Special reaction team gets new training facility

Story and photo by Spc. Sam Smith/The Signal

FORT GORDON, Ga. (TRADOC News Service, April 14, 2004) – Fort Gordon’s special reaction team trained for the first time last week in their new shoothouse.

The shoothouse is a five-room building used to train SRT Soldiers in entering and securing houses and other occupied buildings. The shoothouse walls are reinforced with steel, which allows for safe weapons firing inside.

The Fort Gordon team invited the SRT from Fort Stewart, Ga., to try out their new house.

“(The Fort Stewart SRT doesn’t) have the facilities we do,” said Maj. Kendrick McCormick, Fort Gordon’s provost marshal. “It’s a good cross-section of experience. It gets MPs with MPs, and they’ll see each other again eventually.”

According to a specialist from the Fort Stewart SRT, he gets a lot of good training whenever his team comes to Fort Gordon.

“These cats are pretty high-speed,” he said. “(This training) is newer to me than (it is to) the Fort Gordon guys, so it brings me back to my right mindset.”

To assist the SRTs, instructors from Team One came to Fort Gordon to take the teams through the shoothouse and close-encounter shooting drills. Team One is part of the International Association of Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors. The team specializes in training special-tactics teams across the world.

“(The SRTs) did very well,” Team One instructor Martin Labrusciano said. “A few need to work on practical procedure, but they met our expectations.”

Before Fort Gordon got the shoothouse, they had to use simmunitions, basically a version of paintball, in an old building. Live-fire had to be conducted on ranges, which limited movement and lines of fire to straight lanes, according to McCormick.

“(The shoothouse) lets us brush up on our tactics,” a private first class from the Fort Gordon team said. “It gives us a place to train. (This is a skill) you lose … it’s perishable.”

Fort Gordon’s special reaction team – along with members of the Fort Stewart, Ga., SRT – practice in Fort Gordon’s new shoothouse. The shoothouse is a five-room building used to train SRT Soldiers in entering and securing houses and other occupied buildings. The shoothouse walls are reinforced with steel, which allows for safe weapons firing inside.

View and/or save high-resolution photo