The shooting house
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The shooting house is the close-quarters decision range at the Farm, and the part of his weapons training John Kiriakou describes with the most relish.

Getting there

The course built up slowly. Trainees were issued heavy leather belts with holsters and a pistol, at first Brownings, and required to wear them at every moment they were not in bed or in the shower. Kiriakou, who had never handled a gun, found it exciting: "this is gonna be some real James Bond shit." Range work ran at seven metres, then twelve, then twenty-five, day after day, until he had a callus on his thumb from loading magazines. Then it was done at night, which he says exposes how bad a shooter really is, "you're like at risk of shooting the guy standing next to you."

The house

In the shooting house the trainee moves through rooms, looking round corners and up, while figures appear at windows: a man with a machine gun, or a woman holding a baby. There are roughly three quarters of a second to decide before being shot with a paintball. Miss a hostile and you are dead; shoot the woman or the child who pops up to see what is happening outside and "you might as well be dead."

Kiriakou says he aced it every single time, and explains it in terms of temperament rather than skill: a very steady hand, half a second to classify hostile or civilian, and, in an explicit callback to his account of the sociopathic tendencies the agency recruits for, a heart that does not race in that situation at all.

From the car

The same exercise was then run from a vehicle. The instructors disable the trainee's car remotely; a van a hundred feet away slides its door open and a robot begins firing blanks. The drill is to duck below the robot's line of sight, unbuckle, crawl across to the passenger side, get out on your belly and disable it.

Kiriakou could not get a clear shot, so he shot out the windows of his own car and hit the robot through them. The instructors ran onto the range, "Damn it, Kiriakou! That was the last decent car we had", and he defended himself with their own doctrine: they had told the class to do whatever was needed to get the shot, and to "get off the X"; with the car disabled, the only way off the X was to kill the robot.

See also

- The Farm
- The polygraph
- Counterterrorist Driving
- Kiriakou Skeet Shooting
