What it's like to train with the FBI

The visor on my face guard and my glasses are nearly fogged over. The weight of the modified Glock handgun on my hip feels like 500 pounds and my chest is constricted from wearing a bullet-proof vest.

I pray that the pretend bad guy named "Paul" can't hear the quiver in my voice as I try to arrest him, or that he doesn't see the beads of sweat on my forehead.

My pulse quickens and my vision narrows. So much so that I don't see the gun on the tool chest in front of me.

I'm in FBI training. Sounds fun, right? Well, it's not. In fact, it was one of the most stressful things I've ever encountered.

The experience was part of the agency's Citizens Academy, an eight-week training course that gives people in the community a chance to get behind the scenes of the federal government's main law enforcement arm. I was invited to participate in the exercise in April and we all graduated in June.

What I went through gave me more appreciation – if not empathy – for what anyone who carries a gun for a living needs to process in real time.

As the nation continues the heated conversation about the proper reaction of armed law enforcement officials in crisis situations, I gained an entirely new perspective on the debate following my intense training.

Which is not to say that law enforcement does no wrong. They can and do. And the issue of white cops shooting unarmed black men and the racial disparity between whites and blacks in law enforcement agencies such as the Cincinnati Police Department, and even the FBI, remain a major concern.

Even beyond that, as long as law enforcement carries guns in this country, people will get shot, rightly or wrongly. Just last month, Cincinnati police shot a man who pointed a rifle at them, while less than two weeks later, another Cincinnati officer trained in not only firearms but martial arts died in a gunfight with a suspect, who also was killed.

So, in some small way, I got to see what it was like to be them, with a gun on my hip, facing life or death situations, with seconds or less to make decisions.

Tunnel vision: It's a real thing

Here's the setup.

I'm outside the FBI garage at the agency's Cincinnati office just off Montgomery Road in Kenwood. My partner Steve Bleh, a local advertising/PR executive, and I are outfitted with bullet-proof vests with "FBI" blazoned across the front.

Helmets with face guards, much like those who play paintball use, obscure our peripheral vision.

We're armed with Glock handguns modified to shoot paintball bullets, or Simunition, and have been given official FBI quick-draw hip holsters.

We're up against members of the local FBI SWAT team trained to act like real bad guys. We get no training or briefing. The only thing we're told beforehand are the FBI's rules of engagement; Agents can shoot if they have "reasonable belief" that they, or anyone else, is in "imminent danger of death." No warning shots necessary. And shoot until the suspect is down.

It's the second of two training scenarios, and I'm already out of breath from the first. The Cincinnati office's SWAT team leader and firearms instructor, David Britton, tells us that we're to serve an arrest warrant on the garage owner, "Paul," who is wanted on bank fraud charges. The trainer says that everyone likes Paul and that he is well known in the community, only we don't know what he looks like.

Great. Just great.

My partner Steve and I decide beforehand that I will find "Paul" and get him off to the side and he would deal with the other two.

In we go.

Within 15 seconds, I am face to face with "Paul" as Steve is trying to get the other two on the ground. "Paul" asks to see my ID and asks me what this is all about.

"Move over there, away from the van, and we can talk!" I say in my best impression of an authoritative cop – though I probably sound more like an irritated father, trying to get his kids to behave.

Paul continues to stall – until he picks up the gun sitting right in front of me on that tool chest and fires.

I draw and squeeze off two rounds before my gun jams. Again.

I miss, even though he is less than 5 feet away. This is incredibly lifelike. (Eighty percent of all law enforcement gunfights last between three to five seconds and take place from between 3-5 feet away and involve three to five rounds fired.)

Meanwhile, "Paul's" bullet has hit me right below my left lung, even though I don't feel a thing, thanks to the vest. (Even if I had been wearing a vest in real life, a .40-caliber round would have knocked me to the floor or broken a rib at that range.)

My partner Steve has better luck, shooting the man who drew a gun on him and getting the other one on the ground. But he faces a very angry and panicked "Paul" on his backside before Britton stops the exercise.

Some FBI agent I would make.

Is there a lesson here? Sure. Tunnel vision is real. My heart raced so hard that my blood pressure spiked. And with my eyes focused so much on "Paul," I never registered the gun as I could feel and see the narrowing of my line of sight.

It sure wasn't like any video game I've ever played, and I used to be pretty good at Halo. Growing up, I always wanted to be James Bond or Sonny Crockett from "Miami Vice." So much for that.

I feel like a failure. As a journalist, I am a paid observer, yet I didn't notice a deadly weapon just a foot in front of my face.

"I can't believe you didn't see it," says "Paul," now a good-guy FBI agent. "You could have reached out and grabbed it."

'We were too nice!' 'Go in with guns drawn.'

And it wasn't a real gun.

If all of this had been real, the stress would have been even higher. Anyone carrying a gun professionally is rigorously trained to deal with every situation, all its possibilities, every plausible scenario, all the stress, all the brain chemicals, all the things seen and not seen, all the confusion. Then make a decision in milliseconds.

And this exercise presents less than 1 percent of the danger real cops and agents face. Part of me felt exhilarated from the adrenaline afterward, but my results were sobering as were those of my classmates.

One person shot their partner in the butt. In fact, there were only two out of a class of nearly 30 who actually arrested "Paul" and/or got him away from the gun on the tool chest. Both were former military.

During discussions with my classmates and then during debriefing with the FBI SWAT members, we came to realize two things:

1) "We were too nice," as one colleague put it. We were trying to defuse a situation that needed someone to control it. In one session, we were told to investigate possible trespassers in the FBI garage. One of the agents said that if a supervisor told him there were suspected trespassers on FBI property, they would "go in with guns drawn," which no one even considered in the training.

2) All kinds of things can be weapons. An agent explained that if he had an arrest warrant, he would have drawn his gun to get "Paul" to lay down immediately once they identified him. That would have been justified as they were arresting him, as well as to keep him away from the tool chest. Gun or no gun, there were probably some tools in that chest that could have been used against us.

In fact, one of the "bad guys" tried to wrestle the gun away from former Bengals tight end and retired sportscaster Bob Trumpy in a training session after mine.

"He failed," Trumpy later said proudly (although the agent also told his boss he could have broken Trumpy's finger but wisely refrained).

Other classmates reported shaking and not being able to pull the trigger. Some shot the guy with a cell phone, or in the second exercise, someone waved around a grease gun.

What had we succeeded at? We succeeded by failing.

And we won by learning an important lesson: it's more important to be a jerk to control a potentially explosive situation than being nice and getting people shot.

More than that, we now know what anyone with a badge faces every day on the street.

We didn't even face other factors that officers face every day such as the confusion of a domestic dispute. Or having to make a decision after a long and tiring foot chase.

And race didn't play a part in my exercises, as we were all wearing masks. How does an officer's experience with a minority community or preconceptions/prejudice play into all that?

That's hard. Harder than hard.

So now any time I need to report on or even read about an officer-involved shooting, I will remember this experience and ask myself what I would have done.

And ask: What was the cop thinking? Did he have a chance to think or defuse the situation? What experiences and training led her to fire?

Conversely, what was the person who got shot doing and thinking? What were his chances of walking away unhurt? Did she provoke the situation, which is what happened in my 15 minutes in the FBI garage (and increasingly is occurring on the streets)?

Tough questions, yes. But after this experience, necessary ones.

If you want to learn more about the Citizen's Academy, check out the FBI website.