“A pint of sweat will save a gallon of blood.”
–George
S Patton
Patton said that in response to his troops thinking he was too much of a disciplinarian and that he made
them train to hard. And he was right, he trained his men hard and demanded iron discipline of his soldiers, his officers
and his staff. As a result he was one of the most successful combat leaders in history.
But I can tell you,
if you take a Patton approach to preparing yourself (and hopefully others) as a citizen soldier, you won’t get very
far. We live in the day and age of the highly professional and well trained soldier. They spend hours a day for
months and years practicing their art. They are paid to do it, it is their JOB, and people not willing to excel are
washed out. On the other hand, the citizen soldier is a volunteer. The time he spends training he spends away
from doing things he enjoys. The money he spends on ammo will keep his family from having steak. But Patton’s
quote holds, and training is all important. The more you train the more likely you are to excel in any endeavor.
So we have a dilemma, we have to train but we have to spend our own time doing it. We won’t have near the time
or the resources that the professional soldier does, not even much compared to third world “militias.” This
fact right here causes many people who actually have a clue about combat to give up. But you can’t do that, so
what to do? The best answer is doing what you can. Make as much time for training as you can, and make the most
of the training as possible. I will offer three bits of advice for training. 1) Train at a comfortable pace 2) concentrate
on the fundamentals and 3) make training fun.
1) Train at a comfortable pace.
Slow is smooth and smooth
is fast. In learning any skill it is tempting to always hurry and be as fast at as you can. This is a mistake,
because it risks learning a skill incorrectly. In skills that require muscle memory, mistakes will drill bad habits into you.
With skills that require physical exertion, it can cause injury, which will put you well behind on your training schedule.
Slow and steady wins the race.
The army has a philosophy of education and it applies to the teaching of any skill.
It is called “crawl, walk, run.” Like a child learning to move around you have to crawl before you can walk etc…
For example, take learning a simple shooting drill, the double-tap. The first thing you should do is spend time at home,
bring your weapon to your shoulder from a ready position, acquiring the target and squeezing the trigger on an empty chamber.
This is the crawl phase of learning the drill. (This is commonly called dry firing and I will talk about it elsewhere.)
After you are comfortable with the dry fire double tap, head to the range. Load up a few magazines and give it a whirl
at a target at a nice slow pace. Do it until it is second nature, remember “slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”
This is the walk phase of learning the skill. After this you can add other elements, do double taps while reloading,
using cover, and under the pressure of a timer in competition with friends. This is the run phase, and after this you
can consider the skill learned (but it will have to be revisited.) This learning strategy can be applied to most tangible
skills.
2) Concentrate on the fundamentals.
Another mistake that we make is to try to learn advanced
skills without a firm grounding in fundamentals. Case in point, I fire a couple of hundred rounds of pistol ammunition
every other month. This last year I was getting in to some fairly fancy drills; shooting while advancing, withdrawing
etc. After a couple of cycles I started placing lower in our monthly friendly practical match. That is because
I had stopped practicing the fundamentals in favor of feeling cool and having fun shooting the advanced drills. I have
since gone back to training the fundamentals, I spend the first half of any pistol shooting session on draw-shoot reload,
draw-shoot-reload, all at a slow and steady pace. My placing in the monthly match has improved.
Most
skills are perishable. And without strong fundamentals it is impossible to move to advanced skills. I am not saying
that you should spend all of your training time on fundamentals, but once mastered they should be revisited frequently.
3) Make training fun.
In the 1700s militia training was the big weekly social event for the men of a community.
Militia drill sessions were begun and ended at taverns, maybe with a keg thrown in! I the modern day and age it is possible
to complete much militia training in a fun manner. “Units” for the modern citizen soldier should be a few
close fiends. The things I look forward to most are trips to the range and camping with my friends.
While some skills are true skull subjects, and staying in shape can be hard, the bulk of training should be fun. You
should make an effort to have training be fun. In this way you will make more time for it, attract others to this lifestyle,
and be better off.
