Civilian Situational Awareness. Basic Training Week 2

Lets look at developing situational awareness in relation to something you have already been trained to be sensitive to.

Cleaning the M4. How many times, after cleaning your weapon did you take it to the arms master, only to have him/her stick their pinky inside the dust cover, pull out a spect of dust and tell you to start over? Well.....they were teaching you to create a heightened sensitivity to your weapon by raising your standard of what you thought was clean. Your standarded started out at one level, then increased to another.

Did you ever have those smug bastards in your company....you know the ones who would brag about the cleanliness of their weapon and bring their own cleaning kit? Whenever I got sent back to re-clean my weapon by anyone other than the arms master...... I wanted to rip their head off.

The part I liked most about cleaning the M4 was the functions check at the end. I always felt satisfied by the sound of the click after depressing the trigger and the way, if you did it right, the weapon would smoothly dry fire......meaning that everything was good to go. All that sensitivity paid off, the weapon was performing well.

This weeks practical is all about creating sensitivity to sensation in the shoulders using the breathing exercise I showed you last week followed by a Armor Down functions check. Through this practice you will begin to train yourself to be sensitive to the physical sensations in your shoulders, which will in turn help you become more situationally aware around civilians.

How?

You have been trained to deny your physical feelings, control your thoughts and over ride your emotions. Again, this is great down range, but it does fuck all in the civilian world. To Armor Down you gotta start somewhere. You stopped being a civilian when they took away your identity with a hair cut and a uniform.....you start becoming one again through your shoulders.