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Woodland Brutality 2026 After Action Report

I recently attended Woodland Brutality 2026 and it was the best shooting match of my life, in more ways than one. Every year, Brutality matches get better and better, and this most recent weekend in the West Virginia woods was no exception.

Were I a better writer, this post would be split into three smaller posts - one more detailed and technical post about each of my runs at the match, and one just waxing poetic about the wonderful community I spent the weekend with.
However, I’m not a good writer, so I’m just going to squish it all into one big wall of text. I promise to at least include some images to break up the monotony of my droning, and I’ll try to organize my thoughts at least somewhat coherently, but no promises this is particularly readable. Was it Hemingway who said to write drunk and edit sober? Well, I’m writing tired and editing not at all. You’ve been warned.

Before I get into everything else, though, I need to start with a massive thank you to Karl of InRangeTV for continuing to put on Brutality matches, Jevidar for serving as a great match director, and all of the staff who worked tirelessly all weekend to make the match a success. None of this would have been possible without all of you, so thank you.

Part One: My Super Serious High Speed Low Drag Oper8or Run

My first run at the match was in probably my favorite division, trooper. If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume you’re familiar with the Brutality match divisions, because you’re either someone in the IRTV community that got a link to this post from me, or you’re me going back to narcissistically read my own writing. On the off chance you aren’t familiar, the trooper division TLDR is:

• carry all your stuff for the match, including ammunition/tools/food/water/sustainment gear/etc all day, with no resupply allowed
• Hike a couple miles, no using vehicles
• If your stuff breaks, fix it with what you have on you or drop out of the division
• No mulligans, if your gun goes down mid-stage, figure it out or eat all the penalties

The basic idea is that it is roughly based on a combat patrol loadout that requires a day of self-sufficiency. My loadout for this year was vastly improved from last year’s, with some actual thinking going into it instead of throwing three times the required ammunition and a bunch of tools and snacks into an oversized amazon “tactical” backpack that had for years held my car’s emergency kit. I even thought to take a few pictures of my gear in its (almost) final form.

Here we see my complete kit. Despite troopers being allowed to carry PCCs, I prefer to just run a rifle and pistol, with a gun belt, chest rig, and backpack.
The rifle is a vaguely WWSD-ish build I put together 4-5 years ago - nothing special, just a 16” Faxon barrel on a KE Arms KP15 lower with a nice SLT trigger and a stack of Vortex optics (5x prism + a micro dot). The pistol is my do-it-all gun, the CZ P09-C with a Holosun EPS Carry dot and Cajun Gun Works internals. I’ll write a post at some point about my philosophy I’ve embraced over recent years about having one pistol I use for basically every match + EDC, but the short version is that this is my favorite pistol for basically everything. On my belt, I have five pistol mags, one rifle mag, my IFAK, an extra tourniquet, a dump pouch, my pistol holster, and my Ka-Bar.

My chest rig carried three rifle and two pistol magazines in external pouches, plus one more rifle and three more pistol mags in a zippered admin pouch (these would be the magazines I would grab off the clock to start a stage with, and then spend the stage pulling mags from the external pouches as necessary). It also contained a first aid kit for minor cuts/burns/scrapes, a spoon for loading rifle magazines from stripper clips, a nifty little gadget for refilling my hydration bladder via the hose so it could stay in the backpack all weekend, lots of calories from various sources, and of course some patches so I can be unique, just like everyone else. Not pictured here is my Magpul bipod, which I attached to the bottom of the chest rig via the shock cord usually used to keep a tourniquet close at hand.

My backpack contained my hydration bladder with a couple liters of water, something like 240 rounds of .223 on stripper clips, around 200 rounds of 9mm loose in some organizing pouches, a spare BCG (just because it seems all the other troopers and serious Run n’ Gun competitors carry one, though I’ve never had a bolt/bolt carrier go down in the field. idk, maybe I’m just lucky), Allen keys + torx screwdrivers, a SpeedBeez pistol mag loader (genuinely my favorite mag loader of all time), an MRE (I would later gut the MRE and only bring along the entree and dessert since I had plenty of smaller snacks to get me through the day), and various problem solving supplies (batteries, zip ties, duct tape, electrical tape, ranger bands (aka bike inner tubes), and sunscreen (lmao)).

I don’t have any good pictures of my outfit but it was just some airsoft shirt and pants, some waterproof boots, and my trusty hat hat and keffiyeh.

So, how did the trooper run go? Long story short, pretty damn well. I’m really happy with the improvements I’ve made as a shooter and competitor since last year. Highlights of the run included:

• Going 2/2 on 500 yard bonus target shots on stage 3 (didn’t go for a third because I just straight up couldn’t see the target from the third shooting position due to lighting and decided bailing was a better use of time than hunting it)
• This sick-ass baseball slide, also on stage 3 (credit to the on-and-off torrential rains making the ground muddy enough for me to do this)

• Getting six caltrop bonuses plus two spinner bonuses on stage 5 (perk of trooper division, I got to throw on my bipod and just farm caltrop bonuses for the first 45 seconds or so of the stage)
• Just generally shooting decently - turns out, working on fundamentals pays off. Drill marksmanship fundamentals and it makes shooting from awkward positions while out of breath and under time pressure feel almost manageable.

Anyway, things went well. No major gun issues, though there was a gear issue: While doffing my backpack in a hurry, I swung it around my body and one of the plastic G-hooks used to attach the strap to the pack just snapped. Admittedly, the pack was still fairly heavy what with a day’s worth of water and ammo still in there, but that was a little concerning. Ended up fixing it with some zip ties, and took the time to reinforce the other plastic hardware on the bag with zip ties as well to avoid any more issues during the day. This fix worked perfectly, and made me very happy I included said zip ties in my kit.
Embarrassingly, I ended up needing to fix a plastic buckle on the chest rig after the match as well, though in that case it’s because I accidentally slammed it in a car door while packing up.

When all was said and done, I placed 2/38 in trooper division, which put me at 10/209 overall. I’m gonna be honest, I was pretty ecstatic about this. There are some seriously good shooters at this match and in this division, and I was not expecting a podium place. I felt great all day during the match with my performance, and was over the moon when the preliminary scores were posted.

Lessons learned:

• Rain can make optics annoying to use. I want to look in to some kind of shroud to keep water off the lenses of the prism optic, and perhaps an enclosed dot instead of an open emitter. It wasn’t too much of an issue, but it got annoying on occasion.
• Plastic hardware on soft gear can break. I’m going to contact the manufacturer of the backpack and see if there’s a weight limit for the bag that I violated, but either way I will be looking into replacing the plastic G-hooks with metal.
• I can probably afford to fly a bit closer to the sun when it comes to packing ammo - I probably shot around 50-60% of the ammunition I brought with me at most. Could probably scale that back a bit for weight savings.
• My Magpul PMAGs did not like loading with a spoon from a stripper clip. Gonna be looking into some of the mag loader options to see if there’s any I wouldn’t mind carrying in my kit.
• I should probably tune my rifle up a bit. As I understand it, Faxon barrels are fairly overgassed, so they’ll run extremely reliably at the cost of additional recoil. I could probably afford to throw an adjustable gas block on and start playing around to smooth things out a bit.
• I need to do more offhand shooting while out of breath as well as more shooting from compromised positions. The stage 1 shots at 100 yards after a brief sprint took me an embarrassingly high number of rounds to make contact, and the urban prone stuff on stage 4 was more annoying than it should have been.

In summary: my trooper run was a great time, I did better than I hoped, and I have a few things in mind to work on for next year.

Part Two: My Less Serious Foray into the World of Historic Divisions

Last year at Woodland, Mark was so kind as to bring and distribute “Target Breaker’s Union local 308” patches to people shooting heavy rifles. I decided I wanted to earn one of those, and figured it was high time the first rifle I ever owned got to stretch its legs on the clock. So, I signed up for a run in Roaring 20’s - pretty much what it sounds like, guns are limited to those available before December 31, 1929. I shot this run with my Schmidt-Rubin 1896/11, my (modern reproduction) 1911 pistol by Springfield, and my Winchester 1897. Of course, in order to actually look and feel the part, I had to dress up a bit. I was going for a moonshiner thing, but then partway through the day a very kind shooter dressed up as a hound of sorts offered me a red bandanna to embrace more of a Battle of Blair Mountain look. So, I guess my canonical LARP story is that I’m a moonshiner on my way to support the striking miners with some homemade corn likker to improve their spirits, but when the Pinkertons started shooting I decided to fight alongside the good guys.

Thanks to Thomas Vinther for the awesome picture of me posing in the woods - more about him and the crew he was with later.

So, how did things go? I’d say quite well. This was the first time I’ve ever shot in a historic division, and upon reflection it’s the first time I’ve ever shot a gun older than me on the clock. I knew I would have a few issues to contend with going into this, primarily due to the difference between point of aim and point of impact with my rifle. The Swiss, in their eternal optimism, designed the 1896/11 adjustable sights to start at 300 meters and go out to 2000 meters. As a result, with PPU factory ammo, my point of impact is about 13” higher than my point of aim at 100 yards. Additionally, my front sight post is slightly off, impacting about 4” to the left at 100 yards. Adjusting the front sight post is something I’ve been meaning to look into, but I care about this gun enough that I want to do it right - I don’t want to just take a punch and mallet to the sight and yolo the adjustment. I will say, while having to aim at the sides/off the sides of some targets was a bit annoying, it was a lot of fun to take this thing out to 300 yards and just have the elevation dead on. I have looked into replacing the front sight blade with a 100 yard zero blade but have elected not to do so, at least not yet.

This was also basically the second time I’ve ever shot my Winchester 1897, since that’s a fairly new acquisition. Definitely learned a fair bit about it on the clock, and while I didn’t use it a ton, the times I did use it were extremely satisfying. Case in point:

Turns out it’s just extremely fun to make the happy shotgun noises and just obliterate a target. The shotgun’s uses to great effect were as follows:

• Stage one: Texas star (embarrassingly, since I wasn’t super familiar with this shotgun, I was shooting a bit high with the bead sight and needed to finish the Texas Star with my pistol. Lesson learned, next time it’ll be one and done with the shotgun.
• Stage two: the first three ports of the trench were greatly simplified. Walk up, insert shotgun, make shotgun noises, targets are neutralized.
• Stage three: provide moral support from back on the hill (no pistol targets on this stage)
• Stage four: clear the pistol targets from the front VTac barricade. As of Sunday mid-afternoon, I believe I was the only shooter to use a shotgun on this stage, much to the RO’s delight.
• Stage five: Shooting the eight-ish inch caltrop plate with a rifle that groups well but about fifteen inches away from the point of aim sounded unpleasant, so I just blasted it a few times with the shotgun instead. Much easier.

Other highlights from this run included:

• Finally stretching the legs on the Schmidt-Rubin out to 300 yards. I really wanna get the sights adjusted for the correct windage and then take it out to 750-ish yards (the furthest range I can reasonably get to).
• Ending the day by spinning the stage 3 rifle spinner and realizing I had completed every single stage. I had to hold low right and manage ammunition with only two kinda not great polymer stripper clips, so getting the spinner was not a given. I was mostly single loading from my bag during the match, but still managed to get through it all. Didn’t take any bonuses, but also didn’t take any penalties for skipping targets (though I did eat one penalty for missing an HVT shot).
• Not having any major mechanical issues all day. If the rifle somehow developed an issue, I’m familiar enough with it to break down the bolt in the field and clean it up. If the shotgun or my 1911 developed issues, we would have had a difficult time dealing with that.
• Getting black bagged, kidnapped, and executed as part of the pre-match lore drop. You had to be there.

Anyway, all that said, I ended up placing first of three shooters in Roaring 20’s, putting me at 52/209 overall. For my first shot at shooting old guns on the clock, I’m very happy with my performance. Definitely a few things to work on if I want to be “competitive” with historic guns (ammunition management, mostly) but as a fun little jaunt into a new side of brutality shooting this was a great time and I’m very happy with how it all went.

Part Three: What a Hell of a Community

The shooting that I did on Friday and Sunday was easily some of the most fun shooting I’ve ever done. The stage designs were great, the weather conditions built an appropriate amount of character, and being pleased with my performance certainly doesn’t hurt. That said, I think just hanging out in camp with everyone was even more fun than the shooting.

Huge shoutout to the Blasto crew for organizing Blasto’s Kitchen, an effort to help feed everyone in camp (plus staff on the long days, other shooters who came to hang out, and anyone else who happened to be visiting). Additional shoutouts to all the very cool people who showed up with coolers full of food and food prep supplies. Having not brought anything but very much enjoying cooking, I got some good enrichment out of helping prep toppings for the burger night and griddling pierogies and onions on pierogi night.

When we weren’t cooking and eating in camp, we spent plenty of time watching the night matches from the hill and listening to Gordon live his best drill instructor life. (oh yeah, I shot that one night as well. 16/23 in Infantry division, 31/44 overall. Main lessons from that one: replace the gimmicky integrally suppressed AR9 barrel with a SureFeed or something else with good feed ramps. Also, more power != more better with the IR illuminator, turns out washing out the targets is not helpful.) Sitting on the hill with a beer, a cigar, and a group of cool people to shoot the shit with while listening to the dulcet tones of a DI screaming thought-provoking philosophical questions like “why are you shooting my dirt? Don’t you like my dirt? I don’t come to your house and shoot your dirt, do I?” is a pretty incredible way to spend an evening.

We also had the joy of hosting some members of the Danish public media at the match for the weekend, and they hung around camp a bit with us. Highlights there included the times the cameras were off and we just shared coffee and beer as well as when the cameras were on and they were exposed to USGI MREs as well as the quintessentially American snack of Gushers. They were also just fun people to talk to, whether we were answering questions on camera or just hanging out and killing time. Thomas, Alberte, and Lasse, you were all lovely guests to have around, thanks for being so cool all weekend.

In short, hanging out in camp in the evenings (as well as most of the day Saturday) was a great chance to reconnect with old friends, make new ones, and just generally spend a long weekend surrounded by some of the coolest people I’ve ever met. If you were there, thank you. You people are a big part of what makes brutality matches in general but Woodland in particular my happy place.

Alright, I think that about sums it up. I could definitely go on about other camp adventures (Ben’s Coleman stove fire was almost a fun exercise in teambuilding) or more details about the weekend (seriously, that was just a ludicrous amount of rain Thursday/Friday/Saturday) but I think I’ve rambled long enough. Look, I warned you this was gonna be a largely unedited wall of text.

In short: shooting matches are fun, Brutality matches more so, and Woodland Brutality even more than that. WB26 was the most fun I’ve ever had shooting, some of the best shooting I’ve ever done, and some of the best hanging out with cool people I could ask for.