Habits, Good, Bad, and Training Scars

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Habits are good and bad, but Training Scars will get you in trouble.

2003, Iraq, somewhere between Kuwait and Baghdad:

There I sat, doing what I was trained to do. Dressed in 75 pounds of combat gear including body armor, 14 mags, M16, 3 Frags, 2 Smokes, radio, and dozens of other pounds of assorted crap that a Marine in combat needs, but you wouldn’t think of like binoculars. I was in the back of an open-topped truck with 20 other Marines in crammed together, hiding behind sandbags for cover as a machine gun opened up on the convoy from the only structure within miles.

I fired a couple of rounds back from my M16 and then started helping to lay in the mortar system. My real job was “running the board” for the mortars section. I turned locations on the map into actual data to put on the gun systems to make them hit targets miles away that you couldn’t see from the gun line.

This target was easy. It was a giant house about 350 yards from the road and someone with an AK was firing from a balcony. It looked further than that over the open desert, but my range finder confirmed the distance.

I stood up to get a better view and a clear line of sight for the range finder. Standing was a training scar I had picked up over the last year. Every time we did live-fire we were on an admin range where all of us just stood around like we were having fun, instead of thinking about someone shooting back at us.

I stood in the back of that truck getting the range, telling the gunners what to put on their guns, and looking through binoculars waiting for them to fire a round so that I could adjust for them. Stupid. It was one of many times that my habits and training scars would try and get me killed in combat. Luck, a little skill on my part, and a little lack of skill on the enemy’s part kept me alive.

One mortar opened up on the house in handheld mode. The gunned held the gun tube in place and trigger fired a round without a site. Mostly Kentucky winding it onto target.

The second mortar was setting up in conventional mode that would be able to hit the target house multiple times within the time of flight of the first mortar. Like clockwork, the handheld gun fired another round adjusting off the first one, and the conventional mode gun got up and fired a round.

We were going to lay waste to this building. Then the command ”check fire” came down the line. We stopped firing and just waited. A bad habit we had picked up from training. We should have reloaded and been ready to continue the fight. Instead, we stood there waiting for further commands. Two Humvees came up from the back of the convoy and laid waste to the building. One with an M2 .50 Caliber machine gun and the other with an MK-19 belt-fed grenade launcher.

I heard the weapons firing and didn’t have time to see the outcome. We were ordered back in the vehicles and we moved out just as they opened fire. This had become our “drive-by” technique of fighting to get north to Baghdad.

Looking back I saw both my training scar and my bad habits that I had picked up from the Marine Corps and didn’t notice them until they almost got me killed.

Our problem with bad habits and training scars in self-defense is we don’t know what we don’t know. If we knew we were doing something that might get us killed, we would do something else. This is why training scars and bad habits are so dangerous.

I even disagree with some habits that professional shooters and other trainers use constantly because I saw it cause problems overseas in a combat zone. “Cold” weapons became a problem and the habit of clearing weapon systems by pulling the trigger become an issue.

If you carry a firearm around for long enough and it is unloaded, lots of people stop treating it like a firearm. It becomes an extension of them that you wouldn’t worry about like pointing at someone. And you point your rifle at people all the time. ”Don’t worry, it’s not loaded” was always the excuse for poor weapons handling. And they were unloaded until they weren’t. Now you have live weapons being pointed at people you don’t want to kill or destroy. Law Enforcement and the Military are the worst you could ever see at their daily gun handling safety practices.

Pulling the trigger to confirm that a weapon is unloaded came from the competition community where you are only playing a game. And we thought that was a good idea to adopt what they did to the battlefield but that caused more negligent discharges than you can shake a stick at. And instead of the Army and Marine Corps looking at the problem to fix it, they doubled down and started ruining the careers of all those people standing there when a rifle went off into the clearing barrel.

Training scars are hard to overcome. If you just rack the slide and pull the trigger all the time without thought or looking, sooner or later when there is a filled magazine in the weapon, you rack the slide and pull the trigger before even thinking about anything else. And you discharge a round into the clearing barrel… hopefully containing the bullet and no one gets hurt. Other times and I actually saw this happen, you miss the barrel and zing a round off the concrete barrier and it goes down the line of soldiers waiting to get into chow. With luck no one got hit, that time.

If you can’t pick out anything that is a bad habit or training scar that you do, you need professional training. We all have bad habits and training scars.

I’ve recently picked up, from competition, to move without putting my rifle on safe. It gets me in and out of (mostly out) of positions .25 to .5 seconds faster giving me a better chance of winning the competition. This is bad in the real world. I should have my long gun on safe any time I’m not shooting and especially if I’m moving. That is when you are going to hit your rifle on something and ketch the trigger and have a negligent discharge. I know, it couldn’t happen to you, but I’ve seen it happen multiple times in training and luckily only once in combat.

Stay Safe,

Ben