My week with an American hero

I thought I’d share a little about my last week. I spent 8 days training at a location called CSAT (Combat Shooting and Tactics) in East Texas. This is a 300 acre training range owned by MSGT Paul Howe, Ret USA and a Delta Operator for 10 out of his 20 years (check out his name at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Howe). If you don’t know about Paul Howe check him out on Wikipedia.org. He is the real deal and among many assignments was most famous for his rescue efforts during “Black Hawk Down” in Mogadishu, Somalia. He is very humble and doesn’t talk much about his time unless you ask. The many can shoot everything he requires of his students and probably 10 times better.

I wrote up a summary or After Action Report of my 6 training days with him. I thought I’d share that with you. You can read my complete right up at http://www.baileytactical.com/blog .

There are a couple of photos and a short video I posted on my flickr account. You can see the video here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dbphotography/3307360059/ .

Here’s a photo of the group of guys I trained with. They came from the FBI SWAT team, Air Marshal Service, US Marshalls, local SWAT teams and a couple of Blackwater private security guys going back for their 3rd and 4th time to Iraq and Afghanistan. I was way out of my league but it made me better at the end of the week and I surprisingly kept up with all of them. On my last test I actually ran the fastest times of the week and hit every target in the kill zone, except I threw 1 shot just outside the kill zone on target. The kill zone is a target that is 6” by 13” over the spine/central nervous system.

Hopefully you’ll find it interesting. I came back sore, bruised, bleeding and a lot better tactically than I had been in years. It was hard but a lot of fun! 2000 rounds of ammo - it's all good!

Peace!

David