Macklin, Michael s MILR 4072 12OCT2010 On Combat

In LTC (R) Grossman’s book On Combat I learned a lot of valuable things that will help me as a leader now and in the future. Through out the book there are little keynotes that someone has the opportunity to use at anytime but will never do because they don’t know how to or haven’t lived and experienced it where as Dr.Grossman, Dr.Christensen and the many others in the book have. Sheepdogs are the 1% of people that stand up and are willing to get their hands dirty in order to help the 98% of people that are just sheep; with that I feel that we are an elite few that rarely show weakness but that tends to be one of our biggest fault that affect use and every one around us later in life. We tend to keep all these emotions bottled up and its from the thing that we as warriors make our living off of and we risk having it destroy use; wither it was use showing up five seconds to late and it could of save the life of the innocent or a battle buddy so we blame ourselves even though it truly isn’t. One if the best things that I am going to use as a new foundation for myself is the way he talks about how one/groups need to train. I feel that when we train we need to run training like it’s the actual mission instead of thinking of it as training. Like Dr.Grossman says when you train like its only training you will begin to pick up the dirty habit and eventually you will do the opposite of what you intended and you will eventually start to fight how you trained. This idea can extend into everything in your planning and training. The uniform needs be warn exactly as they will in combat; and this includes LBV, Kevlar, rucksack and down to the gloves you will be wearing along with eye-pro. Warriors need to know what battle is going to feel like and how to be efficient and that’s where this is going to help. If they wear all there gear as they will in battle; they will be able to do simple tasks such as a magazine change, or being able to get up and after you’ve been knocked over or fell while maintaining to keep you weapon towards your target; because you’ve done this before with all your equipment on.
Another point that Dr.Grossman hit on was when people are doing training don’t let the soldier die once they been shot and don’t let them just shoot the opfor twice and call them dead. You need to make it as real as possible in real life people don’t just die after one or two shots they can still live for awhile afterwards. The warrior needs to keep attacking until the opfor can no longer defend his/herself or harm anyone else. In training the warrior needs to be shot or be harmed to some extent in order to teach them what it feels like and what it mentally takes to be hurt and keep in mind that they need to forget about the pain (if their body hasn’t made them already) and keep fighting. With this training