much? That is one percent you cannot get wrong. You can pick up the pieces from almost any other mistake in your life, except the one that ends yours or a loved ones. That’s why we have dedicated our lives as instructors to prepare people for that one percent, that moment that determines life or death.
Bingo.
(chance of occurrence) * (cost of failure) = importance
While the odds of it happening to you may be low, the cost of failure is monumental.
I have to wonder how marketing( by this I mean profit) and insurance fears encourage this. I know some instructors that will admit these very points in confidence. Yet in their classes they have the way, because they feel that for marketing purposes, to get people to attend, they have to promote that they are the only ones doing it correctly. My second thought is that, are some afraid to push their students till failure because they fear something going wrong? I am not saying that this is the case, I am just wondering how much, if any, these points have an effect on trainers or groups attitudes. Slightly off of your point, sorry.
I’ve seen this from a couple of E6’s while we were doing MOUT training. They insisted that we grip our weapons by the magazine well instead of the er…handguard amongst other no no’s. I made the mistake of questioning whether that could possibly lead to problems and was told in no uncertain terms to shut my yapper and do as I was told. Thankfully we had a civilian instructor there who really knew his stuff. It was amazing how students gravitated to him to learn things, rather than our NCO’s. He was also the first mil instructor I heard refer to the tap-rack-bang drill rather than SPORTS. I still haven’t been taught by the military how to clear a double feed or a stuck casing so I tried to teach my peers what I’ve learnt here and other places.
AIT’s could really benefit from some better firearms training from civilians. A bunch of the NCO’s there loved having better subject matter experts on hand as the majority are willing to admit that they don’t know everything or especially current techniques.
They also need to stop using the old excuse of “you’ll learn more when you get to your unit.” That’s bullshit.
Paul - Thanks for posting up that AAR. I’ve mailed it to all my buddies, some of whom will be going - or already are - overseas.
A very good read, lessons to learn from, train hard and stay in the fight. Thanks.
Semper Fi.
Thanks for not only your sacrifice, but also your courage to share this story as well. A very worthy and humbling read.
If I may Paul, I will reluctantly add one more mistake to your list. I do this very reluctantly in fact, but since this is a thread meant to teach I will try to add something relevant in that regard. Please don’t take this comment in a negative way, as I do not want to give that impression. I have a great deal of respect for you, your actions that fateful day and your ongoing courage today.
You stated that you shot the first of the two about 15 times during an adrenaline filled moment while watching his body react to the impacts. While understandable under the circumstances perhaps, it still caused you to reload sooner than you should have had to. Who knows what the outcome might have been should you have hit the first guy with a couple and then quickly moved on to the next target.
So, maybe add a degree of fire discipline to the mix here as well. It would seem to apply based upon your exact wording.
Again, with all due genuine respect.
Paul
Great write up. I lived in that city for a year in a safe house with my team in 2007-2008 the surge.
Not a pretty woman in sight thats what I remember anyhow.
Yeah you’re right, I didn’t need to shoot the guy 15+ times. But like I stated, my adrenaline was maxed out and I just kept pumping round after round into his body. I can’t say enough just how intense it was seeing my bullets impact that Fedayeen fighter from that range. Like I said, it was the first time I’d engaged and had actually seen my bullets impact a dude, knowing that they were mine and no one else’s rounds hitting the cocksucker.
To be honest there is another reason, more psychological, that I blasted the motherfucker so many times, but I’m not going to get into it here in a public forum for personal reasons, the main one being that what I say here is basically public record and I don’t want shit to come back and bite me in the ass someday, if you know what I’m getting at… there’s some things I only talk about with my fellow warriors when I’m conversing with them face to face.
But on the subject of fire discipline overall, yes I think it’s something that should be gone over during training. I was there during the invasion, so no one had gone there to war before us that could give us true-life intel on how many rounds you should fire into a human target in order to kill them.
Coming out of Marine boot camp, we all thought we were fucking snipers and said stupid shit like, “One shot, one kill!” and the like. Well, that’s all good and well if you just so happen to be in the perfect scenario where you pop a dude in his face in the sweet spot and his lights go out instantly and for good, but when you’re in combat and you shoot a bad guy in the chest and he doesn’t even seem fazed because he’s doped up and just shot himself up with epinephrine before picking a fight with you, then it becomes, “One shot, one… of fuck! Two shots, three shots, 6 shots… damn, six shots, one kill!? Fuck me, he was a tough little bastard!”
We didn’t know the Fedayeen we were fighting that day were doped up until afterwards (I was told months afterwards, when I talked to my boys on the phone one day when I was in the VA hospital). But we certainly knew that something was odd about the fact that their bodies could take so much punishment (usually) before they would finally stop fighting and shooting back at us and were dead for good. My buddy got a head shot on a guy and had to pop him in the head again before he finally went down and quit shooting at him (he was using one of the “experimental” ACOG RCOs on an M16A4, so he could actually see the shot placement on the guy’s head in his optic).
Also, even if I had shot the first guy only 5-8 times, as opposed to 15 times, then fired those 5 or 6 rounds at the other guy who stepped out of the doorway of the bunker to engage me, hit him once just how I did, and had 5-8 rounds left in my magazine(I know that round count doesn’t add up to 28 here, but I’m not sure what the exact amount was of rounds fired anyways, it’s all a “general” and “best” guess resulting from my memory of the actual numbers), I most likely still would’ve done a reload like I did, how I did and where I did, because I would’ve known my magazine was getting really low by that point. I’m pretty sure of this because I had been pretty conscious of my ammo count throughout the gunfight. I had actually taken time about 1 hour into the fight, during a lull in firing, to pull out a bandolier of ammo and reload/top off all 6 of my issued mags (looking back on it, it’s hard to believe I only carried 6 mags on me, which equals a pathetic grand total of 168 rounds).
Bottom line, if I would’ve been good to go with my speed reloads, had been looking down range while I was reloading, had my weapon up in my workspace, not worried about retaining an empty mag during such an intense moment (i.e. wrong time, wrong place to retain an empty mag), and had not been standing bladed in the typical known-distance range qualifying Standing position and had instead been standing squared up with my plates facing the target/threat, then I would’ve been good to go and would’ve been able to shoot that guy to shit whenever he got back up on his feet and came back out of the bunker.
Trust me, I’ve had plenty of time to “What if?” the hell out of that day in that backyard, but ever since I’ve begun training and have learned all that I have in these carbine courses (still have a shit-ton more to learn though), the above scenario is the one I keep coming back to nowadays.
Anyhow, thanks for taking the time to read my post and for putting the amount of thought into it that you did. Thanks also for pointing out the fire discipline issue, I’m glad you did.
Take care and Semper Fi,
-Paul
Thanks brother! Yeah, I only saw a small number of good looking females when I was deployed there. But not all of them count because some of them were all veiled-up, so it was hard to tell if the girl was actually hot or not based on just looking at her eyes and/or a few other facial features.
There are a shitload of unibrows grown in Iraq, though!
Semper Fi,
-Paul
Ya but when you take the veils off…
Paul ,Thank you for your Post and for your service .I have a Friend that was in Somalia and also talked of the enemy Being doped up,and taking many rounds before they stop coming.It seems we are hearing more and more of the enemy using drugs to get the courage they need to fight.
The old “two to the chest and One to the head” drilled into my head during basic May need Updated. I so Need to Get the Money up for a Carbine class :(.
Great AAR; wish that all the service branches had taken a better look at Urban tactical operations years ago. I know that if I had suggested it in my unit, it would of been laughed off as “Army” training and never happened.
Our training was limited to qual on the range once a year. Not even enough to really be familar with the weapon.
Keep up the hard work of transistion to civilian, and be proud of the time you spent in service to our nation.
You might look into doing lectures to LE and visiting with the troops in the guard and reserve in your local area. Your experiences would be life saving for many of them.
Scott Lawson
MSgt. USAF, Retired
Paul,
Your story is a reality check for everyone in the military or law enforcement who thinks that their basic and advanced training makes them prepared for reality. Thank you for the time you took to write it and although it probably sounds hollow to you, thank you to your service to our country! Those photos of you fighting from the wheelchair are a testimonial to the fact that you are 100 times the man that I am. God Bless You.
The truly sad fact of your story is that it was your leadership that failed you. I will be so bold as to say it was your upper leadership who were more responsible for your injury that the Hajji who shot you. Why? He was doing his job, They Weren’t :mad: I spent 12 years in the Army as an officer and it was an endless source of frustration that the entire realm of weapon skills to most of the upper leadership boiled down to the simple act of qualification. In the end, they didn’t care if you scored marksman or expert (as if, like you said, that was any real indicator of combat marksmanship skills) or how many times you had to recycle (I had one BN CDR who you could guarantee would need to be recycled at least twice per qual), as long as they could check the box marked qualified, in their minds they were good to go. The few “shooters” in the units were never given as much time as needed to conduct really good train up to qualification. SART (Small Arms Readiness Training Teams - I think the acronym has changed) did the best they could, but even they were limited to a 15 minute class prior to qualification. Of course to the upper leadership, EEO and retention classes were much more important that training their tankers and scouts to survive in combat. In fact, weapons qual was always rushed and assigned to Officers and NCOs that would move the troops through the qualification and not to the ones that would insure a quality product. It was always assumed (by those smart enough to realize that basic rifle/pistol marksmanship was a joke) that the soldiers would get the needed training pre-mobilization. Sadly, in your case and in thousands of others, this did not happen. What is truly sad is that you were a hard charging Infantry Marine and your leadership obviously had the same mindset as mine did. I can only imagine what it is like in a Combat Support unit. 
Paul,
Just read your article in the new issue of SWAT. Great article. I hope you are able to reach out to even more people and share your hard fought wisdom.
Keep out the good work. Airborne.