National Guardsmen Get Special Training

Thursday, August 9th 2007, 9:43 am

By: News On 6

Members of the Oklahoma Army National Guard got some special training from a new kind of Tulsa business Thursday. The United States Shooting Academy is just what it sounds like. The News On 6â€™s Steve Berg reports it trains soldiers how to shoot and shoot well.

The distinctive sound of automatic rifle fire pierces the sweltering air north of Tulsa. Ideally, it's followed by a metallic ping as a chest-sized target is hit in the distance, up to a hundred yards away on the shooting range.

It probably goes without saying that a soldier is trained to shoot, but it's easy to forget that they have to learn a lot of other things that can take away from their shooting training.

"If you look at the military as a whole, the guys have a million different things they have to be good at in order to deploy. Here they have to be good at one thing, and that's pulling the trigger and seeing the sights,â€ said shooting academy instructor Mike Seeklander.

The United States Shooting Academy here in Tulsa is a new private company, with more than a dozen different ranges. They have a special building for indoor combat training. They expect to get the bulk of their business from law enforcement, but they also plan to get a fair share of contracts with the military.

"What we have the ability to do here at USSA is specifically tailor the program to the unit's need,â€ said Seeklander. "We focus on one or two things at a time, make them very, very, very good at those one or two things and then move on to something else later on."

Those two things include shooting and shooting.

"So some of the speed magazine changes, some of the drills that they're running on a long range, we're using more things to shoot around and how to maneuver safely. So it's a graduate-level course,â€ said Oklahoma Army National Guard Captain Mike Urrutia.

"They probably use 10 times more ammo than they do in their normal qualification training session. Typically the military is very limited by ammo,â€ Seeklander said.

"This is just that extra touch in order to give our guys, or our soldiers, the best opportunity to move forward and be successful and come back home,â€ said Urrutia.

There's more to come at the range, including an airplane fuselage to practice emergency aircraft operations and a target range with computer-controlled "moving" targets. They say they are one of only about three such academies in the country.

Watch the video: New Shooting Academy Helps Soldiers Hone Their Skills