Ranburr,
Right. Even as a kid I had some sort of mental block about transposing East and West with respect to Germany, and have always gotten corrected. It doesn't happen with any other geographical location. It seems I haven't outgrown that quirk. I never transpose the two anywhere else and am never surprised to hear it stated correctly. So I can't account for it?
What the hostage rescue team fellow said was that when the wall fell, it was found the Stasi had two kinds of member: the corrupt command structure and the operatives who were, by western standards, rather intense (I believe he used the word "crazy"). He said, as near as he could tell, the new government had dismissed the former and kept the latter. He described their original training including exercises western countries would not allow for safety reasons. I recall he described them doing serial diving rolls over barriers with a pistol in each hand, coming up out of the roll to shoot a target with each gun over the shoulders of the fellow who'd preceded him in the roll, and who was standing their waiting for him to do it. He said they had a lot of scars from training mishaps. He seemed pretty impressed with the results of their training if not enthusiastic about prescribing it for anybody.
This fellow, by the way, and to my surprise, only took second place in the shoot-off at the end of that class week, despite all that heavy training history. The winner was the fellow who eliminated me earlier. He was a California sheriff's department firearms instructor. I don't recall for which county, but it was apparently a large enough one to have him work full time at the position. He clearly practiced a lot. He was not in nearly as good physical shape as the HRT member and would have lost a rappelling contest with him in a heartbeat, but was older and probably a little calmer, which can pay dividends under match pressure.
One of the topics that has always interested me regarding firearms training, is personality type and how that influences the kind of training you respond to and can apply. Why it is, at one extreme, you can get a gunfight between two trained detectives and a drug dealer inside an elevator car in which all guns are emptied and nobody is hit except the detective who shot himself in the bicep while reloading (no, I can't figure out how to do that, either), but at the other extreme have Delf "Jelly" Bryce jump into a room where Jay Ray O'Donnell is in prone position across a bed with an innocent woman next to him as cover and a cocked 1911 already pointing at Bryce's midriff, yet Bryce draws and puts 5 .44 Specials into O'Donnell's head from the hip faster than O'Donnell can react to press the trigger? You couldn't write either case for a movie and have anyone believe it.
After J. Edgar Hoover acquired Bryce from the Oklahoma City PD, Bryce did some training work in addition to his work as an agent. I believe he introduced the FBI crouch position, but am prepared to be corrected on that point. But Bryce was never able to train other agents to do what he could do in a gunfight. The reason the FBI later went to two-hand hold training was the inability to get the one-hand instinct approach to hit consistently in actual fights. As Jack Weaver said, "a pretty quick hit is better than a lightning fast miss", so the compromise was made.
I have a suspicion that to be a Jelly Bryce or Bill Jordan or any other effective hip shot requires a personality that gets low numbers in a fear quotient test. I don't know what psychological conditioning the Stasi did, but undoubtedly they selected candidates and may have had a high elimination rate? But I'm meandering off into speculation. The bottom line is that something has to keep these folks from getting to the extreme fight or flight response state characterized by heart rates above the normal athletic range and by total loss of fine motor coordination.
I agree with Animal and Lee. When I took my first Gunsite class in '92, Cooper said he was, by then, getting a letter about twice a month that began with the words, "it works". He had over 5000 "ticket holders" (graduated students) by then, many police and military, so feedback from the field had become regular. Indeed, he and the other instructors made a point of asking us to provide detailed reports of any incident we became involved in, including those which did not come to actual gun play (the most common domestic type; situations resolved by attitude rather than combat) because that feedback helped provide improvements to the system. Statistically significant feedback is one big advantage an established school with a large student base has.
Not wanting to see the effectiveness record change is one reason Cooper was very careful about making changes to doctrine or equipment or anything else in the system. We I first met him he was wearing a molded plastic half-holster he said he'd been trying, and after about three years of satisfactory use he felt he was just about ready to give it the thumbs up. But not quite.
