Almost as soon as 1st Sgt. Michael Meegan entered the room, the bad guy was on him.
Meegan, then a private with just a few months in the Army, was among a handful of other young soldiers training in a shoothouse during Ranger Assessment and Selection Program, or RASP, in 2010.
The bad guy was another student and a friend of his — and was wearing a supposed ‘knock-out proof” suit designed to let the wearer take heavy blows during hand-to-hand training.
“They are supposed to be knockout-proof. I can tell you they’re not,” Meegan told Task & Purpose. “I remember just uncorking on a buddy of mine and put him to sleep. They’re like, ‘Shit, that wasn’t supposed to happen.’ They put me in the suit after that, and I got my ass kicked for the rest of the afternoon by the rest of the class.”
It was an early lesson for Meegan: hand-to-hand combat is a mental game, whether facing combat or a friend in a ‘knockout-proof’ suit.
“I was so hyped up because the cadre are just fueling you. It’s like speed! Aggression! We need you to show us aggression and that you have the instinct, you got the eye of the tiger, blah, blah,” Meegan said. “And I’m all like, ‘Eye of the Tiger, instinct, all right, yeah, I’m gonna do it.’ So I treated it as if my classmate was trying to kill me, and I’m gonna take his f***ing head off, and I did.”
Hand-to-hand is a core Ranger skill
The moment was the first in a long career for Meegan of hand-to-hand training with the Army’s elite infantry troops. Meegan spent more than 12 years in the 75th Ranger Regiment, deploying six times. He became one of the regiment’s go-to trainers in hand-to-hand combat — though ironically, he says, it’s a skill Rangers work very hard to never actually use.
“As far as clearing a room and getting into an honest-to-God fistfight or knife fight with somebody? No, and we take a lot of pride in that, too,” Meegan told Task & Purpose. “If that were to happen, it’s normally because somebody didn’t do their job very well.”
Before becoming Rangers, soldiers are trained in introductory hand-to-hand combat training through the Modern Army Combatives Program in Army basic training. MACP teaches soldiers the basics of grappling and defending themselves, and soldiers can eventually progress through three levels of training.
Once trainees move on to initial Ranger training, they enter RASP and get more intensive hand-to-hand instruction in the “sandbag circle of woe” at Fort Moore’s Cole Range.
Meegan’s combatives instructor during RASP was Staff Sergeant Pedro Lacerda, a multi-Pan-American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Champion. Lacerda died suddenly from a medical condition soon after his time as Meegan’s instructor. But even now, Lacerda’s name remains a legend in the Ranger Regiment. Former regiment commander Gen. Michael E. Kurill called Lacerda the most “lethal man in the Regiment with his hands” who was “instrumental in the 75th Ranger Regiment’s and Army’s Combatives program.”
Meegan adopted many of Lacerda’s drills, which infused his years of BJJ experience. Through 100-degree heat, Lacerda taught RASP candidates different grips and how to get into good fight positions and out of bad ones. Meegan used many of Lacerda’s drills during
“He used me as a demonstration to try to get past his guard. He used rubber guard (a BJJ guard utilizing extensive flexibility to control the opponent with one arm and one leg), and I never came close. I could not physically overpower this guy,” Meegan said. “He did whatever the f*** he wanted to do while he was talking to the rest of the class as he was telling me to literally try to get past his guard. This guy wasn’t even paying attention to me. So that’s the level this guy was at.”
The Rangers trained in an open field, but any errors were met with a sprint to and from the woods.
“If your hand was out of position, your gable grip wasn’t right, he would notice from 15 to 20 feet away, and then we were hitting the wood line,” Meegan said.
SOCP and specialized hand to hand combat training
After basic combatives in phase 1 of RASP, new Rangers are introduced to Special Operations Combatives Program in phase 2, a standard. The program was established by the then commanding general of JFK SWCS, Major General Thomas Csrnko, for all Army special operations units on March 23, 2010.
In SOCP, soldiers combine the basic combatives they’ve trained on with a rifle and pistol. The concept, said Meegan, is to use hand-to-hand techniques to create space with an opponent that allows for using a rifle or pistol or allows a fellow Ranger to take a shot. Everything is done as a team, Meegan said.
SOCP also emphasizes fighting and training with full gear on. Rangers build up from wearing basic PT clothes — shorts and a t-shirt — to regular duty uniforms, and finally, train wearing full combat loads, including helmets and armor plate carriers.
Training includes one-on-one and multiple-assailant team scenarios and opponents, along with dealing with detainees who are compliant or combative.
Once assigned to a Ranger Battalion, combatives training continues with individual platoons.
“When I was a gun team leader through fire team leader, I continued to train my teams. So I would always do basic grappling, basic boxing with the guys,” Meegan said. “We would have combative training at least twice a week in between our normally scheduled lifting and whatnot. Then, during that combative training, we would also work detainee drills and stuff like that.”
Rangers train constantly in large-scale events, like direct action raids. Hand-to-hand scenarios are a staple in those training.
As Rangers move up in seniority, they have opportunities to attend specialized hand-to-hand schools. Meegan attended a six-day class put on by a commercial training academy that caters to special ops troops. Rangers who had been through the training, Meegan said, walked and talked a little differently.
“It didn’t last forever, but there was a noticeable way that they were kind of carrying themselves like they were just the baddest motherf***ers on the planet,” Meegan said. “I wondered, ‘What did you learn there?”
The course included training with ‘simunitions’ in rifles and pistols and fake but realistic knives. If a trainee was hit by a paint round, the remaining trainees had to treat it as a realistic scenario by addressing the threat before treating and evacuating their wounded comrade.
“It was six straight days of just getting after it,” Meegan said. “Everybody had bruised elbows and bloody knuckles. When you’re talking about entire armies clashing with each other, the principles remain the same. Don’t get outflanked. Don’t get surrounded. Practice set-piece and moving-piece. When it’s you and a buddy, you create angles that are advantageous to you and disadvantageous to your enemy. It trains your mind and body for the concepts of what are tactics.”
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