Imagine, if you will, a teenage boy purchasing the March of 1983 issue of Gung-Ho magazine at the local shop and reading a feature-length article about Executive Security International, Aspen’s bodyguard school. Now imagine that he scraped together five bucks to mail away for the school’s glossy black and white catalog. As you probably guessed it, that teenager was me.
I was all of sixteen in 1983 and wouldn’t graduate from high school until 1985. I must have read that magazine cover-to-cover at least a dozen times. To a teen living in rural Ohio, the life of a professional bodyguard seemed exciting and adventurous.
I can’t recall exactly when I sent it away for the catalog, likely some time in 1985. However, not long after the very impressive school brochure arrived, I got a phone call from David at ESI. David was naturally a salesman for ESI and it was his job to fill classes. He was good at his job and soon enough, David had me applying for their financing option and enrolled in the home study portion of the training.
Back then Al Gore hadn’t invented the internet yet. ESI mailed you a three-ring binder of class material, course manuals, and you would complete written tests and mail them back to Aspen for grading. Occasionally, your brontosaurus would step on your homework, but we made do.
After successfully completing the home study portion, I needed to get into a two-week residency training program held in Aspen. By that time it was 1986. I was out of high school and had a full-time job with benefits and vacation. I talked to my boss and saved up all my vacation time for the residency training portion.
ESI and John Farnam of DTI
It was mid-August of 1986 when I touched down at the Pitkin County Airport to begin my adventure. The school tuition covered lodging, breakfast and lunch each day. We were on our own for dinner. Being a relatively broke 19-year-old, I showed up with maybe $100 in cash.
Walking into the Aspen McDonalds the first evening, I realized that the cost of living there in the mountains was higher than in Ohio. My thought was, Well, I’m going to be hungry at night. Fortunately, I was paired with a roommate, a thirty-something prison guard from Alaska. He took pity on my broke-ass and bought me dinner on more than one occasion.
For the first week we worked on executive protection/bodyguard theory and practical application. We studied the history of terrorism and kidnapping to understand real world threats. About midway through the course, it was time for firearms training, to which I was tremendously looking forward.
What I had no way of knowing at the time, but discovered later, was that my first training class was actually way ahead of its time and far better than the majority of training available then. John Farnam, a Marine Corps officer and Vietnam combat veteran studied the craft under Col. Jeff Cooper at Gunsite. When I met John in August of 1986, I had no way of knowing the impact that his four-day, 40-plus-hour, program would have on me.
Takeaways
This was my first real gun school and when I left there I thought all shooting schools were run that way. I would soon learn how incorrect and fortunate I was.
First of all, John explained to us that he ran a “hot range.” We would be carrying loaded firearms in our holsters at all times, on and off the shooting range, at lunch time, going to the bathroom, you name it. John went over Col. Cooper’s Four Universal Firearms Safety Rules and, in his best, most emphatic veteran Marine manner, he made sure we knew that no deviation from those rules would be tolerated.
- Treat every weapon as if it were loaded.
- Keep your finger straight and off the trigger until you have made the decision to fire.
- Never allow the muzzle to cover anything you would not be willing to shoot.
- Be sure of your target and what is in front and behind it.
You might have asked yourself, How did a broke nineteen-year-old get a pistol for the training course? Good question. Being under 21, I couldn’t buy my own pistol, so I rented a gun for the duration of the class from the school. At that point in history, the most popular pistol in America was some form of M1911A1. The rental gun I used was a WWII surplus M1911A1 in original GI configuration. The school loaned me a leather belt-holster and a couple of leather magazine pouches.
I recall that, of the twelve or so students present, only two didn’t have a .45 ACP pistol in the M1911A1 configuration. Of the others, one had a new 9mm Smith & Wesson auto and the other had a .38 Special double-action revolver. John taught us to carry our 1911s loaded, hammer cocked and with the manual safety on. I had no way of knowing at that time that was unique.
Another big takeaway was the use of reactive steel targets. The only steel I had ever shot up to that point were junk pots and pans in a landfill with a .22 rifle. Modern firearms training at that time relied heavily on cardboard and paper. Shooting steel was almost unheard of in conventional firearms training.
Moving and shooting was another new thing for me. By day three, we were engaging in exercises where we not only had to engage multiple targets, we had to move and shoot them as well. Again, I thought this was standard at the time only to learn later that such was an extreme rarity. We even worked as small teams of three with a protectee. John ran us through scenarios where we were “ambushed.” One student was the body man and evacuated the protectee with the remaining two engaged threats as a team. As you can imagine, it was quite exciting.
One of my big takeaways was that training and practice really work. Farnam taught us basic stoppage clearing for a semi-automatic handgun. “If your pistol goes click instead of bang or stops making noise in the middle of shooting, drop your elbows to your ribs, tap the magazine, once, and rack the slide vigorously. Then attempt to shoot again.”
Of course, this action essentially mimicked the loading procedure for the pistol. During the first couple of days, when I experienced a stoppage, I recalled what John had said and I did it.
During one of our exercises we would be in the front passenger seat of a car going around the private track on the range area. The driver would call out “Ambush right!” There were silhouette targets set up on the edge of the track. As the designated shooter, we would open the door of the moving car, wedge a foot in to keep it open and shoot out of the “V” created by the vehicle frame and door. The car didn’t stop, but kept moving and the shooter had seconds to shoot the targets.
When it was my turn, I fired two or three shots and my pistol experienced a stoppage. I didn’t stop to think about what I should do. I immediately did a tap/rack and emptied the pistol into the targets. After the drill was over and my adrenaline came back down, I was able to take it all in. My epiphany was, “Damn, that sh*t really works.”
The volume of fire was another standout. During the four-day class, in addition to using .50 caliber paintball revolvers for force-on-force training, we all put at least a thousand rounds down range. By comparison, during my first four years in the Marine Corps, despite carrying a handgun as my standard issue, I never came close to firing a thousand rounds. If we were given fifty rounds twice a year, that was considered generous.
Guns back then weren’t built for shooter comfort, particularly a GI 1911. They were built for function. By the morning of day three of training, nearly all of us had white athletic tape covering the red, raw points on our hands from shooting the full-power pistols. As a side note, we didn’t bitch about it, we just carried on.
As you might imagine, after successfully passing the final qualification test at the end of day four, I was pretty amped up and proud of myself. We all were. The entire class went out and stayed out far too late that night, but that is a story for another day (tequila).
Being young and exuberant, full of excitement and pride, after graduating from ESI and getting my Certified Protection Specialist rating I was ready to take on the world. Or so I thought.
The reality of the situation was that, schooling or not, I was far too young to be taken seriously. I shared my frustration with a police officer friend of mine and his advice was, “Why don’t you join the Army, get some experience, then try again after four years.” Well, I wasn’t going to join the Army, but I had been a Young Marine and the Marine Corps always seemed like an attractive option, so that’s what I did.
Back to My Roots
As this year is the 40th anniversary of the beginning of my lifelong journey as a student of the gun, I decided to commemorate it by going back to my roots. I have had a Galco Masterbilt leather holster and leather single-mag pouches that mimic those I used back in 1986 for a while. I also have a pistol in my safe that’s an exact replica of the US GI M1911A1 that I used. This one is from SDS Arms.
On a sunny summer day I took the aforementioned gear and a heavy OD green ammo can filled with .45 ACP to the range. While I’m not going to trade my polymer-framed, striker-fired EDC blaster in for that classic all-steel pistol, it was a most cathartic experience to get back to my roots.
P.S. John Farnam is still teaching and claims that he’s going to do so until he passes away. Check out his training calendar. I would highly recommend that you take at least one class from him while you can.
Paul G. Markel is a combat decorated United States Marine veteran. He is also the founder of Student the Gun University and has been teaching Small Arms & Tactics to military personnel, police officers, and citizens for over three decades.