TNVC Night Fighter 201

Last weekend, I took TNVC’s Night Fighter 201 class in Las Vegas. I’d taken this class before, about a year and a half ago in Grandfield, Oklahoma. It was good enough that I knew I wanted to retake it in the future. When TNVC offered it much closer to home signing up was an easy choice for me.

Gear

As usual, I ran my GPNVG for this class. They’re mounted on an OpsCore FAST Carbon helmet, along with sundry strobes, lights, and ear pro. One new thing I’m playing around with is a USOptics TAD (Thermal Augmentation Device). The TAD is a small thermal camera that mounts on your NODs and projects the image back into the tube, providing a thermal overlay.

My primary live-fire rifle for this class was a 12.5” SBR. It’s set up with an Aimpoint CompM5, a Trijicon RMR in an offset mount. One change I’ve made recently is swapping out an Aimpoint 3x magnifier for the new Unity FAST 4x magnifier. For low light, it’s got an MAWL-C1+ IR laser/illuminator and a Modlite white light. I recently swapped to a new can on this rifle: a Huxwrx Flow 556K. I’m hoping switching to the flow-through can will help the gun get less dirty and improve reliability compared to my experience in some classes earlier this summer.

For shooting with UTM nonlethal training rounds, I brought a similar rifle with a 16” barrel and no suppressor. As a backup, I brought another 12.5” gun set up similarly, but with a Leupold 1-6x LPVO instead of the CompM5.

For the live fire portion of the class, I brought my usual war belt setup.

Night 1

The class started at 3 pm with some introductions. I had met James, one of the three instructors, at a DMR class about ten years ago (let’s say that James is a very memorable guy). It was good to see him again.

They continued with a safety brief and some lecture about how to positively identify targets. They capped the classroom section of the class off by having us disassemble our setups (disconnecting mounts and taking out batteries) and then reassemble them in the dark.

We got our rifles and lined up to do some flow drills outside, switching between different ready and carry positions. After a brief break for dinner, we convoyed over to the live-fire range.

By now, it was dark enough to break out the NVGs. We started with a PID exercise, learning at what distances we could identify what an instructor had in their hand under white light, passive night vision, and IR illumination.

There was some lecture about the procedures for loading and unloading our rifles and handguns before we lined up to start shooting. The live fire began with some drills to help the instructors get a handle on people’s shooting skills.

The meat of our shooting tonight was dedicated to PID drills. Each target had numbers drawn on it in positions corresponding to where you should be looking to decide whether a target is a threat or not: body (checking for a uniform), hands (weapons), waistline (holsters), head (demeanor), and elswhere on the target backer (weapons within immediate reach). Instructors would call out a number or numbers, and if it was on your target, it was a threat, and you should shoot. If not, it’s a non-threat. They rotated us up and down the line so we didn’t just memorize the numbers on one target.

We did a few iterations of this, progressing from instructors calling out one number and checking one target for it to calling multiple numbers and having to check multiple targets. Eventually, they also started calling out colors (either on their own or in conjunction with numbers), so we had to go white light to see what color the numbers on our target were.

While this took up the bulk of our shooting time, towards the end of the night, we did some shooting at longer distances and some team bounding drills.

We wrapped up around 1:30 in the morning. Back at the hotel, I enjoyed a well-deserved sleeping-in.

Day 2

Since the shoot house we’d be using today was in a big warehouse and usable even when it was light out, we met a little earlier, at 1 o’clock, hoping to wrap up before it got quite so late.

The instructors checked everyone for live guns or ammo, then swapped out the live bolts in our rifles for UTM bolts. The UTM bolts won’t fire live ammo as a safety measure.

The instructors emphasized that this is not a CQB class. We wouldn’t be stacking up, making entry, or moving inside the room. Instead, they had us look down at the ground while they guided us into the room, facing toward the wall. On command, we’d look up and turn around to be confronted by multiple paper targets, and we’d have to process what we could see: scan for targets and make shoot/no-shoot decisions about each of them. Targets had the same array of numbers on them as the live fire drill the previous night. The instructor would call a number; if that number was present on the targets, they required shooting. For no-shoots, they asked us to give verbal commands.

We spent the rest of the afternoon doing single-man rooms. The three instructors would each set up a room, and the students would rotate through. I did pretty well, though I need to get better at giving verbal commands to the no-shoot targets.

After a break for dinner, we got back at it using two-man teams. Introducing a teammate required some lecture about sectors of responsibility. From our position facing the wall, each of us would turn outward, away from our partner, and start scanning our sector. Each shooter’s area of responsibility begins on the wall next to where they’re standing and extends to no closer than 1 meter off of your partner’s maximum reach.

The other thing the two-man drills introduced was communication with the teammate. After all the shooting was done, we had to call out targets we’d engaged and no-shoots we’d talked to, not all of which were necessarily visible to our teammate. Then, it was places and portals where we couldn’t see where people could be hiding or emerge from.

We ran two-man team drills for the rest of the evening. Due to the earlier start, we didn’t have to stay up nearly as late as the previous night. I got back to the hotel and into bed at a fairly reasonable hour.

Day 3

Today, we got an even earlier start, at 10 am, allowing us to wrap things up before dinnertime. We started with some great discussion of learning points from the previous day. After that, our next order of business was continuing with two-man runs. The instructors gradually ramped up the level of complexity, adding things like photonic barriers and increasing the complexity of the target arrays.

Later in the day, we moved on to runs with three or four people (unfortunately, since a couple of people had to leave, the number of students in our class was no longer nicely divisible by four). With the larger teams, the instructors took advantage of some of the larger rooms in the building where we were training. The increased size not only made room for the additional team members, it also allowed the instructors to present some more challenging problems. Some students found that the longer distances challenged their equipment. There’s no substitute for more lumens (visible) or milliwatts (IR).

After the last three and four-man runs, we did another drill where we had to reassemble and reinsert batteries in our NODs and lasers.

We reconvened for an excellent debrief of the class. There was a drawing for some swag, and then the instructors handed out the certificates.

After the class

I had a nice dinner and a good night’s sleep, finally back on a more normal schedule. My packing for the drive home was interrupted by the fire alarm at the hotel going off a couple of times, but I finally got everything loaded up in the truck. After a very windy drive, I arrived home.

Conclusion

This was a great class. I enjoyed taking it again and learned a lot the second time around.

This is not really a night vision class at heart. It’s a room processing class with night vision layered on top of it. You have to observe the environment and make decisions about what action to take. We’re observing using NVGs aided and acting mainly by shooting rifles, but it’s the observation and decision-making that are the heart of the class. The emphasis on processing is why I wanted to take this class a second time and why I’ll probably be retaking it in the future.

I’ve been working on processing effectively for the past several years, and in this class, it paid off. It all felt fairly smooth and systematic, and I heard from the instructors that I was doing a good job at it. One thing about doing this in low light is that your processing is a lot more evident to the instructor than it might be in daylight because the illuminator on your rifle serves as a good indicator of which target you’re addressing.

One area where I wasn’t near as dialed in was communication, both talking to my teammates and giving commands to no-shoots. This is something I need to work on.

On the night vision-specific side, this class emphasizes being able to shift smoothly between night vision and white light. By dint of experiences in many courses, I’ve evolved a setup that makes it very easy for me to shift back and forth: a Unity Axon-SL switch right in front of the MAWL’s activation buttons. This served me well in class.

This was a great class. The instructors all did a great job creating challenging scenarios and providing good feedback. If you’ve got NODs and want to get beyond the basics, I’d highly recommend it.