Actually, if you got shot in the hand, there is almost certain to be permanent impairment, and likely a loss of fingers. Although this is rarely show this in movies (the singular exception I can think of offhand is Bickle’s storming the brothel in Taxi Driver), even a cursory look at the anatomy of the hand shows that there is no place you could put a bullet that it won’t hit bone and tear tendons, and the hand is so full of nerves and so articulating that any kind of penetrating damage is pretty much guaranteed to damage something important. .
Stress conditions are caused by a combination of physical exertion (typically performing a series of burpees, pullups, or carrying heavy sandbags to exhaustion) followed by environmental stressors (being yelled at, blinded with strobe lights, playing Ride of the Valkyries over a megaphone, emerging from a darkened space into sunlight, having sand and grit blown at you). After the shooter is sufficiently stressed, he or she goes to the firing line, picks up and loads the weapon under careful supervision of an instructor to ensure that they aren’t so exhausted or distoriented that they are handling the pistol or rifle in an unsafe manner, and then performs a predefined shooting exercise, typically shooting at 3-5 targets at different ranges. I’ve never used sleep deprivation for this and I don’t think that would be a safe operating condition given some of the side effects (such as hallucination, disoreintation, et cetera).
Although these conditions are not really akin to actually being in a combat situation under fire, it gives a sense of how to ignore distractions and recognize when their perception or proprioception is reduced and compensate accordingly. If you train how you expect to fight, and do so exhaustively and habitually, you will fight as you have trained, and if having Wagner blasted at you at defining volume while a fan blows sand across your path doesn’t disturb you, some asshole screaming and firing randomly probably won’t, either, at least in theory. In reality, I’ve been told that you never know how you’ll respond to a genuine combat situation (which I’ve never been in) until you are actually there, but as long as you don’t panic or freeze, the training will reduce your stress load and allow you to make the simple decisions you need to make to come out alive.
As far as tactical assault simulations, we did a number of different scenarios. We didn’t have a full box (shoothouse enclosed by full berm) so we could only do three directions of shooting, and generally only allowed two live shooters on the course at once for liability and safety reasons. The shoothouse was configurable for different scenarios including front entry, top entry, and tubular assault (operating in a linearly confined space such as an aircraft fuselage). A lot of the work was actually practicing entry and placement (which could be done with a full team since we were using ‘blue guns’), and we’d typically do three to five walkthroughs on even a simple course before doing a live fire, starting with a slow-motion walkthough and speeding up every time, then switching roles and going through the whole thing again to give everyone a chance in a live fire position.
BTW, the stuff you see on television about dynamic entries, such as repelling through windows, kicking in a door and doing a tuck and roll and come up shooting, and that kind of nonsense ranks from highly exaggerated to complete fabrication. The goal of an entry is to get the shooters in position and neutralize any threat as efficiently as possible with zero friendly casualties. A shooter that gets injured, say, by flying face first through a plate of glass, or is out of position or injured because he threw himself into a piece of furniture is worse than useless; they’ve now compromised the entire entry plan, and without a plan what should be a controlled team effort becomes a free-for-all clusterfuck. Actually entries are generally slow, almost plodding affairs punctuated by brief flashes of shooting, hopefully only by the assault team, as the entire objective is to take the targets by surprise and maintain initiative. The final raid to capture Bin Laden as protrayed in Zero Dark Thirty is how an entry plan and houseclearing should work; quiet professionalism, gaining and maintaining initiative, applying overwhelming force, and good communications between teams will put defenders at a disadvantage despite being on home turf. Running around screaming and firing full auto through walls does not.
Stranger