Vern Humphrey
Member
The Box Method is a way of fighting the firefight that I developed in Viet Nam, while commanding A-1/61 Infantry. I had first used something like it my previous tour as an Adviser with 4/48 ARVN Infantry. What I will present here is the fully developed method.
First of all, realize that as soon as the first shots are fired, EVERYONE will be under cover. Forget the nonsense about running away from a far ambush, charging a near one, and so on. Everyone takes cover or dies.
Now, as a drill, imagine you have just been fired on and take cover. Look in the general direction where you imagine the enemy to be. In real combat, you'd see very little -- the enemy is under cover, too. So you can't SEE targets, or really tell exactly where he is.
But there is an area immediately between you and the enemy where you know he ISN'T (unless you're nose to nose.) Draw an imagainary line, marking that area. No enemy short of the line.
Now look up a bit higher, and you can see another area where the enemy can't be -- up in the sky. Draw another imaginary line there, too. No enemy above the line.
Select the left and right limits of your sector -- and there's the box. Two horizontal lines, and the enemy is between them, two vertical lines marking your sector limits. In practice, the box is rarely more than 3 front sights high (try it and see) and usually much less.
Shoot into the box, spacing your shots carefully, and fill the box with bullets. Be sure to overlap the shots of the men on your right and left, and shoot low -- a hit short of the box every now and then will still ricochet into the box.
For training, we would set up an enemy "position" with C-Ration boxes, and make sure they were invisible to the selected friendly position. Troops would take up positions, and we would stretch white engineer tape, letting them guide us, to form the upper and lower bounds of the box. The stakes holding the tape marked the sectors.
Afterwards, the troops would go forward and look at the targets -- we always had plenty of hits -- and we reminded the troops that even if you miss a few, enough kills will usually drive the enemy out of position.
Next, we trained with a few targets that were invisable, but "marked" by a stake and piece of tape. The mark indicated a suspected enemy location (located by motion, flash, dust, etc.) and trained the troops to shoot all around that marked area -- taking out a target they couldn't see, but had a good indication that it was there.
We had NCOs and officers carry magazines of solid tracer. In action, a leader would mark sector by firing pairs of shots -- two left, two right, and two center, to mark the sector. This "zig-zag" allowed troops who couldn't see the whole sector to estimate where it was.
Leaders who detected a target would fire repeatedly at it -- meaning "Everyone fire at this target." When the target was neutralized, the zig-zag meant "go back to covering your sector."
The one exception to the "no full auto fire with hand-held weapons" rule was for leaders -- a full auto burst of tracer meant "Machineguns engage this target."
The Box Method is both a way to train individual riflemen in real combat shooting, and a leader-and-unit (collective training) drill. In addition, it offers one thing the Infantry School still hasn't figured out -- a way for a leader to control fires even in combat.
First of all, realize that as soon as the first shots are fired, EVERYONE will be under cover. Forget the nonsense about running away from a far ambush, charging a near one, and so on. Everyone takes cover or dies.
Now, as a drill, imagine you have just been fired on and take cover. Look in the general direction where you imagine the enemy to be. In real combat, you'd see very little -- the enemy is under cover, too. So you can't SEE targets, or really tell exactly where he is.
But there is an area immediately between you and the enemy where you know he ISN'T (unless you're nose to nose.) Draw an imagainary line, marking that area. No enemy short of the line.
Now look up a bit higher, and you can see another area where the enemy can't be -- up in the sky. Draw another imaginary line there, too. No enemy above the line.
Select the left and right limits of your sector -- and there's the box. Two horizontal lines, and the enemy is between them, two vertical lines marking your sector limits. In practice, the box is rarely more than 3 front sights high (try it and see) and usually much less.
Shoot into the box, spacing your shots carefully, and fill the box with bullets. Be sure to overlap the shots of the men on your right and left, and shoot low -- a hit short of the box every now and then will still ricochet into the box.
For training, we would set up an enemy "position" with C-Ration boxes, and make sure they were invisible to the selected friendly position. Troops would take up positions, and we would stretch white engineer tape, letting them guide us, to form the upper and lower bounds of the box. The stakes holding the tape marked the sectors.
Afterwards, the troops would go forward and look at the targets -- we always had plenty of hits -- and we reminded the troops that even if you miss a few, enough kills will usually drive the enemy out of position.
Next, we trained with a few targets that were invisable, but "marked" by a stake and piece of tape. The mark indicated a suspected enemy location (located by motion, flash, dust, etc.) and trained the troops to shoot all around that marked area -- taking out a target they couldn't see, but had a good indication that it was there.
We had NCOs and officers carry magazines of solid tracer. In action, a leader would mark sector by firing pairs of shots -- two left, two right, and two center, to mark the sector. This "zig-zag" allowed troops who couldn't see the whole sector to estimate where it was.
Leaders who detected a target would fire repeatedly at it -- meaning "Everyone fire at this target." When the target was neutralized, the zig-zag meant "go back to covering your sector."
The one exception to the "no full auto fire with hand-held weapons" rule was for leaders -- a full auto burst of tracer meant "Machineguns engage this target."
The Box Method is both a way to train individual riflemen in real combat shooting, and a leader-and-unit (collective training) drill. In addition, it offers one thing the Infantry School still hasn't figured out -- a way for a leader to control fires even in combat.
