Training Day

DETAILS MAGAZINE
DECEMBER 2001

Photo by Alex Tehrani

Covert-ops fantasy camps used to be shoot-em-up playgrounds for upwardly mobile businessmen with itchy trigger fingers. Since September 11, the war games have turned painfully real

“Go ahead,” hisses the man with the .40-caliber Glock. “Make a move.” My arms are raised above my head; a gun is inches from my face. If this were a stickup, I’d just hand over my wallet. But this maniac isn’t interested in money. In the next few seconds I have to make a choice: Fight back or take a slug in the skull. Hesitation is the killer. In a flash, I slap the gun with my right hand, pivot, and thrust the barrel up and in with my left. By the time my assailant pulls the trigger, my body’s out of range, and I’ve snapped back his wrist – nearly breaking a fat little finger – just as the gun goes CLICK. “Not bad,” sniffs Dennis Hebler, a 58-year-old Army Special Forces vet with more confirmed kills than a Rambo double feature. Hebler, who’s just played the part of Mr. Terrorist, now has a gun pointed into his considerable gut. “Now you can squeeze it,” he says flatly, “and take me out with my own weapon.”

Good thing the gun isn’t loaded.

On a former Army Air Corps base in the desert outskirts of Tucson, Arizona, disarming a murderous hijacker is all part of a day’s work. Here, over the next three afternoons,  I and 47 fellow students – many of whom are big-time CEOs or eat-or-be-eaten entrepreneurs – will engage in hand-to-weapon combat, target shooting, evasive-driving maneuvers, and more than a dozen other lethal skills that make up the anti-terrorism crash course known as Covert Ops.

These days, Covert Ops is one of the few American businesses that are actually booming. Until recent events, the operation was basically a goofy Arizona spy-fantasy camp for lawyers, doctors, office-bound bankers, and other warriors willing to pay $3,795 for a James Bond weekend. Today, with rumors of more attacks still to come, this fantasy has taken on a decidedly less escapist feel. It seems that steel-belted cojones may be required to survive in the post-September 11 word. The Covert Ops folks understands this.

“Everybody wants to be those guys who went down on the plane in Pennsylvania,” says Hebler, a Colonel Sanders look-alike with a homicidal streak. “But heroes are not born – they’re made by circumstance. The only thing you can do is prepare yourself physically and mentally.”

Jeff Miller is the 55-year-old tactician behind Covert Ops. A burly hard-ass with a country singer’s salt-and-pepper beard, Miller spent fourteen years with the U.S. Army Special Forces, the same trained killers now dissecting the Taliban in Afghanistan. In Covert Ops’ blue-padded Dojo, Miller and Hebler – an eight-degree black belt in Kenpo karate – are exploring the niceties of taking a gun from an attacker.

“You want the guy to stick it in your face,” Miller says. “The closer the weapon is, the more of a psychological advantage the attacker thinks he has. But action is faster than reaction. That’s why the sucker punch is a great punch.”

Miller and Hebler know what they’re talking about – they’ve been engaged in similar first-assault activity since the Vietnam War. When I ask what kind of Special Forces work they performed in Laos and Cambodia, Hebler puts his finger to my temple and squeezes, “Let’s just say ‘intelligence gathering,’” he offers with a smile.

In 1992, the duo – long since retired from military duty – took several former Special Forces colleagues to Algeria to recover two children who’d been abducted by their father in a divorce battle. Along the way, the grizzled A-team was thwarted by a military coup; an unscrupulous yacht owner would walk off with their $50,000 retainer. Nevertheless, Miller and Hebler would up finishing the job – even though they both earned kidnapping arrest warrants from Interpol for their troubles.

Today, on a brutally hot October afternoon, the latest crop of Covert Ops students are convinced that they, too, possess this can-do attitude. After all, each is a type-A personality who heads a multi-million-dollar business; all are here via the Young Presidents’ Organization conference, an international group of business leaders with 8,000 members worldwide.

Though most of the YPOers are more accustomed to bullying boardrooms than facing down box-cutters, they sear they’d never let a terrorist take them out. They just need a little professional guidance to prevent such a thing from happening. “Grabbing that gun is about having the confidence to do it,” says Cliff Oberlin, CEO of Oberlin Financial Corp. in Bryan, Ohio. “This is great practice. So if you do find yourself in a situation, you’re not totally helpless.”

As we begin another round of gunplay, Joe Corace, fortysomething CEO of Forum Motors Group in Fenton, Michigan, faces me with a doubtful look on his cherubic face. He’s wearing a yellow golf shirt tucked into tan pleated shorts. He plants his black Nikes on the mat and makes his move. I wince in pain as he rips a mock Glock from my hand. Corace smiles victoriously.

Nice job, I tell him as he hands back the gun, but does he really think all this make-believe will ever come in handy? “You never know,” he says, staring down the barrel. Then, with renewed vigor, he again rips the gun out of my hand.

Grabbing a knife from an attacker’s grasp is a matter of proper technique. The key in this case don’t ever stick out your hand. “He’ll slice it,” Hebler says, “any you’re done.” Despite his girth, Hebler moves with a gymnast’s ease. In a blink, Miller is getting his jugular slit with his own knife. For the next few hours, we’ll practice this move until we’re sore. Pawing at a knife is actually more dangerous than grabbing a gun. If the attacker knows what he’s ding and you don’t, Hebler explains, the guy’s likely to “slice out your kidneys like a butcher cutting dog meat.”

Of course, not everyone turns out to be a natural-born butcher. Dave White, 39, president of the White Family Dealerships in Toledo, Ohio, has mixed feelings about all this bluster. “This whole thing is fun in class,” he allows, pausing for breath between stabs, “but if you train a lot of people like us this way, it’s going to be dangerous. People are gonna think they know what they’re doing – and get themselves killed.”

The Covert Ops staff are quickly becoming experts at selling security to an insecure world. In fact, the Ops fantasy camp is actually an outgrowth of Miller’s Safehouse Security, a California-based operation whose creators have spent twelve years teaching such exercises to corporate executives traveling in Latin America kidnapping hot spots. Over the years, Miller and his partner, Gordon Edwards, a former pro-racing driver, have shared anti-terror tactics with 130 SWAT teams, hundreds of CEOs, and the 32-strong extended family of a Mexican Billionaire. Now they no longer have to rely on Latin instability.

“What’s ironic is that we couldn’t sell real security in the U.S. to saver our ass,” Edwards says. We’re standing outside the cinder-block officers’ quarters that function as base camp during Covert Ops training, where beer cans mingle with handguns on the kitchen counter and the satellite dish is usually picking up porn. “Until 9-11, no one had a clue about this type of security. That’s why we packaged it up as Covert Pos. Now the phone’s ringing, and people have a higher sense of our practical skills.”

Meanwhile, long before September 11, corporate security had become a multi-billion-dollar industry dominated by globe-straddling concerns like Kroll Inc., Control Risks Group, and Pinkerton. These companies offer services like driver training, risk assessment for families in dangerous areas, and, in the event of an actual kidnapping, hostage-negotiation teams. While the corporate component of security is only getting bigger, average Americans are looking to smaller companies like Safehouse for personal-safety training this side of the border.

Sanford Strong, a former San Diego Police sergeant, is one of many individuals who’ve capitalized on the new national mood. Strong now supplements his income running $4,000 family-security seminars on the deadly art of self-defense. Since the terrorist attacks, he’s seen his demand double.

“I ask people, ‘Are you ready to kill another person?’” he says. Strong, 58, often uses graphic video reenactments of break-ins and fast-food massacres to drive home his point. “Expect screaming,” he tells his untested students. “Expect everything to be blood-soaked – his blood and, likely, your own.”

Jerry Peterson, a Vietnam vet who used to train FBI agents and NATO forces, runs the unfortunately names SCARS Institute of Combat Sciences, which now offers a Civilian Counter-terrorist Training Seminar. In a move that’s somewhere between patriotism and opportunism, Peterson has cut his usual $5,000 fee to $1,800, “to get as many citizens trained as we can.” He offers tips on sniffing out an airplane hijacking and what it’s like to be shot – by firing a foam cork at your chest.

“What we try to do is eliminate fear from the mind,” says Peterson, who insists that Americans are fat, lazy, and emasculated. “We can teach you to switch it off – so you can take action. If a guy walks down the aisle with a blade to the stewardess’s throat, we can show you how to snap his neck before he can use that knife.”

Of course, for psychologists who specialize in the effects of violence and terrorism, the problem with all this tough talk – beyond the potential to con participants – is that it can do more harm than good. “Investing in these programs is like playing slot machines,” says Rona Fields, a Washington, D.C., psychologist who’s worked in Israel and Northern Ireland. “What are the chances you’ll put this to use? And putting a gun in your house can hurt children.”

Clark McCauley, a professor at Bryn Mawr College and an expert on the psychological impact of terrorism, says the people drawn to such courses are likely to be “control freaks.” “These are probably the first people to think, ‘Well, if somebody takes over my plane, I’m going to be one of the guys who can jujitsu his way out,’” he says. “It’s a perception that could be very seductive.”

Another boiling day on the shooting range. My group sits on bleachers in the shade as Miller, strutting before us with a 9-mm. Smith & Wesson tucked into the waistband of his desert fatigues, lectures on the laws of handgun physics. “Before the invention of guns,” he says with appropriate John Wayne machismo, “the biggest guy was always in charge. But in the Old West they had a saying: ‘God created all men equal. Sam Colt made them all the same size.’”

It’s a good thing, too, because most gun battles, Miller tells us, take place at a distance of between 7 and 21 feet – the size of most rooms, and the distance we’ll be practicing at today. Here’s the problem: Fear ruins your ability to shoot straight. The body tenses in anticipation of fight or flight, and grip is distorted. At such instants, there’s no such thing as a sharpshooter.

“If you’re gonna pull a gun, you’re gonna pull it with the intention of using deadly force,” says Miller. “You’re not gonna try to shoot his gun from his hand, or wound his knee, or any of that Hollywood stuff – it doesn’t work.” To actually make contact, Miller says, you don’t need to stare down the sights of the gun. All you have to do is follow the close-quarter battle (CQB) technique developed by the British in the seventies to offset the crippling effects of fear. Simply push the gun toward the target – from the center of the chest – feet apart, knees bent, elbows locked out so that “your skeleton, not your muscles,” says Miller, “becomes your platform.”

For the next two hours, we practice shooting at targets shaped like human silhouettes. I’ve never fired a gun before. It feels good in my hands, solid, powerful. When that first kick comes, I’m amazed at how easy it seems to put a hole through a man’s heart.

The guy practicing next to me, Pat Farver, is the ruddy-faced, joke-telling owner of Blissfield Manufacturing in Blissfield, Michigan, a refrigeration-parts maker. Farver’s an excellent shot. He keeps two handguns in his home for protection.

As we continued shooting, Miller and Hebler patrol the line, critiquing and offering advice. “You need to stay calm,” Hebler tell Joe Corace, an avid hunter, who is sliding his finger too far over the trigger and nudging the gun to the left. “put just the tip of your finger on the trigger and pull back easy.” Corace’s first shot hits dead center. The second pulls again to the left. “How do I keep it from moving?” Corace asks.

Hebler stares him down, “Practice,” he says.

Joe Blattner and I are standing on the two-kilometer asphalt track as Gordon Edwards, racer, stuntman, and co-owner of Safehouse, demonstrates evasive-driving techniques. When Blattner was a kid in Pittsburgh, he was viciously mugged by a gang of teens and spent months cowering in his room. “I was fearful that I’d die every time I walked down a street,” says Blattner, who eventually armed himself with Mace. When he was jumped again, he blasted the attacker in the face. “I loved it. I felt like I finally had some control.” Blattner, 47, CEO of the Blattner Brunner advertising agency in Pittsburgh, is thrilled by the 180-degree J-turns that Edwards is showing us, otherwise known as the Rockford (as in The Rockford Files).

“Hesitation can make you or break you,” chants Edwards, a likeable guy who chain-smokes Marlboro Lights and looks like he belongs in a NASCAR race pit. “You hesitate, it’s going to cost you your life. Your first reaction: Act on it!” The Rockford is remarkably simple. You’re driving down a road and you see the bad guys up ahead. You pull to a stop, slam the car in reverse, give a three-count as you accelerate, and then sping the wheel hard right or left. Pow! You’re facing the opposite direction, headed away from the trouble. Edwards has taught more than 1,000 chauffeurs, bodyguards, and executives this maneuver. He says it’s saved lives.

As we watch the other performers in this stunt screeching tires and buring rubber on the road, Blattner is itching to hop in and try it. “See, this is the kind of stuff you need to know these days,” he says, a pair of Ray-Bans slung around his neck. “Crazies can do all kinds of things – carjack you, ram an airplane into a building. I always knew that kond of thing could happen. All this stuffs prepares you to live.”

Matt Marko, president of Ducana Windows and Doors in Tilbury, Ontario, flushed with excitement, jumps out of a silver test Camry. “I was one with the car!” he howls. Marko, 43, points at another rookie driver spewing smoke á la Rockford. “That” he says, “is very practical.”

When his turn comes, Blattner nails the maneuver, and goes on to ace the forward and reverse slalom courses. Then it’s off to Contact Driving, a life-and-death variation on the demolition derby using a few old Buick Delta 88s outfitted with crash bars and painted Blues Brothers-black. Edwards chases students with a “hook” car and rams your back quarter panels to teach you how to avoid getting run off the road by kidnappers.

To afford us a terrorist-eye view of the action, Edwards takes each member of the team for a rid in the chase car, where he smokes and sings lazily along with Glenn Miller on an eight-track as he heads straight for the guy in front of him. Pat Farver, strapped into the target car, fishtails and taps his brakes. “Brakes are for parking and pussies,” Edwards drawls through a two-way radio. “Stay on the pedal, Pat. Turn into the slide.” Farver guns it and breaks loose. On the next hit, Farver is sent spinning off the track and into the desert dust. “See that?” Edwards asks with a laugh. “You though I was gonna push hard and you over-steered. You got to feel it.”

Having grown up driving the icy winter roads of New England, spinning out for kicks in deserted parking lots in snowstorms, I turn out to have a touch for avoiding 360s. that said, I put my car in the weeds a few times, to get that heart-thumping rush, and for the dust tsunami it sends into Edwards’s windows.

It’s Blattner’s turn, and he seems unsure. When Edwards love-taps him on the first turn, he throws the wheel and loses it. He gets better as the session goes on, but by the last pass he’s clearly shaken. “That’s very stressful,” he says, stepping from the car and handing his helmet to Marko, the next driver up.

Marko takes the helmet and walks away from the car. “Where’re you going?” barks Edwards. “I gotta get a new helmet,” Marko yells over his shoulder. “This one’s soaking wet.”

On Saturday, the final day of the Covert Ops training, Miller is pacing the front of a bare classroom, lecturing us on the proper way to storm a terrorist hideout.

All of the Ops exercises have been leading up to this: a paintball battle in which the students much rescue a hostage from an old copper-mining village eleven miles north in the desert. In the midst of Miller’s instructions, seven guys in black ski masks burst through the door screaming “Get down!” and firing paintball rifles. As we cower on the floor, the grab Jane Reifert, the Covert Ops PR woman, and split.

“In any kind of terrorist operation, whether it’s an airplane fuselage, a suburban home, or the Astrodome, the space is controlled by the hostage-taker,” says Miller. “Your mission is to use violence of action to regain control and get the person back. The more you plan, the safer you’ll be.”

For the next 90 minutes, we map out the rescue, breaking sixteen students into two teams – one for recon; one for the attack. Pat Farver is elected leader, but there’s plenty of disagreement about whether we should move via the low stone walls of the compound (the terrorists conveniently dropped a map of the place) and risk being ambushed. Miller looks on but offers no advice. The place is a maze of blind halls and dark chambers. We need to avoid shooting the hostage.

After we’re armed with paintball rifles, face shields, and blue coveralls, everyone piles into a van; we make our way up the highway and then down a rutted dirt road past cotton fields and a foul-smelling slaughterhouse. The hideout lies at the bottom of a scrubby hill; it’s being patrolled by one of the kidnappers. Unfortunately, we’ve lost the element of surprise (the van backed up with its beeper on). Eventually the recon team, headed by Bob Kowalick, a tweedy physical therapist from Rochester, Michigan, decides to bag its assigned mission and mount a surprise assault from the hill. Kowalick, 42, is used to preparing for random attacks: He’s a two-time graduate of Sanford Strong’s course and subscribes to Strong’s dictum that you mush always take not of the exits whenever you enter an unfamiliar building.

As we fan out, there’s an alarming haphazardness to the operation. No one is crouching or trying to be quiet on the rocky rubble. Soon, the whole ting dissolves into chaos; Farver’s team, with Kowalick’s crew on it’s heels, storms the building and gets annihilated by red, yellow, and blue paintballs. When it’s all over, Reifer, the hostage, has been pelted numerous times. A shirtless Hebler, who played one of the terrorists, has a dozen red welts on his fish-white belly, and some words of advice.

“You make the best plans possible,” he says, as several sweaty players emerge from their coveralls. “You make contingency plans. You expect them all to go wrong because they will. The difference between a successful mission and on that toes down the tubes is the people who can think on their feet. But the thing is, you have to have balls to take the first step.”

As we pack up, everyone is laughing. After all, we say to each other, this was only a game.