Ayoob: Were We Wrong About the “Tactical Turtle”?

By Massad Ayoob

A misunderstood shooting technique turns out to have a purpose for both competition and self-defense.

Many a modern shooter in a handgun class has been told, “Don’t lean your darn head forward when you’re shooting! Stand erect in a neutral posture and keep your head up! What do you think you are, a Tactical Turtle?”

“Tactical Turtle” became a derogatory term for the shooter whose head was forward of centerline of erect posture. Long before the old man writing this was born, a tenet of marksmanship with the handgun was “Don’t bring your head down to the sights, bring the sights up to your eyes!” It was as if it had been written on the stone tablets when Moses came down from Firearms Instructor Mountain.

As a young “combat shooting” competitor in the 1970s and one of three people (along with Frank Behlert and the late Tom Campbell) to have shot in all of the first 10 Bianchi Cups, people would show me pictures of me shooting and comment that the faster the stage, the more forward my head was. My answer then was “Yeah, I know, I’m supposed to keep my head straight up. Dammit, I guess I’m an old dog who can’t learn new tricks. Too late for me; save yourself.”

What turned me around on that was the week in the early 1980s when Mike Plaxco took my LFI-I class when I was lead instructor for Lethal Force Institute. That was the year Mike had become the first — and to my recollection, still the only — man to win the IPSC National Championships, the prize-rich Second Chance bowling pin match (now known as The Pin Shoot) and the World Speed Shooting Championships at the Steel Challenge, all the same year.

Now, let me be the first to tell you, there was not a darn thing I could teach J. Michael Plaxco about how to shoot a pistol. The reason he came was that he was starting to carry on his own time and he was looking for the legal and tactical side. But the LFI-I class then, like my MAG-40 class now (massadayoobgroup.com), also included 500 rounds of defensive pistol live-fire.

There was no way I was going to have a world champion in my class and not have him do a guest lecture and a shooting demonstration. You have to understand, Mike Plaxco was the guy to beat in the early ’80s, the man who was only unseated from that title by Rob Leatham, who deservedly was nicknamed “TGO,” The Great One, by his peers. Plaxco was awesome to watch in action. His .45 auto was like a 9mm submachine gun, and delivered all hits.

And, I couldn’t help but notice, his head was forward and down as he shot.

One does not gig another instructor, especially in front of a class, and most definitely one does not gig a world champion doing a free lecture and demo to one’s own class. But when that class day was over and we were having a beer together before dinner, I said in private “Mike, I see you have the same shooting problem I’ve got.”

The words stopped Mike’s glass of beer halfway to his lips. He answered, “Problem? I’ve got a problem, Massad?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “You know, with the head forward and down, and we’re supposed to keep the head up?”

“Hell, Massad,” Mike answered. “That comes from old-fashioned bullseye shooting, where you’re trying to hit a tiny circle 50 yards away and you’ve got lots of time and you couldn’t even see the bullet holes without a telescope. You do that in close, especially with reaction targets, and you’re gonna start looking over the gun and you’re gonna miss high.”

I could have slapped my own face, because I realized he was right.

The Too-High-Hit Problem

It won’t show up so much when you’re shooting at paper or cardboard. Where you’ll really see it is on reaction targets — steel plates, bowling pins or, worst-case scenario, some living thing you desperately need to stop in its tracks with defensive gunfire. In those moments your conscious mind might be thinking “watch the front sight,” but your subconscious is screaming “Front sight, hell! We gotta see if that thing we’re shooting at goes down!” This causes the head to subconsciously lift.

A basic truth of physiology and martial arts: Where the head goes, the body follows! And as the head lifts so, to a small degree, do the hands. What now kicks in is Geometry 101 applied to the handgun: as the muzzle lifts with the hands, the shot goes disproportionately high and over the spot you wanted to hit.

With the head forward and down, the shooter would have to consciously, deliberately, unlock the neck muscles to look over the sights. The problem of high misses? SOLVED!

A Problem of Nomenclature

From that day in the early ’80s onward, I taught the Plaxco Technique. Problems arose with the name. New shooters didn’t know who Mike Plaxco was. Then Mike retired from the pro shooting tour due in large part to microfractures in his hands and wrists from a training regimen of 100,000 rounds a year of major caliber pistol bullets.

He focused on gunsmithing (my Plaxco Custom Compensator Springfield Armory 1911A1 is still my favorite comp gun for pin shooting) and as a sales rep for a gun manufacturer, on whose factory team he was a valued member for many years. He passed away all too soon.

I changed things up. Just about everybody remembers the image of Snoopy the beagle in the “Peanuts” comic strip, pretending to be a vulture with his head forward and down. I started calling it the “Vulture technique,” and that was easier for students to remember.

“Tactical Turtle”? The critics got the wrong critter. Telling the student “Vulture Down” brings their body posture where Nature wants it for fighting.

Head, Body, and Fight or Flight Response

“Fight or flight” was named more than a century ago by Dr. Walter Cannon at Harvard Medical School. He explained that a human, a primate or a bear on its hind legs would, when threatened, bring its head forward and down, the shoulders rising instinctively to protect the head, and the body weight coming forward. This is the true natural fighting posture. It keys in perfectly with what the human body is programmed to do when threatened, and works great with a gun in hand, one-handed or two.

With iron sights, the only people who’ll have a problem will be those with multi-focal eyeglasses. The reading plane, which is what you need for iron front sights, is traditionally put in the bottom of the lens; with such bifocals, you have to tilt the head back to focus on the front sight. Simply tell the optician you want that close plane at the top of the lens. When you “vulture down” in that natural fight or flight posture, the front sight will come into focus. You can order those shooting glasses from SSP in Washington state, by the way.

Do you prefer the currently popular red dot sight? Well, have you ever noticed that the shooter new to carry optics has trouble “finding the dot”? If you have, then you’ve already figured out that when they finally find that dot, it usually wasn’t hiding to the side or down below, was it? No, it was hiding at 12 o’clock high – and the vulture technique will bring the new carry optics shooter right to that critical aiming dot.

Bottom Line

Sometimes, conventional wisdom (such as “always keep the head straight up”) doesn’t work all the time, for everyone. Don’t be afraid to try something new or different, so long as it’s safe. The object isn’t necessarily to do what your instructor or advisor does. The object is for you to do the best you can do with your particular handgun.

Give the vulture technique a try. I don’t call it that to disparage the man who taught me to do it; the late J. Michael Plaxco was one of the finest gentlemen in the history of our sport. I call it that so students can get a visual image of where their head should be to perform this technique.

This article is respectfully dedicated to the memory of a good friend, a great shooter, and an exemplar of handgun sportsmanship and skill, Mike Plaxco.

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