Eric was born in Bossier City, Louisiana. His dad was active-duty Air Force, so home ended up being a small town called Pittston in northeast Pennsylvania, tucked between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre.
His first real memory with a gun is a Red Ryder and an old pump pellet gun his grandfather kept around. That same grandfather is the one who put a Ruger 10/22 in his hands and had him shooting golf balls off the fence in the backyard.
He'll tell you straight that he wasn't a shooter or a hunter growing up. He tagged along with his dad and his grandfather, but he didn't really hunt as a kid. That came later, after the Marine Corps, because for two decades he was always training, always deployed, or always at another school.
The first long gun that ever felt like his came in the Scout Sniper Platoon.
That platoon is where it clicked. At 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, the Surveillance and Target Acquisition platoon was his first real exposure to precision work, and he gravitated straight to it. He earned his Scout Sniper qualification there and came up to Chief Scout, the platoon's senior sniper.
He loved the science behind it. He wanted to know more, and then he wanted to know everything. He has been chasing that ever since.
Eric enlisted in the Marine Corps on October 7, 2002. He started at 1st Battalion, 6th Marines and spent his career in the reconnaissance community, with 1st Reconnaissance Battalion and 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion. Later he served as a First Sergeant with Marine Special Operations Command, 1st Battalion, Bravo Company, a leadership billet rather than an operator slot.
The deployments stacked up fast. Afghanistan in 2004. Iraq in 2005, then Ramadi through 2006 and 2007. A training-advisor tour to the United Arab Emirates in 2011. Back to the Middle East in 2014 and 2015. Then almost seven years working out of Okinawa, Japan, with rotations through the Philippines, Cambodia, South Korea, Guam, and the Marianas. His last combat tour was Somalia.
Somewhere in there he became a teacher. At 3rd EOTG in Okinawa he was the course chief for the Close Quarters Tactics course and an instructor for the Urban Sniper, Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure, and Urban Reconnaissance and Surveillance courses. The job was to take Marines and make them genuinely capable, not just push them through a checklist.
The award he is most proud of is the Gung-Ho Award, which he earned at the Mountain Sniper course. It goes to the Marine the rest of the class would most want next to them in combat. Coming from the guys he trained alongside, that one is pretty special to him.
Combat Mindset
The class Eric still talks about teaching is combat mindset, the psychology of holding it together when everything is stacked against you.
His take is blunt. You don't know what kind of man you'll be until you come out the other side of something hard. He has watched the best guys in the room fall apart, and he has watched the ones nobody expected rise to the occasion.
You never wish for conflict. You train to the point where it becomes muscle memory, and that becomes your new baseline. Every time you train, you push that baseline higher. Because when you hit real adversity, you don't rise to the moment. You fall back to your baseline.
What He Runs
That same standard carries over to his gear. Eric doesn't chase trends. He runs what has earned its place, and he can tell you exactly why every piece is on the rifle.
The rifle he reaches for is a custom Remington short action he has run for almost twenty years. Heavy Schneider bull barrel, a 20 MOA rail, and an Arken SH-4J Gen 3 on top, a 6-24x50 first focal plane with a MIL reticle.
He is honest about the glass. It is not boutique money, but it is crystal clear and it holds up. He built the whole rifle to do work in a match, on a deployment, or on a hunt.
For practical work he runs a custom .223/5.56 AR, milled upper and lower, with either a red dot or a Vortex Strike Eagle 1-8 when he wants the magnification. His sidearm these days is a Daniel Defense H9, which he thinks is a phenomenal pistol.
Eric shoots PRS and is working his way toward NRL Hunter, which fits his background better. Glassing a target in woodland or mountains, ranging it, building the solution, and making the shot is exactly the problem he spent a career solving. Speed matters, but the first-round hit is the whole game.
Hunting is the part of all this he came to late and fell hard for.
He is serious about the ballistics behind it, matching the right caliber to the animal, whether that is whitetail, antelope, elk, moose, or bear. Last season he drew a veterans hunt and brought home his first antelope, and that was it. He was hooked.
He would rather be out in the mountains or the timber than just about anywhere, and he says it plainly: that is where he finds some peace.
Eric retired from the Marine Corps in February 2025, but he never really stepped away from teaching. At 3rd EOTG in Okinawa he trained Marines in close-quarters tactics and precision long-range work, and now, settled in Sneads Ferry, he's putting that same focus into private and civilian courses.
The reason is simple. He remembers being the young guy with no idea how any of this worked, getting stonewalled instead of taught, and he would rather be the instructor who gives it to you straight.
How He Teaches
Eric keeps the method simple. Start with the fundamentals that actually matter: position, bone support, muscle relaxation, natural point of aim, and a clean trigger press.
Once you can repeat the basics on demand, he layers in external ballistics, reading conditions, and the realities of what your cartridge is really doing downrange. He works you from positions you'll actually use, like barricades, alternates, and field setups, not just a clean bench.
And he builds self-spotting and honest feedback into all of it, so you can call your own misses and keep getting better after the class is over.
When you walk out of my class, I want you to employ your rifle confidently, on your own, and make first-round impacts. Speed is first, but accuracy is final.
Train with Eric
Eric teaches for confident first-round impacts, but the larger goal is independence. He wants students to leave able to read the conditions, call the miss, and make the next decision on their own.