Does the soldier put that on their dominant eye of not? Do they save their ‘Good Eye’ for actual aiming?
Generally, a monocular NVD will go over the dominant eye, in order to use the night vision feature through their weapon’s sights. However, there are a small number of folks who don’t shoot from the side their dominant eye is on; in that case they’d most likely put the NVD over the “shooting” eye rather than the dominant eye.
You put the NVGs over your weak (non-shooting) eye and you use the IR laser on your PEQ-16 to aim. You don’t aim down the sights with PVS-14s over your face. It’s impossible. If you wish to aim using a sight, you place the PVS-24A optic behind your RCO.
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Wouldn’t the PEQ-16 show up broad as daylight to the enemy if they also have NVGs?
Very much possible to aim down the sights with a PVS-14. Awkward, inefficient, inaccurate? Yes to all. But not impossible.
I didn’t have a PEQ, RCO, or any other weapon-mounted device on my M-16A2 when I got my brief fam time with the PVS-14, which explains my answer. Things have changed a lot since 2002/2003… and I should have caveated my initial response as such.
Maybe not broad as daylight, but definitely visible. Along with all the other IR stuff in use in the relatively permissive environments we are currently involved in.
At the risk of a hijack, what’s a dominant eye?
FTR, I have only one anyway, and I wonder which it is, although that makes no sense because it certainly dominates now. Reigns, one might say.
I’m not sure how efficient aiming down the sights would be with NVGs. Did you have iron sights? How could you line up a decent shot? PVS-14s need to be manually adjusted. Either you can see the enemy, but your sights would be blurry, or vice versa.
And you’d also have to adjust the NVGs also if you were somehow able to look down an RCO. Not the mention the scope shadow would be absolutely horrendous.
If you zero your PEQ at 100 meters you can easily hit targets as far as 300 meters without having to compensate.
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Yes, thats why we only turn on the laser when we’re engaged with the enemy. And if we were in country, you’d place the selected to the “High” function. You’d probably blind them if they looked at you anyway.
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See Ocular dominance - Wikipedia
Just like most people have a preferred hand to manipulate stuff, most people have one eye they mainly see with and the other is more of a helper. It’s subconscious for almost all routine tasks and so many people aren’t even aware they have any sided dominance at all. Also most folks are more like 60/40 than 90/10. Wheras hand dominance is typically stronger and hence more obvious.
The nature of shooting, what with aligning an eye, a rear sight, a front sight, and a target tends to make it real obvious which of those eyes does a better job of it. So eye dominance is a common topic in shooting circles.
IIRC most people have eye dominance on the same side as hand dominance. Folks with split dominance are rarer. In either case when shooting an ambidextrous gun all is well.
But folks with left eye dominance who have to shoot a right-handed-only weapon have an additional minor handicap to overcome.
Irons only on the M-16A2. Sight alignment/sight picture was challenging, but not impossible; a lot like trying to fire with the old M17 gas mask on. First (and only) time I used a PVS-14.
This was just a quick fam fire before we were to deploy for the OIF kickoff. The bright idea fairy came down and declared that aircrew would get a fam fire with NVGs and rifles, in case we went down in the field in Iraq and had to defend ourselves at night. The range folks wouldn’t allow us to shoot with our flight helmets and ANVIS-6 NVGs (which is what we would’ve been using had the excrement actually hit the oscillating air movement device in Iraq…), so the squadron ended up borrowing a couple kevlars with mounts and PVSs for the fam fire. We had zero instruction or help from the range folks, and it didn’t instill the confidence it was intended to.
If using a helmet-mounted monocular night vision device, it should be in front of the non-aiming eye. This is another of the dozens of reasons for Soldiers to be trained to shoot with both eyes open. The interesting thing about using a collimating sight, is that it doesn’t matter if the aiming eye can see the target. One eye will see the sight, the other eye will see the target. Your brain will put those two images together, and you will hit your mark.