looked at me and I knew that I’d have the task to play a bad guy
and make their life hard during building clearance and fulfilling
the mission which was fine with me as it’s always an extra
training opportunity for myself ! Did I mention that the Instructor
also took flashbangs and smoke grenades with him? Yes, he did!
We started! The first drill was for the students to go on the
setup route through the building with me popping out from the
corners and attacking them. It’s a task which looks easy especially
when you have 5 men team where each member can focus on
covering their sector, but it quickly became a mess when I threw
the first flashbang and attacked them from different angles. The
formation got mixed up and chaos ensued. Of course you can’t
teach somebody CQB in one day and this was understandable
for everybody. What was important for us is to give our students
understanding of the difficulties of CQB and room clearance.
After few rounds in teams of five we decided to split them
into smaller groups to see how they were going to cooperate with
each other. This time the mission was to check the building, locate
the hostage and evacuate him to a safe area. All of the course
were equipped with FX Glock, and I was there with grenades
trying to disturb them. This time the drill went better according to
rules; the less operators in the team the less the mess. All teams
managed to fulfil the mission with more or less casualties; I got
shot few times as well. Those drills were performed with low
light conditions where some of the lights in the building were
turned on. Now was the time to bring it to the next level; one on
one hostage rescue drills in pitch black darkness!
The only source of light was a Glock flashlight attached to the
pistol. This time students were really careful and moved forward
very slowly checking each room with lot of attention making sure
When we arrived there equipped with Glocks converted to
FX Simunition and flashlights the Instructor said, “We are not
going to shoot paper targets today anymore, we are going to run
scenarios with real opponents shooting back on you”. Then he
and ready to go live on the range. The first day
was planned to be spent mostly with handguns
and this is what happened, working on drawing,
grip, sight alignment, breathing, trigger work
and a solid shooting platform.
That was the main concern of the instructor;
safety first, and always. After few hours students
were sorted, mistakes were fixed, wrong habits
were wiped out. Accuracy was improved and
everybody was using their handgun in a safe
and professional manner, even those who have
never handled one before. When it started
getting dark we had to come back to the
Academy for dinner, debriefing and relaxing for
the rest of the evening which was spent mostly
in discussion about the course, weapons, other
courses provided and tons of questions and
answers.
Day Two started straight on one of the ESA
ranges. I noticed big smiles on the faces of all the
students when our Instructor opened the cases
full of Brügger & Thomet APC’s and Heckler &
Koch MP5’s. We started with a warm up with the
handguns we had used on the Day One and then
we jumped into SMG’s. Students were impressed
with the accuracy of both weapons systems and
especially with APC which was equipped with a
red dot sight. With almost no recoil all shooters
were able to put bullets on the targets quite
easily. Once they got use to static shooting we
went for more dynamic scenarios with multiple
targets.
When the sun went down and we couldn’t
see the targets properly we got back to the
academy for the dinner, but the day for us wasn’t finished! After
dinner we met up in what is called “Little Mogadishu”. It’s a CQB
village built for the purpose of CQB training and running AOP
(Attack on Principle) drills on PMC (Private Military Contractor)
and CP (Close Protection) courses.
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