Out of The Desert

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Made it back.


No extra holes in me.



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The class was awesome. Tons of fun. My brother went through the whole thing shooting left-handed, and he shot better than almost everyone in the class. But the thing that gave me the most pleasure and pride was watching him teach and coach everyone around him. The class had forty students and only four instructors, so there was not a lot of time for one-on-one instruction and 'fine-tuning'. My brother worked with the other students around him constantly, and by the end of the class people were coming up to him at every break with questions and wanting help with some aspect of their draw, or press-out, or trigger control. And he talked all the time about integrating weapons work with empty-hand techniques, about the need for combatives as part of your training, how the gun won't solve every problem, how over-reliance on it can kill you faster than not having a gun at all sometimes, etc.

He is an encyclopedia of killing.


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And he is the nicest person I know.




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Now to brag on me:


I shot the test clean.



The test is the most demanding I've ever seen in a firearms training class. To graduate you have to get between 70 and 90 percent hits, and only eight students out of forty graduated. To get a distinguished graduate level you have to get above 90 percent on the test. I was the only DG in the class, and I did not miss a single shot.

Yay for me.


Also, they have a last-man-standing, man-on-man competition where students shoot against each other, engaging a hostage-taker target at ten yards, a little steel plate about three inches wide that is behind a hostage target. You shoot that little plate and don't hit the hostage, then you knock down two more steel targets at about twenty yards. It's a nice balance of speed, accuracy, and stress.

Yours truly was the last man standing.


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I may be all kinds of fucked up, but I can sure as shit shoot you dead in the blink of an eye.




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That's what I love about going out there. Yeah, its a pain in the butt, and its hard, and costs money and time, but look how it does!


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Now I am back and can pay attention to the things that really matter. To my wonderful, patient, and understanding wife. To my sweet little bull dog. To my embattled kid.


And wade back into the tide of shit that covered my desk while I was out having fun.




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It is good to be home.




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Namaste.



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