I remember watching a portion of that course or at least one similar to it. For my last active duty ship in the late 80s, I was assigned to an AO out of Norfolk. As Navigator/First Lieutenant/Admin Officer (yes, one of those stupid "minimum manning concept" ships where Department Heads and nearly everyone else wore multiple hats). My training consisted of spending 2 days at Little Creek qualifying on 1911s, M14s and Shotguns and one day "observing" what real self defense teams did.
Since the 3rd Division (Gunnery Division) was under me, and as Navigator/Admin Officer, I had the least important GQ billet (OOD underway), and the Co was always on the bridge for GQ and the XO was in CIC one deck below, it was determined that I should be in charge of our "Ship's Self Defense Force" for our upcoming deployment. The ship had never had a "real" self defense force prior to the new XO and I arriving aboard the same day. I guess in truth, we didn't have one after I got there either.
To call our 3rd Division a real "Gunnery Division" was in a way, a joke. We had 4 50 cal machine guns that could be mounted on 4 swivels on the gunwales at the "corners". We also had 2 M60s, 8 1911s, 6 Remington Shotguns and 6 M14s. That's right - even though the military, including the Navy, had shifted to 92Ms and M16s, my poor little oiler still had 45s and M14s. Oh, yeah, we had 4 "line throwing guns", M14s fitted with the M87 adapter. I guess we could have shot the rubber line spools at people.
We only had 3 GMs. Other than our GM1, no one on our team was ever able to go the training you taught. Part of that was we had no one to spare to go to the classes. Our Postal Clerk, a PC3, also stood watched as our BTOW down in the main spaces. I had a PN3 who was a qualified line throwing gun shooter - we didn't have enough GMs to man 2 stations on each side of the ship during major unrep evolutions.
The Little Creek class didn't cover M60s, so I had to go over to one of the LPDs in port and get trained on it by the E6 (Staff SGT) Marine assigned as MC Liaison. I fired it 1x while underway in the 19 months I was on the ship/team. Our GM1 and I were assigned to handle the M60s as we were the only 2 people the CO/XO would trust them with.
The GM1 and I built our team around a questionnaire I developed and a personal interview with each "candidate". The questionnaire asked the candidate to list all weapons they had ever fired, when thay had fired them and how many times they had done so. It was shocking to this Texas farm boy to find out that 90% of the crew and 70% of the officers had never fired a weapon except for "famfire" at boot camp or for annual "famfire" trainng to be an inport POOW.
When ever we "trained" for defense scenarios, the weapons were issued ONLY with EMPTY magazines. Real bullets never left the armory. The GM1 and I didn't trust our people to give them real bullets, even a singlton like Barney Fife carried.
I routinely reported to the CO and XO that if we were ever attacked, we were all gonna die.
