Only a Game

Competition teaches problem solving under pressure

Competitive shooting isn’t real, it’s only a game.  Combat sports are just that: sports. In a real fight, it will be different.  In a real fight there won’t be boundaries, there won’t be safety officers, judges, and referees.  It won’t be Marquis of Queensbury rules.  Conditions will be austere. The reliability of your equipment will matter more than its accuracy, power, or round capacity.  The light will be too bright, or too dim.  The ground will be uneven, muddy, dusty, or hard.  Most importantly, your opponent will most likely be in the prime of his youth. He will most likely be stronger and faster than you. He probably had a harder childhood than you.  He will likely be under the influence of multiple drugs that will alter his reasoning, motivations, and pain tolerance to a state that you can only imagine.  Even if he is not tripping, he has probably experienced enough physical pain in his short life so as to be unimpressed by anything you can dish out.  He may be unwise, but he will be cunning, and he wants to win.  You have something he wants, and he will marshal all of the above- mentioned advantages to take it from you.  While he is at it, he will think up a couple of new angles that I haven’t thought of, and neither have you.  In order to prevail, you will have to solve problems on the fly, under pressure, and fast.

How do we train for this fight, when it is so different from a competition?

We compete.

Is that a contradiction? Yes and no.

What are the ways that we train?  All training can be grouped into one of three broad categories: Drill, Storytelling, and Play.

Drill is what you do when you practice your draw stroke, when a boxer punches a bag, and when the formation of Greek hoplites learned to march and maneuver around the battle field without breaking ranks.  It is, I suspect, the newest form of training; and aside from target practice with projectile weapons, probably wasn’t practiced until men started fighting in close order formations.  By utilizing drill, we learn to execute that prefect punch, and that precise shot.  We make the correct form a part of our nature, so that it can be executed under pressure, without thinking.  Drill does not teach us how to solve a problem, it simply frees up our mind from the difficulty of the basics, so that we can solve the problem.

Drill is how we practice a particular skill until it can executed without thought, freeing up the mind for other problems

Story telling is much older, and uniquely human.  Around the campfire, old men transmit the lessons from their battles to the young braves.  You carry around the experience of others, and take them into battle with you.  Story telling gives us the framework for solving problems.  If your problem looks like the one described in the story, try a solution that looks like the one from the story.

Consider the story of Mike Rousseau.  Rousseau was fighting in Mozambique when he found himself facing an adversary armed with an AK47. Rousseau drew his pistol, and shot his adversary twice in the chest.  When his enemy did not go down, he took a more careful aim, and shot him in the head.  He later had opportunity to tell the story of this battle to Jeff Cooper, who related it to many more people.  Literally thousands of people have learned from this story, and a great many have used it to their own benefit in combat.

Storytelling is how we learn what skills to apply to a given problem.

Finally, we learn by playing games.  Even animals play games.  Why does the cat give a half- dead mouse to her kittens to play with?  Why do those same kittens chase a ball of yarn, or each other, or even their own tails?  So that they will learn to hunt.  Our oldest sports were training for war.  Track and field, wrestling, and boxing are good examples.  The Nordic sports, especially biathlon, grew up in nations where men fought on skis.  American football, one of the newest sports, is a scale model of Napoleonic warfare.  Hunting and fishing have continued as sports for thousands of years after they were no longer necessary for food.  It is not a coincidence that hunting is always practiced by the societies’ warrior class, be they the impoverished farmers of Appalachia, or the landed gentry of Britain.

Games, sports, and competitions give us practice solving problems on the fly, and under pressure, against able- bodied, living, thinking opponents.  Whether we are calling a coyote into rifle range, stalking a trout, wrestling on the mat, sparring in the ring, or estimating the wind value in a high power match, we are practicing our problems solving skills, and pitting our brains and bodies against the other brains and bodies in the contest.

How does this square with everything I said in the opening paragraph about games, sports, and competitions not being “real”?  Of course they aren’t real, but that does not mean that they are without value.  In order to realize the full value of a game, we need to remember that is just a game.  The game is a problems solving exercise that will differ in multiple key ways from the real fight.  We identify those key differences through storytelling.  We execute the solutions through drill.

 

Every shot counts

Our patrol had walked into a nasty ambush, and it was not going well for us.  We were on the low ground, and our adversaries were raining down plunging fire from the top of a steep bluff.    Our patrol leader had determined that this was a near ambush, and ordered us to assault through the enemy position.  Juan, my fire team leader, led the charge up the slope.  It is hard to over- emphasize the confusion as we struggled through the thorns and rocks, near misses from the enemy buzzing our harness.  We almost immediately found ourselves channeled in a narrow draw that afforded the only footing up the slope.  Suddenly, an enemy head appeared at the crest of the hill. The young man beside me, Madison, raised his M4, fired over Juan’s back, and missed, “killing” Juan.  This was a training exercise utilizing blanks and miles gear, but the lessons are widely applicable.

Every bullet you fire hits something, even the shots that miss their intended target.

Read that sentence again, slowly, and think about it.

Newton’s law of gravity dictates that everything that goes up, comes back down.

Cooper’s fourth safety rule: Know your target; its foreground, and background.

We recently learned that the deputy who was killed in the shooting at the Border Lines bar was shot in the heart, not by the killer, but by another responding officer.  You can read about it here: https:

//losangeles.cbslocal.com/2018/12/07/sergeant-killed-in-borderline-shooting-struck-by-friendly-fire/

Fratricide (literally, the killing of brother) is far more common in combat than anyone wants to admit 1 and we see that mirrored regularly in force on force training at One Shepherd.  In spite of taking extensive measures to avoid “friendly fire” incidents, they still happen.  Most stem from a failure to identify the enemy properly. To my knowledge, the story I related regarding Juan and Madison is the only case I know of where someone was actually aiming at an enemy, and hit a friend.  The officers responding to the Border Line shooting were from separate departments. I doubt they had the opportunity to train together prior to that call, where they had to attack into a dark bar, crowded with innocents, with the exception of one homicidal maniac; bad luck all-around.

But what about a civilian gun fight? What is the likelihood that you will not have any innocent persons within the lethal range of your weapon? Think about the Sutherlands Springs church shooting. Fortunately, Stephen Willeford was able to confront the killer outside of the church; but what if he had been forced to shoot it out in the church?   In a spree killer/active shooter situation, the killer doesn’t care who he kills, only that he kills as many people as possible.  Any shot that misses you, and strikes a noncombatant, is a win in his evil game. Will you be able to position yourself in such a way that you have a solid back stop behind your bad guy?  Greg Ellifritz recently posted a very good article about this:

https://www.activeresponsetraining.net/when-misses-hit-a-look-at-real-world-backstop-issues

One of the antidotes he touches on lightly, but I think bears repeating, is marksmanship.  When you hit your target, you don’t have stray rounds.

Anyone who has studied under Soke Jeff Hall will recognize this doodle, the shooter has killed a parrot, this is an automatic failure to complete the test.

Perhaps the most controversial part of the Hojutsu pistol training system, is the no-miss policy. The shooting portion of the Hojutsu black belt test is 158 rounds of pistol shooting, from various positions and distances, all under time pressure, with 90% accuracy. Here is the catch: if any one of those 158 rounds misses the target, it is a failure to complete the test.  You could shoot a 99% score, and one miss would disqualify you.  I have seen more people walk away from the program because of this stringent no- miss policy, than for any other reason.  They tell me, “This is too hard, I’ll never make this”, and they give up.

The no- miss policy is not an arbitrary standard, intended to make the test more difficult.  It grows out of the cold, hard truth that every bullet you fire is lethal, and every bullet you fire hits something, or somebody.  If you are a cop you might be insulated from some of the civil and criminal liability stemming from killing or wounding an innocent with an errant shot (though civilians almost certainly will not), but the legal consequences pale in comparison to the emotional consequences of having to live with such a thing on your conscience.

Are there things you can do to mitigate the risk? The late Jim Cirrillo, of the NYPD Stakeout Squad, fought countless gun battles inside of crowded stores and banks. He was famous for shooting suspects in the hips, on the belief that the downward angle of the bullet would decrease the likelihood of injury to bystanders.  He reportedly shot so many perpetrators in their neither regions, that he gained the nickname “the Proctologist” among the NYPD, but even this denotes a high level of marksmanship. He was not aiming for “center mass”, but at a specific part of the anatomy.

Marksmanship tends to deteriorate when someone is shooting back at you. If you can’t make your hits on the one way firing range, don’t expect to be any better on the two way.

If you strive for a high goal, you will improve, even if you never make the goal.  What do you want: skill, or recognition?  Strive for the goal, go after the skill, and someday it may save the life of someone you love, or that of a complete stranger.

To attend a Hojutsu Seminar go to: https://hojutsu.com/blogs/seminars

To train with One Shepherd go to:https://1shepherd.com/

 

1 E. B. Sledge With the Old Breed at Peleliu, Charles B. MacDonald Company Commander, Robert Lecki Helmet for my Pillow all recount cases of fratricide, these are just a couple of many more I could sight.