High Risk Environment Deployment Training

I finished my high risk deployment training yesterday. It was a good experience and I feel better prepared to handle certain situations and threats. Here's a little synopsis of what the training was like. Day one - we studied hostile surveillance techniques and countermeasures. Hostile surveillance is when the bad guys watch you with the intent of capturing or killing you at some point. We then did practical exercises to put classroom instruction into real world scenarios. I won't go into too much detail about the exercises - I'll just say they were useful and eye opening.
The rest of the days were all structured the same. We would spend the mornings learning combatives - this is hand to hand combat techniques covering both defensive and offensive moves. We learned and practiced theories for everything from how to fall without getting hurt to how to disarm an attacker (both guns and knives). The main focus was on principles and not specific techniques. This way we have a broader sense of how these applications work and can operate in more fluid situations. Specific theories tend to work best in specific instances. With a broad understanding, we can better adapt to varying situations. The main principles of our training followed the Russian martial art known as systema. Here's a link if you're interested in what it looks like - this is just some website I found and not where I received my training http://www.systemamartialart.com/ One of the main principles we were taught in our combatives was to never give up. Keep moving and fighting and looking for a way out. They used some very interesting training to help us overcome some fears and mind blocks people typically encounter in violent situations. We learned how to take a punch. It sounds strange, but we learned the idea of getting hit is many times worse that actually getting hit, and if you are prepared you can take almost any kind of hit and still move and counter attack. There was a lot of hitting going on - not hard knock out punches, but more hitting than anyone in the class was used to. All this instruction on taking a hit culminated with the wooden pole. This was a one inch diameter four foot long wooden pole. We lined up and each of us took four hits to the stomach. Certainly the instructor was not hitting us as hard as possible - not even close - but, my stomach is black and blue and very sore, so these were not little taps. We did other things like alternately lie on our backs and stomachs while someone did knuckle push ups all over our body. Find a 200 pound friend and ask them to crank some of these out on your shins and stomach. It gets you wide awake first thing in the morning. We also had to lie on our back and have four people lie on top of us and then figure out how to get out from underneath them. Again - it may not sound too bad, but that's about 800 hundred pounds of dead weight. It teaches you how to breath, keep your head, and keep struggling no matter how scary and impossible the situation may feel. Almost everyone managed to get out after some struggle. We did sit ups with our legs out straight and someone sitting on them. Hard enough, but every time we did the sit up the person would throw three or four punches into our chest, stomach and head (open handed to the head). I'm not sure exactly what that taught us - plus it was the day after getting hit with the stick so every punch to the stomach was a little extra torture.
The afternoons were all about shooting. We did three days of hand gun techniques and one day with the long gun. I'm not exactly sure how many rounds we shot each day but it was in the multiple hundreds. We did strong hand/weak hand shooting, one handed shooting, practiced every malfunction you could imagine both one and two handed, shot around barriers, vehicles, engaged multiple targets. You name it we shot it. We also used simmunitions. For those not familiar with this, it's like paintball on steroids. These are real guns shooting special plastic bullets with marker dye in them. We learned they'll shoot through shirts and draw blood. We did many scenarios with these simunitions as well. We spent one day on the long gun, but it was tiring. Hundreds of rounds with a relatively heavy rifle takes a toll. Now, to top all this training off, we had record heat all week long. Everyday was a horrible sauna. There was no cover on the ranges so we were just out in the burning sun standing on hot asphalt. We put a thermometer on the blacktop on Wednesday and it topped out at 136F. The ambient air temp was around 107F and the humidity was around 80%. Miserable.
So, the question is am I prepared for combat? No. In the end, I'm still an Air Force guy that has never been trained for combat. It's OK because I'm not going to be out on patrols or kicking in the bad guys door, so I don't need to be trained for combat. What I am, is better prepared if I find myself in a bad situation, which has happened and will happen again to people in Iraq. As I mentioned in another post, this was great training that taught me valuable skills I hope I never have to use.