I haven’t taken commercial courses before but have attended a few short military trainings as a civilian. Basic stuff like weapons maintenance and operation in live fire, dime and washer drills, room clearing with dummy guns, marksmanship qualification simulators, sighting in iron and magnified optics, and very limited full auto with just 5 in the mag. Even then there’s very little opportunity in civilian life to get a taste of practical shooting and a teaser of what competition feels like.

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As I’ve commented in other AARs, Josh is an excellent instructor, and was able to perform all his drills with the level of skill you’d expect. But he also didn’t showboat, which is a refreshing trend I’ve seen from other instructors as well. The Green Ops instructor cadre has a surprising level of humility given their accomplishments, and I find them very easy to learn from.

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I try to take a lot of Green Ops clinics, but unfortunately, due to my Sabbath observance, I don’t necessarily get a chance to take a lot of their classes. This year, I was lucky: Green Ops offered their Defensive Pistol II class on a Sunday, and I was able to sign up for it. I think the clinic format is phenomenal, but getting that full 8 hours of class in pushes you just a little harder to improvement. I’ll tell you what I thought of it after the jump!

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Always the student is a phrase I have heard repeatedly over the years, and in that phrase, I have always sought out opportunities to learn new skills, improve on skillsets I already possessed, and how to inject life lessons and experiences into those.
Not too long ago I attended the Green Ops Tactical Rifle II course which was held at Shadow Hawk Defense in West Virginia, and I can tell you this about Shadow Hawk, it is by far one of the best training facilities I have ever been able to train at. Great location, range setups, and a plethora of training courses and competitions are held there monthly.

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The day started off with a safety brief, medical evacuation plan, and discussions about justification for the use of force and gear setup.  We then moved onto the range which was comprised of ~12 different shooting lanes with a large stone quarry wall as the backstop.  The shooting started off with simple exercises to help us warm up such as slow firing 5 shots into a small square target from 3-5 yards away with no shot timer.  

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Based on things I’ve read on PF, I reached out to the folks at Green Ops to inquire about a private lesson. Green Ops teaches nationwide but they are headquartered in VA. Communication from Green Ops was excellent. They were very responsive to my questions and eventually put me in contact with their training director Chris. I told Chris that I was looking for pistol/carbine training focused on my wife, a beginner, and that I would like to participate. I could always use a tune up on the fundamentals since I haven’t been shooting much lately. So we agreed to meet at a private range for half day rifle/half day pistol format. So far, we have done 2 days.

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Well, this course was a little bit different! One of my goals this year, when it comes to training, was to get out of my comfort zone (“get comfortable being uncomfortable!”). Starting with this first course of my training year, I can honestly say: mission accomplished! These two days of training took me, for the most part, far outside of my comfort zone and into a place where my prior knowledge, training, and practice could be integrated into a totally new (to me) paradigm.

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“Why should your training be any less special”? I remember those words as clearly as they were spoken to me the first time, I met Mike Green of the training company Green Ops. When Mike and I were put into contact a few years by a mutual friend in the training community. I would say it was one of the most significant encounters of my lifetime.

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Over the weekend I trained with Mike Green and his crew at @greenopsinc for their low light pistol course. I had an incredible time and got a ton of information to take home with me for my own practice. I personally carry a @glock 19 GEN 5 MOS with an @trijicon RMR and a @streamlightTLR1 (It’s name is space gat). I would primarily depend on that TLR1 for night time pew pew’s and have a secondary Streamlight pro-tec that I have for just general use (like digging skittles out from under the driver’s seat of my Jeep). Short of bashing someone in the dome with the bezel, I do not think of that light as something I would use for fighting, specifically gun fighting, mostly because of the TLR1.

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I am very pleased to say that Green Ops in northern Virginia is one of those real-deal advanced training providers, and they’re worth every penny you throw their way. I’ve taken a number of courses with them, and this after-action review is for their Defensive Carbine Clinic.

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I've recently started shooting IDPA, and enjoy it greatly. However, it has definitely revealed some shortcomings in my shooting technique, so I decided that, unclassified or not, I was going to sign up for the Green Ops "Practical Pistol / Competition Clinic" over at the NRA range, which happened last night.

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As you would expect, the low light pistol clinic is an advanced course. I will preface this entire AAR with some honesty: I was on the jagged edge of having enough training, and as a result, I was probably the weakest shooter there. This was because I had not practiced one-handed shooting enough, and one-handed shooting is a serious requirement for this course. Being weak on that means trying to have to make that happen while you're simultaneously trying to make it happen with a light. This isn't to say I couldn't basically hit what I was aiming at, but it manifested in a lot of "just-outside-the-box" misses.

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