Tweet
Had a great group of guys come out to MR 1/2 Night Vision Carbine and pistol training on Feb 7/8 at the SETG range near Alma, GA.
Midnight Rendezvous 1 and 2 is a deep dive into weapons manipulation skills both during the day and at night under NODs.
We learned a long time ago that a "day phase" of training was important to do before we jumped right into weapons manipulation skills at night. Why? Truly because most shooters were lacking a lot of the necessary skills and it is insanely easier to teach new skills during the day, allow the students to get a lot of reps in during the day, before doing it at night. So everything we teach during the day is also "mirrored" at night. We have had a ton of students over the years- LE, .mil and civilians and all their feedback tells me this approach works well.
Day 1 begins when students meet up at 12 noon. We convoy to the range and are usually on line and shooting the first drills by 12:30. We do NOT have a lot of down time in these classes. You are paying for TRAINING not a 2 hour talk on NV specs, or a 2 hour lunch break, etc. And we average 10 hours per day training each day, all for the most affordable training price.
First drills focus on diagnostics. Often we are able to zero in on problems that need to be worked during these drills. Usually it's structure and body positioning problems. We stress movement from the very beginning so we focus on proper body mechanics to achieve this. Proper body mechanics also help with accuracy and shooting faster.
Pic shows a student working one of the many movement drills involving moving while scanning for, identifying and engaging multiple targets. Will get the pics rotated, not sure why they are showing up like that..
Keeping class sizes small and using multiple folks to help spot, allows us to zero in on individual issues and help students work them out. Whether this involves accuracy issues, movement issues, manipulation issues, etc.
Scanning and PID are important skills often just glanced over by most gun schools. We put an emphasis on it and have some "unique" ways to impart actual scanning and ID'ing of targets. We also address the 360 environment but do it in a safe manner. All of the live fire moving drills are done INDIVIDUALLY. This certainly adds to the time involved, but it makes for much safer training. Having been to classes where the entire class does a "moving" drill at once, I can tell you this way is MUCH safer.
And certainly every AAR discussion at the end of the class usually includes a student comment like "I felt completely safe doing these drills and the way the class was run."
The drills include reloading under various conditions of the weapon and can include these being called at any point in the movement drills. Movement often shows if a technique won't hold up under a little pressure.
We stress ambidextrous shooting from the beginning. The AR is a right hand centric weapon, but there are ways to create efficiency while shooting with your non dominant hand that don't require a bunch of crazy add on accessories.
Positional changes is next and just like everything else, we go pretty in depth and have some "unique" add ons to the standard kneeling position. The ambidextrous shooting techniques, shoulder transfer methods and positional changes are all put together and rep'ed repeatedly in a drill we lovingly call "The Contra Code."
The Feb 7/8 group was doing really well and we were actually a little ahead of schedule so we had a 30 minute dinner/prep your gear for night phase break. We don't waste your training time with 2 hour lunch breaks and similar fluff. This combined with the cheap price, allows us to offer the most bang for the buck training.
The night phase begins with a short time to get oriented to the night conditions. While students are doing this we usually have a short talk about how the psyche is affected at night. Remember our range is in the middle of the GA swamp. This is NOT a big city range with tons of ambient light everywhere. Nor do we push the excess and unnecessary overuse of IR. So some nights get extremely dark and it's common for people to get a little amped up if they are not used to this.
Students are given some time to zero their IR laser and there is always a few drills afterwards working on accuracy while shooting with the IR laser. We do the "square range" shooting at 25 yards and then later the practical exercises are done at greater distances. We do not waste student's time and ammo on 5 yard rifle shooting or endless "dot drills."
The remaining part of the night phase "mirrors" the material presented during the day phase of training. Everything is done again under NODs. This allows the students who has most likely not seen some of these techniques, to learn them during the day, get a lot of daytime reps without the added stress of restricted vision, and then work them again under NODs.
The only exception to that is the practical exercise at the end of Day 1. This involves a two man team, a shooter and a spotter working from a hillside. Their objective is to detect and engage small camoflaged targets at distances from 50 to approx 100 yards. This isn't some IPSC course where you walk through the course first and know where every target is at- the objective is to find and engage hidden targets under NODs. Much like a jungle lane exercise we do in other classes, but in a static position mimicking a defensive position.
Day 2 starts a little bit later depending on if everything was accomplished Day 1, as well as time of year, sunset time, etc. We started at 1pm this go around.
Since Day 1 went ahead of schedule with this group and because there were "more than a few" problems with malfunctions, we added in an extended module on clearing jams. After demonstrating some of the various malfunctions and how to work them, we gave the students 100 dummy rounds and had them have their battle buddy load a magazine with these dummy rounds mixed in with live rounds. This went well but usually this just simulates one type of malfunction. So we added further to the drill by purposely inducing malfunctions into student's weapons, setting them up for them ahead of time and adding in a little "stress" to the drill. Students had to retrieve their weapon and begin firing, then ascertain the jam(s) and work through them. Feedback on this in the AAR was excellent and it certainly seemed to help students fix jams under stress during the remainder of the training.
Day 2 focuses heavily on use of cover, cornering and individual CQB skills. We put this to use first with rifle and have some innovative DRY drills to reinforce this. After doing this on the square range without limiting space student could use, we walked over to our new CQB house next to the square range. Now this is not the 2 story FOF/FOT house we have, this is next to the square range. We set this structure up to mimic a duplex or apartment building, but of course it is also laid out a lot like a conventional house. It has an elevated catwalk so we can watch the students go through. We purposely made this structure with a small hallway, as well as several left handed corners, center fed rooms as well as corner fed rooms. The exterior walls are "hard walls" as far as FOF is concerned, but the inner walls are not, and the inner walls can be moved quickly. This allows us to change the layout of the structure, where the rooms and corners are, etc. within just a few minutes. The structure was greatly damaged during Hurricane Helene but our local guys helped us get the bulk of it back together for this class.
We set a role player inside one side of the structure and allowed students to work the angles and corners on two doorways against the role player. With the greatly diminished space in the hallway, it greatly changed the dynamic. Afterwards I gave a few "cheats" I know of to help with limited space.
Afterwards we walked the couple yards back to the square range and worked the drills live, with students working cover on both left and right side, doing a shoulder transfer, slicing the pie and doing a drop out.
MR 2 includes a short pistol module. While it's technically not a "pistol" class we do offer SHTF Pistol which is 2 days and a night on the square range doing live work and then 1 day in the 2 story house doing FOT and FOF against live role players.
A pistol diagnostic drill was run and issues identified. Issues were addressed with drawstroke and presentation. As mentioned, it's not technically a pistol class, but we want to make sure students have at least a bare level of skills for working pistol.
Pistol work at 7 yards. Shooting pistol is the only thing we do at less than 25 yards. We do NOT waste your time/ammo doing rifle work at 5 yards.
We went back to the use of cover, working corners, etc. with the pistol. This was also ambidextrous work. I gave a couple little "cheats" as well. We did DRY drills with one student observing and one cornering both on the square range and in the new CQB house. Feedback on these drills is always excellent including comments like "I've never seen this anywhere else" by various .mil/LE students as well as civilian students with tons of classes under their belts.
The last module of the day was rifle transition to pistol skills. We have cut DOWN this material immensely. Beginning with almost 10 options years ago and cutting it down to about 5 different options for transitioning. A helluva lot different than the one typical lack of imagination "just let it fall on the sling" approach most gun schools teach as the only option. Having various options is good. We do this section WITH A DRY (VERIFIED EMPTY) RIFLE. This is for safety during this part of the class. And it's for mental programming- the rifle goes "click" instead of "bang" and just like real life, you know there is a problem to address. All the drills started like that.
The final exercise for Day 2 is a team "spot and shoot". This involves the class acting as a team acting in unison to engage about a dozen camoflaged targets at the same time from a hillside position and then exfiltrating to a rally point. When we have time, we also practice this at the end of the day phase, to give students who have not had a chance to do this kind of thing do it for the first time while it's still light.
This group got two iterations of this during the day. As all of the training is "mirrored" at night, this same drill rounds out the class as the last exercise of the night. We were way ahead of time with a smaller class, so this group got a chance to do this drill twice during the day and 3 times at night. Each time, there was less and less input from instructors on what to do, how to do it, etc. This group showed a lot of personal initiative which is important in this kind of work.
Daylight picture of some of the area where some of the camoflaged targets used in the "spot and shoot" drills are hidden. There are at least 6 targets in the view, some are pretty obvious (during the day) some are not. The pic was taken close to the targets, shots are made from almost 100 yards away at these.
Excellent group this past weekend, couldn't have asked for better attitudes and willingness to learn. We love that, it makes our job easy AND more fun!
While we are still cleaning up parts of the range from damage from Hurricane Helene, we will be posting a Fall 2025 schedule soon.
Robert
JRH Enterprises​