Authors: Dan Baum
“They apply to everybody, everywhere, all the time!” he shouted. “Four-man entry team in Fallujah, jungles of Vietnam, here on the range, or in your family room. The five rules
always apply
.”
He hung a target for each of us—a life-size man silhouette with a six-inch circle over the chest, two-inch circles on the hips, and an inverted triangle on the face. “This is center mass,” he said, putting his hand on the big circle on the chest. “This is where your shots are most likely to stop the threat.”
Still down at the far end of the shooting lanes, we stood seven yards from our targets and did some shooting. Reid had a nine-millimeter Smith & Wesson M&P semi-automatic like Rick Ector’s. Tom had an extremely complicated double-and-single-action Heckler & Koch pistol festooned with safety, de-cocking lever, slide release, and an external hammer—a lot to keep track of. Their guns held fourteen shots or more. My five-shot
.38 revolver seemed puny, but, standing still and shooting slowly, we all did fine.
“I’m going to give you commands,” Jack said. “ ‘Standard response’ means two shots center mass. ‘Nonstandard response’ means two shots center mass and one shot in each hip to break bone and bring him down. ‘Failure to stop’ means two shots center mass and one in the white zone.” He pointed to the triangle on the face.
As we hung fresh targets, I considered the words “failure to stop.” A man keeps coming with a knife, despite bullets ripping into his chest.
Yeesh
.
Jack barked alternating commands. “Failure to stop!” “Standard response!” “Standard response!” “Nonstandard response!” The faster and louder he got, the more nervous I became and the more I dropped cartridges while reloading. Reid and Tom, with their big semi-automatics, kept shooting and shooting, and when they needed to reload, it was magazine out, magazine in,
zip-zip
, done.
Even under the minimal pressure of Jack’s yelling, that triangle and those little circles on the hips were hard to hit. And I kept dropping the damned cartridges. When we were finished, my shirt was damp and the floor around my feet was littered with live ammunition. God forbid
my
gunfight went on for more than five shots. I’d be toast.
During a break, Jack took me by the shoulder and walked me up to my target. “See this?” he said, pointing to a hole that was half an inch outside the silhouette’s head. “That is everything you own, everything you’ve ever worked for, everything you’d hoped to leave to your children. That bullet went on to hit a seven-year-old girl, or a mother of three, or a heart surgeon. You own every bullet you fire, and you can’t call them back.”
He turned to Reid and Tom. “Regardless of what I tell you, if you press the trigger, you own it. We’re grown-ups. The decision is yours, not mine.”
I already felt a little light-headed, a little heart-fluttery, like at the top of a roller coaster. Talk of thugs running at me as my bullets hit bystanders had me convinced this wasn’t for me. Then we got serious.
Jack had us shoot while walking toward the targets, while backing away, and while walking across them, putting two shots into each. To ready us for being wounded in our strong hand, he taught us to shoot with our weak one. He taught us to reholster slowly—“reluctantly,” as he put it—while looking around behind us, because people are often shot when they think the fight is over.
We played a kind of quick-draw game that Jack called “The Initiator.”
Two of us stood side by side, facing targets, with our guns holstered. One had his hands at his sides; the other held his arms out straight in front of him. It was up to the one with his arms up to start moving toward his gun. As soon as he did, the other could draw. First one to put two shots into center mass won. The initiator, with his arms out, had the advantage of knowing when the game would start. The other had the advantage of starting with a hand close to his gun. We played over and over; neither player had a clear edge.
We shot for hours, burning through about four hundred rounds apiece. We hardly spoke; it was all shooting. Jack walked behind us, adjusting our positions like a yoga instructor. We drew and fired, drew and fired, drew and fired, trying to etch the actions into muscle memory. By the end of it, I was bushed.
But I wasn’t finished. After the other students went home, Hawley handed me off to an instructor named Billy—a short, powerfully built man of about sixty with an egg-bald head and a murky Special Operations past in the brown-water Navy during Vietnam. Billy had a gravelly voice and hands that could probably tear a beer can in half. He wore a .45 automatic on his hip and kept a folding knife the size of a harmonica in his pocket. After we shook hands, he smiled, reached down the front of his jeans to a hidden pocket, and came up with a hammerless stainless-steel .44 Special revolver. It seemed to me that clawing that thing out during the panic of a gunfight would be a good way for Billy to shoot off his wedding tackle, but he laughed that off. “You get as old as I am, and see as much as I have, and you get pretty good with your gear.”
He put his arm around my shoulders and chuckled in a vaguely malevolent way. “We’re going to do something for you we don’t usually do,” he said. “Ready to have your mind blown?”
No, actually. I was ready for a beer and a nap.
“We’re going to put you on the Prism machine, which is really here to train police.” Billy led me to a range that had no shooting bays. Instead it had a booth at the back end in which a young man sat at a big computer console. He said hello with the kind of smirk that indicated that something unpleasant was about to happen.
Billy walked me downrange until we were standing only a few feet from what appeared to be a bedsheet that someone had stretched across the range like a screen. He told me to remove my holstered revolver, then fixed around my waist a gun belt on which hung a holstered Glock 19—a
compact nine-millimeter. He handed me three loaded magazines and told me to put them in my left pants pocket.
“What’s going to happen is, you’re going to see a scenario played out on that screen, and you have to decide whether or not to shoot.” Once again, something about the exaggerated manliness of Billy and the potential lethality of our project reeled me back to the fright and excitement of Hank Hilliard’s rifle range at Camp Sunapee. I could really blow it here; I’d better not.
“I shoot at the screen?”
“It’s made of rubber. Here’s what’s so cool: The heat of the bullet passing through it cauterizes the hole and seals it up. Sensors aimed at the back of the screen detect your hits, the computer analyzes them instantly, and, depending on where your bullets hit, the people on the screen react. They’ll either fall over or not. Is that cool? The whole thing is run by the kid in the booth. You ready?”
“I’ve never shot a Glock before.”
Billy had me take it from the holster. It wasn’t fancy, like Tom’s Heckler & Koch—no de-cocker, no external hammer, not even a safety catch. It was the pocket camera of firearms: point and shoot. But it was heftier than my .38, and it held three times as many cartridges. I loaded it, pulled the slide, and returned it to the holster.
“These are what we call ‘active shooter’ situations,” Billy said. “You have an unknown number of active shooters in a building—your typical university or office-building situation. You ready?”
The range went dark, the screen came to life, and I was in some kind of school building. Because I was standing only about ten feet from the screen, it filled my vision. Up came the sound, realistically loud: people screaming and, in the distance, muffled gunshots. I drew the gun and held it with both hands at low-ready. This was nothing like playing a firstperson shooter game on a computer. I was
there
among the cinder-block walls, the bulletin boards, and the office doors with cartoons tacked to them. And it wasn’t a cheap plastic controller in my hand, but a real gun loaded with live ammunition.
My heart was somewhere up around my collarbone. My hands were sweating. I found myself moving down a hallway and realized how many places there are in the average building for a bad guy to hide. That doorway! That cranny! Behind that fire extinguisher! I checked each one as I passed: nothing.
I turned and moved through a door. Loud screams: Someone came running toward me from the gloom at the end of the hall—a young woman, crying and pointing behind her. Another person came running up the hall from back there—someone chasing her? I raised the gun. No, another screaming person, with empty hands.
Up ahead, a body sprawled on the floor, and something lay near his hand. A pistol? Was he alive? About to pick it up and shoot me? Should I shoot him? No, it was an open cell phone that looked like a gun. Christ, I could have shot a victim.
While I was looking at the body, another person appeared in the hallway, and I jerked the gun up: another empty-handed innocent. I was gasping audibly, my torso rigid with fear. Yet for all that, I was amazed to find that my index finger still lay along the slide, not on the trigger. Rule Three: Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target and you’re ready to fire. Such was the value of good training; it held even under pressure.
I kept moving down the hall. I turned left into a classroom. People were lined up against a blackboard, crying. On the floor lay at least one body, maybe two. Standing directly in front of me was a big woman with her arm around another woman’s neck and a gun to the woman’s head.
I froze.
The big woman with the gun was yelling at me. Everybody else was screaming; the noise was overwhelming, the tableau so terrifying that my brain locked up. I don’t know how long I stood there, frozen, before the screen went dark.
Billy appeared at my shoulder. “You should have shot her.”
“What?” I squeaked. I felt like I’d been plugged into a wall socket. “I was afraid of hitting the hostage.”
“The hostage is dead already,” Billy said calmly, and fixed me with the kind of level gaze I imagined him using in combat when delivering such news as “The leg has to come off” or “You’re dying.” I must have been trying to break eye contact, because he moved his head sideways a little to keep me locked in. “You’ve got bodies on the floor,” he said. “
Look at me
. Bodies on the floor shows
intent
. The woman with the gun has demonstrated she is willing to kill and she’s going to kill again. You have only three options: You can back away; she kills the hostage. You can shoot and maybe hit the hostage. Or you can freeze, like you did, and she kills the hostage and you both. Either way, the hostage is already dead; you have to save yourself and everybody else in the room.”
“Christ.” I blinked and shook my head, like a dog shaking off water.
“It’s the real deal. We stopped it because we didn’t want to overload you too soon. She was about to shoot you and then the hostage. Want to do it again?”
No. I wanted to cry until I stopped shaking.
“Yeah,” I said.
Billy murmured into his walkie-talkie, and the scenario restarted. The doors, the gunshots, the screaming, the running people. I moved into the room where the woman with the gun was behind the hostage, yelling at me. Two-thirds of her face was hidden behind that of the hostage; I could see one of her eyes. I raised the Glock and shot once. She collapsed like a silk scarf drifting to the floor. The screen went dark.
“Good shooting!” Billy growled.
My heart was going like crazy and I was gasping air, but I felt terrific—like a superhero who had saved the day. I felt not a trace of remorse for having killed a woman. At that moment, in the seconds after it happened, it only felt good. The threat was over, because I’d kept my head and shot perfectly. I’d kept people from getting killed.
I had no memory of either the shot or the recoil. Although it was the first time I’d fired a Glock, I’d made an incredibly difficult shot. Whether that said something about the gun or performance under pressure, I couldn’t say. But it was the second time I’d shot well with one of the high-tech guns I’d so disdained. The first had been the kid’s AR-15 at the Family Shooting Center. Gunmaking had come a long way.
Billy spoke into his walkie-talkie, and the screen showed a still image of the moment I’d shot, with a blue dot on the woman’s left eye, where my bullet had struck. “You hit her in the white zone,” he said, using two blunt index fingers to define the triangle on his face: eye, eye, middle of upper lip. “The shock wave takes out her medulla oblongata, and it’s impossible for her to pull the trigger. It’s the perfect shot—the white zone is the only shot that really ends a situation.” Odd, I thought, as I used my sleeve to wipe sweat from my forehead. In the gun world, white has contradictory meanings: the lowest condition of readiness, and the ultimate bullet strike. “Your alternative was to shoot the hostage here,” Billy continued, pressing a finger into his own shoulder. “That’s a nonfatal wound. She falls, and you have a clear shot at the shooter. Ready?”
The screen lit up, and I was in an office building, with even more hiding places than the college—cubicles, closets, hallways. People were screaming and crying, running all over; it was impossible to tell which
might be the shooter. A door burst open to my right, and I jerked up my gun. Again, Jack’s training kept my finger from moving onto the trigger.
I didn’t yet have a target. I wasn’t about to shoot.
People poured toward me and around me. I moved through a door and found myself at the top of a stairway. Two people came running up. A man in a yellow hoodie appeared on the landing, gun in hand. I shot, and, to my immense relief, he collapsed.
“Notice the blood spatter on the wall,” Billy whispered in my ear, proud of the realism.
I continued down the stairs, stepping around the body, and eased through a door into another floor of cubicles. Bodies lay on the floor. I didn’t know if this was the work of Yellow Hoodie or if there were more shooters. The machine kept me moving down a hallway. Slowly.
I looked left. Sitting at a computer, a man in a dark jacket had his hands up. In one hand was a gun, pointed straight at the ceiling.