Without a doubt! SouthNarc focused on teaching the principles and general techniques of how to clear rooms. From there it was up to the students to put those principles and techniques into practice. While doing that, every student learned, through pain, that solo clearing a structure is an incredibly dangerous task. I came home with more than 20 welts from airsoft and sims. Without any instruction, I’m sure that number would have easily doubled. In addition, the students were using the same principles that were taught against each other. No one got off easy.
The end of first day evo was done in a completely pitch black room. It was extremely disorienting, despite having gone through the room multiple times in the light. Even during the day when there was plenty of light, there are plenty of shadows that you would have to check with a flashlight.
Overall, you were constantly challenged mentally and physically through the entire course. The problems faced during the weekend are ones that can’t be found on a square range. This is the kind of course that will pressure test your skills, and then some.
I personally did not get a chance to. But after the first couple rounds of airsoft, TLG seemed less worried about getting shot in the face, and more worried about the one student who was shooting everyone in the dick.
TC shot me in the back of the head once and could have fired another 9 rounds (all he had in his mag) if he'd been feeling vindictive. That was during the no-light evo.
Another student shot me on the top of my head when I was playing role player during his no-light evo.
I've garnered something of a reputation over time for writing course reviews that others find useful. I started writing them primarily for my own edification, as I found that the process of writing the review forced me to organize my thoughts and helped with retaining important information and coherently putting it all together into something that I can build on. It has been enormously difficult for me to do that with this course because I'm finding it impossible to articulate what I took away in a fashion that would adequately communicate the value of the material and practice to the reader...so if this review isn't up to the usual standards bear with me.
It's always good to start a writeup with an overall impression, so I'll get that out of the way now:
I want to be clear about the intent of that sentence: It's not intended to be negative toward the course or the instructor. Sometimes the learning process is frustrating and mentally fatiguing. I’ll deal more with that in a bit.
AMIS was organized into two distinct sections: Firstly a classroom session where SouthNarc presented and explained fundamental concepts, and then a series of exercises on applying the concepts learned during the lecture portion.
The conceptual part of the class could be summed up by the term “Tactical Geometry 101”. It was centered on the idea of using angles to your advantage. If that sentence is meaningless to you, do a simple exercise: Go up to the corner of a building or a room. Get right up to the edge of the wall within arm’s length (meaning you can touch the corner with your hand) and see how much you can see around the corner. Then get as far away from the wall (without breaking an imaginary line drawn from the corner to your position) as possible and note how much more real estate you can see when you gain “depth” on the corner. Now imagine that there is a person with a gun and bad intentions around that corner. If you use the angles properly you give yourself the chance to see the bad guy before he sees you. Hopefully the advantages of being able to see a potential threat before he sees you are readily apparent to most.
SouthNarc used demonstrations in the classroom, video footage, and even a neat little markerboard exercise to explain “getting depth” on corners and thinking of the world in terms of exposure to potential threats. The difference in this approach was evident during the markerboard walkthrough of a floorplan. (someone may reproduce it here…I don’t know) We went through step by step, corner by corner and on a couple of occasions the path I would have taken was different than the path SouthNarc showed us. It may not have seemed to be a significant difference, but SouthNarc was able to show on one portion of the diagram how my approach would have left exposure at seven points where his approach would have left exposure at only two. The difference between being exposed from 7 points of the unknown versus two points of the unknown would have been only a few steps.
The classroom segment of the class was engaging, clear, and the markerboard and video segments of the class were useful in beginning to get your brain thinking of the environment around you in terms of angles, exposure, and pacing.
After the classroom section the facility was put into a cold FOF status. This means that no real firearms, ammunition, knives, OC spray, or other implements of mayhem were allowed in the training environment. All of those items had to be locked up and each student was lined up and patted down by the instructor to ensure that lethal weapons didn’t make it into the training environment. I mention this because the safety procedures SouthNarc used are the mark of an experienced professional. You cannot afford to half-ass the safety procedures in exercises where people are literally going to be pointing “guns” (airsoft or sims) at one another.
The facility we were using warrants some attention here as well. The place was a wreck. Piles of random junk were everywhere. In one room there was a boat, store shelving, dozens of appliances, furniture, and one really annoying car seat strewn about with a couple of person-wide paths through the clutter. In another, there were some reloading supplies, children’s toys, and even some old VHS porn tapes laying around. Sections of the floor were missing. The floor was covered in nails, broken glass, and other random items great for tripping you, poking you, or making noise when you desperately wanted to be quiet. This was not your typical shoothouse. It was, however, the kind of place you would expect to find somebody cooking meth or smoking crack. This was a deliberate choice by SouthNarc. He told me that the goal was to present us with the worst case scenario, believing that the emotional impact of confronting the worst case is effective at driving the lessons home and making the material stick in the student's mind.
In this wonderland of urban decay, we were broken into a few groups and sent to play the most unpleasant game of hide-n-seek ever as SouthNarc and Byron cycled through the groups watching our performance and debriefing after runs to show where we’d fouled up. Naturally I decided to go first in my group and quickly learned that I really sucked at using the angles to my advantage and conforming to cover as I found myself hearing the snap from an empty airsoft gun (we ran dry for the first run) from a location where I hadn’t yet seen anybody waiting to shoot me in the face. The full measure of my failure wasn’t truly apparent until we went live with airsoft and I found myself on multiple occasions hearing the gas operated weapons being fired and the pellets whizzing by my face without the slightest clue where the fire was coming from. On one particularly humiliating occasion, one of the bad guy hiders had combined a decent hiding spot with clever use of shadow to make himself invisible. He was directly in my line of sight but I didn’t actually see him until his airsoft gun stopped working for a moment and he moved to try and get it up and running again. We ran through the different areas of the facility as a group until breaking briefly for dinner. Then we returned after dinner to do low light work and sim runs.
SouthNarc gave a brief lecture on flashlights and flashlight techniques and the challenges of low light. I won’t even attempt to cover what was presented, but I will say that I’m all for a dedicated low light class that goes into greater depth and detail.
After the low light lecture, we went into sims runs through a section of the facility. It was by this time late in the evening and inside the facility it was pitch black. The sim guns were Glock 17T’s with standard Glock slot-filler sights. I played the role of a bad guy first and while waiting for my opportunity to shoot Todd in the face I found that I had to actually touch the front sight post to the nose of my protective mask and then slowly press it out to even have a hope of indexing the weapon in the same general area where my head was pointing.
When it was my turn to be the good guy going through the pitch black house of horrors I was not terribly enthusiastic. I couldn’t see anything but I didn’t want to use my light because doing so seemed to instantly cause a trigger pull from the bad guy player nearest to you…and trust me when I say that could be very near. On my low light run I encountered a bad guy who was hiding in a little corner behind a door that led into a cluttered hallway. By “encountered” I mean that I was aware of his presence only when I noticed muzzle flashes from his pistol (apparently held around the door gangsta style) a couple of feet in front of me. I was so surprised he was able to get off multiple shots before I manage to work out “Oh…he’s shooting at me.” And “Oh, dude…I should probably like shoot back or something….and maybe move too. Yeah. That would be good.” My rounds didn’t find him and thankfully he emptied his magazine of 10 rounds without hitting me. After that little bit of unpleasantness was over I moved forward to continue the exercise. I distinctly remember thinking “I’d give my left testicle to have a laser on this thing” shortly before noticing a laser beam zip over my head from the far end of the hall. Without conscious thought I ducked behind the rickety staircase to get out of the way of the barrage of fire I expected from Todd.
Todd, being thoroughly inconsiderate, moved to another location rather than standing still and letting me shoot him for his mistake. What followed was probably at least two minutes of the two of us exchanging potshots around a corner at no more than 3 yards. (If that far) Eventually Todd ran out of ammo. I don’t think we managed to hit each other once.
Then it was time to go into the room beyond Todd’s position. There was a little crack in the wall behind the doorway that allowed just a tiny sliver of streetlight through. Apparently this was enough light for The Cyborg waiting in the room to fire three accurate shots at me as I moved through the door. Now I had just exchanged rounds with two other dudes at a distance of feet without anyone doing any damage…and this guy nailed me with solid shots from yards away with absolutely no light.
In the last room I encountered the last bad guy and deciding to try aggression for a change I cleared up to a point and then charged in shooting. It worked in that I managed to get good hits on the bad guy…but I took some minor hits in the process.
Then it was The Cyborg’s turn to run through the gauntlet. I don’t remember with absolute clarity, but I believe I was the only one who managed to hit The Cyborg…I managed to use his backlighting trick against him as he tried to come through a door. I hit him once in the hand…but he repaid me with three tightly spaced shots to the head. Folks, I was only exposing the portion of my head from my eyes up, and this guy managed to shoot me three friggin’ times in that tiny exposed area in pitch blackness…while being shot at.
At the end of day 1 I felt like my brain was going to liquify and run out of my ears. Understanding the concepts taught earlier in the day wasn't a problem...but applying them at speed in an environment where every single step you take has at least half a dozen points of exposure and remembering to conform to cover and judging when to change your pace and trying to think about solving a potential shooting problem around the next bend...I was simply overloaded.
Like Todd, I'm not exactly a stranger to being in a shoothouse. I've had the opportunity to spend lots of time in them doing stuff that most would consider pretty high speed for someone that doesn't kill people for a living. I've always been careful to explain that there's a lot more to CQB than what you do in shoothouses and that the XXX hours I've spent in a shoothouse doesn't hope to compare to the months and years that those who do it at a high level spend working on those skills. The goal of a sterile shoothouse is to teach you the basics of movement, angles, going through doors, etc. It's CQB kindergarten. Typically your average shoothouse is largely empty, with perhaps a few pieces of furniture thrown in for a nod to realism...but it's generally not enough to cause significant problems in finding and dealing with targets. Your targets are generally at more or less eye level. Your muzzle is never supposed to be raised much above eye level because of danger to people on the catwalk. You don't shoot low because bouncing bullets off the concrete is generally frowned upon for various reasons. People refer to shoothouses as a 360 degree training environment, but generally they aren't. Most importantly, the targets themselves typically don't move, don't talk, and don't shoot back.
The AMIS program puts you into the diametric opposite of that. You're in a place where you cannot take any angle or any space for granted because if you do you'll expose yourself to it and find that one of your skinny fellow students (that is apparently somehow the love child of Gumby and Stretch Armstrong) has managed to wedge himself into exactly that spot that's tiny, cramped, and full of broken glass and spiders the size of housecats purely for the opportunity to shoot you in the face. The "360 degree environment" is often thought of as a circle an individual can make with his muzzle on a plane parallel to the ground. This 2D thinking doesn't reflect the 3D reality of threats that can come from literally any angle low or high in the AMIS environment. In my group we had guys using ladders to get to hiding spots, and we had guys crawling into god-awful holes that looked like they could swallow Han and Luke. In words the difference may seem to be minor...but in practice once you actually try to tackle both environments the differences are glaring.
At more than one point during the exercises I hit the wall and realized I didn't have a clue how to handle the problem in front of me. This is where the frustration really kicked in. When someone has X amount of training it creates certain expectations in themselves and in others about what they are capable of. At more than one point during the AMIS class I found myself failing miserably at solving a problem and thinking to myself "This isn't supposed to be happening! I'm supposed to be winning, here! I'm the one with the #@^%!*) training! WHAT. THE. *&#!????" I started training in the first place because I have some experience of being in a bad moment and trying to pull a solution out of thin air and I didn't relish the sensation...yet here I was with that same by the seat of my pants "Golly, I hope this works." attempt to fix a problem. No es bueno.
SouthNarc promised that we would show some marked improvement on day 2. I was skeptical, but he was right. On the first cold run we did on day 2 I found myself conforming to cover better and not getting dead as much. I found that I was finding new ways to gain more depth on corners. It wasn't pretty, but it was improvement.
After our cold runs SouthNarc took us through dealing with people who were not immediately a threat. This is also a generally novel approach in a class (even in FOF evos) as most of the time you're presented with binary shoot/no shoot bad guys/targets that don't require as much mental horsepower to deal with. If you're a police officer or average joe, however, you're likely to encounter people who are a threat, but not enough of a threat to justify pulling the trigger yet...and you need something in your bag of tricks to deal with that kind of problem should it be presented to you. I found this section enormously useful and, blessedly, easy to apply.
Nope. The Cyborg managed to shoot me in the head three times...unless you meant people shooting you in the head.
Earlier this year, Craig Douglas aka Southnarc invited me to audit his AMIS (Armed Movement in Structures) class. While I’ve been lucky enough to receive “room clearing” training from a number of different sources and engage in force-on-force scenarios countless times, Craig’s AMIS program brings a level of realism that I have never experienced before. Three things in particular make AMIS stand out from previous training I’ve received.
First, much of the “room clearing” taught these days is based on military/SWAT team principles and then shoe horned into a solo situation. In contrast, Craig’s approach is based on many years as an undercover police officer. His system began from the ground up as a solo approach. It is based on dealing with multiple adversaries in environments far more cluttered than your typical live fire shoot house.
That is another major difference between AMIS and previous training I’ve seen. The “range” for our evolutions was a three story structure that literally looked like someone took a junkyard and put four walls around it. Three completely different environments (a cluttered warehouse, a typical indoor structure with one impossibly tricky room at the end we called the dungeon, and a huge open loft littered with everything from barbells to kitchen appliances) provided a training field that was repeatedly described by students as “overwhelming.”
Finally, all of the exercises were against thinking, moving human beings. You cannot fully understand the impact that has until you’ve experienced it. In a clean shoot house with paper or cardboard targets, you know you’re safe if you can’t see any bad guys. Paper targets don’t walk around the corner. Cardboard doesn’t pop out of a dark recess and start shooting you. Once you have looked down a hallway, you know it will never look any different because the targets are all attached to the walls or stands. During AMIS, however, real people with guns (airsoft or Simunition) did in fact maneuver around the same space you were clearing. The guy you ignored because he was a non-threat in the last room can in fact coming tearing up behind you firing wildly. Most importantly, you quickly begin to realize that you can’t just clear one easy corner at a time because all of the other corners could be hiding someone ready to pop out and start shooting you at the first hint of your presence. Instead of moving from safe point to safe point clearing one corner at a time, you need to be managing multiple exposures constantly.
Class began with a PowerPoint presentation and then some work on a whiteboard with students discussing how they would approach various corners or rooms in a complicated floorplan. Throughout this phase of training, Craig would demonstrate various techniques for dealing with different cover and search problems. At no time did Craig make this stuff sound easy, nor did he say it was a guarantee to success. It was stressed over and over that clearing a real structure with a real human adversary (or adversaries) is exceedingly dangerous even for highly trained professionals. At the same time, the old saw “I’d never clear it by myself” was examined and proved too simplistic. The reality is there are any number of scenarios in which you might have to clear it by yourself. Either you can learn the way to give yourself the best odds, or not.
Next we broke off into teams and began doing some cold runs searching for one another in the three areas of the building. If I had a criticism of the class, this would be it. We went from words on a screen to knee-deep in a chaotic landscape in one jump. It would have been helpful to spend some time working in a more sterile environment just long enough to get the hang of the techniques. We could get individual feedback from the instructor on what students were doing right and wrong at the conceptual level before being dropped head first into a very difficult contextual environment.
After the dry runs, we moved on to loaded airsoft. Students were required to bring their own airsoft guns, ammunition, and protective gear. Each group moved to a different floor of the structure and started all over again with the added stress of potential pain penalties for making mistakes. Three students would hide and then the fourth would go looking for them.
I can only speak for my group, but I was extremely impressed with my fellow students’ attitudes. There was no sense of competition or trying to outsmart the “searching” student. In one run, I completely failed to clear a corner and stood with a guy pointing his gun at me for at least ten seconds before he just said “boo” to let me know he was there and that I’d screwed up. He didn’t shoot me just to show me he could have. He gave me a chance to fix my error and when I didn’t, he let me know it. That kind of maturity lends itself much better to a learning process than the sort of cowboys & indians shenanigans I see too often in unscripted force on force “training.”
Throughout the day, Craig jumped from team to team watching and critiquing. In this task he was aided by one of his star pupils, Byron. I’ve actually had Byron attend two classes of mine as a student but when it came to the AMIS material those roles were certainly reversed. Byron’s ability to execute the techniques we’d been shown was a real testament to the program. Between Craig and Byron, almost every time a student was running through an exercise we had eyes on us offering advice and correcting mistakes.
The next phase of Day One was low- and no-light. Craig again brought us back into the classroom to discuss and demonstrate his preferred flashlight techniques. We did some dry runs and then it was time for the final evolution for the day. The airsoft guns were put away and the Simunition guns came out. The guns and ammo were provided as part of the class; students only needed to use their own safety gear.
The final evolution was done in complete darkness. We took turns one at a time clearing the dungeon. Without question, this was the most stressful and humbling part of the class for just about all the students. Even those of us who have a fair bit of experience with low light shooting and room clearing got a healthy dose of ego adjustment. At one point I got myself into a crossfire situation knowing nothing more than there was one enemy a few feet behind me and another about ten feet in front of me somewhere. I was on one knee, the spare magazine I needed to continue had fallen on the ground (I forgot to put on my mag pouch and had to put it in my belt, doh), and one of my opponents apparently had the ability to see in the pitch black because even when I tried to shift my position by a few feet he was hitting me. Craig just said, “Get the initiative back” and the rest is a blur of paint marks and lightbulb flashes.
Morning of Day Two began with more dry runs. Craig had made the dubious promise that after the low- and no-light exercises, doing it in the light would seem easy. Sure enough, just about every one of the students commented on how much easier things seemed that morning. Getting a chance to sleep on what we’d learned probably helped a lot, too.
Next we got a lecture and demonstration of how to deal with another problem that you don’t see too often in live fire shoot houses: the compliant non-threat. When a cardboard target doesn’t have a weapon, you’re done and move past it. When the “target” is a skinny guy in a hoodie whose hands are empty and who makes absolutely no move to approach or threaten, things are a bit trickier. Craig demonstrated his method with Byron’s assistance as the nondescript neutral participant. Then each group went to one of the training areas and practiced on one another.
The last lecture was on in extremis movement. What do you do when your wife or child is screaming for help and there are a million hiding places between you and her? For added complexity, we also threw in another non-threatening stranger you would have to deal with on your way to the calls for help. Again, class broke up into groups and we had a chance to practice both the movement and the suggested technique for dealing with the unarmed stranger in the middle of the rescue.
We did one last Simunition evolution that served as the final exam for the class. Because the scenario is similar in each AMIS class, I won’t go into the details except to say that after two full days of clearing complicated environments under high stress, most of the students did very well. During the post-class debrief, students universally expressed positive attitudes and a sense that they genuinely absorbed some important lessons over the stressful two days.
As an instructor, Craig was approachable both during and after the class. He came out to lunch and dinner with the students and proved able to go from answering a question to laughing at a joke to telling a war story without skipping a beat. At every turn he worked to inspire confidence without ever letting things turn into an easy “gimme” lesson. While the students had some down time to recharge their batteries during the day, Craig was on from the crack of dawn until well after the sun went down. He never got frustrated, never got angry, and was always up for some fun… like when we found this Boba Fett mask lying around the clutter of the dungeon:
Byron, too, was working 24/7 during the class and students were constantly thanking him for the observations he made and tips he was able to share. As I mentioned previously, just watching Byron clear a room made us realize how effective the AMIS techniques were when executed properly.
After the class, my feedback to the instructor was pretty straightforward. This material could easily be broken up into three separate classes: the concepts and fundamentals practiced in a more sterile space leading up to some reasonable level of chaos as a final exercise; a more advanced class that added the challenges of the worse-than-real-life environment we dealt with all weekend; and, a dedicated low light class. There was easily five or more days’ worth of material and practice to be had from AMIS. Quite a few of my fellow students said they’d happily come back and take an “AMIS for Dummies” level class just to better build their ability to execute the basic techniques. Everyone said they’d come back for a low-light weekend.
AMIS was unlike any other training I’ve received. It broke past the artificial barriers commonly seen in “room clearing” classes and forced students to deal with complicated realistic environments against complicated, realistic human opponents. You might notice that none of the students posted AARs the day after class. Having spoken to many of them, we’re all still processing what was taught. Days later you realize you learned something that skipped past your conscious mind in the whirlwind of stress and excitement.
Would I take the class again? Let me put it this way: remember Byron, the guy who was like the Olympic Gold Medal Ninja of AMIS? He’s taken the class twice. If another bite at the apple makes me only half as good at this stuff as Byron, I’d be stupid not to go again.
I was thinking about this the past couple days. At least at the location we were at, we could have used the classroom, the area by the front door, the painted room, and the loading dock, as that "sterile" environment to try out the basic principles of angles, depth, etc.
I certainly cannot speak for Craig, but I do know that as an instructor it's easy to put pressure on yourself to make classes all-encompassing. You don't want to look like the guy who says, "You can learn everything from me, you just have to take sixteen different classes!" You want students to walk away from a class knowing how to do it. You don't want students to feel like they have to come back for more just to learn something.
That's why I think a pre-AMIS "for Dummies" class would be helpful. Guys who want the raw AMIS experience could still do so. Folks who wanted more Crawl and Walk before Run-Run-Run could do the Dummies class first.
Was this an actual training facility or did you guys just get access to a f'ed up building to use? Kudos to SN either way for setting up such a realistic environment.