Gunfighting 101 |||

NVG CQB with Jon Dufresne, Take Two

I just finished Jon Dufresne’s NVG CQB class in Boulder City, Nevada. This is the second time in the last two months that I’ve done this class, which begs for a bit of explanation.

I had planned a big trip out to Dilley, Texas, in November 2024 to take Jon’s NVG CQB class, followed by attending the 2024 Night Operations Summit. I’d already registered for the classes and made my travel reservations when the Boulder City NVG CQB class popped up on Duffy’s schedule. The Boulder City class was too close to home for me to pass up, but I didn’t want to give up the epic trip I had planned. Based on my previous training experiences with Duffy, I knew he would put on a great class. Based on my previous CQB training, I knew the subject rewarded repeated examination and lots of reps. So, I decided to go to both NVG CQB classes (this would not be my first time repeating one of Duffy’s classes).

Gear

Since this course doesn’t involve any live fire, I’d be running my 16” AR with a UTM bolt that fires non-lethal training rounds. It’s kitted out the same way as my fighting SBR, with a CompM5 up top, an offset RMR, a MAWL IR laser/illuminator, and a Modlite weapon-mounted light.

I brought my GPNVGs, mounted on an OpsCore bump helmet with ear pro and a helmet light. As a backup, I brought my PVS-31As and another helmet set up for them.

This class had the highest concentration of panos I’ve seen, with two other students running quads. Everybody else was running duals. The vast majority of the students had MAWLs, with a smattering of other lasers like the DBAL and the NGAL.

Friday

This class was held at an old warehouse-style building at Pro Gun Vegas. This is a familiar venue; I’ve trained here several times: a couple of TNVC classes and a Greenline Tactical NVG Shoothouse course. We met in a classroom on the second floor.

Jon started the class off with a round of introductions. The assistant instructor for the class, Pat, was a police officer and SWAT team member from a department in Florida. There were quite a few people I knew in the course. In addition to many students I’d trained with before, Greenline instructors Don Edwards, Sam Houston, and Jon Jeu were all taking the class.

After giving the safety and medical briefs, Jon spent some time talking about the non-lethal UTM rounds we’d be using for the class. He talked a bit about gear, covering both the minimal gear we’d need for the class and talking in general terms about CQB setups for the real world.

He reviewed the fundamental principles of CQB. He talked about the difference between a dynamic approach (like hostage rescue) and the more deliberate style we’d be emphasizing in this class. Rounding out the discussion of broader principles, he talked about verbal and nonverbal communication.

Moving on to the details of CQB, Jon covered the roles of each person in the stack and started addressing how to enter a door and clear a room. Video from previous classes provided some real-world examples. With door stuff” and room stuff” out of the way, he went through a series of common situations and some techniques for dealing with each, including hallways with doors on either side, L-shaped, T-shaped, and four-way problems.

The big warehouse-style building where the class was held has a medium-sized shoot house built inside it. We headed over there for Jon and Pat to demo the door and room techniques we’d just discussed. Splitting up into pairs, we spent some time practicing them. Then, it was over to another part of the warehouse where there were some offices. We practiced handling hallways, L-shaped, T-shaped, and four-way problems in four-man teams.

Pat demoing an L-shaped problem

At that point, we went live (with the non-lethal UTM rounds) and started running through the shoot house in our four-man teams. Initially, Jon and Pat split the house in half, and each of them ran one team through their half before we swapped. Jon is a fan of longer runs, so after these initial exercises, Pat took the entire house while Jon headed over to the office area to set up longer runs.

After getting some longer runs in, we broke for the day.

Saturday

We started things out with a cold run in the shoot house. As with his shooting classes, Duffy is a firm believer that your performance without any warmup is a true representation of your skill. In this case, we were definitely a bit rusty.

After everyone had their cold runs, Duffy introduced a couple of calls that we could make in specific situations in the shoot house. A plug” call instructs someone to stand in a door or hallway, protecting those behind him from a threat while they carry out some other task. These areas are called fatal funnels” for a reason, so this is something best done as briefly as possible, but there are situations where it’s the best way to protect the team. Dump” calls instruct the team to take a room dynamically rather than deliberately. Again, this can be more dangerous, but if a deliberate clear will expose them to danger, a dump call may be the best choice. Finally, a shot” call is used when you have to shoot past a teammate who might otherwise move into the line of fire.

At this point, we had done enough runs in the shoot house that we’d seen most of the tricks it had on offer. Pat moved to the second story above the office area to set up for a run while Duffy continued using the office complex. These were our longest and most involved runs yet. The upstairs area has some very large spaces, while downstairs, Duffy used more of the offices.

After getting a couple of runs in, we broke out the helmets and NVGs. Duffy talked a bit about helmet setup and focusing NVGs. He also talked about splitting the tube.” This is essentially making better use of your limited field of view through night vision goggles by putting the primary thing you’re looking at towards one side of the tube rather than staring right at it. So rather than staring at the doorframe when getting ready to breach, just keep it in the edge of your field of view, allowing you to see your teammate who’s going to open the door for you on the other side of your tube.

Duffy took us on a short walkabout through the shoot house just to give everyone a chance to get a feel for moving while wearing their NVGs.

Then it was back to assaulting the shoot house (which was a new set of problems in the dark) and the office area to do our first runs under NODs. After seeing us in action on these runs, Duffy had some feedback on dealing with being backlit when a teammate in a room is using his white light and on not retracting back behind cover after shooting. Pat talked through deconfliction procedures intended to help two elements of a team link up without accidentally pointing guns at each other.

Duffy broke up one of the teams, plussing the other three teams up to five men each. Then he and Pat went to set up for our last run of the day and the longest of the class. This one not only involved more rooms and more complex problems, it also put our deconfliction skills to use. I was glad I ended up in the coordinator role, moving back and forth between elements to bring the linkup off without a hitch. I was able to redeem myself after screwing up in a similar position on the last drill of the NVG CQB class in Dilley last year.

After the big run, we did the debrief and headed out.

Quite a few of us drove to a local restaurant for pizza and wings and some lovely conversation.

Sunday

We were back at it with another cold run, this time in the office area. Today’s cold runs seemed to go a bit smoother than yesterday’s.

After a couple more runs in the office area, Jon gave some instruction on handling stairs. This included both physically navigating stairs under NODs and handling threats while walking up and down stairs.

The building had two sets of stairs, one very easy and one very hard. Outside the offices in a big warehouse bay, one set was completely exposed, making it easy to cover threats from almost anywhere. The other set was inside the offices, coming up in the middle of a large room requiring anyone ascending the stairs to maintain 360° coverage as they popped up.

The difficult set of stairs

We did some dry practice on both sets of stairs before going back to doing runs. With the stairs in play, these opened up to include both levels in a single run. During one run, a team was confronted by a target almost directly above them on that interior staircase. Despite the awkward positioning, they managed to pick up on it and get their hits.

Soon after, Jon rejiggered us into two eight-man teams. At this point, either Jon or Pat would join us on each run, giving us nine shooters to throw at problems. Rather than Jon and Duffy setting up runs, the team that wouldn’t be hitting the house helped set targets and had the opportunity to follow along behind and see the other team run it. Combined with having just two teams, this minimized downtime and kept up the tempo.

Having that many guys really changed the nature of the game. With that many bodies to throw at complex problems and plug holes some things became much easier. You could still get stretched thin and run out of people if you tried to tackle too much, but at least in this space, that was pretty rare.

However, we quickly found having that many people could itself become a problem. It was easy for hallways to get clogged or to throw so many people into even large spaces that they got in each other’s way. Duffy had to talk to us about remaining near enough to the action and alert enough about what’s going on to get in when we’re needed but not putting more people into the mix than was useful. We weren’t always able to put this into practice, but as the runs went on, we did improve.

As teams got more experienced in both doing these runs and setting them up, we were able to incorporate harder problems. On one run my team set up, the other team entered the building through an exterior door and confronted a large open space with an array of open doors, which definitely proved challenging.

Of course, since we’re setting these up for each other, they had a chance to get back at us. Formidable obstacles included furniture up against doors, preventing us from fully opening them and requiring the initial guys to climb over to enter the room. Some targets weren’t visible until we’d passed them, and targets holding flashlights created visibility problems. Not everything that caused us problems was so tricky, though. There was also one target in a perfectly visible spot that three guys nearly walked past before realizing it was there.

As we worked through these runs, I had some issues with my GPNVGs: bright flashes, dimming, etc. In the past, issues like this were generally signs of a low battery. I tried new batteries, as well as swapping over to a different battery pack entirely, but the situation persisted. Eventually, I ended up switching to my PVS-31As. Going from quads to duals was a bit of an adjustment, but it did give me a chance to see how the other half lives.” I probably bumped into a few more things and took a bit longer to process, but it wasn’t too hard to make it work.

We kept alternating teams until almost 7pm, getting in a lot of runs. After a debrief, we cleaned up, packed our gear, and headed out.

Conclusions

In my writeup of the NVG CQB class back in November, I said it had more than met my high expectations. It was just as good the second time around.

That said, it was not exactly the same class. Not only is Duffy constantly evolving his curriculum, he’s also adapting it to the venue and the students. Compared to the shoot house in Dilley, this was much less sterile, especially in the office areas. There was lots of furniture and other junk to navigate around instead of mostly empty rooms. On the flip side, the Dilley shoot house was much more topologically complex. This gave both the people setting it up and the people running it many more choices (and many more opportunities for deconfliction). It also has the benefit of a catwalk, making it easier to observe another team rather than just following along behind them.

The Greenline instructors brought a very high level of experience to the class, and very few students were true novices. This enabled Jon and Pat to push things further and faster.

Of course, it’s not just the class that’s different. I’m different. I found that I’m getting better at recognizing situations in the shoot house and reacting accordingly. Rather than having to look at what’s going on and think through what Duffy told us to do in those circumstances, it’s more pattern recognition. For instance, during one run, I saw a teammate disappearing into a room with no one following him. Rather than having to think, Oh, yeah. We’re not supposed to let anyone go into a room alone,” I just instinctively bolted in after him. Similarly, when the #1 man missed a target, I yelled shot” as I shoved up next to him and fired.

I think the way these instincts have developed is a credit to how Duffy has designed this curriculum and taught these classes. The growth, not just in my own skill but in everyone’s performance over the three days, is truly exceptional.

Again, I also have to give props to Pat for his efforts. He was a great source of knowledge and coaching during runs and set an excellent example as a teammate when he started jumping in during day 3.

NVG CQB is a fantastic class. Even if you have no intention of doing CQB with a team, it will give you a level of comfort fighting inside a building that’s second to none. I’d highly recommend it (and anything else Duffy teaches).

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