To help ensure this, students are only allowed to shoot targets that face them squarely. If a target is at more than a 45-degree angle from you, it’s not shootable. This allows Eric to control what angles a target will be shot from and where that bullet will end up.

Eric’s other big rule when it comes to shooting targets is that you only shoot targets that are completely upright. If a target is partially knocked over, then it’s not shootable. To prevent anyone from shooting through a target into another student, you never move past a target without knocking it over. If you move within arms reach of a target, knock it down. The target stands are 4” PVC pipe with a slot cut in the top of them so a target can be knocked over to the side easily. While in this context this is a range safety issue, it is analogous to the real world. In action, he trained to herd any noncombatants into the center of the room, so training to give a target near the wall a good shove toward the middle of the room fits in nicely.

To stop the action in the event of a potential safety violation, Eric had a pair of air horns (a pair because one is none and two is one). The air horns are faster than blowing a whistle or yelling freeze. Whenever a drill was running in the shoot house he had his thumbs on the air horn buttons ready to sound the horns in the event any student was about to do something unsafe (by far the most common reason for sounding the horns was failing to knock down a target as you passed).

With all the safety aspects explained and reinforced, Eric dove in to Room Clearing 101. He really opened up the fire hose here. I was taking notes like mad.

After Eric explained the basics, we did some dry work. For this class, everything was built around the context of a 4-man entry team. Each of these guys has a separate role to ensure that all sectors are covered, and all targets get engaged as soon as possible when the team goes through the door. However, to keep things simple as we started off, we only had two guys going in the room at a time. First, we had two students entering playing the roles of the #1 man and #2 man, imagining they were being followed by #3 and #4. Once everyone had a chance to run that dry we ran it again with two guys playing the roles of the #3 and #4 guys, imagining that they were preceded by #1 and #2.

After the dry runs, we went live. Again, we started with two students going in as the #1 and #2, imagining that they were followed by #3 and #4 guys.

The big issue that popped up right away and continued throughout the weekend was people going too fast. This stuff is very exciting, and it’s easy to get amped up. Over and over again Eric kept telling us to keep it slow.

The other issue that brought most of the safety horns during the #1 and #2 man entries was failing to knock over a target as you go past it. This is vital for safety, especially once we add actual #3 and #4 men who will want to shoot that target if it doesn’t get knocked down as the #1 or #2 go by it.

While live #1 and #2 with notional #3 and #4 is the first baby step as far as room clearing goes, it still requires students to perform their fundamental marksmanship and safety tasks at a very high level. From across the room, the #2 man is shooting targets within about 6 feet of the #1 man’s point of domination. This is the sort of thing that would give guys who only do square range shooting an aneurysm. However, with the way Eric had set things up, the safety protocols he enforced, and the level of safety and marksmanship that I’d seen my fellow students demonstrate to get to this point, I didn’t feel unsafe or uncomfortable with what we were doing.

We moved on to live #3 and #4 guys, imagining notional guys in the #1 and #2 positions. The #3 and #4 spots are actually more difficult when it comes to marksmanship. The #1 and #2 guy’s primary sectors are in their direction of movement. The #3 and #4 have to move in one direction while shooting in the other. This is where the lateral movement drills from earlier really came into play.

After shooting #3 and #4 live, we wrapped up for the day. During the debrief, Eric broke down some of the “why” behind certain tactics that we learned during the day and talked a bit about how different US military units do CQB.

About half of us decided to meet at a local restaurant that Eric recommends call the Mesquite Pit. It was a busy Saturday night, so there was a bit of a wait for a table, but the food was fantastic. It’s always great to have some fellowship with like-minded folks at classes like this.

Sunday

On Sunday morning we mustered at the range at 8:30. Eric opened things up with some time for students to work on individual skills that they had difficulty with the previous day. Virtually everyone in the class chose to work on lateral movement.

After the individual work, we reconvened outside the shoot house. Eric talked about procedures for stacking up outside the door. One thing he emphasized heavily was for the lead man in the stack to keep his gun up an pointed in at the door. When he was in Iraq, he was covering a door in a similar situation when an occupant of the house came out with an AK to see what was going on. Because Eric had his gun up and the other guy didn’t, it wasn’t much of a fight.

One thing of note is that this was the only real “war story” directly involving him that Eric told the entire weekend. I think this is an important (and revealing) point. While Eric has a very impressive background, he’s careful not to make this class about him. It’s about imparting the knowledge that background provides to the students in the class. I really appreciate that.

He also demonstrated how to open a door. Eric is very slick and smooth at this. When he does it, there’s hardly any pause as he opens the door. He flows through and into the room without losing momentum. It’s obviously the product of a lot of practice.

Eric talked about the importance of the Last Covered and Concealed Position (LCC). The LCC is a position out of sight of the objective where the team can conduct their last-minute pre-combat checks, prep breaching gear, and generally make sure they’ve got everything ready to go. In this class, we would also load our rifles at the LCC (obviously in the real world you would want loaded weapons for the movement to the LCC, doing this at the LCC is an additional safety measure for the training environment).

Up until this point, the team making the entry had been the ones to decide when they go. Here Eric introduced the concept of a higher level command that would initiate the assault. This is important to coordinate multiple teams or support elements like snipers so that everybody goes in a coordinated manner. For this class, Eric would take the role of the assault commander.

The team moves from the LCC to stack up next to the door when instructed. Once they’re ready, the team leader indicates that they’re in position. On command, they initiate the assault and go through the door.

The other new element that Eric introduced was post-assault procedures. The job isn’t done after you’ve shot everybody in the room. One thing I thought was interesting was how Eric initiated this. Rather than having everyone yelling “clear” like the way you see on TV or in a lot of youtube videos, he ties it to your team members actions. When you’re reclearing the room (following up and making sure you correctly discriminated all targets and your shots on hostile targets had the desired effect) you do it pointed in, with the eyes and rifle moving together. When you’re done with the reclear, the weapon goes on safe, you lower it slightly, and you put your head on a swivel. When you see three other guys with their weapons lowered and heads on a swivel, the room is clear.

When the room is clear, part of the team will cover the next door leading deeper into the structure while the rest of the team makes sure the targets you just shot are dead and deals with any noncombatants that you didn’t shoot. Once they’re done, the team proceeds to the next room.

After this huge fire hose of content, we ran four-man entries dry to demonstrate that every student knew what they were supposed to be doing.

While we all got kitted up, Eric passed out radios to everyone communicate between the teams and with him as assault commander. The radios were a nice addition (though for 90% of what we were doing, shouting would have worked).

We headed out to the shoot house and did four-man entries live. We went through the process of checking the targets and stacking up on the next door, but for now, Eric halted the drill before entering the next room.

There was time for each team to rotate through and run this drill twice before lunch.

After a welcome break, we headed back out to the shoot house. This time we ran a 4-man entry, but rather than stopping after clearing and searching the first room, we continued on to clear the second room. Eric also started putting laminated hands up on the targets, forcing us to go through our target discrimination process before shooting.

Colby Rupert (who I’ve trained with in the past) often mentions that you can only fight as fast as you can process your environment. When Eric added target discrimination to our mental load, I really appreciated that in a visceral, hands-on way for the first time. I needed to dedicate my mental bandwidth think about where I need to move, what sector I need to be covering, move using the proper footwork, discriminate targets, account for holdover and properly place my shots, and remain aware of the three other guys in the room doing the exact same thing. While I was able to do all of this at the same time, I definitely couldn’t do it very quickly.

When students exceeded their mental bandwidth, it started to show up in areas like target discrimination and shot placement. One of Eric’s ongoing themes throughout the class was to keep it slow and only go as fast as you can actually do all of this stuff.

The key to eventually being able to do this at a faster pace is going to be to practice all this stuff to the point where the mechanical aspects of these tasks (footwork, holdover) become automatic and the tactics (where to move, what sector to cover, shot placement) become second nature. This leaves as much mental bandwidth as possible to process the environment, discriminate targets, and maintain situational awareness.

After all the teams had a chance to go through the 2-room drill, Eric had us drop our kit and meet in the shoot house to talk about corner fed rooms. All of the entries we’d done thus far had been center fed rooms: the door is in the middle of a wall. Corner fed rooms, where the door is adjacent to a corner of the room, need to be cleared a bit differently.

Rather than starting off with a lecture, Eric had four guys stack up outside a corner fed room (the third room in the shoot house) and told them to make entry. Without any prompting, they managed to figure out what to do pretty much on the first try. I think this goes to show how successfully Eric was in teaching not just the specific tactics, but also the principles behind them.

After talking through corner fed rooms, Eric talked some about what to do if you’re clearing a room and there’s an open door deeper into the structure. You want to address the next room before doing a post-assault search of the current one, but the same time you don’t want to get too deep into the house before going back and ensuring that you’ve taken care of the occupants of the previous room.

Eric rounded out this lecture by talking about what to do when you come to a door that leads outside and, now that you’ve cleared the whole building, how to clear your way back to your entry point.

This was another fire-hose of content, but I found it a lot less overwhelming than the initial room clearing lecture on Saturday. A big part of this was that I already understood the context of a lot of what he was talking about, so this was more about fitting new information in a context that I understood rather than trying to contextualize everything from scratch.

We kitted back up, and each team went through the entire 4-room shoot house (two center fed rooms followed by two corner fed rooms). Eric had open doors between the first and second rooms and the second and third rooms, so we got to exercise those tactics as well.

Given the issues with going too fast on the previous drill, our team agreed that we would go “stupid slow” on this one. We managed to do this pretty well in the first room, but the open doors tended to pull us faster and faster as we worked our way through the structure.

One of the things that a 4-room clear like this really put front and center in a way that the shorter exercises didn’t was the need for sustained concentration. Start to finish this exercise took about 12 minutes for our team, and it really required you to stay on the ball in a way the shorter ones did not.

After all the teams went through the full 4-room clear, Eric had us drop kit and assemble at the shoot house for a lecture on free flow CQB.

Up until this point, all of our training focused on a single four-man team (even when we were doing the exercises with only two guys on Saturday, it was still in the context of a four-man team). If you have more than a four-man team available, how do you apply that extra manpower to the problem? One way to do this is free flow CQB.

Essentially, this can be thought of as simply throwing more people at the problem. If you have more guys, you can get a lot more done. In most reasonably sized rooms, stuffing more assaulters in really isn’t going to help (in fact it might be harmful). So free flow CQB is still built around four guys making entry to each room. What makes this “free flow” is that these can be any four guys, even if they’re not members of the same team.

Rather than just having Team 1 clear the first room and Team 2 clear the second room, free flow CQB is all about “finding work.” Team 1 might clear the first room. While they’re searching that room, Team 2 will come in, and two guys from Team 1 might stack up on the next door with the first two guys from team two. They can go ahead and make entry while the other half of Team 1 conducts the search and the other half of Team 2 hangs back until work presents itself. Or Team 1 may see an open door and immediately stack up on that for entry, trusting Team 2 to take care of the after action in the room they just cleared. The upshot is that this moves a lot faster and more fluidly with less waiting around than a single-team entry.

We did a dry run through the shoot house using free flow CQB to demonstrate. Eric also talked a bit about having multiple teams enter the target building at different points and how to coordinate this. We walked through multiple entry dry, but would not be doing it live fire (it would require a very different arrangement of rooms and targets in order to be done safely in a shoot house without ballistically rated walls).

However, we could run the free flow CQB life fire, so Eric had us all gear up and assemble some distance away. For this run our last covered and concealed position would actually be concealed from the shoot house. We moved up, everyone got loaded, and the team leaders radioed Eric that we were in position. While we were at the LCC, slipped a specific non-threat target in among the others and radioed us a description, designating that target as a hostage we had to retrieve.

On command, we moved up to the breach point. Initially, everybody stacked up on one side of the door in one long conga line. Eric had Teams 2 and 3 pull back and line up perpendicular to the shoot house before Team 1 made entry. Despite being our first time running through this live, it was pretty slick. The additional guys made clearing the house much faster paced. Because all of the building blocks and individual skills and tasks were the same, people were able to slot in easily and process through multiple rooms. There was a bit of confusion about what to do with the “hostage” target, but we got that straightened out and brought it back out with us.

There was a bit of time left in the class, so Eric did a quick debrief and had us assemble and move up to the LCC again. We move up and one team stacked at the breach again, while the other two held short. This time the free flow drill went even smoother. If anything I think three teams (12 guys) on one breach point was probably a bit too many. Even with the free flow, there was some standing around waiting for work to open up.

However, after we’d finished the initial clear and everyone had cleared and flagged their rifles, Eric threw in a twist that took care of that. He designated one of the students as a casualty (leg wound) and had us provide initial treatment and get him out of the shoot house. At this point, we turned into keystone cops for a bit. We eventually cleared up who was going to do what, got a TQ on the “injured” leg and carried him out, while providing good security and backclearing the structure on the way out.

After that we had a good debrief (including some conversation about keeping medical gear easily accessible and in a recognizable spot so that you can treat a casualty with his blow-out kit, rather than your own). Eric mentioned that we were the first class that got through the material fast enough that we had time for a second free-flow CQB drill.

We headed back to the benches, and all dropped our kit. Eric debriefed the entire class and talked a bit about follow-on courses. He has a three-day Intermediate CQB that gets taught once or twice e year. He also has a curriculum for an Advanced CQB class (which he has never taught) that would be held at a facility down in Florida and would be a five-day affair.

Everyone got packed up and headed out. I had a meeting back in Wichita at 10 am on Monday, so my first leg was all the way up to Oklahoma City. I ended up getting to my hotel around midnight. That left a two-hour drive Monday morning to get back to work on time.

Conclusion

This was truly an excellent class. It’s been quite a while since I’ve done a course that I got so much information out of.

In a way, though, this was a very simple class. All we did was clear rooms (no corners, hallways, T-intersections, or any other features). However, we covered that room clearing material in great depth, ultimately building up to multiple rooms and free flow CQB.

One of the dangers, when you have an instructor with Eric’s background, is that things can devolve into “I’m a cool dude, and you’re a cool dude for having trained with me.” Doubly so with topics like CQB. This class did not go down that road at all. Eric is very focused on building the students’ knowledge and capabilities.

As with the CQM class, Eric’s coaching skills were really on display in this class. Coaching is a very different skill set than teaching, and not all instructors have both. Eric can look at your footwork or your results on target, diagnose what you’re doing wrong, and make suggestions that result in improvements on your next run. Going further, he also does a good job explaining what he’s seeing and how that connects with your results, enabling the student to go home and diagnose these issues when practicing these skills.

In live fire CQB class, safety is obviously paramount. Eric clearly had it in mind when he put the course together, in everything from the design of the shoot house, to target placement, to the structure of the class. His step by step, building block approach to the material ensured that everyone demonstrated fundamental safety skills before we move into the shoot house. While the lectures delivered a lot of material, he broke the lectures and the drills that followed so that each one was a reasonable amount of new material for students to master at one time. It’s quite an accomplishment that in a class that involves other guys shooting at targets within 6 feet of my position I never felt any concerns about safety.

Everyone in the class had good muzzle and trigger finger discipline. I did not see anyone with their fingers on the trigger when they shouldn’t or waving their muzzle around carelessly. Of all of the safety rules, the two that seemed to require constant reinforcement from Eric were knocking down targets as you go past them and when to re-engage the safety after shooting.

Knocking down the targets was something that I think was new to everyone in the class, and we hadn’t really internalized it yet. Re-engaging the safety was something we were all used to, but Eric is very strict on making sure you don’t lower the rifle, not even a little bit, before engaging the safety. He called people for it in class whenever he saw anyone doing it. I caught myself doing it a couple of times, and it’s something I need to work on.

In addition to the skills and knowledge that Eric brought to the table, part of what made this class so good was my fellow students. All were safe, with excellent gunhandling skills. Everyone asked good questions and did well in the drills. It was definitely nice having a multiple of four, so we had three full teams.

It was a very solid group of guys, and I was glad to have the opportunity to train with them.

Gear

The Leupold Mark 6 1-6x worked really well. Even though I was the only one in the class with a low power variable rather than a red dot I never felt overly handicapped by having the magnified optic. I think I’m convinced that I need to get a higher mount for it, however. While I could get my eye behind the optic when moving laterally to the support side, trying to do that, while concentrating on my footwork, and discriminating targets, and placing my shots appropriately was asking a lot. A higher mount and more erect head position would have made things a little easier. This is something I’ve heard before (from Eric and Colby Rupert) but experiencing it in a live fire environment is something else again.

This was my first time wearing a plate carrier for an extended period. While Eric encouraged us to drop kit whenever we had a long break between exercises, there were still occasions where I was wearing it for an extended period. It was more comfortable than I expected. The Scarab Light carried the weight well. I was very glad to have the lighter Level III+ front and back plates rather than Level IV. I may tweak the setup for future classes (try running a full chest rig, or a slick plate carrier and a war belt) but I think the carrier and plates will work well.

I was very glad a brought the GoPro, and the rail mounted video camera. I got some good footage of the shoot house exercises. It didn’t do quite as well capturing some of the lectures I tried to record. I may need to do something to get better audio if I want to use it in that role. I also sometimes had trouble figuring out whether it was recording or not when I had it head-mounted (I captured one lecture in time-lapse photos rather than on video, for instance). GoPro makes a remote with a little LCD that shows the recording mode and status I could hang on my gear. That might be the ticket for future classes.

I'll be back

Speaking of future classes, this class definitely did an excellent job of selling me on Eric’s Intermediate and Advanced CQB courses. However, it also makes me want to go back and retake the Close Quarters Marksmanship class. Now that I’ve experienced how demanding the CQB environment is when it comes to footwork and target discrimination, and how much mental bandwidth it demands, I want to take CQM again and raise those skills to the next level.

Finally, I’d really like to go through this class again as well. There was so much stuff here that I think I would get a lot out of it if I were to go through it all a second time. I think it would be easier to appreciate some of the stuff Eric covers in his lectures if I came in already knowing the context of the material. There’s a lot of depth here, even without getting into the intermediate and advanced classes.

I am so glad that I took this class. It was one of the most eye-opening training experiences I’ve had in a while, and I learned a tremendous amount. Eric Dorenbush is an excellent instructor, and I’ve gotten a ton out of every class that I’ve taken from him.