06-06-2011, 08:04 PM
Gents,
While I think weekend/week-long marksmanship courses are essential to honing your skills, none of those facilities or courses can make up for years & years spent living as an animal in nature, with other like-minded animals. That is basically what an 11B does, usually with a majority of guys who score exceptionally-higher on the ASVAB, and are adventure-seekers with a family history of dare-devils and warrior spirits that often runs in bloodlines for generations. This may sound bogus, but that's the way I feel about it after looking at it from so many different angles.
Anyway, guys with a good hunting background and aggressive team sports seem to have good mentalities for it, but you change as a person when you spend more of your time outdoors thinking about killing and being killed as a job description, with your older brothers to pass on lessons that are based in antiquity about killing first to avoid being killed.
When I run courses, I emphasize the violent, conscious thinking and decision-making aspect of conflict, and how that practically manifests itself in techniques, tactics, and procedures. It's based on staying in the frontal cortex thinking, versus brain-stem responses for channeling the fight or flight response. A lot of us have the tendency to isolate ourselves from the reality of the extreme discomfort of being involved in a violent, homicidal encounter.
We do this by asserting and assuring ourselves that one particular caliber, weapon, technique, school, system, holster, etc. will insulate us from the violence. They won't...they are tools meant to facilitate violence by design and definition. That is the first step in approaching this subject from a practical, "live to conquer" mindset that I rarely see in many training courses, martial arts, etc. Embrace the violent/homicidal confrontation when you feel that it is imminent...embrace it aggressively and you exponentially increase your chances of emerging alive.
I can't emphasize that enough. Everyone I have interviewed who has prevailed in gunfights either knew or learned a hard lesson that day/night. One thing I can recommend is getting involved in no-BS martial arts that allow you to physically spar often with dissimilar opponents with very little time wasted on talking about techniques, dojo etiquette, and all the nuances that surround much of the eastern martial arts trends. Spend as much time using your natural body weapons on heavy canvas bags, and take your training heart rate threshold to higher levels with continuous smoker workouts that last long, and come fast and furious. There is a lot to be said for high levels of mental-physical fitness.
Everyone can practice increasing their perceptive habits throughout the day. Every, and I mean every time I drive through an intersection, I am imagining the worst possible chain of events that can happen with the given actors in that intersection that I actively see throughout the process: pedestrians, cyclists, cars, trucks, vehicles obstructing my vision, etc. I watch and think moment to moment what my proaction will be for each action. When I see the green light, I get more attentive...not less, while the majority of motorists might not even know they just blew through an intersection as they talk on their phones or pick up spilled french fries from their laps.
The same goes for when I'm walking. These are habits from walking the woods that I could never get rid of, nor would I want to. I know if someone is approaching me from 100yds away from my rear before I even see them. Call me a liar, throw the BS flag, but it's true and common among guys with that background. The best way I can explain it is that 99.99% of the time I spent walking in places where people normally never go, I became attenuated to what my environment feels like with only the presence of me and my fellow pipe-swingers. The moment we felt a disturbance to that, with other humans acting and thinking in the area, our "ping meters" would go from zero to PING PING PING. It's not even based on sound, but something else on a mental level.
If you read any first-person perspectives on war experiences, you will often hear the author say how their senses alerted them to enemy action before it happened. Guys that spend time in small teams of 4-6 guys conducting recons away from any other friendly forces learn this faster than others, and the shared responsibility for unit tasks is laden more heavily on 4-6 guys than it is 42 or more.
Some good references for this subject are: On Killing, by Lt. Col (Ret.) Dave Grossman, which covers the psychological aspects of killing and mental barriers to killing, how the military deals with that practically, and the history of this issue with the US military and how it changed after WWII.
Another thing is to spend a week out in the woods or nature away from any people, and make it a hunting trip. Live off your back with a hunting buddy or family member, and take optics. When you learn that you can be present in nature without other animals aware of your presence, and get closer and closer to them, you learn a new level of confidence and how to keep that mental pinging sensation from alerting them. You're basically being sneaky without resonating the "sneaky" thought ping for all to "hear" with their 6th senses. It's like electronic emissions discipline, only at a telepathic level.
* No BS martial arts with plenty of barely-controlled sparring and increasing levels of fitness,
* A psychological understanding of your own barriers to killing and how to defeat them when appropriate,
* Spending time in nature away from people other than your small team. Those are what I would recommend for starters. This will make a great foundation for learning how to be effectively and lethally violent when necessary.
As you learn to incorporate violent training into your shoot training, never violate the 4 basics of firearms safety. This takes heightened focus as well, which only helps you mentally and practically. Start slow, but with your imagination overloading your senses with stress, rather than going through the motions when you're in the "crawl" stage of crawl-walk-run.
This is what I do with my courses, and it's quite different than any of the courses that I have attended.
LRRPF52
While I think weekend/week-long marksmanship courses are essential to honing your skills, none of those facilities or courses can make up for years & years spent living as an animal in nature, with other like-minded animals. That is basically what an 11B does, usually with a majority of guys who score exceptionally-higher on the ASVAB, and are adventure-seekers with a family history of dare-devils and warrior spirits that often runs in bloodlines for generations. This may sound bogus, but that's the way I feel about it after looking at it from so many different angles.
Anyway, guys with a good hunting background and aggressive team sports seem to have good mentalities for it, but you change as a person when you spend more of your time outdoors thinking about killing and being killed as a job description, with your older brothers to pass on lessons that are based in antiquity about killing first to avoid being killed.
When I run courses, I emphasize the violent, conscious thinking and decision-making aspect of conflict, and how that practically manifests itself in techniques, tactics, and procedures. It's based on staying in the frontal cortex thinking, versus brain-stem responses for channeling the fight or flight response. A lot of us have the tendency to isolate ourselves from the reality of the extreme discomfort of being involved in a violent, homicidal encounter.
We do this by asserting and assuring ourselves that one particular caliber, weapon, technique, school, system, holster, etc. will insulate us from the violence. They won't...they are tools meant to facilitate violence by design and definition. That is the first step in approaching this subject from a practical, "live to conquer" mindset that I rarely see in many training courses, martial arts, etc. Embrace the violent/homicidal confrontation when you feel that it is imminent...embrace it aggressively and you exponentially increase your chances of emerging alive.
I can't emphasize that enough. Everyone I have interviewed who has prevailed in gunfights either knew or learned a hard lesson that day/night. One thing I can recommend is getting involved in no-BS martial arts that allow you to physically spar often with dissimilar opponents with very little time wasted on talking about techniques, dojo etiquette, and all the nuances that surround much of the eastern martial arts trends. Spend as much time using your natural body weapons on heavy canvas bags, and take your training heart rate threshold to higher levels with continuous smoker workouts that last long, and come fast and furious. There is a lot to be said for high levels of mental-physical fitness.
Everyone can practice increasing their perceptive habits throughout the day. Every, and I mean every time I drive through an intersection, I am imagining the worst possible chain of events that can happen with the given actors in that intersection that I actively see throughout the process: pedestrians, cyclists, cars, trucks, vehicles obstructing my vision, etc. I watch and think moment to moment what my proaction will be for each action. When I see the green light, I get more attentive...not less, while the majority of motorists might not even know they just blew through an intersection as they talk on their phones or pick up spilled french fries from their laps.
The same goes for when I'm walking. These are habits from walking the woods that I could never get rid of, nor would I want to. I know if someone is approaching me from 100yds away from my rear before I even see them. Call me a liar, throw the BS flag, but it's true and common among guys with that background. The best way I can explain it is that 99.99% of the time I spent walking in places where people normally never go, I became attenuated to what my environment feels like with only the presence of me and my fellow pipe-swingers. The moment we felt a disturbance to that, with other humans acting and thinking in the area, our "ping meters" would go from zero to PING PING PING. It's not even based on sound, but something else on a mental level.
If you read any first-person perspectives on war experiences, you will often hear the author say how their senses alerted them to enemy action before it happened. Guys that spend time in small teams of 4-6 guys conducting recons away from any other friendly forces learn this faster than others, and the shared responsibility for unit tasks is laden more heavily on 4-6 guys than it is 42 or more.
Some good references for this subject are: On Killing, by Lt. Col (Ret.) Dave Grossman, which covers the psychological aspects of killing and mental barriers to killing, how the military deals with that practically, and the history of this issue with the US military and how it changed after WWII.
Another thing is to spend a week out in the woods or nature away from any people, and make it a hunting trip. Live off your back with a hunting buddy or family member, and take optics. When you learn that you can be present in nature without other animals aware of your presence, and get closer and closer to them, you learn a new level of confidence and how to keep that mental pinging sensation from alerting them. You're basically being sneaky without resonating the "sneaky" thought ping for all to "hear" with their 6th senses. It's like electronic emissions discipline, only at a telepathic level.
* No BS martial arts with plenty of barely-controlled sparring and increasing levels of fitness,
* A psychological understanding of your own barriers to killing and how to defeat them when appropriate,
* Spending time in nature away from people other than your small team. Those are what I would recommend for starters. This will make a great foundation for learning how to be effectively and lethally violent when necessary.
As you learn to incorporate violent training into your shoot training, never violate the 4 basics of firearms safety. This takes heightened focus as well, which only helps you mentally and practically. Start slow, but with your imagination overloading your senses with stress, rather than going through the motions when you're in the "crawl" stage of crawl-walk-run.
This is what I do with my courses, and it's quite different than any of the courses that I have attended.
LRRPF52