Fight Through! Fight Through!

Let’s establish the ground rules or basic assumptions for this post:

1) You are a Liberty minded supporter of Freedom. You will never bend the knee to Tyranny. You would rather live free and die hard than EVER submit. They can hurt you, capture you, and kill you but they can never bend you to their will.

2) You have trained to fight, you have learned tactical light infantry skills, in order to be able to effectively operate as a member of a team. You are part of a tactical team in an SHTF or Resistance environment.

3) You have worked hard on your physical fitness. There is no excuse, bar injury or illness. If you are obese and unfit, it is a symptom of weakness in your mind.

“Pain is the feeling of weakness leaving the body.'”

“Sympathy is found, in the dictionary, somewhere between shit and syphilis .”

“The effective range of an excuse is zero meters.”

Having established that, lets get down to business:

If you have read any of my writings, or attended my training, you will know that the point of the tactics I teach is to win, and survive. I will never advocate throwing your life away with stupid tactics or pointless heroics. That is why I teach break contact drills, and in the assault I favor use of the flank with effective support by fire, as examples.

I teach various commands during my training, such as “Contact Front!”. I teach “Get On Line!” as a transition command – it signals a break in doing one thing and positions the team before moving to another. For example if you are a team fighting backwards out of contact, and the commander sees an out to the left, he may shout “Get On Line!” firstly to get everyone on line, and secondly to position them for the next command, which in this example would be “Peel Left!’.

If he comes under contact and decides he wants to suppress then assault, he may call for a team, or the whole squad, to “Get On Line!” prior to suppressing and then making his next move to assault.

There will be times when you have no choice but to fight forwards. I have alluded to this in previous posts, such as the ‘When They Are Hunting You‘ post recently. This could be where you are faced with close enemy and you cannot break contact, and you have to fight forwards.

The US Army teaches two types of hasty attack – that for ‘close ambush’ and that for ‘far ambush’. The difference is that a close ambush is defined as within grenade throwing range. The standard drill for a close ambush is an immediate assault by the closest team onto the enemy. That will often leave the other team(s) unable to support. I differ in my opinion in that I will almost always advocate typing to get to a flank if it is possible. It may be within grenade range but that is still a long way – you can fire at each other across the width of an embanked road and it seems like a long way, for example.

Exceptions are when you know that you can skirmish through an enemy using superior fire and movement. You will begin to know the balance of capabilities of you and your enemy. I have written about how this was a favorite tactic of skirmish lines reacting to contact in the southern African bush wars – fire and moving through the bush scrub using superior shooting and moving skills in a skirmish line through the enemy positions. This can also be combined with firing into likely areas of enemy cover (The Drake Method). This is not a ‘reconnaissance by fire’ as per Vietnam but a more considered approach to target likely firing positions and flush unseen enemy out of cover, make them move and shoot them down.

‘Older School’ react to ambush drills involved turning and running through the enemy position. It’s not quite as mad as it sounds. If the enemy is close, and you can pull off the immediate aggressive reaction like screaming madmen, then you can turn towards the enemy and run at them, firing into the ground slightly ahead of you as you run. Done right, you may quickly get onto the enemy kill group and overwhelm them. However, a lot of you will likely not make it – it just depends how alert the enemy were when they sprang the ambush, and the weight of effective fire they put out at you.

To make such an immediate assault you must always be ready for it. If you are not, you will be taken by surprise and freeze in the kill zone. Yes, an ambush is a surprise attack from a position of cover, but to generate an immediate aggressive reaction you not only have to be drilled as a team, but you must carry a slow burning anger and aggression around inside you at all times. You must be prepared to ‘go’ at any moment. Shuffling along a trail into an enemy ambush, feeling sorry for yourself, head down, will not cut it.

As you turn and fight towards the enemy ambush line, rifle up spitting rounds, shouting with maximum aggression, you may find the sounds of gunfire and screaming fading away. Instead, they may be replaced by the roar of the feast hall, the warmth of the hearth fires, as your warrior ancestors welcome you to Valhalla, your rifle in hand and bullet holes in your chest.

“Go, and Die with Honor!”

If you find yourself in a position where you need to fight directly at the enemy, the command is “Fight Through! Fight Through!” This would usually occur after getting on line and the idea is to fight forwards in a skirmish line, in buddy pairs within the overall squad or team line.

This direct skirmish line method does not always have to happen as a full frontal attack – if you do move to the flank, and the enemy is not in specific positions like trenches or bunkers, but is scattered around in the open behind pieces of cover, then you may choose to assault as a skirmish line. This means that the team that went to the flank, supported still by the fire support team, will choose to skirmish through the enemy position.

If you are fighting through an enemy position in a skirmish line, by fire and movement, then you do not always have to do so by making short rushes i.e. “I’m up, he sees me, I’m down.” You can actually advance by crawling, if the return fire is heavy. Thus, each man crawls forwards, covered by his buddy, and then takes a fire position to cover his buddy. You can also stop and hold the line while grenades are thrown forwards, into enemy positions or cover, so long as this does not cause fratricide.

If you are approaching an enemy position as part of an assault, perhaps from a flank, and your assault line is then contacted, or your leader decides to initiate the contact as the enemy position comes into view (this is tactical surprise after going to a flank), the next command (assuming you are already ‘on line’ in a skirmish line) is “Fight Through!”

Thus, in classic infantry terms, an attack on an enemy position from a flank is split into ‘the approach’, ‘the assault’ and the ‘fight through’ phases.

The Approach: as you move around to the enemies flank to a forming up position (FUP).

The Assault: as you cross the Line of Departure (LD), which is the leading edge of the FUP, you move/fight over the ground towards the enemy position. Depending when the enemy sees you, or when you initiate contact from the flank, depends how much of this movement is under fire.

The Fight Through: from the leading edge of the enemy position until you have fought through to the far side.

“If you are going to be a bear, be a grizzly”

The point here is to understand that at some point you may have no choice but to stare into eternity as you are faced with the need to fight directly through an enemy position. It may be that you are outnumbered and outgunned.

Never underestimate the psychological effect in fighting. Your morale, your ability to bring immediate aggression to the fight, is of paramount importance. You may, for example, have just walked into the perfectly set-up ambush. But the ambush is manned by a bunch of conscript (or near to) twenty something FSA assholes who have been freezing their asses of in position for the last eight hours. They are half asleep and numb with cold. They lack morale and motivation. The ambush is sprung, but rather than an immediate overwhelming ambush weight of fire, it starts in a desultory manner and most are firing high over their sights.

You, on the other hand, are a screaming crazy professionally trained tactically competent physically fit Resistance Fighter. You have very high motivation. Your team reacts immediately with a high weight of accurate fire into the enemy kill group position and immediately begins to fight through, whether at the charge or by deliberate fire and movement, towards the enemy kill group.

(The same is true if you run a break contact drill, having punched the enemy in the face, you ‘fade away’ into the trees, leaving them bloody and shocked).

As you fight towards them with cold screaming determination, said FSA asshole loses control of his bowels at the sight of your remorseless advance, which is not being stopped by his banging off of rounds in your general direction.

They panic, and break.

Remember, it’s not over till its over. And when it’s over, it’s over. So, don’t worry about it. Do what you can at all times when you can.

We’re all gonna die, right? Its just really a question of how much it will hurt. We don’t want to die, we will try our hardest not to, but we will put it on the line for Liberty and Tribe. In fact, we will do all that we can to survive and win.

For Morale:

And:

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