Jeff Vrabel
Photography by Bob Jones and Jabberpics

Gary Glemboski has been shooting for 50 years and practicing martial arts for 46, long enough to become a seventh-degree black belt. He’s received a Medal of Valor from his police department for climbing a Savannah TV tower during a nighttime thunderstorm to pull down a potential jumper, and he’s been awarded a Silver Star for an operation in which he and his fellow officers were shot at about 80 times.

He knows what he’s doing. And he wants to teach it to others, often by showing them how they don’t.

As an instructor, he says, his job isn’t to make someone a stronger shooter. “My job is to make you fail. To push you to the point where you can no longer operate. We want you to fail, your guns to fail, everything you bring with you to break, because that’s when you start learning. From a self-defense standpoint, hitting a target consistently and at a speed that’s combat-effective is what you need to be able to do.”

Glemboski’s Global Tactical Training Group (GTAC) — he’s the founder and director — has been instructing Savannah residents in self-defense, shooting and the martial arts for five years. He’s a tall guy who speaks directly and very fast, and it’s not easy to believe him when he says he’s 59 years old, even when he starts talking about his hip replacements. He’s also an expert in the way that you can tell he knows things, is planning things, is a few steps ahead of you tactically, at all times. And he’s an avid reader — as well as writer of a few articles (including one for the FBI Bulletin), and a book he’s working on called The Tao of the Gun. He’s also a cook and an almost-piano player. In learning each, he followed a simple plan: Basics first.

Read more in the October/November issue of South!