Day 1
We spent the majority of the first day going over malfunction drills. What happens if your rifle goes down during a fire fight? I was lucky enough that my husband (cowboy) had gone through the course last year. He ran through the malfunction drills with me at home. Even having that advantage it didn’t fully prepare me for doing it with live rounds and doing it at night without light. We started by setting up each malfunction in our own rifle and clearing it. We then had to pair up and go down the line setting up and clearing random malfunctions on everyone’s rifles. The advantages to this method are not knowing what malfunction you are going to encounter and also getting to practice with foreign (to you) rifles. I actually encountered my first major mistake in preparing for the course on the first day. The gloves I brought were gardening gloves from Lowes. I have been using these gloves for months while shooting so I didn’t see the need to purchase new ones. It turned out that they were not even close to padded enough to protect my hand from constant use of the charging handle. I ended up with a pretty painful blister on my left pointer finger about mid-day. Luckily Rich doctored me up and let me barrow his spare pair of gloves for the rest of the weekend. We spent a good amount of time on reloads as well. In doing this we could find weaknesses in our rigs and the way we carry spare mags. At one point we timed our reloads. We also covered poa/poi shift, braced and kneeling positions and switching hands to shoot lefty. After breaking for dinner we came back and did it all again at night. Being new shooting AR’s I hadn’t had the chance to try out all the different style of lights. We carry toggle switch lights on all of our rifles so getting to feel a few tape switches was an experience. We didn’t go down the line and practice with each type we were just told to light up the target when shooting. I fumbled a lot at first but eventually figured it out. I know a lot of the students were making notes on how to change their light setups after that night.
Day 2
On day 2 we moved to the 22 range. We learned how react to multiple targets and to shoot on the move. We practiced the three different ready positions. Our handguns came into play on Day 2. We briefly went over how to draw and re-holster your handgun. We then moved on to transiting from your rifle to your handgun. Rich stresses the significance of what to do if your rifle goes down in the middle of a fight. You can’t always just stop what you’re doing and work on your rifle. You are often forced to draw your secondary weapon until you can fix your primary. Again we came back after dinner and used what we learned in total darkness with our weapon lights.
Day 3
We started Day 3 with a bang by doing gladiator drills. Gladiator drills are a 3 mag drill on a 50 meter range. You start standing at the 50, drop down to prone and fire 2 shots. Stand up, sprint 10 meters to the next station and drop to prone again for 2 shots. Get up, sprint to the next and kneel behind cover for 2 shots, sprint 10 meters, 2 shots kneeling or crouching. Sprint another 10m and stand behind cover firing 2 shots, then advance towards the target firing 3-5 rounds. Touch the target and sprint back to the starting point. Do that 5 more times. I am not in the best shape so I didn’t ask to be timed. It was grueling and I went from sprinting to walking after like the second trip down. Then we went back to the covered long range and worked with slings and different ways to carry our weapons and make ready. We did a little longer range shooting at the 50,100,200 and 300 meters. Rich set up a few timed/marksmanship drills and we did the reloading drills again. A lot of us, including me, cut our times in half on re-loads. Everyone shaved off some amount of time.
The best part about DARC is the instructors. As stated above Rich always followed up every instruction with the “why.” He gave real life examples of how you can use these techniques. The point of the course is to protect yourself/your family/your homestead. More than a few times, Rich would show us something and follow up with “This is good for…” and the situation would be anything from moving through your house to get to a family member/phone/etc to barricading yourself in a room and watching the door, calling 911 and so on.

My gear included:
Rifle: I brought a home built (I built it, with cowboys tutelage)rifle using a Daniel Defense CHF 14.5” middy barrel with a Troy/Vtac 11” rail and Aimpoint M3 on top. I used a DD fixed front sight with a TLR-1S in front of it for light. I used this same light/sight setup on my M&P 15-22 for the .22 work. Both did great but I did blow out the extractor on the M&P. It was at the very end of day 2 so it had ~1700 rounds through it that day, plus another 1000 or so from prior outings.

Pistol: S&W M&P 9. A Susan G Koleman edition with the pink backstrap. I used a Kaluban Cloak holster with the standard belt clips.
Chest rig: an Eagle LE M4 chest rig. It’s a small, light weight rig with 3 open top mag pouches and molle on the sides and front of the mag pouches. I used a Blue Force gear pistol mag pouch. It was fine for holding mags but it was a two handed operation to get mags back in the pouch. It made it very hard when doing tactical reloads. Cowboy and I are both opting for HSGI Taco pistol pouches and probably some eagle closed top pouches in the near future.
Clothing: The first two days I wore ExOfficio hiking pants and either NorthFace or REI athletic t-shirts. On the third day I wore a similar shirt with 511 pants. I wore Merrells tennis shoes.

First just want to thank Rich and the rest of the staff at DARC for putting this class on. After I read Cowboy's AAR of the first carbine class he went to and the pistol class I knew I wanted to take one of Rich's classes. I can't say what a great blessing it is to have a top notch training facility right here in my back yard.

Before I start my AAR I just want to give a little back ground on shooting career. I have been a life long shooter and hunter and did 8 years in the ARNG and the US Army in the Signal Corps. I started shooting competitively in 94 at The Ft.Bliss Gun and Rod Club in ElPaso, Tx. And have been shooting action pistol, IDPA, USPSA and 3/Multi gun matches with some top place finishes at several national championships matches. I have taken a few classes over the years so I have a pretty good back ground I the shooting sports. For a three year run I was shooting local and sanctioned matches every week and some times two of three a week.

My first experience with DARC was in 2007 when I went out there as a roll player(OPFOR). This was a huge eye opener for me but my son was born the next night so I was not able to get back out there again till 2010. Once again a very huge eye opener for me. FOF( force on force) has a way of letting you know real quick when you make a mistake.

My first class to take at DARC was the TUSC back in July. This class made me stop and reevaluate my whole shooting style. I found so many faults in my shooting skills I had to stop all my competitive shooting for a while. After making several changes to how I was shooting and to my shooting set up I was ready to try it again in the carbine class.

So to the AAR.

Rich has a very cool and easy approach to teaching. He has a god given talent for teaching and a life time of been there done that of experience. He is able to keep the class very light and and entertaining while at the same time keeping you glued to the training topic at hand. he uses a layered  approach while adding new topics to build on it till at the end of the day you you set back and go wow!  And as some have said he is very big on the why just as much on the how. You are more prone to remember and retain if you know why you are doing it instead of just repeating the steps over and over.

Day 1: So day one starts off with failure drills. Which if you think about makes perfect sense. But he has a simple and easy way to approach these drills. How many times when you have an issues the first thing you do is drop the gun rotate it and look at the ejection port so SEE what was wrong? What did you gain by this step? The rifle already told you what was wrong but did you listen to it? Nope we as humans have a tendency to always want to ignore what we hear and focus on what we see.

Se we start with simple failures in our own rifles and how to clear them. Then we set the failures up in all the rifles and set them on the line and one by one we go down the line going to a knee retrieve the rifle from the the ground and try to engage the target. Sometime it works if it does you safe the rifle and run to the next one drop to a knee and start the process over again if you get a failure you go through the method that was taught. After every went through the all the rifles a few times he moves to the next failure type and we start the process over again until we have covered all of the known types of failures on the AR platform. The two runs of this drill you never know what type of failure you will encounter. You pick the rifle up and engage the target depending on what the rifle tells you depends on how you proceed to fix the failure. Needles to say that after going over all these during the day you have dropped to a knee and back up again several hundred times so as you can imagine if you are not used to this activity you will find your self a little wore out. He covered shooting from a supported position while standing, kneeling, week side, strong side, switching from strong side to a more behind cover week side.   From there went over point of aim point of impact. Pretty basic stuff but very important to understand.  Also discussed and drilled was to learn how to use your optic as your rear site. Just imagine you are going along and your red dot goes out. How do you keep you self in the fight without missing a beat? He teaches you this. 

After this we broke for dinner and to await night fall to do this all over again during the night. Several more hundred drop to a knee engage the target fix the failure engage the target drills and it was ready to call it a night. As a side note here the first run down the line during the night it was slow as hell as during the day I really did not note how everyone had their lights set up and here I was at night trying to clear failures and engage targets with a set I did not know. Another eye opener as it is to easy to be comfortable with your weapon and you never know when your could go down and you might have to pick up one your not familiar with. 

Day 2:
The focus of day two is engaging multiple targets, shooting on the 
move and transitioning to you handgun. Just has in day one day two has a layered approach so that each new drill builds on the last till you are doing several things and not even thinking about. All the areas you would think of are covered, shooting while advancing, while advancing on multiple targets, moving left, moving right, moving diagonally from left to right, moving diagonally right to left, how to transition from the rifle   to pistol when you run dry on ammo/ have a failure.( Rich teaches a method that was totally new to me on the transition. But after practicing it it is way faster that I ever would have though. This method is even better in the dark as you employ you light on your rifle.) Oh I almost forgot a lot of these drills also have you guess what? dropping to a knee   clearing weapons/ changing mags etc then back up again. So if you were not sore from all the up downs from the first day there were several hundred more to add to it. 
We broke for dinner again and waited for knight fall to take full effect and did all these things again with weapons lights. As any one who has ever shot at night with a white light knows one you send a few rounds down range the light makes it next to near impossible to see very far so Rich cover many drills to deal with these effects. We finished up right at 11:00 if I remember right. 

More to come on day 3 as I need to get some sleep. 

Looks like you all had a great time. I'll definitely have to attend one of these in the future!

May 2012 is the earliest opening on the DARC calendar.

ETA: meant to send as a PM

Sweet!!!!

Im in for the Tac Pistol!

This sounds very cool also. Aug could be a very expensive month for me.

This is a customer specific TUSC to prep them for a really hostile location.
Lots of extra things have been done to the POI that I think you will like.

In the spirit of ARFCOM you should do both...

really interested in the pistol course. Will check the leave book tonight to see if I can get off

You HAVE to pull that shit when it hot as fuck don't you.

Interesting, very interesting.