If you have a hard time with graphs and charts(Or if you want another trick to remember) I have another trick for you.
Hold your Sight on the Belt Buckle.
Belt Buckle is your point of aim.
At 25 meters/yards its dead on.
At 50 meters/yards it lands in his belly button.
At 100 meters/yards it lands on his solar plexus.
At 150 meters/yards it lands on his upper chest.
At 200 meters yards it lands on his solar plexus.
At 250 meters/yards it Groups around his belly button
At 300 meters/yards it Groups around his belt buckle.
At 300 meters your 2 MOA dot is the size of your Target’s Face and your Irons are about the size of his shoulders.
Level your front sight post on to the chest at his Nipple Line or put that Red Dot’s top apex on the base of the targets neck.
Then… Always fire 3 rounds @ 300 meters/yards or beyond in a slow succession. This is to account for the decrease in terminal velocity(less damage), weapon heat, and for your spread due to inherent MOA.
This process works for match ammo or bulk ammo.
And should be used with both.
It’s best to let your triggers reset be released in a reversed fashion compared to your pull. This will keep you steady and wise during firing.
Now the Formula is.
300 meters/yards is “dead on”
350 meters/yards groups on the solar plexus area.
400 meters/yards groups on the belly button.
450 meters yards groups on the belt buckle.
500 meters/yards groups on the thighs.
550 meters/yards groups on the knees.
600 on the feet.
Now. Past 600 is alot harder to shoot on the fly than you think because of wind and your angle. You need to fire 5 rounds slowly and methodically at any range past 600 meters or yards with any 5.56 round.
FYI this is called the “Fly Formula” for letting lead fly on the fly at multiple targets.
You need to level your Irons on your target’s “head” to get a pelvis/guts/chest group @ 600 meters.
If you can see that far good for you. I can as I am blessed with the gift of uncorrected 20/20 vison. Some people are not or no longer with age. Buy a scope. ACOG works great. So do traditional scopes.
Ignore 650, 750, 850, and 950 meters.
Just add a “head” to each point of aim at 700, 800, 900, and 1000 yards.
Fire your 5 rounds very carefully. You can fire 2-3 rounds before your target even hears it at these distances.
This works very well. You should get 2-3 hits out of 5 rounds at 600 meters. And probably 1-2(probably 1) @ 1,000
And that’s all. I used to be a SDM in Sadr City, Baghdad. So fuck you if you disagree. This shit works.
I just taught you how to kill bad guys like a real meat eater. Sips Tea*
Every night at 6 PM the Sherriff of Butte County reveals the grim count of the dead discovered, so far, in the ashes of Paradise. He also reveals the latest number of known missing persons who cannot be located by family or friends. Finally, there is the list of homes and businesses destroyed. The raging fires that destroyed Paradise utterly have passed (for now) but the search for the dead is only beginning.
Last night’s official tally was:
DEAD: 71 (all but one found inside a home.)
MISSING: 1,100
HOMES DESTROYED: 9,740 (only about 5% have been search so far)
BUSINESSES DESTROYED: 336
In short, they have only begun the search for the dead. It will be some time before there is an OFFICIAL tally of the dead, but whatever that is it will always be on the low side. This is the kind of town and the kind of disaster that means five years from today hikers in the ruined but reviving forests will be stepping on skulls.
Paradise is not a town on some flat land out on the prairies or deep in the desert. Paradise is a series of cleared areas and roads superimposed on an extremely rugged terrain composed of deep, narrow ravines and high and densely wood ridges. The Skyway is fed by hundreds of paved and unpaved roads that twist and turn and rise and dip and then, at their OFFICIAL ends, run deeper still and far off the grid. If you live in Paradise you know there are hundreds of people living back up in those ravines and ridges that would be hard to find before the fire. In those places, the poor are lodged tighter than ticks.
I’ve seen, before the fire this time, people in the outback of Paradise so abidingly poor they were living in trailers from the 70s resting on cinder blocks and at most only two winters away from a pile of rust. These people would have had no warning of a fire, no warning at all. Instead of “sheltering in place” they would have been “incinerated in place.”
In the ravines and forests of Paradise, cell reception was so spotty that AT&T gave me my own personal internet driven cell-phone tower. If those off the grid in Paradise actually owned cell phones they would have been lucky to get an alert. But most of those did not own cell phones, and landlines didn’t run that deep in the woods. When the fire closed over them they would have had no warning. No warning until the trailer melted around them. And then there was, out behind but still close to their trailer, their large propane tank.
How many bodies will be found in the pyre of Paradise? Right now nobody knows for sure. Nobody will ever know for sure. In five years from today, somewhere in the reviving forest of Paradise, some hiker is going to step on a skull. He won’t be the only one.
BY MASON DIXON TACTICAL In the real world with real bad guys, practical accuracy is the only accuracy.
____________________________________________________________________________________________ There’s a lot of confusion even among longtime shooters between what a rifle is capable of doing off the bench on a nice controlled square range and what’s actually practical for a serviceable combat weapon.
The two really aren’t the same. While tight groups are definitely a plus and a goal to be attained, having a precision weapon in the general purpose role is not always completely necessary to make one combat effective.
There’s a happy medium to be found, and getting there is not always hard or expensive. Above all else, it’s the fundamentals of the shooter that make a weapon deadly, no matter what.
One of the really neat things about the past couple decades, firearms-wise, is the real renaissance we’ve seen in weapons development and maximization of potential.
Most visibly is this phenomena with the proliferation of the AR-15 platform, but really among all classes of weapons. One can pick up even a lower-tier carbine and have a decent action capable of making solid hits at further distances than many shoot on average. That is, if the shooter is capable. Some of this has to do with the plethora of modern ammo choices out there, some with the advent and precision of CNC machines, and some with the proliferation of free-floated handguards.
While the Colt M4A1 series has a mil-spec tolerance of 4 MOA, or a ~4 inch group at 100 meters, and usually easily exceeding this your common off the shelf AR-15 can expect much better than that on average. It begins, however, with the skill of the man behind the trigger.
The same can be said for the huge boom in the Long Range hobby. Lots of people are getting into it and it can be a lot of fun putting steel on target from 500m or more.
The ability to squeeze every last fraction of capability is definitely nice. And usually the underlying question, whether plinking, running 3 gun or Long Range type stuff, is ultimately protection of hearth and home.
But the question that comes to my mind is do you really need all of that to make an effective rifleman? The answer is largely determined by the rifleman’s purpose.
For a combat weapon, even a designated marksman’s role, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a .5 MOA rifle or even one that really impresses at the range.
Gasping for air, I know. Practical accuracy is a different animal from mechanical accuracy. But let’s look at some reasons why. 1. What is the median distance you plan to engage?
For my operating environment, I live in mostly dense forest with rolling hills. The long distance stretches are either pastures, power lines, or highways.
From a light fighter’s standpoint, these three amount to the cardinal rule of never walking in the open or crossing a linear danger area with no overwatch.
Overwatch, by the way, is not some fancy buzzword to sell you junk but actually is someone on your team hidden watching for muzzle flashes in case you get shot…while you’re crossing in the open or across linear danger areas. They watch over you.
That said, my average engagement distance here is under 100m. Are you accurate enough to be lethal within 100m? How about 200m? How about 300m?
Do you really need to shoot further than that? Maybe, maybe not. What are the intermediate barriers, i.e. potential cover (rocks, deadfall, etc) between you and where an adversary may fire from? Are you capable of shooting over those same open areas that they may cross?
Average backwoods of NC.
A good way to put this into context is to think of the average shot a deer hunter will make in a given area. Around here, between thick Carolina conifer and hardwood stands, shotguns do just fine for 99% of putting meat in the freezer.
Rifles are nice for shooting across cutovers or fire breaks- those open areas requiring a little more range I just warned you about.
And how accurate is that Remington 770 or 742 with meat ammo versus a heavyweight barreled Remington 700 5R and precision handloads?
Mechanically it wouldn’t make much difference in the woods over relatively short distances. But the weight sure as heck will, regardless of whether you’re a twenty something stud out shootin’ n’ lootin’ or a mid 50s patriarch looking to protect his home.
Doesn’t mean that any of these are my personal choice for anything other than hunting game, but the concept is basically the same. Which bring my next point. 2. What is your Weight Threshold?
I knew a guy a while back who had a uber-high end semi-auto AR-10, decked out to the nines, with every cool guy thing you can imagine and a giant NightForce 56mm celestial telescope on top.
Beautiful rifle, crisp glass. Weighed 18lbs empty and carried like a 4×4 in the hands. And there’s nothing wrong with that, if you want a high end benchrest-type gun.
But that’s a ridiculous and unnecessary amount of weight for a general purpose weapon. For him, making tiny groups at a given distance was a lot of fun. But when it came time to carry it, you’d see him ditch that for his handy WASR-10 that weighs half as much loaded and accomplishes the same task within 100m.
The point is that what feels heavy but tolerable in your hands at the gunstore becomes a boat anchor after carrying it over distances with supporting equipment.
Common knowledge usually dictates weight equates superior accuracy, but too much becomes self-defeating. That lightweight AR-15 with a pencil barrel can get heavy too.
After a four day cave clearing mission in Afghanistan my M4 felt like a cinderblock. And aside from a PEQ-15, it wasn’t too far removed from the AR-type carbine pictured above.
Granted, I was carrying a lot of other equipment including a SMAW-D and several days worth of 5590 batteries (which is like toting aroundbricks), but the point is that a carbine I intend to fight with needs to remain lightweight to keep me unencumbered.
There’s a reason the broad shouldered bubbas get picked to hump the M-240B; it’s big and heavy, and the small guys can’t handle and effectively employ it over long distances.
Even the meat eaters get tired though, and shaving a few ounces here and there makes a world of difference when you’re gassed. 3. Remaining Combat Effective- Remember BRAS
The reality of fighting in armed groups is that it is nothing like sitting at a range plinking targets. That’s nice for basic rifle marksmanship, and it’s really important to work on fundamentals.
It’s purpose is to confirm zero & dope (Data Of Previous Engagement- a record of ballistic data for that weapon and specific ammo load) and make sure you can hit a target at a given specific distance, hence why most square ranges are referred to as Known-Distance or KD ranges.
Square range time is critical, and should be at least a monthly training event for you and your group. But understand it is not the end-all-be-all; its just a foundation for Basic Rifle Marksmanship consisting of BRAS- Breathe, Relax, Aim, Squeeze. For creating and maintaining proficiency this is the proper cadence for trigger control.
It’s easy to get right when relaxed and very easy to get wrong any other time. Only training on a 100m square range is a dangerously false sense of security.
Only shooting from a bench and calling it good is preparing you for nothing except shooting off a bench. Getting out and humping that safe queen through the woods for a bit is critically more important than making tiny groups from the bench or even shooting fast at stationary targets in the 3-gun stall.
You learn the ins and outs of that weapon on a patrol and get to make it better.
You may very well learn that what you can do with a 12lb rifle you can also do with an 8lb rifle, and that 4lb weight saving could make a big difference.
If I’m running a .5 MOA rifle but it’s a beast to carry with that 20in bull barrel, I may end up being so exhausted after a movement or a quick react to contact that I can’t hit anything with it because I can’t settle down behind the gun. Under duress this will happen to you.
If you’re out of shape this will be you. And at that point the rifle’s accuracy is irrelevant. Shooting a half inch at 100m now becomes not even being able to acquire a target in that 14x zoom lens, because you’re spent and can’t think through your situation. Believe me, it will happen to you. 4. “If you can’t do it with irons, don’t bother with optics”
I was talking recently with an old-hand Sniper Instructor who told me this. It may come as a shock to some of you but I agree wholeheartedly for making new riflemen.
The optics themselves make life easy, especially today in the world of precision machining and glass manufacturing that makes even lesser-expensive options fairly high quality. And it can produce marksmen in a shorter amount of time because the process of sight-aquire-fire now becomes streamlined.
But- and this is a big objection- without the fundamentals of proper marksmanship, an optic of any type does you little good and in some cases might make you worse.
If I’m running way more glass than necessary, such as putting a 16×50 on an M4 because it helps me shoot tiny groups off a bench or in the prone, I’m not effective anywhere but in that one scenario.
I may very well lose my target if something throws me off kilter as usually happens in a dynamic environment and I may also have trouble getting on target with any amount of speed.
If I back the zoom off but have a second focal plane scope, now my reticle is worthless for any sort of bullet drop or ranging measurements.
His logic is that if I can do it with iron sights, then I have zero problem with optics. The fundamentals are there, along with my confidence.
The foundation is laid. Optics of any type are a tool to enhance one’s capability, not a shortcut in training. If Joe knows he can ring steel with irons on his weapon at an average engagement distance, then an optic of any type enhances his capability.
He now has confidence in himself and his weapon. And confidence is the difference maker above any piece of kit. So with that said, anyone getting started in rifle marksmanship should begin with iron sights and graduate to implementing optics down the road. Simplicity equals success.
Keep in mind this is for basic training purposes; a standard for those new or inexperienced. Additionally, for those simply thinking optics always equate accuracy, buying airsoft-grade trash or even decent glass but a skimpy or improper mounting solution is a recipe for problems in the long run.
If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right. If you genuinely don’t know, swallow that pride and get some instruction- I promise, it will be worth it. Mechanical vs. Practical
Mechanical accuracy definitely plays a large role in practical accuracy, but if your fundamentals are trash nothing is going to make you a good shooter.
While you’ve read up until now that pinpoint accuracy is not a central requirement in a primary fighting carbine or rifle, good mechanical accuracy is definitely a desirable asset.
If my weapon shoots 2 MOA, or a 2 inch group at 100 yards, that means on an average man-sized target at any given distance I have some margin of error to still make solid hits, all things being equal. Anything up to 4 MOA for a general purpose carbine then becomes perfectly acceptable.
Even out to 600m this gives us, in theory at least, 24 inches of spread but still perfectly capable of a solid hit if you do your part. But you have to know how to do your part, and that only comes from solid training.
But will you need to shoot that far? Probably not in most cases- and only your own situation can determine this. Most often our expectations should be half that distance at the most, but if everyone in your group can make those kinds of shots, then they’ll have no problems engaging closer than that.
Practical accuracy comes from the individual rifleman; riflemen are only produced and maintained through quality training. The tactics of the Team of Riflemen are the real difference maker. You should be seeking out training outside the square range on a regular basis.
My friend JC Dodge has an upcoming class which will go beyond the typical comfort zone of most, pushing both the student and his equipment.
In addition, I’m available for those seeking private instruction on both making the shot and proper field techniques, along with other small units skills such as off-grid communications, Recon & Surveillance, and Combat Casualty Care.
We’re not the only ones who can teach this stuff; there’s many others. But I highly implore the reader to get that training along with all the other skills to give you the tactical edge in setting up a secure retreat, even if you think you’re the ‘expert’. And with that, I’ll leave you with a quote from the late, great Peter Kokalis:
To train others in the art of war, you must both know war from the trenches and undergo constant training from others, both to keep the sharp edge and be exposed to the ever-evolving tactical concepts of combat at the down and dirty level.
Several have asked why an “expert” (God how I loathe that word) like me would need to participate in training at a firearms school. The answer is simple: for the same reason tennis and golf pros constantly train under other tennis and golf pros.
You cannot observe yourself while shooting, but the professional firearms instructors under whom I train can constantly detect slight nuances of incorrect movement that need to be reprogrammed.
-From Weapon Tests and Evaluations, The Best of Soldier of Fortune
The idle musings of a former military man, former computer geek, medically retired pastor and now full-time writer.
Contents guaranteed to offend the politically correct and anal-retentive from time to time. My approach to life is that it should be taken with a large helping of laughter, and sufficient firepower to keep it tamed!
____________________________________
I’ve had a few readers take issue with my article on Wednesday about defensive firearms on a budget, particularly my comments about training disabled shooters using table tennis balls or equivalent targets.
Some people seem to think that such results are impossible – in other words, they think I’m lying. Others believe it’s irresponsible to recommend the ‘puny’ .22LR as a defensive round. I’d like to take a little time to address both perspectives.
Let’s start with .22LR’s viability for defensive use. I completely agree that a defensive round should have adequate power to get the job done.
The trouble is, allhandgun rounds are deficient in energy, not to mention the nebulous concept known as ‘stopping power’, when compared to almost any centerfire rifle or shotgun round. The ‘gold standards’ of handgun cartridge effectiveness are widely perceived to be .45 ACP in pistols, or .357 Magnum in revolvers.
However, there have been many ‘failures to stop’ using both rounds. They’re far from infallible. Furthermore, most modern defensive ammunition appears to offer very similar performance, irrespective of caliber or cartridge, when results are compared in uniform test media such as ballistic gelatin, as the image below shows.
The image is taken from this excellent discussion of the topic, which I highly recommend you read in full. Given an effective round, defensive success appears to be far more dependent on shot placement – putting one’s bullets where they’ll do the most good (or harm, depending on one’s perspective) – than on bullet diameter, weight or energy level.
The average muzzle energy of all six of the above rounds is 404.33 foot-pounds. In comparison, a .22LR hollow-point round weighing 36 grains, fired at a muzzle velocity of 1020 feet per second from a 4″ handgun barrel, offers muzzle energy of a mere 83.2 foot-pounds – about one-fifth that of a handgun round considered more suitable for defensive use.
That’s pretty weak. However, it will also generate very much less recoil than the better-performing rounds. For example, the first round in the illustration above, a 124gr. 9mm. bullet fired from a Glock 19 pistol at a muzzle velocity of 1181 feet per second, produces free recoil energy of 7.69 foot-pounds.
(Most of the other rounds mentioned in the image will produce greater recoil energy than that from a typical handgun.) The .22LR round described above, fired from a Ruger SR22 pistol, will produce free recoil energy of only 1.37 foot-pounds.
Ruger SR22 pistol
That recoil figure is why the .22LR is a game-changer for some people. I’ve worked with disabled and handicapped individuals who have limited upper body strength and/or mobility, including their arms and hands.
They find it difficult or even impossible to control an average handgun in recoil. However, the very low recoil impulse of a .22LR handgun is a different kettle of fish. Basically, if they can pick up a tennis ball, they can cope with a .22’s recoil.
Therefore, such individuals are much better served being able to shoot something in self-defense, even if it’s generally considered less than optimum, rather than be left with nothing at all.
That brings us back to the training I provide to such individuals – the training some readers seem to think is ‘impossible’. It’s not. In fact, I’m going to challenge all of my readers to try this experiment for themselves.
First, I’m assuming that you’re capable of keeping all your shots from a handgun inside a 6″ circle at a range of 20-25 yards, firing slowly and deliberately. If you’re not yet at that level of competence, you should work on that before proceeding with this exercise.
Next, you’ll need a BB pistol and ammunition, given the high cost and limited availability of .22LR ammo right now. If you don’t already have one, I suggest this one (that’s the model I use, but there are many alternatives – do your own research and select one you like).
Buy also a pack of CO2 cartridges and a supply of BB’s. All three purchases together will cost you about $62, which will give you up to 2,400 shots for a total cost (including the pistol) of about 2½ cents per round. If you want to go to 4,800 shots (which I frankly recommend), buy two packs of CO2 cartridges and two of BB’s for a total investment of under $84 – well under 2 cents per round. (If you’d prefer to use an Airsoft pistol rather than a BB, that’s your call. Personally, I find the BB more effective as a training tool.)
Once you’ve bought those things, you need to invest in some suitable targets. 60 cheap tennis balls will cost you a dollar apiece and are tough enough to last for a long time, but might be a bit heavy for BB pellets to roll them across uneven ground. These ‘small balls’ are even cheaper and weigh less, but probably won’t last as long. I’ve used both options. (I know one shooter who invested in a small ball pitching machine to help his training.) As your skills improve, you’ll need smaller targets. I use these mini practice balls, and also bulk packs of ping-pong (table-tennis) balls – the latter don’t hold up well to multiple bullet impacts, but they react very well when hit, making them a lot of fun. You’ll also need hearing protectionand eye protection (VERY important, particularly the latter!).
Finally, find an open area of bare ground on which to place the balls, with a suitable backstop (an earthen berm, a solid wooden fence, etc.) to stop the BB’s ricocheting off the ground and endangering others. (A grassy surface isn’t optimum, as the grass will slow down the balls, perhaps even prevent them from rolling at all under the very light impact of BB’s. However, if a grass surface is all that’s available, consider laying down a tarpaulin or old carpet on top of it as a rolling surface. It’ll get torn up, so don’t use anything you want to keep in good condition.) As a commenter has noted, you can also use the interior of your garage provided you line the walls with old carpets, or cardboard boxes, or something else to absorb BB’s that ricochet off the cement floor. You don’t want them bouncing off the walls and coming back at you! (A great source for old carpets is a carpet seller/installer. They rip out old carpets by the mile every week, recycling the best and throwing away the worst. You can often get old carpet rolls from them free of charge, or for nominal sums.)
Start by laying out a few of the larger tennis balls or ‘small balls’ at random. From a range of about 10 feet, try lining up your sights on each one and hitting it with a magazine full of BB’s, moving it along the ground. Don’t try for speed at first, but concentrate on accuracy. As you get better, start shifting your sights between balls with each shot. Hit one ball, start it moving, swing to another ball, hit it and start it moving, then swing back to the first and hit it again. Do this until you can make every shot count, then move back to first 15 feet, then 20 feet, then 25 feet. Practice until you’re competent at every distance, including putting balls at varying ranges from near to far and hitting them all.
When you’ve got this down pat, move to the smaller balls and repeat the process. Practice until you can hit a stationary table-tennis-ball-sized target with every round at ranges up to 25 feet. When you achieve that, you’ll need to call upon a friend for help to get to the next level. His job will be to stand next to you, or just behind you, and toss the balls ahead of you so that you have to hit them while they’re moving. When you’ve acquired that skill, he should start bouncing them off a plank or other obstacle to either side, so that they’re moving across your front instead of away from you. This makes them much harder to hit. As you’re able to hit more and more balls one after another, increase the speed and frequency at which they’re thrown, making the shooter’s task more difficult. You can work up to a point where he’s throwing several balls at once.
The object of the exercise is to reach a level of skill where you can hit 7 out of 10 randomly moving table-tennis balls within 5 seconds. I find even disabled or handicapped students can reach this level of skill after about 3,000-4,000 rounds of practice. The best can hit all 10 in that time. (A few shooters, after much more practice, can even hit several balls firing from the hip, without using the sights.) Once you can attain that standard using a BB pistol, it’s not hard to do likewise with a .22LR handgun (assuming your backstop is adequate to prevent the bullets from ricocheting outside your range area and endangering others – I use a field with a hillside behind it to prevent that happening).
Now, consider this from a defensive shooting standpoint. You’re capable of hitting 7 out of 10 moving targets not much bigger than a human nose, using a .22LR handgun, at typical defensive ranges. Using the same handgun, do you think you could put 7 out of 10 rounds into the inverted triangle formed by the human eyes and nose (a larger, easier target) at the same distance – even if your target is moving? You bet you could! I think we can take it for granted that any bad guy receiving a faceful of high-velocity hollowpoints (my standard recommendation for defensive use in .22LR is CCI Velocitor ammunition, with CCI Stinger as a second choice) is going to be discouraged. Three of my disabled students (so far) have already demonstrated that to their (and my) complete satisfaction. They’re still here, and uninjured. Their assailants . . . not so much.
Under those conditions, for shooters with physical limitations but with that sort of training, you’d better believe the ‘lowly’ .22LR is a viable defensive round!
Peter
I grew up around guns my entire childhood. My dad was a federal game warden, so seeing him holster up or clean his gun are some of my boyhood memories. Despite being around guns, I never really took an interest in them. I’m not sure why. I guess I just saw them as my dad’s work stuff. Nothing to get really excited about.
A few months ago, I had a sudden urge to shoot a gun. I called my dad on the phone. “Hey Dad. I want to learn to shoot a handgun. Can you teach me how?”
He was sort of surprised.
“Why do you want to learn to shoot a gun all of a sudden?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s just something I think I should know how to do.”
So my dad took me, my brother, and my wife, to the gun range and showed us how to fire a gun.
It got me thinking. I know I’m not the only man out there who has gone their entire life without shooting a gun. For some of these men it’s a deliberate choice. They don’t want anything to do with guns and that’s cool.
But I’m sure there are a lot of men out there who have never fired a gun, but like me have the desire to do so. Or maybe you never shot a gun, but got invited to the gun range by some buddies. You want to go, but you don’t want to look like an idiot when you handle the gun. You’d like to have an idea of how to fire a gun safely and correctly before you go.
To get the lowdown on how to shoot a handgun safely and correctly, I headed over to the United States Shooting Academy in Tulsa, OK and talked to Mike Seeklander, the Direct of Training at the Academy. He explained the basics of firing a handgun so a first-time shooter could do so safely and semi-accurately (the accuracy part will take some practice!).
The Four Cardinal Safety Rules of Firing a Handgun
The very first thing Mike brought up were four rules, that if followed strictly, will keep you and others safe so you can have a good time unloading a few rounds. 1. Always treat every firearm as if it were loaded. No ifs, ands, or buts. Even if you know the gun is unloaded, still handle it as if it were loaded. 2. Always keep the firearm pointed in a safe direction, a direction where a negligent discharge would cause minimum property damage and zero physical injury. According to Mike, even the most experienced gun handlers break this rule all the time. They’ll take a gun and start pointing it all over the place while exclaiming, “Ah, sweet bro, this gun is kickass.”
“They don’t even know they’re doing it,” says Mike, “which makes it even more dangerous.”
The safest direction to point a gun is always downrange (as long as there aren’t any people downrange!). 3. Always keep your trigger finger off the trigger and outside the trigger guard until you have made a conscious decision to shoot.
4. Always be sure of your target, backstop, and beyond. You want to be aware of what’s in your line of fire. This isn’t usually a concern if you go to a professional gun range. They make sure that people and property stay out of the path of the guns firing downrange. Where this becomes a concern is when you go shoot with your buddy out on his property.
“Ask your friend what exactly is beyond the target and backstop you’re shooting at, especially when you’re shooting into a wooded area. Don’t just settle for, ‘Oh, don’t worry. There’s nothing back there.’ Ask specifically if there are any houses, property, etc beyond your backstop. Err on the side of being overly cautious,” says Mike.
How to Grip a Handgun
Alright, let’s get down to business. How do you hold a handgun?
For beginners, Mike says a two-handed grip is a must.
1. The gun hand (your dominant hand) should grip the gun high on the back strap (the back strap is the back of the grip on the gun). This gives you more leverage against the weapon which will help you control recoil when you fire the gun. Mike showing how to hold the gun high on the gun’s grip with your gun hand.
2. Place your support hand (your non-dominant hand) so that it is pressed firmly against the exposed portion of the grip not covered by the gun hand. All four fingers of your support hand should be under the trigger guard with the index finger pressed hard underneath it. Here’s Mike demonstrating for us: Fingers of support hand directly under the trigger guard. Notice Mike’s trigger finger is on the outside of the trigger guard. Safety first!
Like you did with your gun hand, you should place your support hand as high as possible on the grip with the thumb pointing forward, roughly below where the slide meets the frame. Look at the back of your hands. There should be a distinct fit, like the fit of a puzzle, with your gun and support hand, like so: Notice how your hands fit together. Just like a puzzle.
Assume the Extended Shooting Position
Stand with your feet and hips shoulder width apart. Bend your knees slightly. Mike calls it an “athletic stance.” It allows you to fire the weapon with stability and mobility. Raise the weapon toward your target. Here’s Mike showing us how it’s done:
How to Aim a Handgun
Use your dominant eye. You want to aim with your dominant eye. To figure out which of your eyes is the dominant one, perform a quick eye test by forming a one inch circle with your thumb and index finger. Hold the circle at arm’s length. Look at a distant object and look through your circle so that the object appears in the center of it. Keeping both eyes open, bring your circle toward your face slowly. Your hand will naturally gravitate toward one eye. That’s your dominant eye. Align your sights. Your handgun has a front sight and a rear sight notch. Aim at your target and align the top of the front sight so that it lines up with the top of the rear sight. There should also be equal amounts of empty space on both sides of the front sight. Proper sight alignment Set your sight picture. The sight picture is the pattern of your gun’s sights in relation to your target. When you’re aiming a gun, you’re looking at three objects: the front sight, the rear sight, and your target. However, it’s not possible to focus simultaneously on all three objects. One of the objects will inevitably be blurry when you’re aiming. When you have a correct sight picture, your front and rear sight appears sharp and clear and your target appears to be a bit blurry. Like so: Correct sight picture. The sights are in focus and the target is blurry.
According to Mike, the further away your target is, the greater the need for a clear focus on the front sight.
Trigger Management (aka Pulling the Trigger)
To fire a gun, we often use the popular phrase “pull the trigger.” However, to fire a gun properly, you don’t actually want to pull the trigger, but rather press it in a controlled fashion so you don’t disrupt your sights. Here’s a brief and very basic rundown on proper trigger control when firing a gun. 1. Press, don’t pull. Instead of pulling the trigger, press (or like my dad likes to say “squeeze”) the trigger straight to the rear. Apply constant, increasing reward pressure on the trigger until the weapon fires. Ensure that you’re only applying pressure to the front of the trigger and not the sides. 2. Take the slack out of the trigger. Squeeze the trigger to the point you start feeling resistance. 3. Surprise yourself. Keep pressing the trigger straight to the rear until the gun fires. Don’t anticipate when the gun will fire. You sort of want to surprise yourself as to when the gun actually discharges.
And there you go. Now you can go fire a gun at the gun range and look like you know what you’re doing. However, none of the information in this article can replace the instruction and supervision of a professional instructor. If you’ve never fired a gun before, we strongly suggest you visit a firing range and talk to an instructor who will walk you through the process. Have any other tips for the first time shooter? Share them with us in the comments! Editor’s note: This article is about how to fire a gun safely and correctly. It is not a debate about gun rights or whether guns are stupid or awesome. If you try bringing up that dead horse around here, your comment will be deleted. I will show no mercy. Keep it on topic, please. _____________________________________________________________________________
Special thanks goes out to Mike and the crew at U.S. Shooting Academy for their help on this article. Mike along with the U.S. Shooting Academy Handgun Manual were the source of this article. If you’re ever in the Tulsa area, stop by their facility. It’s top notch and the staff and trainers are friendly, knowledgeable, and super badass.
A little over a year ago, our fearless and talented illustrator Ted Slampyak sent me an email telling me that he wouldn’t be able to do as many projects for us because he was working on illustrating a book written by a Navy SEAL.
It would teach civilians cool, Jason Bourne-esque spy skills like picking locks, using drops, evading pursuers, and even killing people with improvised weapons.
When he told me about the book, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy. Well, that book is now available, and it is awesome.
It’s entitled 100 Deadly Skills: The SEAL Operative’s Guide to Eluding Pursuers, Evading Capture, and Surviving Any Dangerous Situation,and today on the podcast I talk to the book’s author, retired Navy SEAL Clint Emerson, about the deadly skills even civilians should know in order to protect themselves and their loved ones. You won’t want to miss this podcast. Lots of great actionable takeaways from it.
Show Highlights
The EDC every man should have in order to be prepared for any situation
The Violent Nomad Workout that will keep you in fighting condition
Why even civilians should know how to make improvised weapons
The pen Clint recommends carrying because it can be used as a weapon or to break glass if you ever need to escape
What a Vehicle Bolt Bag is and what you should put in it
What you should do if you ever find yourself in an active shooter situation
How to develop your situational awareness
How to secure your hotel room when you’re traveling
How to detect if someone has been tampering with your stuff
And much more!
100 Deadly Skills is one of my favorite books I’ve read this year. Sure, I’ll likely never have to make explosive devices or make a gas mask with a milk jug, but I like to know that I could if I had to. It’s a great book to just pick up and thumb through so you can learn or refresh yourself on the seriously cool skills of a secret operative. Also, Ted of course did a bang-up job with the illustrations. If you’re a fan of his work, you’ll want to pick up a copy. What are you waiting for? Go buy a copy today!
Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
A little over a year ago, our illustrator, Ted Slampyak … If you’ve been to the site, you’ve probably seen his illustrations. Really talented guy. He emailed me and he said, “Brett, look, I’m working on this new project, so I’m not going to be able to work on as many projects for you.”
I said, “What’s the project?”
He said, “It’s this book of Navy Seal skills on how to make improvised weapons, how to pick locks, how to evade someone in traffic, how to hide things and even kill people.”
I was like, “This sounds like the coolest thing in the world.”
He was like, “Yeah, it’s really cool. My illustrations have to be approved by the government before we can publish them.”
I was like, “This is awesome. You’ll have to let me know about it when it comes out.”
He did, and the book is out. It’s called 100 Deadly Skills: The Seal Operatives’ Guide to Eluding Pursuers, Evading Capture, and Surviving Any Dangerous Situation, and the author of it is Clint Emerson, and he worked with Ted to come out with this book.
It’s an awesome book. It is a lot of fun. It’s cool Jason Bourne stuff. Even if you don’t have to ever use it, you feel good or feel cool knowing that you know how to do this stuff if you ever had to.
Today on the podcast, Clint and I discuss these 100 Deadly Skills, why civilians should even know how to make an anal concealment. Why is that? Why should we know that? We talk about some other great, cool, Jason Bourne, James Bond, Navy Seal skills. A lot of fun stuff on the podcast, with a lot of useful, practical, takeaway information you can start incorporating in your daily life to have more situational awareness and to protect you and your loved ones.
Without further ado, 100 Deadly Skills with Clint Emerson.
Clint Emerson, welcome to the show.
Clint Emerson: Thanks, Brett. It’s great to meet you. Great site. Love your stuff.
Brett McKay: Thank you so much. Your book is 100 Deadly Skills. It’s illustrated by AoM favorite, Ted Slampyak, but before we get into the details of the book, this is fun. We’re going to talk about some really cool Jason Bourne stuff today. Let’s talk a bit about your background. How did you go from becoming a Navy Seal, transitioning to running a security consulting company?
Clint Emerson: I think becoming a Seal started just like a lot of guys, where as they were a kid, they probably met a Seal, saw something on TV, read a book, something usually that triggers that.
For me, I grew up overseas in Saudi Arabia. I was there from the second grade all the way to high school, and I was traveling through Frankfurt with my family on a vacation back to the states, and at the Frankfurt airport, at the bar, we were waiting on a flight, and I was probably 9, 10 years old, and at the bar, there was a guy with a black polo on, and I could see a tattoo hanging out from his sleeve on his left arm. Being a curious kid, i was like, “What’s that?”
He said, “It’s a trident.”
I said, “What’s a trident?”
He said it represents a seal, blah, blah, blah, and he gave me the breakdown.
Eventually, he was like, “Where are you from, kid?”
I’m like, “I live in Saudi.” I kept on asking what do the Seals do, and finally, he gave me a little snippet that stuck in my head forever, and that was, “You know we bombed Libya right?” I was like, “Yeah,” because I was living in Saudi, and Vice President George Bush, at the time, came into the country and said we’re going to have C-130s in case they retaliate into Saudi Arabia on the Americans.
Long story short, he gave me a story about how the Seals went in, took out the anti-aircraft guns, so that the B-111s could come in nice and low, drop bombs, and pull out. Made sense to me as a child. Then later, the funny part is, as I get finally through Seal training, and end up at Seal Team 3 which, at the time, focused primarily on the Middle East, and I started looking through the archives, talking to guys who had been around for a while, and asked them about that particular mission. They were like nobody here ever did that.
I was like hmm, maybe it’s out at one of the more discrete commands, like Seal Team 6. Eventually, I end up at Seal Team 6. Then I do the same thing. I start asking around, and no one has any record of any kind of op like that ever taking place, and I guess the point is is yeah, it was sparked by probably a fraudulent operation that never happened, but it stuck in my head forever. That’s where my career began. It’s actually kind of funny.
Brett McKay: It is.
Clint Emerson: Then, while I did my 20 years, towards the end you see a lot of guys start to get out early, and they end up doing contract work in Iraq or Afghanistan, wearing body armor. Some of them get to do some fun stuff, but overall, it’s nothing glamorous. It’s nothing that you really want to be doing, but the money’s great, so a lot of guys fall into doing that type of stuff.
I knew I was a career guy. I was going to do my 20, and then figure it out from there, but I wanted to go into more of the corporate side, dealing higher-level stuff that consists of crisis management policies, workplace violence policies, and then educating workforces.
Basically, now, I’m building this stuff that’s policy-driven, then you take that policy, you turn it into workplace education via e-learning and videos, and you push it out via their … Whatever their platforms are, their servers, or whatever they have in place. Their infrastructure. I could’ve never predicted doing that, but I wanted to do something a little smarter. I really didn’t want o be standing on a wall in Iraq making $500 a day. I really started investing in myself towards the end of my career, and then set everything up so that I could get out and start paying myself the day that I got out. A lot of guys either don’t have a plan, didn’t have time to make a plan, or they get out and they go with whatever their buddies are doing. I forecasted a little bit, and put some things together, so that I could do my own thing. Hence, escape the walls.
Brett McKay: Escape the walls, you guys go into corporations, help them with their digital security, also travel security?
Clint Emerson: Yeah, we’ve put together crisis management plans, and then educated the workforce on what to do during natural disasters, what to do during active shooters, you name it. We also do network analysis, vulnerability assessments, but our unique capability that’s been really attractive to Fortune 500s is our ability to get in clandestinely. Literally breaking in using criminal tactics, and then taking over their networks. If we can get to one computer that’s on their network, then we take it over. Then, at the end, we give a nice, big, thick vulnerability report, and then tell them how to fix those problems.
It emulates bad guys. It emulates a foreign intel service. It also emulates an insider attack, something like Sony. If something can be done at the computer, inside the office, the we will do that. Along with your typical, remote attacks from outside the fence-line trying to get in from the internet. We do it all in one shot, which gives them facility threat assessments, where are all their gaps and loop holes, can I … A lot of times we get in during the day with a coffee in one hand and my cellphone up to my ear, and somebody will hold the door open for me, and I’m in.
We put it all together. Social engineering, facility assessments, cyber, and then give them a big, fat report.
Brett McKay: That’s awesome. Let’s talk about your book, 100 Deadly Skills. Ted Slampyak, he does the illustrations for Art of Manliness, and when he told me about this project, he was like, “Yeah, I’m working on this project with this Navy Seal.” This was about a year ago. He’s like, “100 Navy Seal skills, and it has to be approved by the government.”
I was like wait a minute. What kind of stuff are you putting in a book that needs to be approved by the government first? What kind of stuff … I’m curious. What things in the book needed to get approval from the government before you published it?
Clint Emerson: Really, it’s a much bigger level than that. Ever since No Easy Day came out, by Mark Owen, that book created a firestorm with an approval system that no one knew about prior to Mark releasing his book. Everyone else prior to him had written books, put them out, published them. Nobody had any clue that, wait a minute, I’m supposed to get this stuff reviewed by the Pentagon before I publish?
Mark, unfortunately for him, he ended up being the guy that took a barrage of fire, federal investigations, and probably a whole lot of other stuff that we don’t know about, because his information was … It was light. It wasn’t anything that anyone tells you before you get out or you retire, “Hey, make sure you do this.”
First, the book … Every person in the military, it’s highly recommended that, if they’re going to put something on paper or if they’re going to put a PowerPoint brief together to go brief a bunch of people, that it gets reviewed by the Pentagon, and now, I highly recommend it. It’s more about, as a former military guy or retired guy, doing the right thing, making sure that what you put in the book isn’t somehow sensitive, and that’s not up to the individual’s discretion. That’s up to the government’s discretion.
I had to turn all 100 skills in and have them review each and every one, along with the narratives, the illustrations, you name it. Then they actually … From the Pentagon, they send it to every agency you ever stood at. It went to Naval Special Warfare. It went to Seal Team 6. It went to SOCOM. It went to the NSA. Anyplace I ever hung out, it is the Pentagon’s responsibility to disseminate it out to everyone, and then everyone gets to take a look at it, and put their two cents in on whether they think something is sensitive or not.
The review process is there for that reason, to protect information that could possibly be sensitive or classified, that is sometimes, to a former or retired guy, maybe something innocent that maybe he didn’t think that was all that sensitive, but turns out it is. That’s the rules now that … Since No Easy Day.
Brett McKay: Gotcha, that makes sense. In your book, you talk about everything from how to have situational awareness, how to make improvised gas masks. I’m curious why do you think … Why should civilians know this stuff, like how to make improvised weapons, and anal concealments? Whenever we’ve done content about tactile things, like how to pick locks or escape zip ties, you always get a lot of guff from people, like, “Oh, now the bad guys know this,” and law enforcement officers who say, “You’re making our job harder now.” Why do you think civilians should know this sort of thing?
Clint Emerson: First, I think with the increased number of attacks, whether it be loan wolves, inspired terrorism, you name it. Everything that’s been going on lately. Whether you’re on a train in France, or you’re in your office building in DC, there’s always that possibility of a good day going really bad.
Our natural-born instincts are great. Usually you got something in your gut says something’s wrong here, and you hopefully react to that accordingly, but a lot of people don’t, and it’s getting to the point now where bad guys are becoming more and more advanced. Your natural-born instincts are great, but you got to couple them with some good skills as well.
A lot of the skills in the book are presented in an offensive manner, but it’s all about exposing the bad guy offense in order to fortify your personal defense, and even give you some of those offensives skills, so that you can fight violence with violence. As far as people watching movies, reading books, or playing games and then leveraging that as an excuse as why they go and do bad stuff, the reality is if someone’s going to go do something, they’re going to go do it. Most of the time, they might be leveraging some of the information that’s out there, but it’s all over the internet these days. It’s everywhere else, and I like to believe that more good people read books than bad people do.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Clint Emerson: The more well educated, ready civilians there are out there to take on these encounters with the random bad guy, I think, the better.
Brett McKay: You call a prepared civilian or a prepared person a violent nomad, which I thought was a cool description there. It’s funny. You start off with the Every Day Carry Kit. It’s something we’ve talked about on the site before, but what should be in an EDC for a violent nomad, so that he’s prepared in any sort of situation?
Clint Emerson: These things change day to day. I think a lot of times EDCs go hand in hand with what you’re wearing, what you’re carrying. You have to tailor it each day to whatever it is, the environments, that you might be visiting. Overall, if you’re going to be traveling abroad or you know you might be put in a high-threat situation at some point, you should always have a means of escape. I’m a big proponent of that. If you can hide a key somewhere … Handcuff keys are readily available all over the internet. If you can put a razor blade somewhere, between the two of those, you can get out of just about anything without knowing tricks. If you look all the way back to 1921, Houdini’s manual of escape, he didn’t’ do it because he was obviously great at some kind of all true magic, he was good at escape because he was good at hiding tools everywhere that he could leverage and use without anybody knowing. It’s nothing new or novel, but having some tools on you that give you the upper hand when things go south …
I like the Zebra pens, because they’re 1) They’re cheap, but 2) It’s a steel barrel pen that you can buy at any store, but because of the way it’s designed, you can punch it right through plywood.
There’s a myriad of things that I think are common day items that everyone can utilize. You don’t need to go spend $300-400 on all the different items that I see online or different sites. Keeping it simple too, I think, is a priority. There’s a point in which you can be carrying a whole lot of stuff that makes you look suspicious to begin with, and the goal isn’t to look like a bad guy. It’s to have what you need to increase your odds of survivability.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I love … You had a section about the Zebra pen that it could be turned … You could punch it through plywood, which I was impressed with. There’s other uses you could do with that. Improvised weapon in a pinch, correct?
Clint Emerson: For sure. Obviously, if it can go through plywood, then it can go through … I have different points on there that, if you’re going to use a pen, 1) the grip. A lot of people think that you got to have your thumb running parallel to the pen or a knife. The reality is, you want a nice fist grip. It can be overhand, underhand, but then that way, when you do have to use it to stab the bad guy, it doesn’t slip or inevitably end up on the ground. Once you do it, you want to keep going, and the reason I talk about the violent nomad, that’s good people using skills for good not evil, but it’s a point in which in the fight that you have to be just as violent as the person that you’re dealing with or else you’re going to lose. That’s the … It dovetails into everything inside 100 Deadly Skills.
Brett McKay: Yeah. In addition to the EDC, you also recommend creating what you call a Vehicle Bolt Bag, and I think we’ve written about this before, but can you give us the general idea of what a Vehicle Bolt Bag, and what sort of things you might want to keep in it?
Clint Emerson: Sure, a Bolt Bag is really if crisis strikes you while you’re out on the road, you want to have an ability to survive at least for a day. Depending on what you’re doing, you may want to increase that and it doesn’t have to be a big backpack. It’s something small in nature. A messenger bag, if you will, that can hold water, some food, extra batteries, an extra phone. All of the essentials that you might need if your vehicle turns upside down. You want everything for that Bolt Bag compartmentalized into something, so it’s not spread out. You have to assume worst case scenario, that if you get into an accident, stuff’s all over the car, you don’t want to have to be collecting it up. You want to be able to put the bag, also, somewhere that you can get to it. No matter what the configuration of the vehicle is, you want to be able to grab it, and get out of that vehicle as quickly as possible.
The things that you need to have inside could be Warmies, environmental type stuff, it could be survivability, all of your life-sustainment tools: Water, food, warmth, signal. Signal these days is usually cellphones, radios. If you’re out in the middle of nowhere, having a spot or some kind of GPS system on that can be tracked and you can be found. There’s a number of things, but those would be probably the primary.
Brett McKay: Awesome. One thing I’ve noticed in the tactical role that often gets overlooked is fitness. There’s a lot of content about improving your self defense, unarmed defense using weapons, blade or firearms, but we rarely talk about fitness. You have a section in there about the nomad workout. What sort of exercises do you recommend people using to stay fit for fighting conditions?
Clint Emerson: Yeah, I put the Run-Fight-Run philosophy, which is something that I do, literally, every day. It’s not about looking good in a mirror or getting ripped. The secondary results, sure, you probably look good in a t-shirt, and you probably can see your abs, but that’s not the primary reason. Primary reason is to give you functional strength, which works when you’re in the middle of an attack.
Run-Fight-Run, one, in a fight, it’s great to have skills, but if the skills aren’t coupled with cardiovascular endurance, then you’re probably going to run out of gas, and you’re going to inevitably end up either losing or not having enough energy to get away from the problem or the conflict. You want to make sure you have sprints included into your workouts, hence the reason you have the run aspect of Run-Fight-Run.
The fight, I like heavy bags. I like … It doesn’t matter if you’re a boxer or not, you can get on a heavy bag, and go to town on that thing punching it, kicking it, kneeing it, whatever you need to do and over time, you’ll find out your punches, your kicks, and your knees become pretty darn swift. Combining one minute of fighting on a heavy bag with a sprint, and then coming right back to that heavy bag and utilizing it for squats, lunges, if you want to do heavy bag carries, heavy bag on the ground and also strike it from there, and do a sprint, but you want to rotate between sprints and some kind of fighting action on a heavy bag or whatever you can get your hands on back and forth, and then increase your times for both as you move through it each day.
You might start out at a minute run and a minute fight, and go back and forth five or six times, and then a month later, you’ll be going multiple minutes, which you want to work up to about a three minute round, which in boxing is the average. Three minutes on a heavy bag, three minutes at a fast paced run, and rotating back and forth between the two, switching up your bag routine to either the hanging bag, the bag on the ground, or using that bag to do different lift. That’s generally the purpose, so that if you do get into a fight, at least cardiovascularly, you can maintain the fight and hopefully have enough gas to run away, not just … You don’t want to stay engaged in it. You want to get away as soon as possible.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I love how simple and functional that is. The other thing I want to talk about … We’ve had a lot of high-profile mass shootings in the US the past few years, and one thing I’ve noticed, I think it’s disheartening, is that whenever the news reports on them, I rarely hear them getting experts on to talk to civilians on what you’re supposed to do, if you find yourself in this sort of situation.
What should you do if you find yourself in an active shooter situation?
Clint Emerson: The philosophy that, even with my company that we’ve pushed corporations, is the Run, Hide, or Fight. It’s a lot like the workout, but the goal is one, to get away, and running, if you hear shots or you smell fire, any kind of crisis, you obviously want to increase distance. That obviously will increase survivability. Running is the first option that should be part of a mental checklist, and the run should be in a zigzag pattern. Anybody who’s been on the battlefield knows that someone running away in a zigzag, left to right, and increasing distance at the same time, is a very hard shot to make. If there’s an active shooter, it’s his first time to go into a building and start killing people, his accuracy is already going to be diminished on nerves alone. When you add in a zigzag pattern, and you’re increasing distance, then you’re probably going to win on that front.
As you run, you want to run from cover to cover, and the way I define cover versus concealment … Concealment is like hiding behind curtains. It’s great, I can’t see you, but the bullet’s going to punch right through it. Whereas cover is more like a planter, an engine block, a concrete wall. I can’t see you, and if I shoot in that general direction, the bullet is not going to be successful. You always want to run from cover to cover. You always want to maintain a zigzag pattern.
Hide. Like the guys on the train, they were in a confined space. In their head, they were like can I run? No. Can I hide? No. That leaves the third option, which is fight. With the hide, you want to make sure that you’re hiding behind cover. You always want to make sure that you can keep your eyes on the bad guy. You never want to lose track of that, because that’s the one advantage that you can maintain is knowing where he is at all times, which also determines your tactical decision making, which is he’s not looking at me or in my general vicinity right now, so now I can move to the next position, and always increasing distance, hiding along the way.
When you’re in a confined space of a room, a train, a plane, then obviously, fight is really the only option. The fight is better done as a team. I always say hey, you have to have team of two or three, and each person is going to have big, macro jobs or positions in the fight. One guy’s going for the weapon. One guy’s going for the legs. One guy’s going for the head. If I can control the head, I can control the body. That’s the general gist of how active shooters should be dealt with from a civilian’s point of view.
Then you have schools and lock down drills, which is an entirely different philosophy that was designed so that SWAT Teams would be successful, because if you have everyone hiding and out of the way, then it gives a SWAT Team a greater chance of winning the fight against that lone wolf standing by himself in a hallway, but not necessarily always great for the people hiding.
Brett McKay: Yeah, has their philosophy changed since the recent shootings where oftentimes the guys are killing themselves very quickly after they finish their job? Are some policies changing where they’re actually encouraging security on campus or teachers to go and try and disarm the guy as fast as possible?
Clint Emerson: Yeah, I think … The environment’s been dictating that a lot for us. If we come in and we custom build something, it’s do you have a campus setting? Multiple buildings on a large estate? That’s one train of best practices. Or are you in a downtown, more of a vertical space?
If you’re a campus, that’s a nightmare situation. If you’re in a vertical space, that’s a little better, but really the environment is going to dictate what the students or what the employee should be doing in order to survive an active shooter. There’s no band-aid to fix it all. It’s environmentally based.
Brett McKay: Sure. You mentioned something interesting. You have to recognize what’s going on around you. You have to recognize fire, you smell something. Like the guys in the train, they recognized the sound of some guy racking a rifle. That leads us to situational awareness.
What can people do to develop that situational awareness? That they can make fast actions, as soon as they know something’s not right?
Clint Emerson: It’s a tough one. You have so many distractions these days, but the best analogy I can compare it to is … Years ago, you would never get into your car and think about safety first. You got in your car and you drove, our parents. Now, you get in your car, and without any thought, you’re putting on a seat belt, and you’re driving, you’re taking it off, and it’s all muscle memory. It’s all part of your daily habits that have been ingrained in us, because there’s always that possibility of consequence. Consequence is a driving force in making something a little bit more habitual. For us, it’s getting a ticket by a cop or possible death in an accident. We go all right. Or it’s an annoying beeping sound that your car makes until you put your seat belt on.
Consequence is a driver. If I take that analogy and I apply it to situational awareness, what is the consequence of me sitting in this restaurant? What is the consequence of me being on a train? Then working backwards from that. Inevitably, what happens is all of a sudden, you start paying attention to things a little bit better by what if-ing, and you hear it all the time. How do you get good at situational awareness? Everywhere you go, you what-if it. It’s not so much about having this mental checklist or colors that represent different states that I’m supposed to be in. It’s about being a little more alert, getting your head out of the cellphone from time to time, and taking the opportunity to go what’s the consequence of me sitting where I’m sitting right now or me walking where I’m walking or driving where I’m driving? You’ll find yourself coming up with things that you would do if that consequence actually became reality.
That’s the quick analogy that I can give. There’s a mental checklist, obviously, but the things tend to work when you’re doing it, but don’t become a habit, unless you’re thinking about consequence.
Brett McKay: Gotcha. We could get into some other, more very violent, tactical things. There’s a lot of great stuff in there, like what to do if someone pulls a gun on you from the front, from the back, how to make various improvised weapons. The gas mask thing was awesome. A weapon you can make … Or a flash bang you can make with a lighter. That’s in there.
It’s fun stuff, but I want to talk about some stuff that I think would be really useful for folks who might not find themselves having to use this stuff, the more violent stuff. You have a lot of things in there about security travel, like what should you do to keep yourself safe when you travel.
Our readers who travel a lot, what can they do? I’m always worried about this. I freak out about this whenever I stay in a hotel room, but what can you do to maintain security in your hotel room, and that your stuff doesn’t get stolen?
Clint Emerson: There’s a first. You got to start … Once again, I like starting macro. I like starting with the country I’m going to. I can pick a Marriott, I can pick a Hilton. What most people don’t know is that Marriott’s, Hilton’s, a lot of your big, western hotel chains are not owned by Marriott. It’s a licence, they’re leveraging. It’s usually held by a larger holding company, or you have 27 hotels, let’s say in China, that all say Marriott, but they’re owned by an investment portfolio.
Marriott headquarters then roams the planet, making sure that everyone is following all of the best practices that they’ve put into the manual that all of these holding companies are supposed to be following, hence the reason why, when you walk into every Marriott on the planet, they all feel exactly the same. The reality is, they’re all owned by different people. That’s the first thing you got to know. Just because you’re staying in a Marriott, doesn’t mean it’s a US owned Marriott.
Second, it could be owned by a hostile country, and when I say hostile, I mean countries that are doing cyber attacks against us everyday. Your BRIC countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China. All the countries that are trying to become economic superpowers, and want to match America financially, they will do anything if they can to get ahead, which means if you stay in a hotel that’s owned by a Chinese holding company, but it says Marriott, then everything in your room is subject to search, overtly or covertly.
As we’ve found with the Olympics in Russia, they built a whole ton of stuff, hotels and buildings and everything, but when they built it, they went ahead and loaded it with audio and video in every room. This is nothing new. It’s been going on since the invention of the microphone. You have to know, one … You have to basically assume that you’re always being watched, that you’re always being listened to.
Your hotel room tends to become a sanctuary for a lot of people, and they feel at ease and relaxed, but really, it’s probably where you should have your guard up the most. Your valuables, don’t leave anything behind, especially digital stuff. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got passwords. There’s ways around most of it, especially when you’re talking about foreign intel services. Sophisticated foreign intel guys are going to come into that room and they’re going to take whatever they want off of any device you leave behind, and you’re never going to know it. That’s why it’s the government operating … Why would the government operate against you? You’re just a civilian on vacation, but the reality is China, in particular, is doing shotgun blast, sponge-like absorption of everything they can that they will figure out later how to use against us, and it’s becoming a trend. If they can do it through hacks, then they’ll also do it physically, if they can get ahold of a laptop.
I just had a friend come back from China, and he stayed in his hotel room. It was approximately two weeks there, and everyday he’d come in, the room smelt like smoke. He’d go to the front desk, say my room smells like smoke. They’d say that’s just the security forces checking your stuff. They like to smoke. He’d be like, “Okay, can I change rooms?” Okay, change rooms.
He changes rooms, and every day it smelt like smoke, because they’re smoking while they’re searching his room and going through his stuff. This is the point where China’s become very bold. They don’t even care about consequence, because there isn’t any, and they continue to do whatever they are to us westerners, because they can.
Bottom line, with hotels, don’t leave anything behind. Take your valuables with you, especially if it’s digital. If you’re working for a big company, don’t hold any sensitive conversations in those rooms. Leave that for outside. If you got to talk about something sensitive, go outside to talk about it. Those are probably my bigger recommendations and hopefully something new for those listening.
Brett McKay: That’s counter-intuitive, because you would think I’m going to go to a room where there’s privacy, not to some public place to talk about discrete things.
Clint Emerson: Yeah, you’re right. It’s get outside. It’s much different for people to collect your conversation when you’re out in the open than it is if you’re confined in a room. Especially if there’s microphones and cameras sitting there.
Brett McKay: Go ahead.
Clint Emerson: No, the only other piece I would add to this is you don’t want to be the guy that gets thrown in jail because people think you’re a spy. You don’t want to actively come into a hotel room and start searching the place for these types of things. It’s something you need to know that could possibly exist and remain normal.
Remember, if they are watching you and you start acting a little strange, it might give them a reason to arrest you for espionage or something and you don’t want that happening, just because you’re looking out for your own safety. It’s better to assume you’re being watched, assume you’re being listened to, and hold those conversations for a later date.
Brett McKay: Awesome. You had some James Bond-esque tactics on how to detect if someone has been tampering with your stuff. I guess for your buddy, it was pretty easy because it smelled like smoke, but what are some little subtle things you can do so you know when you come back to your room someone’s been messing with my stuff?
Clint Emerson: The first thing that I’d always push is technology. There’s an app out there called Phototrap. That thing, you take a picture of your room before you leave, you take a picture when you come back, and it animates anything that’s been moved. If a drawer is left slightly open, you’ll see that drawer open and close, open and close. If a book or your laptop or anything that you’ve left behind has been shifted at all, you’re going to see it shift. You’re going to see that something has been disturbed.
If you’re not using technology, then there’s some physical things you can do. One, you want to set up eccentric rings that signal you that something has been displaced. First, starting with your door. One, put the tag on the door that says Do Not Disturb. You cannot assume that that does not mean people aren’t going to go in and out while you’re gone. They will go in if they want, but what you can do is set that Do Not Disturb up to where it closes between the door and the door frame. If the door is opened, then it’ll hang freely, and when you come back to your door, you’ll see that free-hanging Do Not Disturb sign, and that’s your first signal that, all right, somebody may have gone into my room or somebody came by your door and pulled it out from between the door and the door frame, while hanging on the knob, but at least it’s a signal to start paying attention when you enter your room.
Things you can do inside your room is one, keep it simple, keep it discrete, keep it common to the environment that you’re in. You don’t want to put the old school stuff of tape across the door or something stupid like that, because that looks like espionage and you could get arrested or whatever they want to do to you. You got to remember you’re in someone else’s country, in someone else’s domain. They can do whatever they want to you. Keep it natural to the environment. Keep it simple, so that you can remember it.
I like cardinal bearings. Cardinal bearings is north, south, east, west. I can take a coffee cup, I can put the handle cardinal bearing north, and put it right next to the USB ports near my laptop, because I have to leave it behind, because I don’t want to carry it all day while I’m doing tourist stuff. You’re putting it by the USB ports, because that’s going to be the point of attack, and then you’re putting the coffee cup there with the handle pointed north.
When you come back, you’ll know if that’s even slightly off, you’ll know it. Or you can use … I like to use my thumb as a guiding measurement. I know I’ve got my laptop is one thumb-length away from the desk edge. I know that the coffee cup is one thumb away from my laptop. It’s your thumb, it’s your measurement. No one can change that. When you come back, you put your thumb back down. Yep, the tip of my thumb is barely touching my laptop. I know it hasn’t been shifted. The coffee cup, the water bottle, all of these things you can do around the room. You’re keeping it natural to the environment. You’re keeping it simple, so you can remember it.
If you set things up in weird ways, the odds are you won’t remember exactly how it was set up. It’s not until you get back, you go wait a minute, was that … Was that tag actually hanging to the left or to the right? Those are some simple things, but the book definitely covers more.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Speaking of … You mentioned that app or digital security in general. You mentioned that the USB port’s the point of attack. What can you do … Are there some simple things people can do to keep their phones and computers safe from hackers?
Clint Emerson: Yeah. Password, password, password. We hear it all the time, but the philosophy that we push, and no one likes to hear it, but the longer the password, the better, and longer passwords have been very effective against the different attacks out there. We all think that there’s a hacker sitting in the shadows of his basement, and he’s going to town with his keyboard trying to get into things, but they actually have evolved. They’re creating programs or viruses that do a lot of work for them, and then they run these programs or viruses against hundreds of usernames and passwords at the same times.
Some of these programs they create can actually run 500 characters per second against a password. If you look at it like a dial on a safe, if I’m running the dial 500 different of the possibilities on there per second, and there’s only three combinations, I’m probably going to get in pretty quick. If you only have three digits in your password, then they’re probably going to get in pretty quick. The idea is, the longer the password, the longer it takes for someone to get in, especially these bots. You hear them called Bot Attacks, and these bots go out and they run against a username and they run against a password, simultaneously, hundreds of characters per second, and try to figure it out. A lot of times, they’re programmed to only stay on target for 15 minutes, give or take. If you create a password that is 22 characters or more, you’re going to … It would take a bot attack approximately, if you do the math calculation on a 22 character password, somewhere around 15 to 20 years that you’ve increased time on target for a bot attack.
That takes many usernames. Your username sometimes we feel like it has to be your email address. Not always. You should treat your username like a second password. If you have the ability to put in whatever username you want, don’t use your email address, don’t use things that are common to you, because that’s the easiest thing to figure out, and that’s the first step in cracking the code. Your username needs to be looked at as a password. Make it something, not necessarily complicated, but make it long. Peasandcarrots can be a username, and then a 22-character password doesn’t have to be crazy symbols and all this and that, because if a bot attack is running all the characters, it doesn’t matter what symbol you use on the keyboard. It’s going to run through it anyway. You just want to make it long, and you don’t want your username or your password to be associated to your personal life or things that most smarter systems are going to leverage first. Birth dates, we’ve already heard all that stuff. That’s the general philosophy.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I guess you want to keep away the personal stuff too, because people could use social engineering to figure out your password or your username. I guess people have done that where they’ll call customer service, and say I don’t know my … I forgot my password, but here’s my birthday, because you put your birthday out there somewhere.
Clint Emerson: Exactly. Birthdays, social security numbers, you name it. These days, social engineering has gone more from the phone call to spear phishing or phishing attacks. Now you’ve got them sending out emails that look like they’re from the company they work for. Let’s say it’s a big box retailer, and their logo happens to look like a target. They send out mass emails to every employee, it looks official, and it has a little spot on there for username and password. If you can get 25% of the company to click on that email and then another 25% to put in their username and password, then you inevitably end up owning that company, if you know what you’re doing.
You never want to fall for that kind of stuff. You never want to give up … If you’re getting stuff via email that is asking for usernames and passwords, pick up the phone, call and verify that it’s real or not, but more than likely, reputable companies are not going to be sending out that kind of … Those kinds of emails to get you to do stuff like that. They just don’t. Don’t click on anything that you don’t recognize, and sure as hell don’t put a username and password into anything that you shouldn’t.
Brett McKay: Awesome. Clint, this has been a great conversation. We’ve just given people a taste of what you’ll find in 100 Deadly Skills. We didn’t talk about what you do if you ever get kidnapped and how to escape. There’s information in there about escape and evade, how to track someone, lot of great, cool, Jason Bourne stuff, but where can people find out more about the book and about your work?
Clint Emerson: You can go to 100dailyskills.com. That’ll guide you to all of our social media, and there’s a place to sign up for our newsletter, because we’ll be doing updates on potential digital series of each skill, so that people can watch how to do this type of stuff versus just read about it. 100dailyskills.com will get them to everything else.
Brett McKay: Clint Emerson, thank you so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Clint Emerson: Thanks, Brett, and keep up the good work.
Brett McKay: Thank you.
Our guest today was Clint Emerson. He’s the author of the book 100 Deadly Skills: The Seal Operatives’ Guide to Eluding Pursuers, Evading Capture, and Surviving Any Dangerous Situation. It’s available on amazon.com. Go out there and get it. You’re going to have a lot of fun with this book. You can also find out more information about the book at 100deadlyskills.com.
That wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com and if you enjoy this podcast, I’d really appreciate it if you’d give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher, whatever it is you used to listen to the podcast, really help us out a lot by getting the word out about the podcast, as well as giving us feedback on how we can improve the show.
Thank you so much for your support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.
“WE TRY TO LEARN EVERY TERRORIST ATTACK”: INSIDE THE TOP-SECRET ISRAELI ANTI-TERRORISM OPERATION THAT’S CHANGING THE GAME
Governments around the world are quietly turning to YAMAM, Israel’s special police force, for help with their most intractable security problems. And now, elite commandos publicly reveal the tactics that have made it one of the most fearsome counterterrorism units in the world.
Tel Aviv, Israel. December 2017. YAMAM rappellers simulate retaking a skyscraper from terrorists.
Video still by Adam Ciralsky.
I PURSUED MY ENEMIES AND OVERTOOK THEM; I DID NOT TURN BACK UNTIL THEY WERE DESTROYED. —PSALM 18:37 (MOTTO OF ISRAEL’S CLANDESTINE COUNTERTERROR SQUAD)
On a spring evening in late April, I traveled to a fortified compound in the Ayalon Valley between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The location is not identified on Waze, the Israeli-built navigation tool, and so, as far as my app-addled cabdriver was concerned, it does not exist.
Then again, the same could be said for its inhabitants: YAMAM, a band of counter terror operatives whose work over the last four decades has been shrouded in secrecy.
Upon arrival at the group’s headquarters, which has all the architectural warmth of a supermax, I made my way past a phalanx of Israeli border police in dark-green battle-dress uniforms and into a blastproof holding pen where my credentials were scanned, my electronic devices were locked away, and I received a lecture from a counter-intelligence officer who was nonplussed that I was being granted entrée to the premises. “Do not reveal our location,” he said. “Do not show our faces. And do not use our names.”
Then he added, grimly, and without a hint of irony, “Try to forget what you see.”
YAMAM is the world’s most elite—and busiest—force of its kind, and its expertise is in high demand in an era when ISIS veterans strike outside their remaining Middle East strongholds and self-radicalized lone wolves emerge to attack Western targets. “Today, after Barcelona,” says Gilad Erdan, who for the past three years has been Israel’s minister for public security, “after Madrid, after Manchester, after San Bernardino—everyone needs a unit like YAMAM.” More and more, the world’s top intelligence and police chiefs are calling on YAMAM (a Hebrew acronym that means “special police unit”). During his first month on the job, recalls Erdan, “I got requests from 10 countries to train together.”
I made my way to the office of YAMAM’s 44-year-old commander, whose name is classified. I am therefore obliged to refer to him by an initial, “N,” as if he were a Bond character. N’s eyes are different colors (the result of damage sustained during a grenade blast). His shaved head and hulking frame give him the vibe of a Jewish Vin Diesel. At his side, he keeps an unmuzzled, unbelievably vicious Belgian shepherd named Django.
I made my way to the office of YAMAM’s 44-year-old commander, whose name is classified. I am therefore obliged to refer to him by an initial, “N,” as if he were a Bond character. N’s eyes are different colors (the result of damage sustained during a grenade blast).
His shaved head and hulking frame give him the vibe of a Jewish Vin Diesel. At his side, he keeps an unmuzzled, unbelievably vicious Belgian shepherd named Django.
Near Tel Aviv, Israel. March 1978. The aftermath of a bus assault by P.L.O. guerrillas, which claimed the lives of 37 Israelis and wounded 71.
Photograph by Shmuel Rachmani/AP Images.
Last fall, Israeli officials agreed to provide Vanity Fair unprecedented access to some of YAMAM’s activities, facilities, and undercover commandos.
When I asked N why his superiors had chosen to break with their predecessors’ decades of silence, he gave an uncharacteristically sentimental response: “It’s important for operators’ families to hear about our successes.” (Field “operators,” as they are called, are exclusively male; women sometimes serve in intelligence roles.) N does not discount less magnanimous reasons for cooperating, however.
First, YAMAM has devised new methodologies for responding to terrorist incidents and mass shootings, which it is sharing with its counterparts across the globe. (More on this shortly.) Second, Israel, as an occupying power, faces international condemnation for its heavy-handed approach toward the Palestinians; as a result, some top officials evidently felt it was time to reveal the fact that governments—including a few of Israel’s more vocal critics on the world stage—often turn to them, sotto voce, for help with their most intractable security problems. And last come the bragging rights—perhaps the unit’s most meaningful rationale.
YAMAM, it so happens, recently won a bitter, 40-year bureaucratic battle with Sayeret Matkal, a secretive special-forces squad within the Israel Defense Forces (I.D.F.). Sayeret Matkal was formerly the ne plus ultra in this realm; indeed, Vanity Fair, in an article published right after the 9/11 attacks, called the group “the most effective counterterrorism force in the world.”
It counts among its alumni political leaders, military generals, and key figures in Israel’s security establishment. And yet, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a Sayeret Matkal veteran, had to quietly designate one unit to be the national counterterror A-team, he chose YAMAM over his old contingent, which specializes in long-distance reconnaissance and complex overseas missions.
Netanyahu’s decision, supported by some of the prime minister’s fiercest foes, had all the sting of President Barack Obama’s selection of the navy’s SEAL Team Six (over the army’s Delta Force) to conduct the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. YAMAM is part of the national police force—not the military or the Mossad, which is Israel’s C.I.A., or the Shin Bet, the country’s domestic-security service, which is more akin to Britain’s M.I.5.
And yet, in recent months, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has blurred some of the lines between these agencies’ duties. YAMAM’s primary focus involves foiling terror plots, engaging militants during attacks, combating crime syndicates, and blunting border incursions.
In contrast, the military, in addition to protecting Israel’s security, is often called upon to respond to West Bank demonstrations, using what human-rights activists often consider excessive force. But as Hamas has continued to organize protests along the fence that separates Israel and Gaza, I.D.F. snipers have been killing Palestinians, who tend to be unarmed.
What’s more, Hamas has sent weaponized kites and balloons into Israel, along with mortar and rocket barrages, prompting devastating I.D.F. air strikes. While members of the YAMAM have participated in these missions as well, they have largely played a secondary role.
Off and on for a year, I followed N and his team as they traveled, trained, and exchanged tactics with their American, French, and German counterparts on everything from retaking passenger trains to thwarting complex attacks from cadres of suicide bombers and gunmen firing rocket-propelled grenades.
YAMAM’s technology, including robots and Throwbots (cameras housed in round casings that upright themselves upon landing), is dazzling to the uninitiated. But so are the stats: YAMAM averages some 300 missions a year.
According to N, his commandos have stopped at least 50 “ticking time bombs” (suicide bombers en route to their targets) and hundreds of attacks at earlier stages.
“I’ve been out with the YAMAM on operations,” John Miller, the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, told me in his office, a few blocks from the World Trade Center. “There are a lot of outfits that have a lot of knowledge and do a lot of training, but that’s different from a lot of experience.” He pointed out that for every terrorist attack in Israel that makes the news, there are 10 that are prevented by YAMAM acting on perishable intelligence provided by Shin Bet.
Avi Dichter agrees wholeheartedly. After serving in Sayeret Matkal, he joined the Shin Bet and in 2000 rose to become its director. He now chairs the Committee on Defense and Foreign Affairs in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.
For years, he admitted, counterterrorism officials shared only a portion of their most sensitive intelligence with covert operatives, out of fear of its being compromised.
Now, Dichter says, YAMAM representatives sit in Shin Bet’s war room to ensure they have the full picture. “It took us a long time to understand that you can’t keep information from the unit you’re asking to perform a mission, because what they don’t know may undermine the entire operation.”
When I asked him how he would describe the unit to outsiders, he said, “YAMAM is a special-operations force that has the powers of the police, the capabilities of the military, and the brains of Shin Bet.” They are, in effect, the spy agency’s soldiers.
NOWADAYS, SOME TERRORISTS AREN’T INTERESTED IN NEGOTIATIONS OR EVEN SURVIVAL.
The N.Y.P.D.’s Miller, for his part, claimed U.S. law-enforcement agencies benefit from YAMAM’s successes. A former journalist, who once interviewed bin Laden, Miller maintained, “You can learn a lot from the YAMAM about tactics, techniques, and procedures that, when adapted, can work in any environment, including New York.
It’s why we go to Israel once or twice a year—not just to see what we’ve seen before but to see what we’ve seen before that they’re doing differently. Because terrorism, like technology—and sometimes because of technology—is constantly evolving. If you’re working on the techniques you developed two years ago, you’re way out of date.”
Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security, concurs: “We have a lot to learn from [Israel—YAMAM in particular] in terms of how they use technology as a force multiplier to combat an array of threats. Over the last 15 years, we at D.H.S. have partnered with them on almost every threat.”
A NEW PARADIGM
“I saw a few Hollywood movies about fighting terrorism and terrorists,” N said. “But the reality is beyond anything you can imagine.” Back in the States, I trailed him and his entourage, who met with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department’s Special Enforcement Bureau, as well as New York City’s Emergency Service Unit, which falls under Miller. “Terror organizations used to take hostages because they wanted to achieve a prisoner exchange; now they’re trying to do something different,” N observed, remembering a bygone era when terrorism was a violent means of achieving more concrete political ends.
The conventional wisdom for how to deal with fast-moving terrorist incidents has evolved over time, most notably in hostage situations. Since the 1960s and 70s, first responders have sought to establish a physical boundary to “contain” an event, engage the perpetrators in dialogue, draw out negotiations while formulating a rescue plan, then move in with a full team. Similar principles were adapted for reacting to kidnappers, emotionally disturbed individuals, and mass-casualty incidents.
But over the last 20 years—a period that dovetails with N’s rise from recruit to commander—he and his colleagues have come to treat terror attacks the way doctors treat heart attacks and strokes. There is a golden window in which to intervene and throw all their energy and resources at the problem.
While units in the U.S. have tended to arrive on the scene, gauge the situation, secure a perimeter, and then call in specialists or reinforcements, YAMAM goes in heavy, dispatching self-contained squadrons of breachers, snipers, rappellers, bomb techs, dog handlers, and hostage negotiators.
Metaphorically speaking, they don’t send an ambulance to stabilize a patient for transport. They send a hospital to ensure survival on scene. Moreover, they establish mobile units with clear lines of authority, not an array of groups with competing objectives. These teams can rove and respond, and are not unduly tethered to a central command base.
“The active shooter changed everything,” John Miller elaborated. Nowadays, the terrorist or mass murderer isn’t interested in negotiations or even survival. “He is looking for maximum lethality and to achieve martyrdom in many cases.”
Because of this, the response teams’ priorities have shifted. The primary objective, said Miller, echoing YAMAM’s strategy, “is to stop the killing. That means to use the first officers on the scene whether they’re specialized or not. The other part is to stop the dying.
How do you then set parameters inside as the people are chasing the threat, going after the sound of gunfire, engaging the gunman? How do you get to those people who are wounded, who are still viable, who could survive?
American law enforcement has struggled with [this] since the Columbine case”—when responders waited too long to storm in. “We’ve got to get inside within 20 minutes. It can’t be within the golden two hours—or it’s not golden.”
Major O, the 37-year-old who commands YAMAM’s sniper team, explained that one of the unit’s signature skills is getting into the assailant’s mind-set. “We try to learn every terrorist attack everywhere in the world to find out how we can do it better,” he noted. “Our enemies are very professional, too, and in the end they are learning. They try to be better than us.”
To maintain its edge, YAMAM, after analyzing far-flung incidents, fashions its training to address possible future attacks.
In the time that I spent with the operators, they rappelled down a Tel Aviv skyscraper and swooped into an office dozens of floors below, testing alternative ways that responders might have confronted last year’s Las Vegas attack in which a lone gunman on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel fired more than a thousand rounds at concertgoers, killing 58.
A YAMAM squad also spent hours on a dimly lit platform taking over a stationary Israeli passenger train—alongside members of France’s elite Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale. (The French had come to Israel, in part, to practice such maneuvers, evidently mindful of 2015’s Thalys rail attack, which recently found its way to the big screen in Clint Eastwood’s The 15:17 to Paris).
And at a telecommunications facility north of Tel Aviv, Israeli operatives simulated a nighttime mission with Germany’s vaunted Grenzschutzgruppe 9, facing multiple gunmen and explosions in all directions. Taking it all in, I felt like I had unwittingly been cast as an extra in a Michael Bay movie.
As they briefed their European guests, the YAMAM team preached its gospel of never allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good. “To be relevant and to win this battle, sometimes you must go with 50 percent or 70 percent knowledge and intelligence,” N said.
As he considered what his counterparts faced at places such as Orlando’s Pulse nightclub or the Bataclan concert hall, in Paris, N asserted that in today’s scenarios, unlike those in the 20th century, “we don’t have the privilege of time. You must come inside very fast because there are terrorists that are killing hostages every minute.”
Dimona, Israel. March 1988. The so-called Mothers’ Bus attack, in which three nuclear-research workers were executed by P.L.O. terrorists.
From Polaris.
THE SECOND DIRECTIVE
The inside story of YAMAM’s genesis has not been told by its leaders, until now.
In 1972, during the Summer Olympics in Munich, members of the Palestinian group Black September kidnapped and murdered 11 Israeli teammates.
The cold-blooded attack—and Germany’s botched response—prompted Israel’s prime minister Golda Meir to initiate Operation Wrath of God, sending hit squads to track down and kill the group’s organizers and others (later depicted in Steven Spielberg’s Munich).
And though it may have escaped public attention, a secret second directive would go forth as well, which ordered the establishment of a permanent strike force to deter or defeat future attacks.
This mandate would not be realized until two years later, after terrorists sneaked across the border from Lebanon, killed a family of three, and took over an elementary school in Ma’alot with 105 students and 10 teachers inside—hoping to negotiate for the release of their brethren held in Israeli prisons.
Sayeret Matkal raced to the scene and mounted a disastrous rescue attempt. Twenty-one students perished. Addressing the Knesset, Meir exclaimed, “The blood of our children, the martyrs of Ma’alot, cries out to us, exhorting us to intensify our war against terrorism, to perfect our methods.”
Following the attack, counterterrorism responsibilities—especially the delicate art of hostage rescue—shifted from the I.D.F. to a new police unit, initially dubbed the “Fist Brigade” and, later, YAMAM. Chronically underfunded, ostracized by the military, and deemed an unknown quantity by the intelligence services, the unit was a backwater.
That is, until Assaf Hefetz was put in charge. He was a well-regarded I.D.F. paratrooper with important friends, among them future prime minister Ehud Barak. Hefetz had supported the April 1973 operation in which Barak—famously disguised as a woman—infiltrated Beirut and killed several Palestine Liberation Organization leaders as part of Israel’s ongoing retaliation for Munich.
Hefetz professionalized YAMAM, persuading skilled soldiers to join his new police commando unit—whose work was a secret to all but a handful of Israelis.
In May, I visited Hefetz, aged 74, in the seaside hamlet of Caesarea and found a man with the body of a 24-year-old and the hearing of a 104-year-old.
Like many of his generation of Israelis, he speaks his mind without regard for how his words may land. “After 18 months, I had recruited and trained three platoons, and I knew that my unit was much better than the army,” he insisted.
“But I was the only person in the country who thought so.” In due course, he found an eager partner in the spymasters of Shin Bet, who agreed to let YAMAM try its hand at the treacherous work of neutralizing suspected terrorists.
Still, it was Hefetz, personally, who first put YAMAM on the map. On the morning of March 11, 1978, armed guerrillas arrived on Zodiac boats from Lebanon, coming ashore near Haifa.
Once inland, they encountered and murdered an American named Gail Rubin, whose close relative happened to be Abraham Ribicoff, a powerful U.S. senator. Next, they flagged down a taxi, murdered its occupants, then hijacked a bus.
Traveling south along the picturesque coastal highway, they threw hand grenades at passing cars and shot some of the bus passengers. The attack was timed in hopes of disrupting peace talks between Israel’s prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.
The rolling pandemonium came to a halt at a junction north of Tel Aviv. “When I arrived, my unit was [still] an hour away,” Hefetz recalled. The bus had stopped, but it was a charred wreck. “No one knows [exactly] what happened. Call it the fog of war.” Hefetz soon learned that some of the assailants had escaped on foot and were moving toward the beach.
He grabbed his gun and gave chase, eventually killing two of them, capturing a third, and rescuing some of the hostages. In the process, he took a bullet to his right shoulder and lost hearing in one ear.
The incident, known as the Coastal Road Massacre, claimed the lives of more than three dozen people. But Hefetz’s valor raised the question: given what YAMAM’s commander accomplished on his own, what could the unit as a whole do if properly harnessed?
The answer was a decade in coming, during which time YAMAM was bigfooted by Sayeret Matkal during its response to terrorist attacks. In the notorious Bus 300 affair, for example, Sayeret Matkal commandos stormed a bus to rescue hostages and claimed it had killed four terrorists when, in fact, two had survived.
The pair were turned over to Shin Bet operatives, who, a short distance away, murdered them in cold blood. The debacle and its aftermath, which disgraced Shin Bet chief Avraham Shalom—who had ordered the on-site assassinations and then tried to cover it up—left an indelible stain on Israel’s institutions and international credibility.
FOR EVERY TERRORIST ATTACK IN ISRAEL THAT MAKES THE NEWS, THERE ARE 10 THAT ARE PREVENTED.
In 1987, Alik Ron, a man with deep credentials and a devil-may-care attitude, took over YAMAM. He had served in Sayeret Matkal and participated in the legendary 1976 raid on Entebbe, in which an I.D.F. team stormed a Ugandan airport and successfully freed more than 100 hostages. “I was in our most elite units and took part in the most celebrated mission in our history,” said Ron, who in retirement has become a gentleman farmer. “Only when I was put in charge of YAMAM did I realize I was in the company of the most professional unit in Israel.”
And yet when he first addressed his men to say how proud he was to lead them—describing all the great things they would accomplish together—they broke out laughing.
Apparently, the operatives were fed up with being highly trained benchwarmers, always left on the sidelines. Ron persevered nonetheless. And he is withering in his assessment of his old unit (Sayeret Matkal) and its overseers. “Nobody, nobody, not the head of Shin Bet, not Mossad, not the prime minister, can give me an order [to kill terrorists after they have been captured]. He can get me an order, but I will do like this,” he said, lifting his middle finger. “I will not murder them. I will have already killed them in the bus.”
Ron soon got the chance to try things his way. In 1988, he learned that three terrorists had crossed in from Egypt and hijacked a bus full of working mothers on their way to Dimona, the epicenter of Israel’s top-secret nuclear-weapons program.
As Ron raced toward the Negev Desert to link up with his team, he saw CH-53 Sea Stallions on the horizon heading in the same direction. Pounding his fist on his dashboard and unleashing a stream of expletives, Ron recalled, he screamed, “Sayeret Matkal . . . again?!”
Ehud Barak was on one of those helicopters, a man who would go on to hold virtually every position in Israeli officialdom—prime minister, defense minister, commander of the armed forces, and head of Sayeret Matkal. Recalling his first encounter with YAMAM 30 years ago, Barak, now 76, expressed astonishment at how Ron and his team had somehow managed to arrive ahead of Sayeret Matkal’s helicopters, raring to go. “We asked them what they brought with them,” Barak recalled. “It ended up they brought everything which was needed for taking over the bus. So we let them do it.”
Israeli-Egyptian border. August 2011. Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak (gesturing) visits the scene of a deadly jihadist incursion.
From the Israeli Defence Ministry/Getty Images.
According to David Tzur, who was a major at the time and would later take over as YAMAM’s commander, the so-called Mothers’ Bus incident was a turning point because it showcased the unit’s speed, judgment, and agility. “We were called to the field at 7:30 in the morning,” he said. “Before we arrived, [the attackers] had killed three hostages.”
At around 10:30, the team’s snipers shot two of the attackers while other YAMAM members stormed the bus and shot the remaining assailant. “No hostages were killed during the operation,” Tzur proudly recalled. Israel’s national-security apparatus—including skeptical I.D.F. generals—took notice and recognized that when it came to counterterrorism they had a scalpel at their disposal instead of blunter instruments. “I don’t believe that anyone has a better unit,” Barak observed. “They are kind of irreplaceable.”
THE ROAD TO SINAI
Lately, YAMAM has gotten used to terror’s new face: extremists intent on inflicting maximum carnage with maximum visibility. “I’ve been in dozens of operations and many times under fire, [facing] many terrorists and suicide bombers,” N admitted. “But the [one] I remember more than all the others is the terror attack on the border in the Sinai Desert.”
It was August 2011, six months after the Arab Spring ouster of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak—and three years before ISIS formally declared its caliphate. YAMAM, tipped off by Shin Bet that a large-scale attack was imminent somewhere along Israel’s southern border, dispatched one squadron and a sniper team by helicopter. They waited through the night before getting word that shots had been fired at a bus, injuring passengers inside. A family of four, traveling the same highway, was ambushed and slaughtered. “This group of ISIS-Salafi jihadists that came from the Sinai Desert, they were a different challenge for us,” N said of the 12-man death squad. “We know from intelligence that they received training abroad. They were proficient with weapons, grenades, explosive charges, [and even] had handcuffs to kidnap people.” They also brought cameras to film their handiwork.
N, who was a squadron commander at the time, was fired at twice as his YAMAM team arrived on the scene. In the skirmish, one militant detonated a suicide vest, killing himself and a bus driver, and, N recalled, “a terrorist shot a surface-to-air missile at one of our helicopters, but it missed.” Two gunmen were spotted crossing the highway. One was killed in an exchange of fire while a second took aim at a passenger vehicle, killing the driver. By midafternoon the scene seemed to be under control, and Pascal Avrahami—a legendary YAMAM sniper—briefed his superiors, including then defense minister Barak. A short time later, shots rang out from the Egyptian side of the border. Four YAMAM operators scrambled for cover, and in the frenzy a 7.62-mm. round hit Avrahami above the ceramic body armor covering his chest. The sniper, a 49-year-old father of three, had been killed by an enemy sniper, who simply melted back into the desert.
I joined N this past April at Mount Herzl, the final resting place of many of the nation’s fallen warriors. It was Israel’s Remembrance Day, a somber holiday when life and commerce grind to a halt. On this day, N spent time with Avrahami’s parents at their son Pascal’s grave, embracing them and reminiscing about his outsize role in the unit. (The previous evening, as the sun descended, squad members had stood in the courtyard of the YAMAM compound, having refreshments and trading stories. Family members of slain commandos were taken inside a darkened shooting range where their loved ones’ holographic images were projected in midair. The scene was otherworldly but somehow appropriate for this secretive, high-tech cadre.)
On this Remembrance Day, N mourned the loss of his friend, whose 24 years of service made him YAMAM’s longest-serving member. But he stopped at one point to stress that his team is focused less on the past than on the future: “We know the enemy will always try and do something worse, something bigger, something extraordinary that they never did before. And for this scenario we are preparing ourselves.”
There’s a lot of confusion even among longtime shooters between what a rifle is capable of doing off the bench on a nice controlled square range and what’s actually practical for a serviceable combat weapon.
Notice how your hands fit together. Just like a puzzle.
Proper sight alignment
