Retrainer Day Three

Day three of the retrainer and we went to a shoot house at the local National Guard Camp, Camp Beauregard. The Army and the National Guard are seamlessly integrated like never before, with scores of thousands of Guardsmen having been deployed over the last twenty years. The Guard trains their troops to real-world standards and one of the things they have to learn is how to clear houses and rooms.

So, the Guard builds what it calls a MATCH house. MATCH is an acronym for Modular Armored Tactical Combat House and it's basically a big steel building sandwiched with steel and plywood walls, with hallways and doorways and rooms that the trainers can configure to several different scenarios. In these houses you use live ammunition with total confidence that the ammo won't leave the house. A facility like this trains our troops in the real-world scenarios they're likely to encounter while deployed. The house has speakers and is totally wired for video so that training exercises can be captured for review at a later date.

Facilities like this insure that our troops are completely trained-up before they move to deployment. It keeps them safe, keeps them professional and is an asset to any training calendar. It's a real-world, train as you fight type facility and it teaches our troops to get used to firing in a building, increasing their muzzle awareness and taking out targets in close combat.

A long hallway with several doors looks remarkably like the hallway of a school, and we often train on active-shooter scenarios. The MATCH house is perfectly configured to support this type of training, and the Guard lets us borrow their facilities when they're not using them. So, today we scheduled the MATCH house and spent the day conducting one-officer, two-officer, and three-officer scenarios with live ammunition.

Today was probably the very best training we've had on this type of scenario-based exercise.