P&S ModCast 452 - Tales of Old(er) and Lessons Learned

Kurt Weber explains the improvements he observed in weapons, equipment, and training in the U.S. Army since the 80's.

Host: Matt Landfair

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Okay, I guess it's going now. So yeah, so far
I am seeing the picture I have. I see two
pictures as a matter of fact. The first one that
you sent was one I was considering to be the cover.
But then I saw the one with the with basically
all the HK stuff, and I thought, oh, no, this
has to be it.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
That was the HK. One was in Thailand.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
Nineteen ninety three's right before, no, probably ninety two. That
was right before that was the last Echo team of
the prehistoric era. Because my team broke up right after that.
Everyone everybody PCs except me and I got all new people,

(00:48):
which we so we tried really hard to avoid doing that.
But sometimes the Army PCs system just doesn't do you
any favors.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
Kind of goes with something that Presburg was talking about
two years ago. Just yeah, the Army seems to be
its own worst enemy when it comes to being offerative
in certain aspects very much.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
So.

Speaker 3 (01:14):
I know all former unit guys will will take offense
to me.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
Saying this, but like they're they're not superman or super soldiers.

Speaker 3 (01:27):
Like they're really really really good at what their job is.
But you know, at the stiffs and I'm sure in
the range of regiment, even though I was never there.
I know in on the regular side of SF, like,

(01:48):
there are guys who are just absolute superstar studs who
would give on an individual level, would give any member
of the unit a run for their money. You know,
maybe on one day the Delta guy would come out ahead,
maybe on another day the other guy.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
Would come out ahead.

Speaker 3 (02:10):
The difference, the two main differences are their worst guy
is way better, like orders of magnitude better than our
worst guy. Yeah, because like if they have a bad guy,
he doesn't last, whereas if we have a bad guy.

(02:32):
To kick a guy out of Special Forces is a chore.
It's a chore because your command fights you all the
way because they've already invested, you know, millions of dollars
and years of training to get that guy to where
he is. And are you sure there's not just one

(02:52):
more thing you could try to maybe turn him into
a productive member of the team. And it's like, you know,
by the time I'm filling the paperwork to kick a
guy out of the Army, it's like we've we've tried everything,
Like there there's nothing left and they don't have that problem.

Speaker 2 (03:10):
If you don't fit, You're gone. Like that day. There
there's no no hemming and hang.

Speaker 3 (03:18):
So you know, in that sense, they're they're they're much
better able to keep only the best, whereas in every
other unit, some of your guys are the best, but
some of your guys aren't, and you have to do
the best you can whip them. And then the the
other thing is their team longevity. It's something I alluded

(03:42):
to with the PCs breakup with With us, a third
of our unit exchanged every year, you know, so, so
literally every year in the summer, usually starting in June.
By the end of August, sometimes early September, a third
of your unit is brand new.

Speaker 2 (04:01):
They've just been assigned to you.

Speaker 1 (04:03):
How does that work?

Speaker 3 (04:05):
Not very well, Yeah, because usually it takes a year
or two before a guy is out of school and
comfortable with moving at the speed that we expect them
to move at.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yeah, I don't know what.

Speaker 3 (04:27):
I do know what all the sister are like, because
I did go and grade all of them when I
worked at Sephardic. Like, we move really fast, maybe not
quite as fast as everyone from from Delta does, but
like my team, especially like you were expected to keep

(04:48):
up when when I took off like a rape date
through the house, you were expected to keep up with
me and do your job along the way and getting
a guy out of that, you know, safety thing at
schoolhouse where there's no running in the shootouse. In real life,
there absolutely is running. In fact, you should be running

(05:10):
every time. You don't absolutely have to slow to a
walk in order to either give yourself time to identify
a target or to make the shot on a target
because the shot is you know, some some order different
than than normal, either by distance or size of the
target cover or something.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
Yeah, and then as soon as that's done, you should
be running again.

Speaker 3 (05:34):
And it takes a long time to work guys out
of that because they've only been told their whole career
that you know, I don't run in the shootouse. I
only walk at a controlled pace. Like that's great if
you're going slow in the shootouse, but we don't.

Speaker 2 (05:50):
We don't have that time.

Speaker 1 (05:54):
So that that's going to be an interesting aspect to
hear some feedback on with a law enforcement listeners, because
there are a couple of schools have thought with literal
different schools on room clearing and the speeds that people
should be going and the tactics being used. That's I
like it speed.

Speaker 2 (06:17):
My philosophy with speed and CQB.

Speaker 3 (06:19):
Speed doesn't come from like the quickness of the actions
that you're doing. It comes from eliminating everything that's not CQB.
So that movement from when I enter the breach point
through the room, as I'm clearing my sector, fire to

(06:41):
get to my dominating position like that time. The faster
I can do that, the faster I've accomplished clearing the room.
So if I can do that at a run, I
should Yeah. If I can't, I should slow to a
pace that allows me to clear my sector, identify tarig
and make good shots on those targets that require them,

(07:05):
and to start giving commands on targets that don't require
If I can do that running, I should do that running,
and then I get to.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
My dominating position.

Speaker 3 (07:15):
The rest of my teams are in their dominating positions.
We've achieved the security that we're able to in that room,
and it's time to move to the next one. Why
should I walk to the next door, Like that's just
wasted time. How I get fast is by eliminating all
of that wasted time.

Speaker 2 (07:33):
So I run to the next door.

Speaker 3 (07:36):
By the time I get there, I've you know, my
flash bang's already out. Or if I'm a shotgun preacher,
my shotgun is already out. I've already stowed my rifle.
My shotgun is ready. All I'm doing is I'm looking
for the team to make sure that they're they're ready
when I get to the door with the shotgun so
that I can breach it and get out of their
way and let them in. And then they enter, I enter,

(07:56):
and we're back to fast and like doing all of
those things and eliminating that gap between standing over there
in that corner to getting to that door that needs
to be breached, Like that's where the speed comes from.

Speaker 1 (08:14):
So if I were to restate, essentially speed comes in
between the times of work. You're eliminating that gap, ye, and.

Speaker 2 (08:24):
Then work is done at the pace you need.

Speaker 3 (08:26):
To do to do it successful, yep, yep, and if
it can be done at a run, Like there's a
lot of things. You know, you come into a room,
you're clearing your sector. There's a bad guy at full presentation.
He's got an ak strap to him and he's bringing
it up to the firing position at seven meters.

Speaker 2 (08:46):
I can take that shot at a dead sprint, no problem.

Speaker 3 (08:49):
And I'm going to get my heads now, he's thirty
five meters away, he's got some intermittent cover between me
and him. It's at night on even terrain. Yes, I'm
going to have to slow down to make that shot.
But if I can run and make the shot, I'm
going to.

Speaker 1 (09:06):
Yeah, well that also kind of that works with the
idea of the and I'm thinking law enforcement here because
that's my frame of reference, active shooter response. More time passes,
more people are killed, or we will be a shot. Absolutely,
So we need to be fast and we need to

(09:26):
be fast to respond to if we're not creating a
diversion to get the or not a diversion, but if
we're not pulling the attention away from the killing, so
the shooter starts focusing on us. We need to be
putting ourselves in.

Speaker 3 (09:41):
A position to be doing that, especially in that especially
in that situation.

Speaker 2 (09:47):
Yeah, I mean, that was the whole.

Speaker 3 (09:50):
Rub on military CQB at the very beginning of g WAT,
is that we had all been trained for hostage rescue
like that.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
That was why we did CQB.

Speaker 3 (10:03):
You know, the idea of doing it in order to
get bad guys. That was something police did in order
to like, we don't secure buildings, like that's not if
you just need a building destroyed. We have jade ams
like you don't send you don't send eighteen guys with
them four us Like that's just crazy talk. But that's

(10:26):
what it turned into and learning that had to change
how we entered so that's where the you know, the
combat clearing and all that stuff came from.

Speaker 2 (10:37):
We were so used to doing.

Speaker 3 (10:39):
Hostage rescue where speed is the most important factor.

Speaker 2 (10:46):
To getting the hostages out alive.

Speaker 3 (10:48):
That like, you ran at everything you did at full
speed because that's the only way to make it successful.
The best on screen real life performance of it is
TIGHTE Delta forced the Italian job into the YouTube search
bar and watch how fast they move from getting off

(11:12):
the helicopters to complete saturation of the building and having
guys standing in the room where the hostages are like,
it's crazy fast, and that's how fast you have to
go because that's what prevents the bad guys from going
all heck, the Americans are here, we need to go
kill our hostages so that they can't rescue them. Like,

(11:33):
you don't ever give them that time to react by
being faster than they are.

Speaker 1 (11:37):
Yeah, yeah, that's awesome.

Speaker 3 (11:42):
So totally we got totally off track, like, oh no,
oh no, it's this is this is?

Speaker 1 (11:48):
I like it. I don't. I think this is right on.
I messaged you out of the blue. I had a
helmet question for you, and it was talking about Okay,
what where do you do differentiate when you're wearing the
bump helmet? Yeah, there you go versus some form of
ballistic And that's what kind of created this this discussion,

(12:09):
and you were you were provided so much cool info,
and I said, why don't we turn this into a podcast?
Because I think the stuff that's being shared this is,
this is this reminds me of why we started the
podcast to begin with. It's because some of these conversations
behind the scenes are so cool and there's no reason
people shouldn't hear about this. So let's just do a

(12:31):
podcast and talk about it. So here we are, So
here we are, here we are. So we've talked a
bunch of times. You've been on the podcast a bunch
of times. What's your background? When did you when did
you enlist?

Speaker 2 (12:46):
What were you hoping to do. I came in the
Army in nineteen eighty three. I enlisted on a whim.

Speaker 3 (12:56):
I was working in a restaurant to get food, because
if you're around the kitchen, you can oftentimes eat for free.
I was in college as a full time student, and
one of the guys that I worked with needed a
ride to the Army recruiter.

Speaker 2 (13:18):
He was not.

Speaker 3 (13:19):
Probably going to go anywhere with his life and decided
at some point that he would join the military.

Speaker 2 (13:27):
So I said, sure, you know.

Speaker 3 (13:30):
I told the boss, Hey, I'm gonna leave for a
couple hours taking Chris to go to the Recruiter'd be
back at you know, three o'clock this afternoon, And.

Speaker 2 (13:42):
In fact I signed up.

Speaker 3 (13:44):
And so like, no, no no plan, no idea what
I was doing. I signed up for the Infantry. My
recruiter told me a little bit of a fib said
I'd be able to go ranger or special Forces right
from Infantry basic, that they'd come in and recruit and

(14:05):
I'd be able to go that that in fact was
not the case, But I spent forty years time.

Speaker 1 (14:13):
Oh at the time, though, what was your impression of
what rangers did versus what special forces did.

Speaker 3 (14:19):
I shot mostly shotgun stuff, mostly trap and skeet with
some guys who were Ranger Company guys in Vietnam and
a couple of SF guys in Vietnam, and so like,

(14:40):
that was my understanding of what they did. Rangers did
deep reconnaissance patrols in small elements of Rangers, and SF
did deep reconnaissance control patrols across border lines, usually with
one or two Americans and six to ten locals. To me,

(15:02):
that's what That's what I knew of their operations because
that's what they talked about. Beyond that, I really didn't
have any idea whatsoever. So I spent four years in
the infantry. It turned out to be a really awesome experience.
We were the first at the time switching over to

(15:24):
a light infantry battalion was the big push from Secretary
of the Army and the d O D. And my
battalion was the test battalion to do the proof of concept,
and so we got access to a lot of things
that most people never would in a you know, conventional

(15:45):
not airborne infantry unit. Got to go to amphibious reconnaissance school,
got to go to really a whole bunch of schools,
too many to list among them. I went to a
a CQB course, a four week CQB course taught by

(16:06):
a bunch of Ranger Battalion guys and what what I'm
now assuming we're probably two Delta guys were there. We
learned how to do CQB under mvgs under white light
at night during the daytime, and learned a bunch of stuff.
And it was all nobody knew what a light infantry

(16:27):
battalion could do, so teach them and everything cool, and
then let's see if.

Speaker 2 (16:32):
They can go do that. So it was a it
was a really good experience.

Speaker 1 (16:38):
So did that basically set you up for success to
go to the next level?

Speaker 2 (16:43):
In a way? It did?

Speaker 3 (16:44):
But and that was again happenstance. I was transitioning out
of the Army. I had a couple of weeks left.
I'd been accepted back to college.

Speaker 2 (16:58):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (16:59):
I told the recruiter a couple months before that the
only way I'd go is if I could go to SF.
That's the only way I'd stay in the army. And
at the time SF was closed for recruitment. You couldn't,
I couldn't couldn't join for for like that couple of
months and I was like, well, okay, then, you know,
I was in college when I when I came here,

(17:22):
I'll just go back. And so I had been accepted
back and the recruiter came running into my office one
day and said, SF is open, but I need to
know like today is because I was getting out of
the Army in like two weeks. And he's like, I
have to do the paperwork today if you want to

(17:42):
do it, and so I did. And that became my
next eighteen years of being on temporary duty and Special Forces,
where every every enlistment was like I'm only doing it
this and then I'm getting out. And that that lasted
for quite a while, much longer than I thought it would.

Speaker 1 (18:04):
So what was the carrot on each step?

Speaker 2 (18:09):
Not really a carrot, just curiosity.

Speaker 3 (18:15):
I had gone about as far as I could in
the infantry. A couple of our guys had left to
go to Ranger Battalion.

Speaker 2 (18:26):
I talked to them.

Speaker 3 (18:27):
That didn't really seem like where I wanted to be. Uh,
their their lifestyle. I'm a lot more laid back. My
privates would probably disagree, but like I was a lot
more laid back than you're than I wanted to be
as a Ranger E five or E six uh, and

(18:52):
SF seemed a lot more comfortable. At that point I'd
worked with I'd worked with SF a couple of times
in Panama and Honduras. I had worked with Rangers a
couple of times on different exercises, and the SF guys
just seemed more of a It was a better fit

(19:14):
for me, So I joined went there, got to my
first team, and.

Speaker 2 (19:24):
It was.

Speaker 3 (19:26):
Everything that could go wrong or everything that could be
bad in a peacetime army unit was it was right
there on that team.

Speaker 2 (19:37):
So I realized right away it was like my first day.

Speaker 3 (19:41):
All I could think about was what a huge mistake
I had made, and like, at this point I could
be finishing off another semester of college on my way
to a good job.

Speaker 2 (19:51):
Ye Luckily that didn't last very long.

Speaker 3 (19:57):
I saw some guys walking through the Box one day.

Speaker 2 (20:01):
That is our building.

Speaker 3 (20:02):
We called it the Box because it's it's an old
listening station, so there's no windows. I saw some guys
walking through with some equipment that didn't look like the
equipment that we had.

Speaker 2 (20:14):
It was like, who are you guys, and how do
I get there. Yeah, like you, we're nobody, and you
don't when when it's time for you to come, you'll
you'll know.

Speaker 3 (20:25):
I went and did on a did a deployment with
one of their teams. Started talking to him and it
was like they were at the range a lot and
shot and I shot.

Speaker 2 (20:38):
I was a good shot, So that seemed like a
good fit.

Speaker 3 (20:44):
And I didn't know what else they did, but I
knew there was shooting involved, and I wanted to do that,
So I started pestering their command. And about two years later,
I got the chance to do that, and I never left.

Speaker 1 (21:01):
That's cool, thankfully.

Speaker 2 (21:03):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (21:04):
Most of the most of the guys that come into
the program, would you know, they come in for an assignment.

Speaker 2 (21:09):
It's a three year assignment.

Speaker 1 (21:12):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (21:12):
They part of which involves going to the to the
training course. They come out of that. You know, it's
a two month CQB course.

Speaker 2 (21:23):
Uh. They come out of that.

Speaker 3 (21:24):
So they've got, you know a little bit a little
bit less than three years now at their home station.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
Uh, and then that's the last time they do it. Uh.

Speaker 3 (21:35):
I stayed the three years. I went to the schoolhouse,
I came back to the unit.

Speaker 2 (21:41):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (21:41):
In between I did stuff with the with the command
to keep my feet wet, and because I having looked
at what everybody else in Special Forces was doing and
looking what they were doing, I wanted to do that.

Speaker 2 (21:55):
Yeah, I never wanted to go back.

Speaker 1 (22:01):
Now looking back on it, when you were initially in
that that light infantry unit and you were sent to
all these different classes, how did that compare to what
you wound up going through through s F Was there
are there any parallels?

Speaker 2 (22:17):
The CQB, Like a lot.

Speaker 3 (22:23):
Of CQB has changed pretty significantly, especially through GYT, but
a lot of it really hasn't.

Speaker 1 (22:33):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (22:35):
You know the.

Speaker 3 (22:38):
Well people misunderstand CQB uh because I think partly because
of the way that it's taught to them. Like in
the military, everything has it. You have to be able
to define everything, Like every term that you use has
to have a doctrinal definition.

Speaker 2 (22:57):
Uh. CQB is a.

Speaker 3 (23:00):
Technique of fire maneuver conducted in an urban space. So
you know, if you're doing fire maneuver in the infantry
in the woods, you're bounding by buddy team or by
fire team, You're you're moving forward. Somebody picks up suppress

(23:20):
a fire, another team moves forward, right that's individual movement techniques,
and your movement under fire, she.

Speaker 2 (23:28):
Can be it is the same way. It's a movement technique.

Speaker 3 (23:31):
You're moving under fire, only now it's in an urban environment.
And so that you know, enter and go left, right,
go left right like that hasn't changed. That's the same
that I learned in nineteen eighty four. You enter the room,
one guy goes left, one guy goes right, one guy
goes left, one guy goes right. That's never changed, you know,

(23:54):
unless the room demands that you can't do that. But
you know those basics, the interlocking sectors of fire like that,
that's straight out of an infantry manual. If you look
at a lazy W defensive line, those interlocking sectors of
fire work the exact same way that they do inside

(24:15):
of a room, and for the same reasons.

Speaker 2 (24:20):
You know, because it's effective.

Speaker 3 (24:23):
If you're if you're just shooting straight in front of
you and that's all you do, You've you're ignoring all
those things off to the side that may not be
an immediate effect to you. They may be affecting the
person or the unit on your left and right. But hey,
if that dude gets rolled up, guess what that affects you,

(24:43):
So you need to look over there and you need
to be able to fire in that direction because it
saves him, but saving him saves you.

Speaker 1 (24:51):
Yeah, yeah, yes, it's it's establishing positions of dominance and
it's yepah, you're providing advantage for yourself and your team.

Speaker 3 (25:04):
Yeah, you're the Some of the terminology has changed, points
of domination, dominating positions, fatal funnel, funnel of death. Different
units used different explanations for them, but really they're all
the same.

Speaker 2 (25:20):
Like, most of those things are still the way I
learned them in nineteen eighty three, nineteen eighty four.

Speaker 1 (25:29):
So now comparing that what you learned initially to what's
going on now, do you see that it's primarily the
verbage that's the biggest change.

Speaker 3 (25:40):
The verbage has changed. A lot of the TTMP has changed.
Like the first method of entry that I learned was
a high low criss cross at the front door. So
one guy's down on his knees on one side and
the other guys up on the other side, and when

(26:02):
they get the signal to go, the guy that's down
on his knees, he kind of crab walks into the
room and the guy that's standing up. Once the guy
crab walks into the room, he walks in behind him
and they go in opposite directions. Thankfully that's gone. We
didn't have SIMS at the time. I wish we would

(26:22):
have because you could have disproven it like right right
from the get go, and unfortunately it had to be
disproved under live fire.

Speaker 1 (26:31):
YEP.

Speaker 3 (26:31):
I think we were told that it was some Miami
police in a drug raid that got people shot up
because they got the guy trying to crab walk through
the door and started shooting him, which tied him up
in the doorway, which meant everybody else got tied up.
So then you've got, you know, three or four people

(26:52):
jammed in a doorway with people shooting at the doorway.

Speaker 1 (26:55):
And there's no speed or surprise, now no nowhere to go.

Speaker 3 (27:00):
If you can't if you can't go forward because there's
a guy there, you can't go backward because there's people
pushing on you from the rear, and you can't go
to the left right because you're in the in you know,
there's a door jam.

Speaker 1 (27:13):
What about the methods of teaching? How have you seen
that change?

Speaker 2 (27:19):
Really, that's an individual thing.

Speaker 1 (27:21):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (27:24):
You know, because different people have different.

Speaker 3 (27:27):
Styles of teaching, I'll say I've like good and bad.
My instructor at Sephardic he's recently passed on, so I
won't speak ill of him by name, but his idea

(27:49):
of teaching CQB was that we would lay out tape
house with engineer tape, and we would rehearse it until
every person knew every step they were.

Speaker 2 (28:00):
Going to take in every room.

Speaker 3 (28:03):
And then maybe if you started at eight o'clock in
the morning, which was you know when we started, maybe
by eleven thirty eleven forty five, you'd be able to
get a hot run in and then go to lunch
and then come back in and change the rooms up,
and we'd start dry running tape again, and then maybe

(28:24):
we did one hot run in before dinner could be Could.

Speaker 1 (28:29):
This method be why so many students in the past
are staring at the ground as they're entering a room
versus having their eyes up. Yes, because they don't want
to walk through those imaginary walls.

Speaker 2 (28:42):
Yes, that's a.

Speaker 3 (28:44):
Big part of it. It's also it's just really easy
to be lazy. Your rifles pointed down at the ground.
There's no reason your eyes shouldn't be pointed down at
the ground too.

Speaker 2 (28:57):
Just in case. Yeah, you know, other teams, we could
hear them going hot, like right from the very beginning
as a team leader, when I taught it for State
Department and when I would teach it really back to
the unit.

Speaker 3 (29:17):
Because the school, the purpose of Sephardic is to get
all of the students to an acceptably safe level where
they can integrate into a team, and then it's up
to the team to teach them the specific TTMP that
that team uses to conduct operations. Right, they're not trying

(29:38):
to teach you everything because it's it's an eight weeks school,
and to teach you everything would be way longer than
eight weeks. You know that one one of the benefits
is that the Army will take time to teach you something.
But you know, they figured eight weeks was enough to
get you safe and we'll let your your your team

(29:59):
handle the US.

Speaker 4 (30:01):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (30:01):
So that was a big part of like my job
as an assault team leader was taking guys out of
the course and you know, decoursing them to get them
to work the way that we worked, which was you know,
go faster, shoot faster, and you need to shoot way
way better, Like you're not shooting good enough. That was
the best shot. My FARTI class is like, yeah, you

(30:23):
don't shoot good enough.

Speaker 2 (30:24):
Sorry.

Speaker 3 (30:27):
The standards are much much higher here than they were there.
But like my teaching and especially a state department when
I was in charge of the training teams, I would
tell instructors like, correct one thing, and if you can't

(30:47):
find something life threatening, to correct and just say good job.
Like if somebody screwed something up so badly that it
would get them killed, the correct that one thing, and
each instructor that's watching, whether it's two or three instructors,
each of you gets one thing, then send them out
and have them immediately come again.

Speaker 2 (31:08):
And if it's okay, like if nothing.

Speaker 3 (31:11):
Was immediate, like if that would not have got them
killed on an operation, let them keep doing it. Let
him keep doing it as many times until we run
out of AMMO. If we run out of AMMO, we'll
find a way to get more. Because something I learned
at the Rogers Shooting School, you don't learn by listening

(31:32):
to someone else talk about doing.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
You learn by doing yourself.

Speaker 3 (31:36):
And the analogy that Bill Rogers used it at school
was you know you have to swing at a fastball
to be able to hit a fastball, and in CQB
that means you need to make entry with live fire
at full speed, and you need to be shooting targets,

(31:57):
not not you know, step step, pause, not we're going
to do sims all day.

Speaker 2 (32:03):
That's that's not how you learn.

Speaker 3 (32:06):
You learn by going at full speed, shooting real bullets,
learning what That's how you learn what your teammates can
do and can't do. That's how you learn what you
can do and can't do. That's how you learn to
get over the fear of the loud noises in the
room with you is you. You have to have that stuff,
and if you don't do it, you're doing your students
a disservice if you're if you talk to them for

(32:29):
forty five minutes.

Speaker 2 (32:31):
You know, especially in the State.

Speaker 3 (32:32):
Department, we're teaching foreign police, so they don't understand us. Anyway,
that forty five minute speech about you know, approaching the
fatal funnel, he maybe got five words out of it,
and the rest of that was for you, not for
the student. So hey, when you come up here, you
need to have your gun pointed at the doorway. Don't

(32:52):
point it down to the ground, point at the door, Okay,
ready to go, and send them in. And if you
do that enough, all of those things that you want
them to pick up, they'll pick up. They'll they'll just
sort of one day they'll be at a position where
they're ready to receive it and they'll and they'll get it.
And it doesn't matter how many times you tell it

(33:14):
to them before. If they're not ready to receive it
because of their own learning, they're not ready and they're
not going to and it doesn't matter what you tell them,
you're never going to transfer that knowledge.

Speaker 1 (33:27):
Absolutely. The case in point that I've seen is conducting
some form of active shooter training and if someone is
not familiar with how their weapon functions, or if they
can't clear malfunctions yep, you know what, or.

Speaker 2 (33:45):
Their magazine is, how do they reload.

Speaker 1 (33:48):
It's oriented in the wrong direction? What yeah?

Speaker 3 (33:53):
Yeah, yeah. Oh. We had we at Saphardic. We had
a really good facility. It's even more amazing now. But
for its time, all of the time, for its time,
it's a it's as good a training facilities are going

(34:14):
to get.

Speaker 1 (34:15):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (34:15):
And we hosted every FBI team on the East coast,
including HRT. We hosted Delta was there at least once
a week. There's at least an assault team, if not
a troop or bigger using our range. Rangers come up

(34:36):
and use it. When we kicked them out, didn't allow
them to use it for quite a while, but then
they came back. Other military units, a lot of local
you know, any local police department that was in driving
distance would come. The one caveat to allow them to

(35:00):
use our range is they had to do our shooting test.
They didn't have to pass it, but they had to
do it. I like that whoever their command was had
to say that this is acceptable for my team and
I will accept risk of them doing life fire CQB.

(35:24):
In the four years, never had a police officer pass
it to student standard. And most of it was and
this was including HRT.

Speaker 2 (35:38):
None of their guys passed.

Speaker 3 (35:41):
Most of it was unfamiliarity with equipment, unfamiliar with their weapon,
and inability to They don't trust themselves to take hard shots,
and the test is set up in such a way that, like,
some of the shots are not easy, and you think

(36:03):
you'll be able to maneuver on the target to make
it an easier shot, and in fact you can't so
that you know part partial target that you see at
thirty five meters that when you're moving like that's the
only view you have of it. So if you don't
take it when you see the partial, you're never going
to get bullets on it. And so those, you know,

(36:24):
those aren't going to score. And it's on purpose.

Speaker 1 (36:30):
I know my late brother in law who's in nineteenth
always talked about going to Sephardic and just seem to
eat it up.

Speaker 3 (36:38):
It's it's it was a very good school. Yeah, it
was a good school when I went. It was a good.

Speaker 2 (36:48):
But different school when I was an instructor.

Speaker 3 (36:52):
It was a good but different school when I was
coming back still in the army, A good but different
school the times I visited as a as a retired guy.

Speaker 1 (37:05):
So you're saying good but different. Is that just due
to the personnel and the way they would instruct or
What were the differences.

Speaker 3 (37:13):
The different command emphasis different during during g WATT the
mission change, UH, Hostage rescue was no longer the be
all end all UH.

Speaker 2 (37:27):
There was a lot more UH what we used to call.

Speaker 3 (37:32):
Killer capture missions, counter leadership, UH, A lot more seizing
seizing terrain or going for equipment.

Speaker 2 (37:46):
The whole idea of running through.

Speaker 3 (37:50):
Like your hair is on fire to get to the
last room before the bad guys killed the hostage that
was that was gone because that's not what guys were doing.

Speaker 1 (38:02):
But did you see that paralleling and it made sense
with the reality of what the modern battlefield needed.

Speaker 3 (38:11):
In a sense yes, But in a sense no, because
what you ended up with was a whole generation of
guys who didn't have the ability to go to that
level of speed when required because they'd never done it.
They'd never seen it, no one had ever taught them

(38:31):
how to do it, and there was no one around
with experience to teach them how to do it.

Speaker 1 (38:37):
Well, it's just like what you were saying about being
in the shootouse and yeah, unless you do it, you're
not going to know how to do that. If you
want to hit the fastball, you're not going to be
able to do it unless you swing at the fasketball.

Speaker 3 (38:53):
Unless you have a picture that can throw a fastball
at you. Yeah, if you've never seen it, you don't
know that it exists. Yeah, And uh so when when
it became necessary, like that skill was lacking, like there
there there was a reach out. A friend of mine
went back as the first sergeant sergeant major at the course,

(39:16):
and like we talked several times when he first got
there about how how to refocus. It's like, if you
can go fast, you can slow down if someone teaches
you to go slow. But if you go slow, you
don't necessarily you can't necessarily go fast because they're they're

(39:39):
like shooting on the run is different than shooting at
the ground.

Speaker 2 (39:44):
Show marks slow walk.

Speaker 1 (39:46):
Yeah, hmmm, interesting stuff.

Speaker 2 (39:53):
But also, you know, equipment had changed considerably. Uh.

Speaker 3 (40:00):
You know, the the greatest thing about g Y probably
one of the two good things is that, you know,
our equipment changed so dramatically in those years, but you know,
more more so than it had changed from the end
of World War Two to the beginning of it.

Speaker 2 (40:22):
The equipment had changed. The evolution of gear was just unreal. Uh.
And the the amount of money available.

Speaker 3 (40:33):
Uh that that was the good thing about being in
the SIFFS uh was we always had money, even when
the rest of s F did not. But you know,
when they turned on even more money like that just
allows you to train. It's it's kind of hard to explain.

(40:54):
I would see guys in on the on the white side,
It's like, why aren't you guys doing this? Like because
we can't, Like how could we how could we possibly
do that? Like we don't have the ability to train
to do it. I'm like, well, just go to the range.
And it's like to me, it's easy, Like I need,
you know, I need, I need twenty cars to work

(41:15):
on breaking windows out so that every one of my
guys can go through breaking the windows and pulling somebody out.

Speaker 2 (41:21):
Of a car.

Speaker 3 (41:22):
Okay, go buy twenty cars. Like, well, why can't you
guys do that? It was like, which are you insane?
Like we can't go buy twenty cars.

Speaker 2 (41:31):
It's not that'll never have so mid late nineties.

Speaker 1 (41:37):
Yeah, so, and so this parallels perfectly with Chuck Presburg's
stories of finger guns and they're training with finger guns essentially,
and here you are with your Yeah, that's awesome.

Speaker 3 (41:50):
And we're drawing, you know, three hundred thousand plus nine
mil for eighteen of us every seventeen weeks.

Speaker 1 (42:01):
Well, with that comp Dretta, it happens, well I.

Speaker 2 (42:08):
Was the only one with the comp. Which that that
leads leads back to equipment.

Speaker 3 (42:13):
Yeah, so I spent almost from when I got there
H until I retired.

Speaker 2 (42:22):
I was part of what UH was the SPM and E, the.

Speaker 3 (42:26):
Special Special Projects Munitions and the equipment or munitions and explosives,
and then later we added equipment, so I was part
of We had a guy from each sef UH and
a couple of guys from Jaysock and every year we
would meet and we would talk about weapons. You know what,

(42:48):
what weapons for, what roles, what ammunition to go with
what weapon?

Speaker 2 (42:54):
What density do we need these weapons? What density do
we need the ammunition? Uh?

Speaker 3 (42:59):
You know, does does a guy need When the seventy
seven grain first came out, it's like, does a guy
need seventy seven grain ammunition to do updrills on the
range or can we order fifty five grain ball and

(43:20):
have them do updrills? And it's like, well, we don't
want to waste a seventy seven grain accept that if
you don't put a high volume of it through your
weapon every once in a while, you don't know if
it's going to work all the time, if it's you know,
a single shot for the snipers, that's one thing you
can you can single.

Speaker 2 (43:41):
Shot you know, an.

Speaker 3 (43:43):
M sixteen style gun, But if the assaulters are going
to be carrying be carrying it, they need it in
sufficient volume to be able to practice with it so
that they know that it works and they have confidence
in its ability to hit what they're aiming at, but
to fund but all so to function in their weapon
and not cause a problem.

Speaker 1 (44:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:05):
So that that was you know.

Speaker 3 (44:07):
For for every every weapon, for every mission, for every
role that we could define.

Speaker 2 (44:13):
Uh, that was part of it.

Speaker 3 (44:15):
And then also you know, different types of explosives and
then not morphed into the equipment, uh, starting with radios
and night vision gear, and then it just sort of
like everything that was different that Delta had. It was

(44:35):
you know, do we also need to provide it to
the shifts if so, in what numbers, or does one
sift need it but one sift doesn't because of different
you know, theater requirements.

Speaker 1 (44:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (44:51):
So you know, being being involved with that, I saw
a lot more of how the how the evolution worked
from the big arm beside, because like that that was
one of the things that at the beginning when I
first got there, we just bought stuff. If we needed
breaching shotguns, we send a guy back to Hawaii with
a credit card, buy a bunch of shotguns and then

(45:15):
you know, take them over to the marine base and
have the marine ship them over here, and that you know,
it turns out that's not the best way to do
it because when those shotguns break, there's no support package,
there's no maintenance. The you know, the army looks at
those is like, we can't fix those. They don't belong
to us. But you know, if you get your if

(45:38):
you get your rifles through some sort of military program,
there's intermittent replacement. You know, every every three years they
start replacing, so that every five years you have total replacement,
you get periodic maintenance and all the other stuff that
comes with it. So that was one of the things
that that program brought to us. But you know, being

(46:01):
able to see how the evolution just just in the
bullets that we carried, how fast they changed, and you know,
I need a bullet that can do this. Okay, let's
start researching what bullets are able to do that. Okay, now,
how do we get it? How do we get it
in sufficient quantity?

Speaker 1 (46:23):
That's cool stuff. Well, and you brought up buying the
random shotguns having what was it? I attended a Mosburg
event a year and a half ago, and it was
cool to talk to them about some of this, some
of the military things and some of the special projects

(46:43):
and various things. And I think it's their common knowledge now,
but it was just interesting to hear about these programs
and comparing that to how you just described. Yeah, we're
just going to go and buy a bunch of them,
ship them. We're good.

Speaker 3 (46:57):
We at one point we sent a message back because
we couldn't send someone to go buy them. So we
send a message back to our command, please have someone
go buy five shotguns.

Speaker 2 (47:09):
And they sent us.

Speaker 3 (47:13):
Like presentation grade Remington eleven hundreds with gold scroll inlay,
gold triggers, gold stuff. And I was like, I opened
the box and I looked at him, and I'm like,
that's great at everything, but I need breaching shotguns.

Speaker 1 (47:31):
Yeah, spray paint that real quick, take a hacks off
to it.

Speaker 2 (47:35):
So we.

Speaker 3 (47:37):
Send them to Stage International to have them be blasted
and parkerized and chopped down into shorty eleven hundreds.

Speaker 2 (47:48):
And when he opened the box, he called and he
was like, are you certain? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yep.

Speaker 1 (47:56):
Sorry, Well that's that's somewhat reminiscent. Also again another Presburg
story when he was carrying what were they forty caliber
sti's and essentially they had a traveling minstrel of armors
just for those hand guns.

Speaker 3 (48:14):
Talk about support, Yeah, luckily they have it. They have
a good set of gunsmiths available to them. The it
arguing that that was me, me.

Speaker 2 (48:32):
And a couple other guys who went to gunsmithing school.

Speaker 1 (48:36):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (48:39):
That's fun the ones. It was fun and it was
good learning.

Speaker 3 (48:44):
And but you know that that was part of part
of my nighttime job was working on guns, because especially
back when we had the old nineteen eleven's, keeping all
of those things up and running was that was its
own full time job. Uh yeah, along with my other
full time jobs.

Speaker 2 (49:08):
But when you're twenty five, you can do all that stuff.

Speaker 1 (49:12):
Oh heck, yeah, heck, you don't need sleep.

Speaker 2 (49:15):
Well.

Speaker 1 (49:17):
So one of the things that we started talking about
was the helmet aspect and going from the having the
ballistic available and then the bike helmet essentially or the
skate helmet yep, and how that evolved to where we're
at now.

Speaker 3 (49:34):
So originally, like we had the I don't know what
it stands for something, the PA Sgt.

Speaker 2 (49:45):
Helmet was the.

Speaker 3 (49:47):
Original kevlar helmet issue to the Army in the early eighties,
we had it as well.

Speaker 2 (49:55):
What we found was.

Speaker 3 (50:00):
Ama to the head was actually worse if you were
wearing that helmet the way that it's suspension system, and
I don't have one to show, but there there was
something about it suspension system that if you took a
serious blow to the head, it was going to transmit

(50:20):
all of that force straight to your skull, and the
hard side of the kevlar was going to push in
on your skull and you were going to get a large,
a larger skull fracture than you probably otherwise would have.

Speaker 2 (50:38):
That in our comms wouldn't fit the coms that we
had at the time.

Speaker 3 (50:45):
Before before slim linepel toors existed, so you had the.

Speaker 2 (50:52):
The big ones and they just didn't fit underneath that helmet.

Speaker 3 (50:59):
So we ended up going with skateboard helmets with protects.

Speaker 2 (51:04):
I had a hockey helmet. A couple of other guys
had hockey helmets.

Speaker 3 (51:10):
I had a protect as well, but mostly what I
wore was my my hockey helmet and then our Camo guys.
I wish i had I've got one somewhere, but I
don't know where it is, I don't know what box
it's in, but we just like these. You cut, just
cut the plastic. We'd rivet the the holder, the hangar

(51:34):
for your ear mufsh and then your you know, your
boom mic on whatever side on one of your ear muffs.
We would just rift that right to the side, rivet
your night.

Speaker 2 (51:45):
Vision mount onto it, and it was good to go.

Speaker 3 (51:50):
So everything was built into your into your protect uh,
and we wore those for quite a while. Everybody in
the community knew of the problem. It was, you know,
if they're if they're shooting at us, the protect really doesn't.

(52:13):
It doesn't offer any protection, like not even the idea
of protection. The little known thing was neither did the
the parachutist ground troop helmet. We we took I think
ten of them out to the range because we had

(52:34):
to convince our command that downgrading to a plastic helmet
wasn't really a downgrade, and so we shot them with
everything we had from various ranges.

Speaker 2 (52:47):
And they do stop any bullets, beguns.

Speaker 3 (52:50):
We didn't have BB guns, but nine mil forty five, five, five, six, seven, six,
two and twelve gage. They didn't stop anything, not not
from you know, at fifty meters it would would not
stop a nine mil round. So you know, in that sense,
downgrading to a plastic helmet wasn't as much of a

(53:13):
downgrade as people thought.

Speaker 2 (53:17):
We wore those for quite a while, knowing.

Speaker 3 (53:22):
The lack of ballistic protection, but we weren't really I mean,
you didn't want to get shot in the head, but
there wasn't really the shrapnel threat, like what that helmet
was designed to protect from. It was you know, it
was designed for ground troops fighting in the folded gap
against the Russians who have you know, artillery saturation, so

(53:47):
it was designed to stop low velocity fragmentation, not high
velocity bullets. Yeah, we weren't facing that threat at the time,
so it wasn't a worry to us. It was more
worried about the building collapsing or the off chance if
someone gets a lucky shot and hits one of us
in the head. Unfortunately, that's what happened in Somalia, a

(54:12):
guy did get hit in his protect and that really
drove the look for something to replace it with. I
left my unit in December of ninety three, went to
language school, and then about a year after that I

(54:38):
showed up at Sephardic and we had the high cut
CGF gallet helmets.

Speaker 2 (54:46):
That's the helmet I'm wearing in one of the pictures
that I sent you.

Speaker 3 (54:49):
Okay, it's a good helmet. It's heavy, it does off
for really good ballistic protection. It has a pretty decent
suspension system in it. Uh, but it's just it's ungodly heavy.

Speaker 1 (55:20):
Okay, I'm gonna see if I can pull one of
them up.

Speaker 5 (55:26):
Maybe it'd be nice if my computer cooperated with me. H,
I'd help you, but mine would be even worse. Okay,
So I have two pictures, one where you're it appears

(55:48):
that you're loading a rifle.

Speaker 2 (55:50):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (55:51):
Is that the one?

Speaker 2 (55:53):
Uh? Either just the same helmet and bold.

Speaker 1 (55:56):
I'll start with the other one then. So of course

(56:21):
my computer doesn't want to cooperate with me.

Speaker 2 (56:25):
So that helmet actually saved my life.

Speaker 3 (56:31):
I got a pretty serious concussion but didn't die, which
is you know, always always a benefit. We were doing
breacher training and for I personally was very against explosive

(56:52):
breaching charges that did limited things to.

Speaker 2 (56:56):
Move the door out of the way.

Speaker 3 (56:59):
So if all a charge did was attack the locking mechanism.
I'd rather have a charge that cut the whole door,
just in case that, you know, the locking mechanism that
you're cutting isn't the only thing holding the door in place.
So they put what's called a GP charge, which is

(57:21):
a really large chunk of explosive and you put it
right next to the doorknob and fire it off, which
works okay, like for jail cell doors and some other things,
but like for a standard door, it's not what you use.

Speaker 2 (57:40):
Well.

Speaker 3 (57:41):
It launch this doorknob at just short of the speed
of light through the shoot house. Yeah, And we were
four or five rooms back down a hallway, and I
swear in my mind, I can see this door knob
ricocheting and coming at me and it hit me square

(58:04):
in the top of my head on the helmet and it,
I mean, it crushed the front of the helmet like
it left a like a fish sized divot in it
and pushed that into my head, which knocked me out
but didn't kill me. Yeah, So I'm thankful for that.

Speaker 2 (58:26):
I know if I've been wearing anything else that was.

Speaker 3 (58:29):
Available to us at the time, but I don't think
i'd have done so well.

Speaker 1 (58:38):
I just brought up the other picture.

Speaker 3 (58:39):
Yep, I wish I still had that helmet. Unfortunately I
had to turn it in to get another one.

Speaker 1 (58:45):
Mmmm. Well it was custom fit to you too, now
that you have that indentation in your head.

Speaker 2 (58:53):
It fit perfect for me and no one else but me.

Speaker 1 (58:58):
Yep. So question for you with this specific picture. It
appears that you have a rifle in your hand yep,
and there's a weird thing on the very top. It
almost looks like a RMR.

Speaker 2 (59:12):
No.

Speaker 4 (59:13):
That is a very old eotech Holo site where you
could change out the radical.

Speaker 3 (59:25):
And that radical that has a one minute dot radical
in it instead of the circle dot.

Speaker 1 (59:34):
So the okay, so that's the battery compartment there yep,
in front. Okay, because it almost looked like this right
here is just a reflex with something right there. But
I see that now what you're saying.

Speaker 3 (59:47):
Yeah, there's the original original release of the eotech Holo site.
We we were the testing location for the shop made
block one, so.

Speaker 2 (01:00:03):
A couple of the instructors.

Speaker 3 (01:00:04):
I was not involved in the test, but a couple
of the instructors were, and so we saw everything that
went through.

Speaker 2 (01:00:14):
And almost all of us bought holocytes.

Speaker 3 (01:00:20):
The ain point comp M was the site that ended
up winning against all of our recommendation. But all of
us bought holocites. Nobody bought a name point. Everybody bought
an eotech.

Speaker 1 (01:00:38):
About what year was this?

Speaker 3 (01:00:40):
This would have been nineteen ninety ninety five or ninety six.
I got that. I bought that holotech from Kyle Lamb
along with the one minute dot. He told me you

(01:01:00):
like this much better? I said, okay, and I did.
I actually have a couple. T Rex Arms sells an
e XPS three with only a one minute dot.

Speaker 2 (01:01:17):
Yeah, and I have.

Speaker 3 (01:01:19):
I have a couple of those, and I prefer them
very much over the circle dot.

Speaker 1 (01:01:28):
So speaking, which, that's another thing that progressed during your career.

Speaker 2 (01:01:36):
Uh yeah, hugely, Yeah, hugely.

Speaker 3 (01:01:43):
I'll come back to the site because I want to
go back to the helmet. Oh so, right about that time,
I started going over to Delta as an observer at
their training course. So I worked every other day at
Sephardic every other day at their operator training course. And

(01:02:08):
when I went through and got my equipment issue, one
of the things they issued me was a brand new
Mitch helmet.

Speaker 2 (01:02:17):
As part of the Mitch Helmet Test.

Speaker 3 (01:02:19):
This is before they were issued out around SF and
to everybody else. And it's got the three point hookup
in the back instead of what they ended up going
with was like an HRNIST because they said it was
more stable for parachuting.

Speaker 2 (01:02:36):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:02:37):
I got about one hundred jumps on this thing. Never
had a problem.

Speaker 2 (01:02:43):
I didn't steal it when I left. They told me.

Speaker 3 (01:02:46):
They told me to keep it in case anyone wants
wants to come get it. But the aside from it
offered better ballistic protection than the Galay did. It weighs
probably half as much. And then the suspend it doesn't
have a suspension system. It's got the foam padge And

(01:03:10):
what we ended up finding out was like these foam
pads protect you so much better from impact.

Speaker 2 (01:03:18):
So we finally got the helmet we wanted.

Speaker 3 (01:03:21):
Yeah, the only issue was the extended ear lobs. Is
for some of the comms it worked. For some of
them it wouldn't fit. And so it wasn't until a
couple of years later a couple guys tried to cut them.
These helmets didn't cut very well. But you know, a

(01:03:44):
couple of years later, the high cut op scores started
coming out and that was finally like the helmet we
really wanted all along.

Speaker 2 (01:03:53):
Yeah, with the best of every world. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:03:58):
I remember one of the things you said was the
only time then once you have the new stuff, that
you'd actually go with That bicycle helmet was for water ops.

Speaker 2 (01:04:07):
Yep, Yeah, doing water jumps. Uh, because you don't want to.

Speaker 3 (01:04:12):
I don't. I don't want to swim with that thing
on my head because it's it's still heavier than a
plastic helmet. Yeah, and I was a very good swimmer
still am.

Speaker 2 (01:04:24):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:04:25):
Not everyone in SF can swim, but it's two varying degrees.
Uh not not everyone is comfortable. And when you put
you know, when you're when you're in the ocean, the
parachute is trying to drag you down to the bottom
of the ocean and you're in full you know, all
of your stuff. Uh, every little bit of extra weight

(01:04:48):
is another opportunity for something to go wrong as your
your your parachute, when it fills up with water, it
becomes an ank or pretty quickly.

Speaker 1 (01:05:01):
I can imagine, and I don't imagine being of a
younger age much. Yeah, and they're all in probably the
best condition they've ever been they're probably not that boyant.

Speaker 3 (01:05:18):
No, not that boyant at all, except they're usually your
team sergeants and war officers.

Speaker 2 (01:05:25):
They're they're usually pretty boyant.

Speaker 1 (01:05:28):
So if you start going down, just grab them.

Speaker 3 (01:05:30):
They're you're Yep, they're your life preserver that will go
over really well.

Speaker 1 (01:05:35):
I'm sure too.

Speaker 2 (01:05:36):
Yep, the uh so red dots. Uh. We used to
go back from our unit to work with Delta once
a year, and the first time I did in let's see,
I got there in nineteen ninety, so it was either

(01:05:58):
the summer of nineteen ninety or the summer of nineteen
ninety one. I don't remember.

Speaker 3 (01:06:03):
Was the first time I saw a red dot on
a rifle. I had used an Armsen OEG before, but
on a shotgun, and I kind of I knew intellectually
that they had been used during Sante, but for some reason,

(01:06:26):
I just it never made the switch in my head
to try one on my rifle and see what it did.

Speaker 2 (01:06:33):
But I saw. I can't remember the model number.

Speaker 3 (01:06:38):
I think a point nine thousand, like a point two thousand,
I don't know, A long, long, long, skinny a point
on almost all the rifles that the guys had.

Speaker 2 (01:06:53):
It was like, what is this, what does it do?
Why do you have it?

Speaker 3 (01:06:57):
Because it's one of the first thayings you learn being
around them is that nothing is a mistake, Like everything
has been thought through, usually by more than one person,
and if you see a couple of people doing something,
it's very much on purpose. So I saw them on
all the rifles. It was like, why what advantage does

(01:07:20):
this give? It's like it's faster under every condition, allows
you to be more accurate everything we know now about
red dots. So I went to whatever the store was
outside of Fort Bragg and I bought all the red
dots that they had, which were they were all Tasco

(01:07:41):
pro points. I think I bought eight of them.

Speaker 1 (01:07:46):
You remember how much they were?

Speaker 2 (01:07:48):
No, not much I was. I was.

Speaker 3 (01:07:52):
I was a poorer e six living in the barracks
at the time, so probably one hundred hundred and twenty
five dollars something like that. But I bought all of those,
put one on my rifle, immediately zeroed it, and from
then on all of my rifles had one. The Tasco

(01:08:15):
wasn't that good of a site, but it was good enough. Yeah,
And I just I always had a box of you
know six or eight or ten that was in my
gear that if one of them failed, I could replace it.
But they're on my MP five, they're on my car fifteen.

(01:08:38):
Anything I was going to shoot as a long gun
had a red dot on it.

Speaker 2 (01:08:46):
I heard. And it's funny.

Speaker 3 (01:08:50):
I'm sure all the old guys that were around for
the transition to red dots on rifles. All of the arguments.
Batteries are going to fail. It's you're it's not going
to turn on. You're You're not You're You're gonna forget
to turn it on when you need it. Uh, you're
gonna drop it. It's going to break.

Speaker 2 (01:09:10):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:09:10):
Electronics are always going to fail at the moment when
you need them the most. Your iron sights are more reliable, Uh,
just as accurate.

Speaker 2 (01:09:19):
But you know, none of none of those things were
true for rifle. Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:09:23):
When I saw red dots on pistols at a n
r A match, I was like, we have to find
a way to make to transition these over to put
red dots on our work guns.

Speaker 2 (01:09:39):
Yeah, I'm out outside of us P s A.

Speaker 3 (01:09:47):
I want to say I probably had one of the
first red dots on a pistol. Uh, Merle Eddington worked
with us at Sephardik. He was a Sapharnik constructor and
he had gone over to England for the World's Shoot
and brought back I don't remember who made them, but

(01:10:08):
they became the Doctor Optic, yeah, or maybe the Meopta,
one of the little small mini red dots.

Speaker 1 (01:10:16):
Doctor was a huge one back then.

Speaker 3 (01:10:18):
Yeah, it wasn't called the Doctor Optic yet, but I
think Doctor Optic brought them out from whoever was originally
making them. But Merle brought some of those back and
we started experimenting with ways to mount them onto our guns.
It never worked, just because the mounting system wasn't wasn't

(01:10:43):
rugged enough enough. It was you had to drift out
the rear sight and put a basically a plate with
two screw holes in and then you screwed the site
down into that and so it sat up above the
slide on top of that plate, and so any any
movement would just share it right off.

Speaker 1 (01:11:05):
Yeah. I think the first time I saw red dot
on a duty gun was in nineteen ninety nine and
a deputy who was heavy into competition had it as
his duty gun, and I thought, this is amazing.

Speaker 3 (01:11:22):
What can I get one, and you know, except that
the batteries are always going to fail when you need them.
They're going to break when you drop them, you'll forget
to turn it on. Your iron sights are more reliable
and more accurate. When I when I when I I'm
still amazed that I still hear that about pistols.

Speaker 1 (01:11:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:11:44):
It's like, dude, we had we had this fight in
the early nineties and iron sights lost. Yeah, like that's
that's why there is no modern battle rifle in the
world that relies primarily on iron sights, because we know
they're not as good.

Speaker 1 (01:12:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:12:03):
Why do you think they'd be as good or better
on a pistol.

Speaker 1 (01:12:08):
Because this is how we've always done it.

Speaker 2 (01:12:10):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:12:12):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (01:12:15):
Yeah, unfortunately yep.

Speaker 1 (01:12:18):
But that being said, there there's still there's still a
place for for irons. I still enjoy them on occasion.

Speaker 2 (01:12:25):
I do.

Speaker 3 (01:12:26):
I still yeah, I still shoot them.

Speaker 2 (01:12:31):
I I don't shoot them as well as I used to.

Speaker 3 (01:12:35):
Yeah, I actually I probably do now because now that
I've had eye surgery. Ah, now you can see I
had total lens replacement on both eyes.

Speaker 1 (01:12:51):
My dad just did that. He wore glasses for his
entire life did this and it's weird now seeing them
about glasses. Yep, he loves it absolutely, And he said
it's weird because he's so used to having something blocking
the wind and brain and things. But he absolutely loves it,

(01:13:11):
which as he did it before or earlier.

Speaker 3 (01:13:14):
I didn't wear glasses, then I did, then I didn't,
then I did, and now I don't again.

Speaker 1 (01:13:20):
So yeah, but do you overall see better than you
ever have?

Speaker 2 (01:13:25):
H No, I actually saw better right after PRK.

Speaker 3 (01:13:29):
Okay, so that was another benefit of me going over
to Delta.

Speaker 2 (01:13:36):
They brought PRK to the Army. Oh.

Speaker 3 (01:13:41):
PRK was originally a Navy program. They were doing it
for fighter pilots because you can't become a pilot if
you need glasses. But if you are a pilot and
then one day developed the need for glasses, you can
get corrective surgery. And what they determined was that for

(01:14:04):
because of the forces that are applied during ejection, that
p r K was the best system available at the
time for correcting.

Speaker 2 (01:14:16):
Correcting vision. Someone from Bragg heard about it.

Speaker 3 (01:14:22):
They as the story was relayed to me, they sent
some guys to San Diego to investigate, and they said,
we want to buy two machines, and we want to
get two doctors and put them into training. Who do
we talk to? And the guys like, you don't understand.
These machines are really expensive. I think we can afford it.

(01:14:42):
And it's like, no, they're really expensive. And it's like,
we're buying two Like who do I write the check to? Yeah?
And they did, and they brought them back to brag
And I was not one of the first, but I
was in the first group of people. Cool because the

(01:15:02):
guy saw.

Speaker 2 (01:15:03):
Me putting glasses on to shoot, and because I didn't.

Speaker 3 (01:15:06):
Wear them normally, and guy saw me he put glasses
on to shoot, and he says, how bad is your vision?
He said twenty thirty five, which is not bad enough
to need correction all the time. But like when I
was shooting at we were shooting the M fours at
I don't think they were m fours at the time.

(01:15:27):
I think there were car fifteens or maybe M fours
anywhere were shooting those at one hundred yards. And so
for that I put on glasses and he's like, hey,
we got this new thing.

Speaker 2 (01:15:37):
You want to get involved?

Speaker 3 (01:15:38):
And I was like sure, And I went in and
the doctor's the I was the lowest the person with
the best vision, so the lowest setting on the machine
because I was technically outside the limits of what they
were prepared to do, but they wanted to see how
it would work, so they corrected my vision and I

(01:16:00):
had twenty fifteen overall, twenty fifteen and one eye twenty
ten in the other eye.

Speaker 1 (01:16:06):
Cool.

Speaker 2 (01:16:10):
Yeah, that was that was pretty amazing.

Speaker 3 (01:16:13):
Yeah, until one of the warnings that they gave was
that when it fails, it's going to fail fast as
your press biopia what you get as you turn older.
They said, it will come faster than normal, and it
will come with a vengeance. And it did. I went

(01:16:35):
to bed able to see. I woke up and I
could not see. Oh wow, Like it was that fast.

Speaker 1 (01:16:41):
Yeah. How long ago was that?

Speaker 3 (01:16:46):
This is after I retired, so probably two thousand and
seven or.

Speaker 2 (01:16:50):
Eight, Okay, so I had about ten ten years of
really really good vision.

Speaker 1 (01:17:01):
And when the last replacement.

Speaker 3 (01:17:05):
I got that four or five years ago when I
first got to Thailand on my last contract.

Speaker 1 (01:17:13):
And that's cool. It's modern technology.

Speaker 3 (01:17:19):
It's the best money I've ever spent on myself, and
I've spent a lot of money on myself if go
to Thailand and get it done.

Speaker 1 (01:17:31):
So going to Mexico for certain things, go to Thailand
for eyes.

Speaker 2 (01:17:35):
It was six grand you know to stay there total.

Speaker 1 (01:17:41):
Oh wow.

Speaker 3 (01:17:43):
You need to stay there for about ten days. Most
of the pre work can be done at home. Most
of the afterwork can be done at home. But the
doctor is going to want you there for about ten days.
So you need a place to stay and the money
to do it. Uh, you get too, depending on the

(01:18:04):
hospital you go to. They'll use ice lenses or one
of the other major manufacturers of.

Speaker 2 (01:18:11):
Of multifocal lenses. Uh. It's multifocal in both eyes.

Speaker 3 (01:18:17):
So I have I can I can read fine, I
can see at distance fine, I can see medium fine. Yeah,
and I and I will for the rest of my life.

Speaker 2 (01:18:28):
I will never never require glasses again.

Speaker 3 (01:18:32):
But if you know some newer, new fangled high technology lens,
it's got some super wiz bang thing in it. They
can pull them out and put them right back in.

Speaker 1 (01:18:46):
And you know, within the next five years, we'll see
it was.

Speaker 3 (01:18:53):
The the change was instant, Like they pulled the lens
out and like I was completely blind, and he put
the new one in and I could see like, I mean,
that's how fast it was.

Speaker 1 (01:19:09):
Yeah. My dad just absolutely. I wouldn't say he was bragging,
he was just he was in such amazement with how this,
how this worked, how the multifocal whatever works. So much
of this He's just amazed, and it was so cool
to hear him talk about it.

Speaker 3 (01:19:28):
The aside from being able to see, the coolest thing
is colors.

Speaker 1 (01:19:35):
Color were you you don't really know, but that's right.

Speaker 2 (01:19:39):
Yes, your your lens in your eye turns yellow as
you yellow age.

Speaker 1 (01:19:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:19:44):
Yeah, so it blocks the light transmission, which affects how
you see color.

Speaker 2 (01:19:49):
Yeph Now I have, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:19:52):
Crystal clear glass lenses that allow one hundred percent of
light transmission. One thing, I'll have much better night vision
than I did. But I also see colors like vividly
and brightly.

Speaker 2 (01:20:06):
And like a baby dune and it's and it's amazing. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:20:12):
I remember he said something about walls being much whiter
than he remembers. Yeah, yeah, makes sense. That's awesome. That's awesome.
One of the things you brought up in the in
the in the message was what you had to do
with armor.

Speaker 2 (01:20:28):
Oh, yes, our old old body armor.

Speaker 3 (01:20:31):
So initially we had two different sets of body armor
that we could wear, and one, uh, I'm wearing it
in there.

Speaker 2 (01:20:42):
Your cover picture was our concealed body armor. Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:20:47):
And that's just like a Safari Land concealed Level three
Alpha body armor with a trauma plate. Yeah, a hard
there's a rifle rated plate, but it's like, you know,
the size of a sick azone. The other one was
this great, big behemoth that was a steel plate that

(01:21:13):
was covered with little ceramic squares, and it was so
wide when I put it on, it was so wide
at the shoulder, around five foot eight and you know,
as an assaulter, I weighed about one hundred and fifty pounds,
maybe one hundred and fifty five on a really good day.
That thing came so far out in my shoulders I

(01:21:34):
couldn't get my hands together. So there's like no way
for me to get a firing grip on a pistol because.

Speaker 2 (01:21:41):
I be like that.

Speaker 3 (01:21:44):
And so you had to cut it with a set
of bolt cutters and cut around where the ceramic was
because we didn't we didn't have ceramic cutters to cut those.
So you just you cut it to wherever it was
comfortable and then grounded smooth and one hundred mile.

Speaker 2 (01:22:01):
An hour, tape the ceramic back onto it.

Speaker 1 (01:22:07):
Then fast forward. Where what was the next step after that?

Speaker 2 (01:22:11):
Uh? I don't remember. We got we got some pretty
decent place that they were heavy.

Speaker 3 (01:22:22):
Uh about the time that RBR came out, About the
time that the Rangers.

Speaker 2 (01:22:30):
Got RBR, we got something else that was pretty good. Uh.
In two thousand.

Speaker 3 (01:22:41):
Two, maybe we got the Paraclet releasable body armor.

Speaker 2 (01:22:48):
And that was amazing. Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:22:54):
Now what made it amazing being lighter, breathable, more.

Speaker 3 (01:22:59):
More comfortable, being able to ditch it. Because I worked
in Asia, a lot of my stuff was over water. Yeah,
so like when you're when you're doing the ditch exercise
and the little helicopter thing that turns upside.

Speaker 2 (01:23:12):
Down in the swimming pool.

Speaker 3 (01:23:14):
Like, being able to get out of your gear is important.
So having armor that that helped with that. Plus it
was always hilarious to run by someone in the shoot
house and grab the pool handle and relieve them of it.

(01:23:34):
And the hard plates were better, lighter and had better coverage,
you know, they they had better protection. They were three
plus for you know, multiple hit for five, five, six,
which we didn't have. We either had level three or
level four. We you know, you could decide which one

(01:23:58):
you wanted. Ye, but getting the multi hate put multi
hit plates that were lighter was that that was a biggie.

Speaker 2 (01:24:08):
I gotta take it like a two minute break.

Speaker 1 (01:24:12):
As a matter of fact, that if you want, we can.
We were at an hour and a half.

Speaker 2 (01:24:16):
We can.

Speaker 1 (01:24:18):
We can call it right now. Okay, Yeah, this is
this has been a fire hose of cool information.

Speaker 2 (01:24:27):
And not too many stories. That's just one about the doorknob.

Speaker 1 (01:24:33):
Yeah, but I don't know about you. I enjoyed listening
and that. Yeah, I don't. I don't think you're listening
to yourself. I'm listening to this. I'm really enjoying this.
I could see this starting something where other people will listen.
Go oh, I want to I want to be on
the next one so we can talk about this, or hey,
get Kurt back so we can talk about this specific thing.

(01:24:56):
Because here in this kind of stuff is cool because
the best part is to know where we've been, to
understand where we're going, and also so we don't repeat
past mistakes.

Speaker 2 (01:25:07):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:25:08):
I can appreciate your time. Appreciate your time and your pleasure. Yeah,
do you have anything you want to plug or anything
like that.

Speaker 2 (01:25:17):
P ands like subscribe, join the site that works, that works.

Speaker 1 (01:25:23):
Yeah, this was kind of a spur of the moment
episode and one of the things Kurt brought up as well,
if we don't have enough panel, maybe we can give
it another week. I thought, you know what, we don't
need more people. This is just going to be cool
to hear this, hear your perspective on stuff. And you
haven't been on much recently. I took off a couple
of weeks too, or a couple of months too. But yeah,

(01:25:46):
it's good talking to you.

Speaker 2 (01:25:47):
It's good, good to see you again.

Speaker 1 (01:25:49):
Yeah. Yeah, I'll just do my quick little final whatever's big.
Thank you to Kurt. He's been on, He's been on
multiple times. Always a pleasure to have him. The way
we met was he had a really cool beretta and
he posted a picture a picture of it, and that
sort of conversation. And he also somehow he was already

(01:26:11):
familiar with primary and secondary because I said, I think
I wanted him to be on a podcast or something.

Speaker 2 (01:26:16):
I was I was already watching all your podcasts.

Speaker 1 (01:26:19):
Yeah, and how many of the people that were on
did you already know?

Speaker 3 (01:26:25):
I knew some of them by name but hadn't met,
Like Steve, I mean Steve Fisher.

Speaker 2 (01:26:29):
I'd heard of him obviously.

Speaker 3 (01:26:33):
Craig Douglas I heard of him obviously, a lot of
the others I had heard of but hadn't met.

Speaker 1 (01:26:41):
I was just talking to Brian with the Why last
night Eastridge, and he was telling me a funny story
about how he knew you from before, and he then realized.

Speaker 2 (01:26:54):
Oh, I already know you, and yeah I know that guy.

Speaker 1 (01:26:58):
Yeah, yeah, Oh, I do have one last question before
we do officially end. What is with SF guys commandos
being under six feet tall?

Speaker 2 (01:27:11):
Uh? Speed movement? Wrong?

Speaker 3 (01:27:14):
Yeah, So if you look at cornerbacks and safeties, most
of them are not six feet tall because we can
change direction faster.

Speaker 2 (01:27:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:27:29):
I can lower my hips and change direction much faster
than the guy that's six foot four can.

Speaker 2 (01:27:35):
Yeah, most are not.

Speaker 3 (01:27:38):
They're they're heavier now than they were in my day
because we just didn't have access to the calories. Okay,
but yeah, quick quickness is like one of the most
important attributes you can have.

Speaker 1 (01:27:55):
Yeah, and my brother in law he was five eight,
five nine, I don't remember, but yeah, he wasn't He
was a larger guy, but just not a very tall guy.

Speaker 3 (01:28:10):
We had some big muscular guys. They just usually didn't
fare very well. Yeah, food gets scarce, they have problems.

Speaker 1 (01:28:22):
I know how that is.

Speaker 2 (01:28:24):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:28:25):
Yeah, well all right, thanks you too, all right, thanks, yep,
my pleasure.

Speaker 2 (01:28:32):
Take care.

Speaker 1 (01:28:33):
We'll see you later. So big thank you to Kurt
you the listener of the viewer. Also big thank you
to the Patreon subscribers. If you go to Patreon dot
com slash Primary and Secondary, you can help support the network.
There are different tiers. Additionally, if you go to Primary
and Secondary dot com, I have a bunch of articles
that I've written. Some also buddies have been writing on there.

(01:28:55):
There happens to be a forum attached to that, so
Primary and Secondary dot com slash forum and and right
there that's it's an old school forum. It's kind of
being used as somewhat of a backup to all of
our Facebook because you know, there's a possibility Facebook is
going to remove us off of social media, off their platform.

(01:29:18):
We're talking about guns. They're scary if you aren't part
of the Facebook groups. Let's see here, what do I
even have a called P and S hyphen Primary and
Secondary is my main group, and that's an actual discussion group.
It is as it is, as active as you want

(01:29:41):
to be. There are a lot of industry people, there
are a lot of military, law enforcement, responsible gun owners,
some amazing competitors. You bring up the questions, we'll provide
the answers, awesome interactions. They're awesome community. I also have
Primary and Secondary LLC is the page that's where I

(01:30:02):
post a lot of stuff. Not as much discussion there,
but if you join that group PNS hyphen Primary and Secondary.
That's our main group there, and there are all a
lot of little splinter groups off that that cover different topics.
That really gets you in touch with the community. This
is through those two areas. Also the page and the group,

(01:30:22):
that's where I'm sending out the invitation or not the invitations,
the announcements of these. So the announcement for this came
out a couple hours prior to actually doing the episode.
So I have this old school forum that is there
in case Facebook decides to remove us. You can find
us on the Yeah the website, Facebook, Instagram, I'm on

(01:30:45):
x and there's a lot of cross pollenization. There's a
lot of cross sharing on there. There are yeah, through
primary secondor lots of opportunities to interact with some wonderful,
wonderful people. Big thanks to the sp sponsor is High
Desert Cartridge basically what desert does specifically for me is

(01:31:10):
and of course I'm saying that as I don't have
a revolver immediately in front of me throw behind me,
I put them back on my wall for my revolvers
or for specialty cartridges. I'm going through High Desert basically
what I found. And this is through doing a bunch
of podcasts on this topic. This is talking to all
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(01:31:32):
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is what I want. Also, they're easier to shoot than
your traditional jacket and holowpoints. Matter of fact, I guess
I can take these off now. Shooting a snubby with

(01:31:55):
a jacket and hollow point, you might not have sufficient
velocity to get that expansion. Well, with a wad cutter,
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(01:32:17):
They have all kinds of ammunition available. The reason I
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(01:32:40):
I was changing out various stocks and grips on some
of these guns. But I had also had a bunch
of speedloaders and things set up. Oh well, but yeah,
thanks for listening or watching. This was a fun This
was a fun one. Don't be surprised if we have

(01:33:00):
another similar episode getting someone else to talk about their
first hand experience with us. Again, it's important to recognize
where we've been and a lot of what he was
talking about. I can track it through other conversations I
have I've had, whether it's on the podcast, in person,

(01:33:23):
or phone conversations with buddies. It's just fascinating to understand
where we've been, why we were where, where we were at,
why specific decisions were made when they were, and to
now look at what we have now. And I've said
this before, right now we live in an amazing time

(01:33:44):
where there are so many amazing options available for firearms,
for equipment, for ammunition, you name it. We have amazing options.
And right now the biggest thing to do is find

(01:34:04):
whatever option you think is going to work best for you,
get some training and practice, get that dry fire in,
and you're going to you You are the the the
solution of the problem, not whatever whatever weapon you choose.
You ultimately are going to be that solution. So go
get some training, maintain that training, and don't overly rely

(01:34:25):
on the the the tangible things. Rely on the intangible,
rely on the skill sets, the mindsets, and that training.
So that is all. I will kill the feed now
and I will talk to you later.

Speaker 2 (01:34:42):
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