My guest today is Casey Glass. Casey is the founder of Warfighter Health and Performance and for the past 11 years has been a Special Operations Strength Coach for US SOF units. Casey’s Grew up on a ranch in Texas. In college, she played soccer at Texas Christian University and interned with the strength and conditioning staff her senior year. While pursuing her master’s in health and Fitness at Purdue University she became their Graduate Assistant Strength Coach. She then went on to work for the University of Arkansas for 4.5 years starting as a paid intern and leaving as the Associate Director of Olympic Sports Strength and Conditioning. Eleven years ago she accepted a position that would change her life working in the Human Performance Program for a US Special Operations unit working to improve our warfighters’ operational performance and resilience. Last year she founded Warfighter Health and Performance an organization designed to bring the experience and skills our SOF units are receiving to law enforcement special operations units.

Book Recommendation:

Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky - ISBN-13: ‎978-0805073690

Building the Elite by Craig Weller & Jonathan Pope - ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0578918099

Contact Info:

https://www.warfighterhp.com

https://www.linktr.ee/warfighterhp

On June 28, 2022, the Greater Victoria Emergency Response Team (aka GVERT) was working as a quick response team for narcotics surveillance when a call went out of an active bank robbery in progress. Two suspects, covered almost completely in body armor and heavily armed with SKS rifles were robbing the Bank of Montreal branch in nearby Saanich BC. The suspects had herded all of the bank patrons and employees into the back of the bank and then proceeded to wait more than 12 minutes in the entrance vestibule of the bank hoping to ambush and kill the responding officers. In accordance with their policy of remaining covert until suspects left the bank to avoid creating a hostage situation, responding officers from Saanich, Central Saanich and nearby Victoria PD descended on the area and inserted into covert locations around the bank.

The GVERT team left the surveillance and headed immediately to the bank. As they arrived on scene and gained situational awareness, the two male subjects, covered head to toe in armor and armed with SKS 7.62 x 39 rifles with high-capacity magazines, exited the bank. The team raced into the parking lot in their surveillance van, deployed a flashbang, and began to exit to effect arrest. As they did the suspect nearest the van calmly turned and opened fire on the van. In just a few seconds, 6 of the 7 operators in the van were shot, some multiple times. All of them were injured and at least one of them was at immediate risk of death.

The remaining team members and patrol officers returned fire eventually killing the suspects. What transpired over the next few minutes can only be described as a heroic performance by team members and army of patrol officers and other first responders who quickly transitioned from taking the suspects into custody, to searching for a possible third shooter, clearing the bank, freeing the hostages, dealing with numerous IEDs and most importantly providing care and transport for their injured teammates.

This is the first of a two part series that will look at this event through the several different perspectives. This episode will be unlike any previous episode of the debrief because of the sheer number of people we were able to interview. The agencies, patrol officers and teams involved in this incident gave us access to more than a dozen people who responded to the event. As a result, we will be seeing incident from the perspectives of the team commander, team leaders, detached sniper element, assaulters, medics, and even the patrol supervisor for the day. It is our hope that doing so will allow us to understand not only what happened, but how their training allowed them to succeed in an almost unwinnable situation and how their lessons learned from the event informed future training and tactics. In this first part we will look at the timeline of the event itself, in part two we will sit down on video with three of the team members to look back at the events and formally discuss lessons learned.

In keeping with the standard policy of the debrief we will not mention the suspects’ names or objectives in the hopes that they will be lost to the sands of time. We will however mention the names of responding officers as they are heroes and need to be remembered as such.

One additional note, this episode has a corresponding decision-making exercise created by the California Association of Tactical Officers. Please be sure to run that exercise with friends or your team.