Gunfighting 101 |||

Greenline Tactical Zero Vis Operator

Drills on the second night

Last weekend, I attended the Greenline Tactical Zero Vis Operator course taught by Jon Jeu and Don Edwards.

I’ve trained with Jon and Don before, and I’d gotten a taste of this curriculum in a one-night pistol-focused class Jon taught at the 2023 Night Operations Summit. All of this had me really looking forward to the course.

Gear

As usual, I ran my GPNVGs in the class. They were mounted on an OpsCore FAST SF Carbon bump helmet.

For the rifle side of things, I brought my 12.5” AR with an Aimpoint CompM5 and an offset RMR. Low light adaptations include a MAWL IR laser/illuminator and a Modlite weapon-mounted light. One change I made just before this class was to switch from a nickel-boron bolt carrier group to a SIONICS NP3 BCG. I was hoping that this would make cleaning a little easier and help the gun run better when it was dirty.

I brought my usual Glock 19X for handgun work. It sports a Trijicon RMR, KKM comp, and a Modlite PL350 weapon light for low light.

The rest of the class were all sporting dual-tube NVGs. MAWLs were the most common IR device. Everyone was running an AR of some description. There was more variety on the handgun side, including Glocks, Sigs, and one Staccato.

Saturday

Saturday morning, I finished packing up the truck and set out for Boulder City. After some stops to stock up on snacks and check into my hotel, I headed to Pro Gun Vegas. We met at the Pro Shop to take care of the usual waiver paperwork before driving down to the range.

One of the first things Jon told us was to only load our magazines to 15 rounds. The class emphasizes gunhandling, and only loading to 15 gives more practice with reloads.

Jon started the class off with a round of introductions. There were several folks I’d trained with in previous classes.

After the safety brief, Jon talked a bit about the content of this class, including weapons manipulation, combat marksmanship, and the integration of white light and IR. He also discussed terminal ballistics and photonic barriers.

On the line, we started with a zero confirmation on our pistols (everyone was running a red dot). For some reason, I had the yips real bad on the first string of fire, shooting very poorly. After that, I settled down and produced much better groups.

After a quick review of the draw, Jon went through various handheld flashlight techniques, including FBI, neck index, and Harries. By this point, it was dark enough for flashlight work, so we practiced each of these before switching to our weapon-mounted lights.

Next up, he talked us through how to clear various pistol malfunctions. Because we were doing this in the dark, Jon emphasized non-diagnostic malfunction clearance. Work through the flowchart of possible problems and solutions until you get the gun running again. Practiced each of these for a while.

After we finished with malfunctions, Jon brought out the Casino Drill. This drill comes from instructor Tom Givens. You have a target with a mix of variously colored shapes numbered from one to six. The goal is to shoot the 1 once, the 2 twice, the 3 three times, etc. You’ve got seven-round mags, so this will require some mag changes, usually at inconvenient times.

The default is to do it in numeric order, as we did our first time through. After that, Jon started giving us other orders (evens first, then odds; squares, triangles, then circles; red, blue, then yellow, etc.). Up to this point, we’d been doing all of our shooting with white light, but for our last run through the Casino Drill we broke out the NODs.

At this point, we broke for lunch” (about 8pm). After the break, we pulled the rifles off the rack and started doing long gun work. Jon discussed the deliberate loading process, which includes things like testing lights, lasers, and optics, in addition to just putting ammo in the gun.

We did some shooting under NODs with our rifles. Next, he talked about various rifle malfunctions and how to clear them. This is a somewhat longer list than it is for pistols. We practiced each of these individually before doing the Three Little Kittens drill. In this drill, there are three rifles with malfunctions set up by other students. The student shooting the drill has to clear each malfunction and engage a target with each rifle. This requires really leaning on the non-diagnostic aspect, since you don’t know what malfunction you’re going to get with each rifle.

Our last new subject for tonight was rifle-to-handgun transitions. Jon explained the mechanics of the transition, then we practiced a couple of times.

We returned to the casino drill, but this time, we had one rifle mag with seven rounds and two seven-round pistol mags. This necessitated both a transition from rifle to pistol, and a pistol reload.

After a quick after-action review, we got packed up and headed out. My head hit the pillow about 1:30am.

Sunday

I slept in Sunday morning, then spent some time working on this write-up and running some errands.

We started a bit later today, closer to dark. Jon reviewed the safety brief and then did some lecture on photonic barriers. Out on the line, he went through various carry and ready positions.

Our first drill put these positions to use, working on safely turning to face the targets and engaging using both pistols and rifles. Jon had also set up an extensive array of lights. We used these to practice overcoming photonic barriers using our IR illuminators and weapon-mounted lights.

The rest of the night was focused on a series of increasingly elaborate individual drills. These all involved some degree of movement and put together the skills we’d been learning throughout the class.

We started off with some shooting and moving drills with both pistol and rifle. Initially, this was limited to forward and back movement, stopping to shoot. However, we progressed to the Blaze X drill, which incorporates some diagonal movement and optionally shooting on the move.

There was some more shooting on the move, including Don’s Xbox drill. Since Don originated this, Jon let him take the lead on this one. It involves shooting while moving forward, laterally, and diagonally to the right and left. This is designed to mimic the shooting skills needed for clearing your way to your point of domination in team CQB.

Arguably, the tricky bit here for a right-handed shooter is the leftward diagonal movement since it has you twisting around a bit. Sliding your support hand further back on the forend makes this easier, but that can conflict with the need to run your IR illuminator. During my first run, I tried double tapping the MAWL so I didn’t have to hold the button, but I wasn’t able to get it into constant on mode until halfway through my movement. The second time through, I just slid my hand far enough back that I hooked my index finger on the hand stop and could still reach the back button on the MAWL with my thumb.

The culmination of the class was Jon’s Discriminator drill. This involved an array of targets next to signs with shapes, colors, and numbers. The instructor called out a combination of a shape, color, and number, and you had to find and hit those three targets. The whole drill involved five of these cycles. Just to make things extra fun, the targets were backlit, creating a strong photonic barrier. Oddly, the hardest part for many students was flipping the plate on the dueling tree you had to hit between each set of targets.

That wrapped things up. We did a debrief, tore down the range equipment, and headed out for some well-deserved rest.

Conclusion

Based on my previous experience with Jon and Don, I came into this class with pretty high expectations. It more than met them.

Darkness is the real crucible for gunhandling skills. The lack of visual input forces you to stick to the procedures for non-diagnostic malfunction clearance. Reloads rely on muscle memory and proprioception. This class really emphasizes both teaching these skills and putting them to the test.

This also dovetails with the nearly even split between pistol and rifle work. Most night vision classes tend to emphasize the rifle more (if you’re going to the trouble of donning NVGs, you might as well grab a rifle too). However, because the mechanics of gunhandling for each platform differ, getting the reps in with both is essential.

The curriculum boasts an impressive set of challenging drills. Photonic barriers, movement, and target discrimination all layer on top of the underlying gunhandling and shooting to push students and test their skills.

I’d recommend Zero Viz Operator for anyone with some night vision experience looking to take the next step to elevate their low-light gunhandling and shooting skills.

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