Last weekend, I finally got to cross paths with Don Edwards of Greenline Tactical. Don and I literally have hundreds of mutual friends. We all have a circle of friends. The Venn diagram of our circles of friends has more overlap than not. Yet somehow, we had never occupied the same zip code at the same time. I’m glad to have finally rectified that. The entire weekend was one of the most enjoyable classes I’ve attended as a student.

I’ll start with the class itself. Don was the lead instructor, assisted by Sam Houston. I assumed that was a stage name but forgot to ask him if that was the case. I’ll just file Sam’s name away as his stripper name until I find out otherwise. The class was 2 days long at the Ben Franklin Range in Templeton, PA. BFR has an onsite bunkhouse, but we didn't use it as it wasn't available on the website when we signed up for the class. By the time they got it online, we had already reserved hotel rooms about 20 minutes away, so we just used those. I can't fault them too much, as I know what it’s like not to be a web guy who also does web guy stuff for his business. Sometimes, the website gets updated later than it should.

Communication with Greenline leading up to the class was very good. The morning before class, the 8 of us arrived and met up with Don, Sam, and the 7 other cats in class. As we got chatting, I totally understand why all my friends are friends with Don. What a great dude. We got the class started with the standard intro, medical plan, and safety protocols, then dove right into the classroom portion. This portion was well explained. Whiteboards were used, and as a student, I like those. There were the right amount of experiences shared on the various topics to keep it very engaging. The plan was to work this day with the bulk of the classroom work, followed by glasshouse runs using cones to simulate walls, then hit the house, working in pairs.

We followed that plan and spent a long day there doing corner-fed, center-fed, and multiple rooms, working with a swim buddy. Mike from Bulletn.net was my partner and made a great wingman. During the glasshouse runs, Don and Sam coached everybody, and with the entire class on hand, everybody got to learn from the coaching, not just the ones running the room. When we went into the house, Don explained that he understood that burning a target down with heart shots was viable; he wanted us to make hits to the brain. I had little heart emojis floating out of me since here at Tremis Dynamics, we teach that the brain is the primary aiming point, and if circumstances reduce a shooter's certainty of making that hit, to move to the heart as a secondary aiming point.

Something that I really liked was Sam made a chart to track our individual performance. I think he called it the Board of Shame, but I can't guarantee that. Our mistakes were tracked on that chart. I’m totally going to use that when we run shoothouse study groups. After each run with UTMs in the house, we had a thorough debrief with Don and Sam. Sam tracked our performance on that chart. It was a reminder of where work was needed.


On Day 2, there were the normal refresher Safety and Med briefs. We had a short classroom section on the #3 and #4 man, and we went into more glasshouse runs. More coaching for all. Then we hit some rooms as a fire team. We started on multiple rooms, eventually working up to using a large portion of the house that the students had yet to see. This wasn’t a dark house, but the lighting was variable enough to need to use white lights. A very thorough debrief followed each run. Eventually, we culminated with the final exercise that had an extra wrinkle thrown in, which I’m not sure is a secret, but I hadn't heard about this wrinkle ahead of time, so I’ll omit it here. We had a large debrief at the end, followed by the obligatory class photo and certificates.

The conversations during breaks and lunch, before and after class, were outstanding as well. It is difficult to quantify the value of those, but it’s certainly a value-added perk that I very much appreciate. Overall, this is one of the most enjoyable classes I’ve ever attended as a student. It rates right up there with my first Fighting Pistol in 2005 or TAPS back in 2017.

Personal shit:

I was well below being physically at 100% for this class. A 6mm Impacted Kidney stone, a stent, and meds that were messing with my GI system did not give me a good head start going into this class. I’m writing this the day after class, and tomorrow, I am scheduled for surgery to tackle this stubborn stone. I’m adding this to illustrate that this class rates so high, even with all of the physical discomfort I was dealing with.

I ran an LMT lower with a dedicated upper for UTM/Mantis. Those ran well, the only hiccup was a loose battery door on my Trijicon MRO, leading to no dot during one run. Other gear-wise, was clear Oakleys and my normal attire, shorts, T-shirt, Merrells, etc.

Team Shit:

Quick Backstory. I fell in love with martial training at my first civilian class back in 0-something. Immediately, my goal was to join a group of guys who train and practice regularly. That group didn't appear to exist locally. But it was fine, I’d find one. So I went to more and more classes. I found people, but they weren't a group, and they only saw each other at the next class, not at all in between. When I started teaching, the number one goal was to more easily find the people for that group. I went to work at Tactical Response, thinking that a bigger audience would make it easier to find that group. And none of that worked. When I came back to PA I figured I’d have to make that group. I got it started while I was working for another company, but when I finally started working solely for myself, that group finally started to really come together.

It’s been 4 years since I have had a boss other than myself, and my personal primary goal was to build this group of dudes who train together. That might be a terrible reason to run a business, but it has worked rather well.


This weekend, more than half of this class were “Garry’s People.” I think this was one of the true highlights for me. This group we have compiled all signed up, paid for, and traveled to this class as a pre-built team. It wasn't organized to be this way. It started as a group chat on Signal, showing that the class was happening. The group just individually jumped on board with no prodding. We had 2 fire teams that ran together and gelled well. We stayed at the same spot and had dinner together in the evenings and then hung out until we split to go to our particular rooms to rack out. We’ve been running this training group for a few years privately, and I felt as if we unlocked an achievement by taking that and going to a new class/instructor and being good teammates there as well. It might not be something that will go in everybody's AAR, but I want to make sure that Mike, Becker from Ammo Supply Warehouse, Shinday from 5 Rivers Armament, Tony from Kentucky Windage, Josh, Scott, and John know how thankful I am for them being awesome.

TL:DR - Awesome class, go take it.