Southnarc PUC /ECQC AAR Day 1 part one

Today was my first day of 3 days training with Southnarc. Southnarc is the online alias of a sheriff's deputy from the Gulf coast. He was in the army and then spent the first two years of his police career undercover among drug traffickers, pimps, and various other unsavory types. His police career progressed through various other street, supervisory, and training roles. He now also travels the country offering training to civilians and law enforcement officers.

The class I'm taking includes the modules "Practical Unarmed Combat" and "Extreme Close Quarters Concepts. PUC is a "fundamental block of instruction that introduces the student to the parameters and context of criminal assault." ECQC is a "multi-disciplinary approach to building functional, combative handgun skills at zero to five feet."

Today included the PUC material and the beginning of ECQC. We started in the classroom with an introduction to elements of the typical criminal assault such as opportunism, economic motivation, unequal initiative, and unequal armament. We then discussed awareness and task fixation. Southnarc introduced the beginning of how to respond to an unknown contact/potential assailant. This included verbal techniques and movement strategies. We paired off to practice these techniques for a while. While we were doing this, Southnarc came around and offered tips, advice, and corrections.

The next lecture component was pre-assault cues. Southnarc has spent hours and going over surveillance video and dash-cam footage of assaults on police officers, convenience store clerks, etc. From this and other research, he's distilled down to four common pre-assault cues that you can watch for to warn you that an attack is imminent. Then we broke into groups of three and repeated the earlier set of drills. This time, the aggressor would exhibit the pre-assault cues and the defender would react and also say "cue" whenever he spotted one of the cues. The third person acted as a coach and pointed out missed cues and any areas for improvement.

The final component of the classroom portion was the introduction of several basic strikes that could be used to regain the initiative, disrupt the attack, and buy space and time to respond. We drilled these techniques with a partner using a focus mitt or HammerHead.

This concluded the classroom time. We broke for lunch and then reconvened on the range for live fire drills. Stay tuned for that in part two. If anyone is actually reading this let me know if you'd like more detail or if this is too long and boring already.