The question of "how much training time does one need?" has been on the mind of late.

A couple weeks ago I was talking a friend through purchasing their first handgun, what training they were looking for, how much practice time they could/should take and so on.

And recently it's been a side topic of discussion with some colleagues over how much training time is considered good or adequate or even above average over in the stage/screen combat world.

And few outside the fight choreography world know this, but there's a particular boom-and-bust cycle usually centered around pilot season. It goes something like this:

1. Combat-heavy show is announced in the trades.
2. Every actor fitting the description of the combat-heavy roles chases what combat training they can get.
3. The show gets cast.
4. The bulk of actors training, not being cast, suddenly lose interest in combat training.

The short answer to my original question is the ever-dependable copout of "it depends."

That said, I did some math on real-world operator training time, specifically USMC grunts.

So the question becomes, on average, how much combat training time to people who fight for a living get?

Grab a pencil and a calculator, we're off!

Call it 8 hours training time a day starting from boot camp (8 hour days, my ass, but long hours plus hurry-up-and-wait time makes it close enough for government work.)

8hrs/day, 7days/week. Figure 3 weeks of actual combat training (as opposed to other business being taken care of). That covers grass week, range week, BWT and Semper Fu. That takes us to 168 hours by the end of boot.

Off to SOI (Grunt school). Now, our non-grunts go to a short version of grunt school. It's a month long, 7days/week. That adds another 224 hours. 392 in total by the end.

Now bear in mind, this is for our cooks, clerks, and mechanics. 392 hours to ensure that even if they do nothing but push paper the rest of their careers, they at least know what a raid, ambush, patrol, and guard post look like from both sides.

Refresher training? Figure about 2 weeks annually. Call it 80 hours/year.

Now back to our grunts.

 SOI for grunts is a 2-month course, minus weekends but similar hours.

That gives us 320 hours in SOI, 488 hours total.

That does NOT give me an advanced level of warfighter. That gives me a boot that can be called upon to shoot who they're supposed to 4 falls out of 5.

Let's be generous and say that on dropping to the fleet, what with this, that, and the other, our new Grunt gets about 2 month's worth of training before deploying. That covers ITX (which they used to call CAX, Mojave Viper, and other things) and about a month's worth of miscellaneous field ops, ranges and so on. Add another 320 hours.

Now we're at 808 hours. To get someone competent in at least 3 weapons systems and familiar in at least 4 more. (YMMV depending on specific MOS).

Now deploy them. 7 months. Full time. Is that always combat? Nope. But I'll use the 9-5 M-F option again to distinguish patrols, raids, and combat from working parties, standing post, and suchlike. Again, mileage may vary, but it's the yardstick we've been using so we'll get some good rough numbers from it.

Now we're at 808 hours of training and 1120 hours of experience. 1928 in total. To create what grunts call a "one-hump chump." Still might be a dirtbag of some variety. But on the whole, generally reliable and effective fighters with their own weapons systems. Some may have effective cross-training outside their MOS. A few might even be ready to lead teams soon.

A good skillset. And like all skill sets, perishable if not used.

Not only that, but keep in mind what these numbers don't cover...

- Workouts. Training burns some calories, PT builds more. So tack a good workout schedule on that.

- Study. There are a lot more bibliophilic grunts than you'd think. For every one that's reading Hustler, there's another that's reading Gates of Fire and On Combat, and a third reading both, along with some Clauswitz, Musashi, and Kipling.

-Any manner of super secret special ninjas black classified elite pick-your-own-hardcore-adjective training. I've been talking about standard Marine ground-pounders. Highly skilled, not-to-be-fucked-with ground pounders, but ground pounders all the same.

Something to keep in mind when judging exactly how well trained a weekend seminar makes you.

Yep. You read that right.
I'm justifying teacupping.
Hell, I've done so once in a private class and once on a gig in the past month, I might as well keep at it.

For those who don't know what I'm talking about, "teacupping" is a derogatory term used for a certain way of gripping a handgun that's currently out of favor.

In fact, nowadays I'd have to say in the top ten of "things to make your firearm advisor happy on set," "not teacupping" might rank just below "calling it a magazine, not a clip," and "not flagging me."

So, what is it? What makes it a bad thing? (if it even is a bad thing?) Why the bad rap?

History lesson time.

For the bulk of its existence, the pistol was a one-handed weapon. Once technology could scale down from the "handgonnes" of earlier times, the pistol became a favored backup weapon alongside the saber and cutlass, not to mention reins or rigging. Until WWI, U.S. Army holsters were designed to cross-draw, reflecting a right-handed officer's instinct to use the sword with the right hand and pistol with the left.  

Here and there, two-handed grips were used for whatever reason, but on an ad hoc basis. It's my personal belief that the first use of a two-handed grip was what we now call The Teacup.

This grip is almost invariably the first two-handed grip that an untrained shooter uses.

The reason is simple. With the pistol operable with one hand, the other is relegated to a support role. The most immediately needed support to a new shooter the vast majority of the time isn't against recoil, but against weight. Pistols are heavy, so the support hand naturally rests under the butt to take some of the weight off of the shooting hand.

Looking at it this way, teacupping is the untrained, but natural and instinctive response to having to hold a pistol two-handed.

It felt so natural the U.S. Army was recommending it in WWII.

(Teacupping ensues at 5:20)

So, if teacupping is a natural and instinctive response, what's the big deal?

Well, the major sin of teacupping these days is inefficiency at worst. When actually shooting, the support hand offers no support against the force of the shot (what with coming from the wrong direction and all), leaving the shooting arm to absorb the recoil.

There's a couple different ways to be more efficient. Jack Weaver took a teacup and turned it into a sort of piston grip by having the support hand pull back while the shooting hand pushed forward. This helped get the pistol back on target after the force of the shot lifted the muzzle up.

The most popular grip these days, however, seems to be a wraparound of one kind or another.

In this particular case, the support hand comes up on the side, fingers sliding into the grooves left on the grip by the fingers of the shooting hand. The shooting hand's thumb curls down and forward, paralleling the thumb of the support hand.

(Hint: if you ever hear gun enthusiasts yell "thumbs forward!" while watching an action scene, this is what they're talking about.)

What this grip ends up doing is keeping the grip balanced between both hands, giving the shooter the strength of both arms (and in some instances, the torso) to alleviate the effects of recoil.

That's pretty much it.

So, why teacup in a gunfighting scene if you know that?

Any number of reasons: an untrained character, a period piece (wraparound grips didn't become popular until the great pistol technique argument was kicked off by folks like Cooper, Weaver, and Chapman in the late 50's-early 60's), character fatigue or injury (where a steady shot is more important than recovery for follow-up shots), or any number of other reasons.

I can recognize the teacup isn't the best grip out there. But it's there for a reason. And knowing why and how lets me and my performers come to a more informed choice, and ultimately, a more nuanced story.

~J.

Been a busy time the last month and change.

The biggest for anyone reading this is the move of the site over to the current digs, which are much, much easier on my limited coding skills. Between a host and a wysiwyg editor that even a savage like me can understand, I got this place up and running in an afternoon, where the old site would have taken me weeks. As an unfortunate consequence, the old email (Jay at Jaythebarbarian dot com) no longer exists. It was mostly a redirect anyway, and there's a handy button at the top that will accomplish the same thing.

Went up to Cincinnati OH to T.A. at the Cease & Desist workshop. Fun was had all round, saw a lot of old friends and made some new ones. Actually went up a day early to go shooting with some friends. Ready Line outside Cincy is a brand new facility with a really nice setup.

Did some work on Public Enemy #1 (an action-comedy short) and a music video for a film school bud of mine, along with a day of military advisement for a production of Ruined.  

Gig-wise, its been a tad slow lately. But I haven't minded, as that means I've had the time to photograph and catalog my rental stock page. Local business has already picked up, and made the "Jay, do you have a ...?" questions answerable with a quick url.

And in the coming soon section, the Theatrical Firearms Handbook, penned by Kevin Inouye over at Fight Designer. Definitely looking forward to this one.

Spent the last several days in the shop, making about a dozen viking-style round shields. By the end I may well have enough to build a literal wall.

~J.

Oh yeah, my new business cards came in the other day, too.

I’ve got a special spot in my thoughts for Henry V.

When going through MEPS (inbound processing before shuffling off to boot camp) I had a paperback copy to keep handy through the various points of waiting. At some point or another I took my “address book,” (A scrap of paper with the addresses of those you’d care to write to. One of the few items I’d be able to have with me during my stay on the island) and scribbled St. Crispian’s Day on the back of it. The paperback I left on a stack of magazines for the next soul passing through. The speech I had memorized by the end of the second week.

Shakespeare isn’t quite the chosen poet of warriors (Kipling likely holds that particular title), but he’s up there. And if he’s been read and/or seen beyond what High School required, Henry V likely makes it near the top of the list.

If I had to take a guess as to why, I’d have to say that its because everyone whose found themselves fighting a war has a counterpart in Henry V’s world. International power brokers who play chess on the world like Henry and Charles. Stoic professional ass-kickers like Exeter. Bearing-impaired shitbags like Bardolph, joined up for loot, adventure, or lack of anything else to do. Wide-eyed boots like The Boy, with no clue what they’re getting into but knowing it’s the most exciting thing they’ve seen in their young lives and not about to let it pass them by.

And then there’s Mistress Quickly. The bit that always hit me hard about Branagh’s film version has dick to do with Hartfleur or Agincourt. It’s watching Quickly seeing loved ones walking out the door, knowing there’s not a damn thing she can do about it except make sure the tears don’t fall until they’re out of earshot.

There’s someone in Henry V that resonates with anyone that’s fought in a war, or had a loved one do so.

But while Henry V resonates with fighting a war, it’s Troilus and Cressida that resonates with living in a war.

I’d only occasionally thought of Troilus before being cast in a production earlier this year. I’d known the gist of it (Romeo & Juliet-ish set against the background of The Iliad) but hadn’t gotten into the story much. The big exception being using Tersities’ “reason you all suck” speech as one of the Machine Gun Shakespeare pieces.

Where Henry’s war has a progression from England to Hartfleur to Agincourt and beyond, Troilus’ war is stuck in Troy, and has been for years. Boredom and bullshit lead to bad decisions all round. It’s one of the most cynical works in the Shakespeare canon. And to an OIF/OEF veteran’s eyes, it looks like Shakespeare embracing the suck.

It’s got moronic higher ups (the entire Greek contigent), the one guy with a clue being unable to get anything useful done (Ulysses), the one guy incapable of shutting the fuck up (Ulysses again), Coming up with conterproductive bullshit as a distraction from all the suck (the exhibition fight), professional shitbags (Thersites), good people dropping their packs when the bullshit becomes too much (Achilles), and a really hideous toll taken on relationships (the titular couple in particular, but it also affects Hector/Andromache and Achilles/Patroclus to an extent).

Even tiny plot points like stumbling around a camp in the dark trying to find Achilles’ tent reminded me of transition quonoset huts in places like Al Taq and Bagram, which all look the same and make trying to stumble back to your own cot after nightfall a mild annoyance.

By the end of the play, nothing substantial has been accomplished but a body count. The suck carries on, as does the war.

For the OIF/OEF vets that read or see both, I personally think Henry V resonates more like the war we fought, while Troilus feels like the one we had to live through.

~J

With the 237th Birthday of the United States Marine Corps yesterday (oorah), this week we’re looking at one of the Corps’ iconic personal weapons: the KA-BAR fighting knife. The Kbar knife company, now KA-BAR Knives, Inc, (the trademarked name is actually KA-BAR, including the all capital letters) was around for a while before creating the blade we all can recognize. A rather large group of Pennsylvania cutlers formed the Tidioute Cutlery Company in 1898.

Company legend claims that a fur trapper wrote to the company praising one of their blades. The trapper was accosted by a bear when his gun jammed, leaving him armed only with a knife. Said trapper proceeded to take down and kill the wounded bear with his knife. However, the trapper’s penmanship was kind of lousy, so that all that could be read from the phrase “kill a bear” was “K a bar.” With a name and story like that coming out of nowhere, the company saw a winning brand name (though they wouldn’t change the actual company name until after the war. They had shit to do, like make a few metric asstons of knives.)

The fighting knife commonly called the USMC KA-BAR was born in the beginning of WWII. Pearl Harbor kick-started an American wartime production machine that needed a laundry list of gear and needed it yesterday. WWI-era trench knives were used for this initially, and while they were decent enough weapons, they were lousy as tools, and both were needed. For a while, a stiletto-looking copy of the British Fairburn-Sykes fighting knife was used by Marine Raiders, but they proved even more useless as tools. As usual, supply was the lumbering paperwork dinosaur it’s always been, and troops often bought their own knives, usually hunting styles.

Eventually the supply pogs got their shit together and took data and suggestions from veterans of the Battle of Guadacanal for a design that would become the K-bar. The initial bits were all there: The clip point, almost like a scaled-down Bowie knife, the small crossguard, stacked leather handle, and thick pommel. There were a few early design flaws, almost all of which revolved around “it breaks too easily with (insert feature here), let’s fix it.” While not all Kbars were from KA-BAR, it was the company that bore the knife’s name that was generally agreed to have made the best.

Then, as now, the Kbar was issued first and foremost to warriors armed with pistols, carbines, and machine guns (riflemen already had bayonets). Today, it is most currently issued to S.A.W. gunners in the USMC.

There have been surprisingly few variants in design over the years. One of the most interesting is called the Stone skull & cobra knife. One of the design problems that cropped up in the Pacific campaign was the leather handle rotting after prolonged exposure to seawater. Enter E.W. Stone, Sr., a sailor aboard the USS Holland. After several Marines and Sailors commented on the problem, Stone used scrap aluminum from downed Japanese fighter planes to form new handles for these blades. Checkered and hand-molded grips based on snakeskin patterns helped assure they wouldn’t slip from the user’s hand in wet weather, and distinct skull-shaped pommels made for useful percussion tools & weapons.

Stone knives are one of the more obscure bits of WWII memorabilia, with a number of fakes and copies in circulation. Stone’s son Bill maintains a website with some nice looks at the originals.

As for my personal Kbar? I have 3, actually. One is in my bugout bag. One was my Grandfather’s from his time in the Pacific theater during WWII. One was a gift from my little brother, which I took into combat (and at one point used to disassemble a particularly belligerent grenade launcher that had gone down at an inopportune moment, but that’s another story) and is kept at hand to this day.

So that’s a look at the Kbar. Happy Veteran’s Day, Semper Fi.

“Where do you put the Bayonet?”
-Chesty Puller, upon seeing a flamethrower for the first time.

In an effort to get myself to use this more, I’m adding a new feature: The weapon of the week. Every week I’m going to take a weapon and throw around some history, trivia, and whatever else comes to mind. Some may be meticulously researched, some may be off the top of my head. Either way, I’ll try to make it entertaining.

And with last night’s U.S. presidential election debates fresh in mind, I’m going with the Bayonet as our first weapon of the week.

Bayonets are kinda weird in that they’re an edged weapon that came about as a direct result of firearms (as opposed to say, a rapier, where introducing gunpowder was one of a handful of reasons for it’s evolution). Even as the arquebus became the musket, early guns were still single-shot weapons with short ranges and long reload times. And where they really sucked was in the defense. Muskets were good for reaching out and touching someone (by the standards of the time, anyway), but once you’d fired off your shot and surviving opponents were headed your way, life would suck.

(Note to self: find out the plural of “arquebus.” Arquebii? Arquebuses?)

Suckage was somewhat alleviated by forming mixed-use companies of musketeers and pikemen. Musketeers would fire a volley and reload while pikemen kept the enemy’s charging and ensuing suckage to a minimum. It worked, kinda, but it was clumsy and felt like it. The solution was to merge the 2 weapons.

Why they’re called bayonets is unknown for sure. Best guess I’ve heard is that they started to first crop up in Bayonne (France, not New Jersey).

The first bayonets were jammed into the musket barrel and called “plug” bayonets. Useful if you could only get off one shot, but it also meant everyone could tell that you hadn’t reloaded and weren’t planning to anytime soon (and if you had reloaded, it probably sucked almost as much to stand near you as in front of you). Some Scots called Jacobites once took advantage of British soldiers armed with plug bayonets by shooting a volley and charging. By the time the British fixed bayonets, they had a couple hundred pissed-off Scots in their midst with swords and shields, making their displeasure energetically known.

The problem: how to get the bayonet the hell out of the way so reloading could happen. The most popular method was called a socket bayonet. This was a blade attached to a twist-lock cylinder that fit over the muzzle of the musket. The blade stuck out to the side or under the muzzle, keeping out of the way of the bullet (and hopefully the hands of the gunner trying to reload.

There were other designs that cropped up over the years, which ranged from the workable (the spring-loaded bayonet, which folded under the barrel. The Chinese used a variant of this design on the AK-47 well into the 1980′s) to the bizarre (a trowel-bayonet, ostensibly designed by someone who figured soldiers would spend more time digging than fighting. While not necessarily wrong, it may well have been a case of misapplied engineering).

By the time multi-shot rifles came around, a trend cropped up of merging the bayonet with a camp knife, turning a weapon into another kind of weapon as well as a tool, because hey, you have to carry everything, and multiuse tools are always handy. The Russians went one step further and rigged up a nut-and-socket system with one of their bayonets, turning the blade and scabbard into a set of wire cutters.

So, that’s my look at the bayonet beyond the political quip. It’s been useful since they showed up, and I think it’s going to be around as long as blades and projectile or even energy weapons exist.