This weekend I had the chance to do Night Vision Operator training with Eric at Green Eye Tactical.  Eric was a Unit guy with lots of experience on such things.

I've seen info on how other training outfits do Night Vision training.  I'm not saying they are bad.  I learned a ton from Jamey Caldwell's NV videos.  TNVC's classes look like they totally rock and plan to do them down the road.  But this class is different.  Despite the round count listed for the course, it ended up being a relatively low round count class.  But those rounds were spent strategically to find our capabilities and limitations.

The focus was on passive aiming.  We ran drills and exercises with IR lasers and IR illuminators, but those were designated as backup.  Primary was our EOTech EXPS3 Nightvision compatible optic.  Zeroing with EOTech is great because once you do your daytime zero, you just hit the NV button on the optic and you already zeroed and ready to rock after dark.  Before the class I found my zero how Jamey Caldwell suggested, with glint tape, parallel zero, etc. But the truth is that even military IR lasers have a tendency to rapidly loose zero.    The hack is if you are rocking an EOTech, simply focus your laser at a distance object and align the laser with your already zeroed EOTech.  No ammo required.  For me it was simply a IR laser zero confirmation, but it's great to know that zero confirmation is that quick and easy.  We performed that at a distance of approx. half a mile.  I found that a "lowly" Holosun laser actually performed well at that distance.  High power lasers are simply compensation for poor Nightvision tubes.

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more to follow

Our shooting started out in the daytime on a 400 yard KD range, working at 100 yards to establish zero with 5 round groups from the prone.  Eric is a fan of custom zeros, and has the belief that rifles are never fully zeroed, but most of us were dialed in for 50 yards.  The though was to simply adjust our expectations for the zero distance we wanted.   As day moved to night, visible lights were added and I noticed a shift in my reticle POA/POI, perhaps related to astigmatism.  An adjustment was made, and that set me back on accuracy beyond 200 yards that night.  I ended up removing the adjustment the second day and had no further issues with zero.  

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We were briefed and exercised on defined procedures for loading and unloading which work day/night.  Useful as everything is more challenging under NVG.

Under NVG we then moved down to 80 yards from the end of the range to do a live fire walkdown.  We began standing, shooting everything from small steel plates to a fullsize silhouette.  We walked back to 120y and did the same.  We walked back to 160 yards and added kneeling and sitting to our standing positions, then 200 adding barricade support, then 250, 300, and 400.  At 400 we added prone and a tank trap support.

It was extremely eye opening to find the limits of our equipment.  There was a variety of gear and standard red dot sights tend to fall off on accuracy quickly after 80 yards.  Lasers start to get more difficult starting around 200.  Good night vision tubes and EOTechs with Nightvision settings allowed the chance to detect and aim from 400 yards.

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We started with Pistol the second night.  Like most, Eric recommends red dots on pistols for nightvision shooting.  I was having difficulty finding a decent holster for my pistol IR light/laser and made it interesting by shooting both irons and a red dot.  Initial distance was 4 yards.  Irons were impossible to see with NVG, but I found that point shooting works just as well as the daytime.  So 3-4 inch group with irons and point shooting at 4 yards.  One hole with a red dot at the same distance.  At 15 yards pure point shooting is really only reliably capable of "body" type shots... it was difficult to even clearly align the top of my slide under NVG.  With a red dot 15 yards standing gave me perhaps a 3 inch group.  There are some odd optical effects with NVG and fogging that may have pushed the center of my red dot group slightly left.

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We then did an exercise on the process of topping out a ladder to a platform.  Perhaps not difficult during the day, but far more difficult to do this at night under nightvision.  Important reason to carry a pistol as you can't do this with a long gun.  There is actually some interesting technique to it. We engaged a hostage target at a distance of around 5 yards.  All shots fired were successful... even my point shooting with a pair of headshots.
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The grand finale was to climb to and up a tower under NVG, then engage targets from the tower at a distance of 200 yards.

Eric recommends VTAC slings as they can do everything.  I brought that, but I hadn't planned on climbing so I didn't bring my tree climbin' holster.  We were using some range safety procedures to have the slide open on our unloaded pistol, and during the middle of the night I didn't think to confirm the retention tightness on my kydex holster.  In the dark under fatigue and nightvision I managed to screw up my sling length and started out with the sling too loose.  Very important Lesson learned... don't do commando stuff until your gear is actually squared away.  I started out as a soup sandwich.  Rifle knocked my pistol out of the holster while climbing to the tower.  Fortunately no damage to the pistol.  Very humid night so my eye pro fogged up badly.  Head lamp around my neck had a white light AD.  Inside the tower I ended up flipping up my goggles and using white light to un-f**k my sling and see.  One of the guys banged his goggles hard on the ladder and the lanyard was the only thing that saved them from falling 20 feet to the ground.  I was so badly fogged I just used white light to climb.  There are windows in the tower, so I engaged from one and had a very satisfying session banging steel in the dark with Nightvision from 200 yards.  Everybody downclimbed.  I was the last down and the range was cold so I ended up removing my fogged eyepro and simply using the moonlight to downclimb.  Having my gear squared away and the experience on the way up made going down go a lot better, but with the shadows it still wasn't easy to see.

phone cameras make it look a lot lighter that it was.  This activity was done around 2am.
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This was my view from the tower to the targets.  You can't actually see the steel targets in the photo, but they were there along the back black wall:
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Final thoughts.  The Nightvision crowd was a group of professionals and successful businessmen (who can afford that kind of gear & training).  Eric is cigar smoking, tobacco chewing & spitting, cussing soldier, so if you take his classes be prepared for that.

I'd done night shoots before.  Started out with white light shooting eons ago, with pistols, carbines, and scoped rifles... I've done silenced night shoots, Nightvision shooting out to 50-100 yards... but this was something very different.  It felt much more up to date than anything I'd seen before.  I certainly learned a lot about capabilities and limitations and how to make better use of my daytime training and administrative time for night shooting & movement.  Makes me want to do more.  

Great write up. I've yet to take that class with Eric, reading this gets me motivated to take another trip out there.

Thanks for the write up. I was looking at registering for the march 2025 class.