Without Warning!
Personal Preparedness in our Exciting age:
“Now remember, when things look bad, and it looks as if you’re not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. Because, when you lose your head, and you give up, then you ain’t gonna win, and your ain’t gonna live. That’s just the way it is.” –Josey Wales (played by Cline Eastwood) in the 1976 feature film, “The Outlaw Josey Wales”.
These comments from a recent student at one of our Courses:
“Things I took away:
(1) I can shoot reasonably well
(2) Shooting is the easy part
(3) When you fumble at the beginning, it makes everything else harder and sloppier
Conclusion: We need to perfect basic manipulations. There is no doubt that
fumbling/indecision/hesitation/dithering invariably represent the ‘kiss of death!’”
Reinforced by a friend, an old Warrior like me, in the UK:
“I remember the way we regularly practiced in total darkness, against time, all aspects of weapons handling. Wasted parts and wasted motions were thus assiduously eliminated.
We regularly spent endless hours on the range precisely adjusting and confirming sight settings, so our personal rifles were always absolutely ready, ‘… left of bang’ A rifle that is not precisely, continuously sighted-in (zeroed), to your satisfaction, will be about as useful to you as a bar of soap, as you pointed-out in your last Quip.
Someone asked me today, with a cynical tone of ‘moral superiority,’ why I drive a powerful SUV, equipped with four-wheel drive. I preferred not to answer this idiot, as foul weather erupts over us with freakish regularity. I told him I prefer not to get stuck, while always being able to leave paved roads, when civilization’s trappings disintegrate without warning!”
Comment:
The operative phrase is, “… without warning!”
“No matter what anybody else on board says or does, never get into an aircraft flying over enemy territory without your pistol, AR, magazines, blade, compass, trauma kit, rations, water, hat, jacket, and boots!”
Brigadier General Chris Thirion, SADF (a genuine hero of a long-past era)
/John
Read This and a Host of other Original John Farnam Quips at Defense Training International
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