AAR Midnight Rendezvous 2.0 November 14 Night vision/Carbine training
AAR for Midnight Rendezvous 2.0 November 14, 2020
Southeastern Training Group range near Alma, GA
Twelve students from all over the Eastern US met up on Saturday the 14th for Midnight Rendezvous 2.0 Two students were last minute cancellations but this worked out well with just 12 students and we will likely continue to cap at 12 students per class from here on out.
Everyone was on time at the rally point which is always helpful and helps to move things along quickly. We were on the range doing a safety brief by 12:30 after everyone got their gear to the range and we did admin work.
Attendees were a mix of students that had previously attended NV workshops and various other training, LE and former military folks.
Midnight Rendezvous 2.0 is designed to build on skills covered in 1.0 but it isn’t 100% necessary for them to be taken in order. Since about half of the students hadn’t been to 1.0 we started with a few simple drills for diagnostics assessment. These went well and some slight corrections to body positioning, stance, etc. were presented and worked that would prove important when we started working angles, etc. later in the day.
One reason we start at noon instead of right before dark is to allow students to work the material presented both day and night. Learning new skills at dark can present a problem and everyone agreed it was easier to learn these during the day and drill them extensively then before attempting them at night.
From there we went into using cover. This including use of angles and space, “slicing the pie” and doing dropouts. We did what we call a “peek a boo” drill with red guns wherein one student is on the hard angle on one side of the barricade and the other student works the angles on the cover. The “bad guy” student calls out anything he sees ahead of time. Many calls of “foot!” or “elbow” were corrected by the student on the other side of the barricade. The importance of optimal body positioning when working covered was reinforced there. This is covered in great detail in Midnight Rendezvous 1.0 with various exercises to teach and reinforce this.
After the peek a boo drill was over, we went live fire again against the targets. Like we do in all classes this meant both right and left side work. In Midnight 1.0 we reinforce ambidextrous work and work on shoulder transfers and manipulations from your “other” hand- we don’t call it “weak” hand, it’s simply your other hand.
Everyone was run through both drills multiple times live fire. Due to the number of students this took quite a bit of time but allow everyone to get multiple reps on both left and right side on two barricades.
Around 3pm we changed to pistol work. Following a similar format to rifle we started off with a simple 7 yard shoot as a diagnostics tool. A couple of small changes were made for a couple students and then we went right into working cover again, this time with pistol. We began the discussion with a drill we do in pistol classes involving compressing and extending based on position of the opponent- essentially a retention drill. This gave everyone context of approaching a hard corner with a pistol. We worked the “peek a boo” drill with red gun pistols here as well and “bad guy” students on the hard angle on the other side of cover called out corrections in body position to those on the other side working cover.
We discussed and demonstrated center axis relock as a possible technique for working left cover for those that were having issues shooting left handed. Finally we went live fire against targets both left and right handed on both pieces of cover.
The final instruction for the daylight portion involved transition to pistol from rifle. We demonstrated numerous methods to do this from on sling, off sling and even if there is no sling on the weapon your using. Suffice to say two people commented in the AAR that they had “never know there was this many ways” to transition to pistol from rifle. Students worked these drills dry for dozens of reps before we went live fire with a DRY rifle and a loaded pistol. In doing it this way, rifles are completely empty while they are being manipulated out of the way and the pistol is drawn- which makes for a much safer way to drill this.
We took a quick break to change targets and for everyone to woof down a little food and were back at it again a few minutes after dark.
This was one of the first classes where nearly everyone arrived with their IR lasers zeroed. That’s great and helps to save a ton of time.
Mirroring the daylight training we started off with rifle warmups under NODS at both 25 and 50 yards.
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To be finished- more to come....
We moved the barricades back into place and jumped right into working cover, slicing the pie and doing drop outs at night with NODs. We talked about and demonstrated the problem of spill and how to avoid that as much as possible.
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We moved to pistol work at night. Some students shot this with nothing but iron sights and their NODS. Several had DBAL-PL’s and various other IR lasers, a few had Trijicon RMRs or Holosun models. Everyone got a change to try others equipment out as well.
After some basic pistol drills we went into working cover with the pistol at night also.
Finally we ended the “square range” portion of the night vision portion of the class with transition to pistol while under NV.
The final exercise was a team “spot and shoot” involving a 6 man team taking a position on a hillside and engaging camouflaged targets at distance. This was done twice.
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I would like to thank everyone for coming and making this a great success. There are 4 spots left on Midnight Rendezvous 2.0 in February- our other Spring NV classes are already sold out. We “may” add another 1.0 class later in the Spring.
Some daylight pics as well-
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A movement drill done DRY (why you see no ear pro on some people) during the day.
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Working cover during the day.
