Once a year M4Carbine.net tries to hold a class where the mods, staff, and invited guests can get together for some learning on the range and some fellowship off the range. This year's class was graciously hosted by the U.S. Training Center in Moyock, N.C. (Formerly Blackwater USA) As anyone who has been there will tell you, it's one of the nicest range facilities on the planet. The versatility of the facility allows instructors the freedom to present interesting and challenging scenarios to the students to further the learning process.
Originally the class was slated to be taught by Mr. Vickers, but somehow he talked Ken Hackathorn into joining in on the fun. Ken was in excruciating back pain and yet still traveled over 8 hours on the road to get to the class, spent full days on the range in horrible weather during the class, and endured another day's journey on the road to get home while in a back brace and in what I can imagine was enough pain to leave most dudes in a fetal position crying for mama. Ken is one tough hombre. That he thought enough of us to put up with all that nonsense to help out LAV and meet a commitment to be there is awesome.
You'll notice I mentioned weather. If you've been paying attention to the news...or if you live somewhere on the eastern half of the US and you've walked outside...you've noticed that we are in the midst of a record-breaking round of storms dropping feet of snow everywhere. February in North Carolina and Virginia can be a crapshoot. It can be sunny and 75, or it can be 3 feet of snow and everything in between. In Moyock it was near-freezing rain that began at around lunchtime on TD1 and persisted for the rest of the day, becoming progressively more heavy and miserable as the day went on. Day 2 was a slightly more pleasant mixture of snow and rain with even lower temperatures. Day 3 was chilly, but dry. Cold by itself isn't so bad. Wet by itself isn't so bad. Cold and wet, however, is just miserable. Despite the weather, we still had fun and learned quite a bit.
TD1 --
We started TD1 with a safety brief and an outline of some of the content of the course. The classroom session ended with Mr. Vickers pronouncing that all of our optics were dead for that day's instruction. We broke into two groups and headed to the range, with my group going with LAV for carbine instruction. I was actually kind of glad that Mr. Vickers terminated our optics as that gave me a chance to pull my as-yet-unfired Daniel Defense XV upper out of the box and use it since several others still needed to zero their iron sights. Not only did the upper work perfectly out of the box, it was a couple of clicks on the front sight away from being perfectly zeroed from the box.
After doing some basic zeroing...and personally spending a little time drooling over Buck's LAPD semi-auto Thompson...we moved on to a couple of drills.
Then Mr. Vickers went on to teach us a point shooting technique with the carbine. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. "Speed is fine, accuracy is final" spent an entire morning's instruction on point shooting with the carbine. Why? Because if you have an iron sighted weapon in low light, you are basically stuck point shooting without a light on the target you can use to define your sight picture. Mr. Vickers showed us a very viable technique that works quite well at close range, when moving, and even at longer ranges. We did a point shooting walkback drill that went back almost to 100 yards with people still making solid hits on the steel target at that range....with taped up sights. The top performer on the walkback was Buck with his Tommy gun. It was rather funny as most people who missed missed because they were shooting over the target, misjudging the technique Mr. Vickers showed us. We were continually directed to aim low. Buck, however, had to lob that 230 grain bullet in there and so he had to aim high.
It was rather comical to see all the modern hardware on the line flame out and then to see Buck step up with his old Gat and BANG......IthinkIcan, IthinkIcan, IthinkIcan...........tink. Hit.
After breaking for lunch we swapped ranges and my group went to do pistol stuff with Ken. By this point the rain had started in earnest and everyone was bundled up in their rain gear and gloves. Ken took us through a block of pistol instruction where he used some of his standard assessment and skill drills to give us a measure of where we were in our handgun skills. This list is shamelessly stolen from Mark5pt56:
PISTOL
1, 2, 3 Drill (18 shots)
IPSC/IDPA TARGET, draw, 1, 2, 3 shots.
5 yards-SHO-head
10 yards-2HS-body
20 yards-2HS-body
1-5 Drill (static and moving) (15/30 shots)
3 IPSC/IDPA targets. Par is 20 seconds, 15 good, 10 really good, 1 second added for each miss (outside of A zone) 15 shots total.
10 yards, body shots, 1 on #1, 2 on #2, 3 on #3, 4 on #2 and 5 on #1.
HACKATHORN Head Drill (9 shots)
IPSC/IDPA target. 3 SECOND PAR.
7 yards (do w/o draw, then work to draw) One shot per. #1-left-right, #2-right-left, #3-center, and then R-L/L-R.
COMPASS DRILL (12 shots)
IPSC/IDPA target, body
Start at 12 yards, 3 shots forward, 3 back, 3 left and then 3 right
COMPASS DRILL W/STATIC SHOT (16 SHOTS)
Same drill but with static head shot at end of each movement.
RELOAD DRILL (5 shots)
IPSC/IDPA target. 3 second par. 5 repetitions.
10 yards, start with slide lock, mag in, reload and one shot.
SWITCH HANDS/EYE (12 SHOTS)
IPSC/IDPA TARGET
10 yards, shoot one right handed/right eye, switch to left hand/eye, repeat six times
It's a great set of drills.
At around 3:45 pm we were all pretty much freezing and soaking wet. Mr. Vickers drove up in the Mystery Van and told us that he was pulling the plug on his section due to overall misery. We wrapped it up shortly after that and headed back to the classroom.
Mr. Vickers gave a written test in the last mod/staff class that was, and I'm quoting him directly here, mainly for his own amusement. He again decided to amuse himself with a written test based on the AR-10 family of rifles, the FN family of 5.56/.223 weapons, the SVD family of rifles, and the Browning Hi-Power pistols. Out of over a dozen questions I managed to snag the highest score with 9 correct answers. Most scores were....um....considerably lower. How did I end up with the high score in the room, you ask? Easy: Templar hadn't shown up yet.**
Hey, a win by default is still a win. I takes it however I can gets it.
After making fun of our collective ignorance (particularly the guy who answered that the distinguishing characteristic of the first AR-10 magazine was that it was clear) and handing out some SWAG graciously provided to us by Magpul (PMAGs, BAD levers, and AFGs) and the nice people who make TW-25B, we headed back to the hotel for some pizza and beer and fellowship.
TD2 --
.
TD3 --
Thankfully the weather on TD3 was much better than on the previous days. It was still cold, but at least there was no precipitation.
We spent the day running through some drills scored for accuracy like the carbine version of the 1-2-3-4-5 drill. The drill is run at 35 yards for the carbine and requires 3 targets. The shooter fires 1 round on target 1, 2 rounds on target 2, 3 rounds on target 3, then 4 rounds on target 4 and then 5 rounds on target 1. Hits outside the A zone add seconds to your overall time.
The standard given to us was a 20 second passing grade. 15 seconds or less was really good. 10 seconds or less was phenomenal.
I scored a 10.90, the high score until Grant tried it. Grant-hawk with his zero recoil suppressed wunderrifle did it a little more than a second better, which I regard as worthless since he was cheating. ***
After lunch we did some team drills involving shooting on the move. 6 shooters per team, and each shooter's performance was scored to come up with the team's overall performance. Team names, as is the standard in Vickers courses, were approved based on the entertainment value for LAV. Team "Aim Fast, Miss Faster", of which I was a part, won the drill. Our team captain was Josh of Grey Group who told me that I seemed to be one of the faster and more accurate shooters there. I secretly wondered if he'd lost his contacts or something.
After the last drill (and note that I'm skipping over some stuff for the sake of brevity...and yes, the first person to joke about my brevity in an AAR will get an internet noogie) we headed back to the classroom for a little session on the world according to Ken and Larry.
The first item was a question:
If we had to be sent to a remote place with little support resources and needed a handgun that we expected to have to employ to save our bacon, what handgun would we take?
The majority of the class answered: Glock 17. A smaller number answered Glock 19. A still smaller contingent answered Sig P226. One dude answered M&P...and no, it wasn't me. As much as I don't like them, I also picked the G17.
This led to a rundown of the state of pistoldom from Ken. Turns out 9mm Glocks, particularly the G17, are pretty darn reliable guns. .40 caliber Glocks are the most problematic service pistol in America. 10mm Glocks seem to work pretty good. The M&P has the potential to one day unseat the 9mm Glock's current status as the standard for reliability and durability by which other weapons are judged, but it has not accomplished that yet.
The 1911 is a dying platform. Keep in mind that this was said in a room with some of the world's foremost 1911 experts. A few of the students in the class (including me) were die-hard 1911 guys in the past and have transitioned to combat tupperware. The last remaining 1911 holdout in the class (ErikL) stated that this was his last class with a 1911.
After that we had a brief discussion of terminal ballistics where a gentleman who works for an agency that has killed a lot of scumbags with modern 9mm JHP ammo stated that their department was seeing superb results in the field with their 9mm guns. Mr. Vickers added that in all the training he has done he has yet to encounter a department using 9mm's with good ammo that have complained about the performance they've seen with the 9mm on the street. "9mm if you can carry JHP ammo, .45 if you're stuck with ball."
It was quite surreal for a dude who grew up reading about the 1911 and about terminal ballistics in gun magazines. When I was reading all that stuff all those years ago I never dreamed I would be in the same room with a guy like Ken hearing this kind of stuff.
All in all we didn't shoot very many rounds. I've said this about prior Vickers/Hackathorn courses, but it bears repeating here: Low round count does not translate into low value. I took away some valuable lessons from this course in addition to all the fun and enjoyment usually attendant when the M4C regulars get together. Any time spent learning from instructors the caliber of Ken and Larry is well spent, and any money put into the effort is a sound investment.
Thanks to USTC for hosting us, Magpul and Milcomm for the swag, Ken for enduring excruciating pain just to be there, Larry for not punching me in the head first thing on Thursday night, Sylvan for doing some logistics work on the hotel arrangements and the frangible ammo, Buck and the taxpayers of L.A. for letting me play with the Thompson, and lastly to Dinger for the magnificent weather.
** Note: We gave the same quiz to Templar later over some pizza and beer (water, in my case) and he bested my score by only missing a single question. Why is this at the bottom of the AAR as a note? Because it's my AAR, dammit.
*** Note: Why is Grant's rifle cheating? Because he has gone on and on and on about how little recoil it has and how fast it is and I was using a basic Colt 6920. Besides, it's my AAR, dammit.
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Originally Posted by C45P312
Something about standing in 38 degree rain for hours on end just kind of beats you down. Everything I owned was 100% soaked to include the small ap on my BUIS. I now have a new SOP for shooting my AR. It goes like this:
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