Drive out of the Kill Zone

As you all know, Military.com Editor Ward Carroll and I spent three days in eastern Virginia doing some weapons tactics training and a tactical driving course.

We were lucky to be linked up with International Training Incorporated which runs all kinds of courses on everything from basic pistol to a full-on multi-city surveillance and counter surveillance package. The guy who runs the facility in West Point, VA, Lamar Tooke told us the company has been around for 20 years training military, law enforcement and "government agency" personnel -- ITI is located only about 20 miles from Camp Perry (The Farm)...so, you do the math.

The place has a fully certified drop zone, two, one mile driving courses, three firearms ranges out to 200 meters and a full live ammo shoot house. The 900 acre campus also has paintball and airsoft shoot houses and miles of off-road courses for four wheel drive familiarization.

I want to take just a moment to give Wards's and my sincere thanks to the instructors at ITI for their patience, humor and gentle teaching with us. We never felt intimidated and no question or request was off the table no matter how inane. They delivered us plenty of crap with a smile, mostly because we deserved it, but sometimes just to mess with us. If I hear "just to be extremely nit picky..." again I'm going to scream!...

Sure the firearms training was awesome and fun, but by far the most valuable training we got was the tactical driving course. This is the kind of training government and military folks wait months or years for. We're talking high-speed driving, formation driving, offensive and defensive driving, recoveries ... even roll-over training.

We shot a ton of video of the entire three days, so rather than nod off reading my incongruous rants, take a look at the videos as I post them.

The one posted above shows the three "Attack Recognition and Response" scenarios we were trained on. The instructors, Aaron House and Robbie McGinnis, took some extra time to teach us these since we were there for only a short time. We learned how to back out of a road block, ram our way through one and take out a car while COPs style -- and deal with it if we were taken out.

We're surely not the best at it, but as you can see, McGinnis and House gave us the tools we need to deal with the situation if we're ambushed in the field.