Physics and Fear

Physically, personal combat can be pretty simple. If I can be more efficient than you- get power to the right place faster than you can- I will prevail. That becomes a very complex simplicity very quickly.

If I am better at generating and delivering power, I have the advantage. If you know how to disrupt balance and can do it at the right time, you can neutralize my advantage in power. If I can keep the encounter at a range where your tools are ineffective, I have the advantage. If you can control how I perceive time and opportunity, the advantage is yours. There's a lot there, but the actual physics of it is pretty clean. Simple.

That's the baseball bat problem. The problem of someone swinging a bat at your head isn't that complicated. The closer you can contact to his shoulders (hips, technically...) the less force you need to absorb or dissipate. The bat can only move along one plane and each plane has specific dead zones. The momentum of the weapon in a committed attack gives you certain gifts and the constrained momentum of an uncommitted attack limits the damage you will take. It's not hard, physically.

But mentally and socially, knowing what to do is a far cry from doing it. In the last post, there were some good comments, especially from the BTDT. Uncomfortable... pressure to succeed... concerned... PISSED... cold and very, very focused... Some speculation that it is probably the same chemical, but interpreted differently. I would go so far as to say the hormone is properly used instead of taking over. LawDog says something to the effect that the hindbrain has the authority to take you over.

A very, very primitive part of your brain has the power and the inclination to shut down the sophisticated parts of your brain, including your martial arts skill, and revert to an animal or child, a screaming monkey or passive victim hoping mommy can save you.

So we get past that. All of the BTDT regular commenters have done it. The question is , "How?"

Anonymous speculates that adrenaline junkies get the same thing, so it might be a training issue. That sounds wrong. The trouble with chemical reactions is how to tell if we have learned to deal with it or we have desensitized to it. That's a profound issue, because if it is a purely desensitizing process, there truly is no substitute for experience and training in complex skills will not help you at all until a certain threshold number of encounters. If it is a training issue, it can be taught...

Evidence- Mark brings up that in my one operation where I was assigned as shooter, I got a lot of the adrenaline effects that didn't occur anymore in hand-to-hand stuff. Tunnel vision (which actually seems to help with accurate shooting); time dilation; extraneous thoughts and new after-effects. All true. But I broke through it faster and was operational almost immediately. So it appears (aware that a sample of one isn't much for statistical purposes) that breaking the freeze can be learned or modeled as a skill. That's good to know, and might give us the crack we need to teach it.

It's also clear that BTDT people don't feel the fear the same way. Or so it seems. There may be no difference between "Oh my god I'm gonna die!!" and "This isn't going to end well." The only difference may be the words. You can't measure what is in someone else's head.

It may be as simple as having done it a hundred times without anything too bad happening. Maybe it is simply unknown territory for some and less so for others. It may be the difference between singing in public for the first time and a professional performer.

Or it could be a difference in wiring. I was raised in rural eastern Oregon. Some of those ranchers and loggers were tough. But when it got down to it, did they handle pain better (using will to ignore it) or did they feel it less (just insensitive nerves)? How would you tell?

So- deal with fear better? Or feel it less?

I'll think more on this. This emotional aspect is what I fear is missing from most training- or worse, students are simply told that it won't happen to people trained in X ("because we meditate" or "Because we practice self-discipline" or "because mushin will take over," or....)

And this is just one emotion- fear. And just one way- fear inside yourself. A panicked animal is a different animal to fight than a rational person, even if the animal is human. Incoming rage seems to trigger a monkey-minded fear in most people. And a truly cold killer, someone who can take your life or simply, coldly, put you down and put the cuffs on without engaging any emotion at all is another thing entirely.

Lots here. Consider the surface barely scratched.

Fear and Trepidation

Some disjointed thoughts on fear:

Dealing with fear, terror and trepidation, all the little variations on an emotional reaction to a bad thing is more complex than I would like it to be. Trying to explain to K the other day that I haven't felt real fear (if you define fear as the monkey in your brain screaming, "Oh my god we're all gonna die!!!!") in a long time. It's more trepidation- something else, definitely not a monkey and not screaming- giving a long suffering sigh and saying, "This is not going to end well." And then you get to work.

Here's the question- is there really a difference and if so, where did it come from?

Little background. I'm a believer in the James-Lange theory of emotion, which states roughly that we make up the emotions after the fact. Not:

1) See the bear

2) Get scared

3) Run

More like:

1) See the bear

2) Run

3) Realize that you were scared

There are a lot of subtly different flavors, but there are only a handful of basic hormone cocktails that your body dumps into your bloodstream in times of stress. Your palms sweat, your knees shake, you forget to breathe, there's a rushing sound in your ears... If you just saw a bear, you know you were afraid. If you just saw a beautiful stranger, the same symptoms can seem like love at first sight, or at least infatuation*. The emotion, in the sense of the label, how we explain it to ourselves, comes well after the chemical reaction.

So, when people talk about dealing with fear, dealing with adrenaline, what are the tools? What are we really talking about? The chemical or the label?

There was a long space where I was almost completely burned out. Getting trapped upside down in a kayak in icy water was annoying. Good odds I was going to die and pretty sure it would be an embarrassing way to die, but the hormone cocktail trickling into my veins really didn't rise to the level of fear.

That's different, though. It wasn't some trained skill or even being inured, there was a physical issue- my body wasn't producing a normal dose of adrenaline. It allowed me to think more clearly, which worked out fine. But it wasn't a good thing. Not healthy at all. Plus most of my hobbies quit being fun.

Normal times, I still feel the symptoms, if I have time. If I know things are going to go bad, there's a little burning sensation in the back of my head and it feels like my ears are trying to stand up like an alert dog. Sometimes the palms get sweaty. My voice doesn't get squeaky like it used to (except for the first few seconds public speaking). I haven't got the shakes, even a finger tremor, in years. It doesn't feel as intense as when I was a rookie, but how do you tell if there is less adrenaline in your system of if the level of adrenaline just doesn't seem unusual? Do I not get the shakes because my body doesn't want to, or because I have more practice controlling it? Is there a difference? Functionally, maybe not, but if there is a difference in mechanism it means different ways to achieve the condition (assuming you would want to.)

Emotionally, what adrenaline there is, doesn't feel like it used to. It used to be heavily based on a fear of injury or death or (and this is huge, but almost never explicitly stated) helplessness or impotence: If I hit this guy with everything I have and nothing happens; if he destroys me without breaking a sweat like I am nothing, then what am I? What did all this training or working out really mean? It's a very sub-surface thought and very, very common. Most of the fear in a fight, especially a one-on-one, is social, not physical. Subconsciously, I think that this fear drives a lot of training and gear collecting and other types of macho posturing. (Not all training is macho posturing, but whether it is or not depends on the student, not the training.)

That social fear of helplessness doesn't seem to enter into it much anymore. If I think about the hormones beyond just noticing them hit my system, it usually translates as performance anxiety- what if I look stupid to the officers I have been teaching? It's less personal, less about my health or identity and far more about their faith in my teaching.

One piece of that is huge- 'just notice the hormones'. There really isn't any need to label them. Most of the time I don't, and that seems to work fine. How much of the cognitive deficit in stress situations is because the human monkey is trying to come to terms with an emotional state instead of just feeling it and moving on?

* And you can reliably trigger this in another person, consciously inducing the feeling that often gets translated as 'romantic love.'

Home

It's good to be here. The sun is shining but not blazing. Green as far as I can see and as deep as I can feel. A few good friends. The family is wonderful. Not quite ready for the big social things- begged off of an SCA event, but made it to a wedding.

Cleaning and yardwork make the transition easier. Things that need to be done, but also things that bring the place back to 'mine'. I felt a little like a stranger with the new furniture and not able to find my tools. Cleaning and mowing and weed-whacking (how did so much get overgrown so quickly? Was I really gone that long?) returned a sense of ownership (not quite the right word, I'm not very possessive.)

Then, at the end of the day, a fine scotch on the deck looking at dusk through the vines.

Crass Commercial Announcement

(and a little whiny moralizing, too...)

I will be officially off contract tomorrow.  That means I'll be available starting in September for seminars, private lessons, consulting and I will consider contract work. 

rory@easystreet.net

This is weird- I've never charged for teaching before. Seminars were either an honorarium, which rarely covered expenses, or just expenses and a T-shirt (though John Darby always insisted on giving me money.)  Classes were a small mat fee left for the person who owned the space we were using.

There's been a lot of ethical armor in that concept- accusations of self-promotion don't fly as well when there's no money in it.  No accusations of watering stuff down to keep students because I didn't want to keep students, I wanted connections with people who were willing to work to be extraordinary.

No plans to do anything any different, but I am curious how the dynamic will shift. Internally and externally.  Or I could just hunt up another contract and table this for a year or so.

High Level Skills + Intensity

He is an up-and-coming lieutenant in a foreign service.  He heard a story about something I did the week before and so he tracked me down to ask about some one-on-one training time.  He wanted close-quarters handgun.  Or knife throwing. Sigh. We went with the handgun.  Four count draw, dry fire, firing from retention, moving and shooting, scanning.  Because he was a leader we also went into how to train: faults to watch for, what would happen if his men ever needed to shoot as a team.

At one point he threw up his hands and said, “I am so angry. Everything they taught us was wrong!”

If you look, you’ll see that that one statement has driven a number of recent posts. 

To an extent, people read what they either want or expect to read. Many people have interpreted MoV as a scathing critique of traditional martial arts and think that I’m attacking them here.  Sometimes.  But I wouldn’t stick with something for (OMFG! It will be 30 years soon! How did I make it to this age?) so long if I thought I was wasting my time.

Back to the lieutenant.  What he had learned at his basic training were the fundamentals of pistol marksmanship. They weren’t wrong, they were just incomplete.  Beginners need to learn safety.  It’s stupid to accidentally kill yourself.  They need to get some feeling for success and how the weapons work, so they become a stable platform.  They learn grip and sight alignment and sight picture and breath control and trigger press.

They learn these fundamentals in a context that makes it easy for the instructor to monitor and easy for the student to correct- good lighting, good footing, hearing and eye protection, safety monitors and not moving.

Those environmental basics are rare as hell in real life.  Gunfire is loud and muzzleflash can be blinding in low light.  Often not only is the footing bad, but it may be too dark to tell how bad.  And you’d better damn well be moving unless you already have good cover. If you do have good cover, think about moving anyway because the threat should try to flank you.  And cover geometry can be counterintuitive- cover is often better the farther you are away from it.  Said it was counter-intuitive.

There are details that came at a price- when and how to fire from retention; why the weapon should be canted out when at retention.   Details that aren’t on the beginning syllabus.

Combat shooting, whether raiding or counter-ambush, is a whole different animal than range training.  Honestly, range training is probably closest to assassination skills, which aren’t that useful for good guys.

And there are things that work very well on the range that are ineffective in real life.  I was a weaver shooter for decades, trained that way from a pup.  But there are three significant flaws in the weaver- it is almost impossible to maintain while moving.  It points the biggest hole in your body armor (armpit) right at the threat.  Most damning is that according to research no one has been able to pull it off in a firefight.  An assassination maybe.  I wish I could reference the study (library not here!) but in reviewing all the videorecorded gun encounters he could get (which I had a hard time believing was a lot…), the researcher couldn’t find a single one where the person fired from a weaver, even if he had trained weaver for decades. (Some corroboration from, if memory serves, "Men Under Fire".)

But that doesn’t make dojo or range training wrong.  I go to the range. I practice my dry-fire and failure to fire drills.  When I have access to a good instructor, I go to my martial arts classes.  Nothing is wrong, but it is incomplete.  So when I practice my dry fire, I know what I will see when the projectile hits flesh and I know what it will do to my mind and body- because I have experienced it.  Once.  When I go to classes I know when I am practicing moving and when I am practicing breaking people.  Often, in my experience, the instructor does not know that crucial difference.

It gets wrong for me in two ways: when the students insist that what they do is what there is.  When they are taught that the real world changes nothing (One of the best grappling instructors in the world talking to a room full of LEOs: "No, we've never actually tried this in body armor and duty gear, but that wouldn't change anything." Sigh), that there is a one-to-one correlation between the skills they practice safely with their friends on their nice clean mats and being ambushed by someone who uses violence professionally or is in a rage.  The other 'wrong' is when the techniques become centered around the artificial aspects.  Altering techniques for safety is inevitable, but when the altered technique becomes the right way and the effective technique becomes the wrong way, it doesn’t work for me.

So I practice the pieces with as much awareness as I can of the totality, and the absolute certainty that there is a lot of that totality I haven’t seen yet and I will inevitably fail and have to improvise.

Adult Content

One of the best things about the recent contract was the opportunity to meet people who had been exposed to many things that I have not.  When an experienced operator talks about firefights or senior members about getting blown up (colloquial for getting hit by an IED) or getting caught in a middle-eastern riot, I listen. 

There are things I have trained for and read about that aren’t quite right.  They seem fine until someone who has tried it under fire points out the fatal flaw.  There are issues of context- (e.g. the rule for standard convoy ops/witness protection/high-risk transports is to abandon a disabled vehicle because they are bullet magnets.  That’s different when your vehicle is armored.  That changes a lot of protocols).  There are also issues of level and intensity.

Sometimes very high-end skills are qualitatively different than regular high-end skills.  It takes a paradigm shift to make that leap to the next level.   A sniper doesn’t touch the rifle the way a hunter does.

And intensity.  You can go ostrich and hide your head in the sand, but until and unless you can walk a 4x4 suspended between 17-story buildings as easily as you can do it at ground level, everything you have trained will be hardier, scarier, slipperier and less effective when it is real.

That’s easy to deny, too, because there is a lot of bullshit out there.  Things that are told and passed on from student to instructor that don’t make a lick of sense if you think about it for even a second- like a 90% one-shot stop ratio for a handgun.  For the statistic to even be possible 90% of shootings would have to be one-hit affairs, which we know isn’t true.  But someone you trust told you and you had your ‘sensei is always right’ hat on and went into child mode.

That’s where I’m going with this.  If your training is a religion or a talisman for you, you’re wasting your time here. If your panties get in a twist because I’m attacking a portion of your identity, you probably won’t be happy reading this stuff.  Because I don’t care about your twisty panties.  These are just observations from the field and connections that I’ve made.  Take them, use them, skip them… whatever. Because you aren’t wasting my time. I’m writing this for me, this (whatever 'this' is on a given post) is what I am working on or working through right now.  Chiron is where I do my thinking out loud.

There are lies to children.  It came up in comments a while ago.  If you need a bedtime story to make yourself sleep better, that’s not what I’m providing here.  If you want clean, easy answers, I’m sure there is a ‘master’ somewhere willing to sell you some.  I respect you as adults- to be able to deal with messy stuff with no right answers and high stakes; unsatisfying endings that would never play on a made-for-TV movie; ambivalence; the uncertainty of complexity.

There are other voices writing and talking about this stuff- almost for sure someone is closer to what you want to hear. 

Commitment

Balancing offense and defense is largely a sparring artifact.  At hand fighting range there is a sensitivity and a flow to sparring- the fist comes in, you glide it off line with a touch and snake your own strike over the top and he raises his elbow and/or shrugs his shoulder weaken the strike...

You don't commit your weight to a strike in sparring, largely because you don't want to do any real injury and partially because you have been convinced by your instructors how easy it is to destroy the balance of an over-committed attacker.  Being cautious from both ends, we train our attacks to be weak and don't realize it. Reps are reps.  A thousand reps of weak attacks hones the skill of attacking without power.

That's only a piece, because the defenses that we learn are based on these uncommitted attacks.  And they work well here, for what it is worth.  But the physical and emotional difference of a truly committed attack is amazing.  It will blow through many of the sparring defenses.  It can freeze you and take away the subtle glides and evasions.

It's not a difficult problem, the fully committed attack. The physics are pretty simple, the stuff that works works pretty reliably.  But it is so rarely addressed in training (more, I think, because it is not very safe and most people cannot summon the emotional intensity on demand) that when it happens it is an alien thing.

Many of the things that don't work in sparring are beautiful for the fully committed attack.  Some of the old stuff has what you need- imprecise enough to cover a wide area, gross-motor based, closing and leaving you in good position... and some of these very same things are suicide in  sparring.  The x-block that Steve and Scott rightly decry is a godsend when you see a flash of steel arcing towards your belly with a frothing, angry, PCP or meth dosed freak behind it.

And this is the thing.  Monkey dances, sparring, dueling are fine.  But someone trying to slaughter you, whether a predator working from ambush or a domestic situation yielding to rage, will be the fully committed attack.  With all of the threat's weight and speed, no holding back and with the psychological intention of introducing your insides to the cold air.

This leads to risk training. It's a little tweak for some, terrifying for others.  Every so often you must practice defense in an environment where if you do it wrong, you will be injured.  A full power, full speed baseball bat strike to the head. Preferably from someone with the skill to put himself in a rage mindset for a single blow and then come out of it.  The old two man kata, at higher levels, had a huge element of this.

And here is the test- if uke attacks with full power, speed and rage and tori screws the defense and uke in any way is able to regain control and not hurt tori, then uke didn't have the right mindset to begin with. The training would have been 'off', valueless.

I'm not suggesting this training method, because it is not safe.  I do it as tori. I will do it as uke if I know that tori completely understands that I will not pull in any way and his own survival is entirely in his hands.  I am reluctant to risk a manslaughter charge for training, especially if it is for someone who may choke or not understand.  The stupid and clumsy need not apply.

But there is a lesson there.  Especially if you can be both, the fully committed attacker and the defender.

121

121 degrees a couple of hours ago.  Lots of doing nothing right now.  Paperwork, turning stuff in, sending stuff away.

Operational areas, for me, are easier than administrative areas.  There's more to do and 121 doesn't feel as sticky and nasty when I have something real to think about... but much of the world is run by lists and right now it is my turn to add stuff to lists.

Internet access is iffy and will be for a short while.  When access solidifies I'll write more.

Right now, shut your eyes and identify five sounds, five touches and five scents.

A jet taking off.

Generator humming.

A nargila bubbling.

People around me typing.

Birds

The edge of the table against my wrist.

Sweat trickling down my back.

Shoes wrapped around my feet.

Wrist watch slipping to the side.

A light breeze on my forearms.

Nargila smoke- orange mixed with watermelon.

Woodsmoke.

Dust.

Only three scents. That is my weakest. I can't smell myself without trying right now, which is probably good.

Four

I have to apologize to JJ- That's US Deputy Marshall JJ to you-  he taught me something very profound once that I have since embellished and internalized so that I no longer know what was my add-on to his thought.  So what follows, especially the good stuff, is JJ's and he deserves the credit. Be safe my friend.

Teaching instructors and leaders is different than teaching troops.  Leaders have to understand well enough to improvise, know the rules well enough to break them.  They need to know the 'why' of a thing pretty deeply.  Troops should know it too, of course, but part of concentrating that time at the instructor/leader level is so that they can pass it on at their discretion.

So, today, teaching basic skills to a leader I had to give him some background.

1) Anything you teach, anything you practice must have a tactical use.  If it is not useful, why are you practicing it?  Case in point- returning a katana to the scabbard quickly, smoothly and without looking is one of the hallmark proofs of extreme skill.  News flash- getting you weapon into the holster fastest has never won a fight.  There is no tactical use for disarming yourself quickly.  To be fair, the ability to secure your weapon without looking allows you to pay attention to potential emerging threats, and that is a good skill.

2) You must be able to perform the skill moving.  Fights (unarmed, guns, knives, swords or clubs) are not static affairs.  They are conducted moving.  You will be moving and so will the threat.  If you have to freeze in order to strike hard or stop in order to shoot accurately, what you have is not a combat skill.  If your opponent must freeze for an instant to give you time for your disarms or locks to work, it is not yet a combat skill.

3) Your skills must work when you are scared.  I can almost guarantee that if you ever need serious close-quarters survival skills, you will be scared.  That affects your mind and your body.  If the techniques you rely on require wide peripheral vision, calm planning, precise hand movements, or even a fairly complicated coordination of hands and feet they very likely won't work.  Levels of fear change with experience and somewhat with internal wiring- if you choose to believe that this doesn't apply to what you do, you are counting on being a mutant. Best of luck to you.

4) It must work whether you can see or not.  Not just because bad things happen in the dark but because you can't waste time looking at the weapons on your belt or checking to see which way your magazines are turned.  Something else, like the threat's hands, may well be in your face.  You won't get the choice that the threat will even be in front of you.  Some things, like shooting, require some vision (country western songs aside) but there is a reason why so much time is spent on low-light and poor visibility shooting. Reason being, that's how most of them happen.  Touch is reliable. Anything you can do by touch, you do by touch.

Integration Blues

While waiting for critiques on the first draft of book two, I've been working on the next one.  Frankly, it's driving me nuts. I'm trying to explain the nuts and bolts of why things work.  There is a reason why some small people can make joint locks work in a real fight and some can't.  There are physical and mental nuances that effective fighters do differently than ineffective fighters.

I'm trying to pick out the most important of these nuances, most of which are just applied physics, and explain them in a way that makes them useful.  That part is really easy.  Where it gets tricky and frustrating is that nothing stays in its neat little box.

Each thing affects the other thing.  Structure is important (but sometimes structure is utilizing free-fall, the exact opposite of rigidity), but compounded with exploiting gravity, and ... and ... it is amazing.  Combine and practice some of the principles right and you have contact telepathy.

None of it should be completely new to most well-trained martial artists-- but some of it will have been just lip service and some is in the motion but not really explained or understood by the instructors.  Structure is a good example.  I've known many people with excellent structure who didn't know it.  It was just something they picked up by training and when they became instructors they assumed that everyone just 'picks it up.'  Some do.  I think most don't, and it's one of the reasons why many students never live up to their instructors.  Learning some of these very critical nuances are left up to luck.

All of these are in the physical drills of almost every art that I have seen, but you can get through the drills, you can get through the entire syllabus of most systems and never actually learn or understand the stuff that is in there. You can do the techniques 'well enough' or even very well, and entirely miss whole principles.

But it is frustrating to write.  All of the chapters so far refer to multiple other chapters... so which goes first?  Each chapter starts with an experience where that particular principle was critical, but almost all of the principles played a role in almost all of the stories.  Leverage points make better sense if you understand base and Center of Gravity first, but base and CoG are easier to grasp if you understand leverage.

It's going to take a lot of work from the readers, I think. I'll make it as easy as I can, but in the end people can only effectively read one thing at a time, so the flow will never be the same as a force incident where multiple things are happening at multiple levels.

Training people is much easier than writing. 

Re-Entry

You can get as mythical as you want, or as mundane- Hero's Journey or simply off to college.  You go somewhere, you do some stuff and then, ideally, you go home.

Do you go home to the same home?  Yes and no.  Things will have changed.  People will have grown, learned, become.  Declined or improved.  Many of the challenges they were facing will have evaporated. New challenges arisen.  

Same for you (for me, of course, since as our anonymous friend will point out this is all about me).  You don't feel different, the you at the center of your universe is still you.  But you have learned a lot.  Some deep stuff. A few core beliefs have shifted.  Parts of the world you were naively certain of are no longer as absolute.

The dynamic I see, and used to feel a lot, is that the traveler goes home expecting things to be more the same than they will be. Those who stayed at home expect the traveler more changed than he is.  Either way, and this is another thing you get used to, it can be fun to explore the changes. The people you were closed to when you left? You were close to them for pretty good reasons.  It will be fun to rediscover them.

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Admin note:

The RSS feed for Wim's blog died for some mysterious reason.  I tried to switch it to his facebook feed and got an error message, so I temporarily moved it down to the 'links' list.

Tripods

Just some basics, things that came up today.  You can look at them at a lot of different levels of magnification, take the principles and play with them.

Move, shoot and communicate.  I was taught this trio as the very essence of small unit tactics.  If you can't move, you can't get to the right place at the right time.  This magnifies from individual combat (Steve Perry very much likes to describe his art as 'positional' and that is one of the keys to making anything work) to logistics.  You need to be able to move as individuals, move your people, and move your gear and supplies.

'Shoot' might be a little narrow, but I learned it in the context of applying force to people who would far rather be applying force to me.  Playing with the principle, this becomes the basic skills to do the job.  A tow truck will take care of the transportation problem, but you still need a mechanic.  Again, this magnifies- from HtH skills up to nukes; and sideways from communication to customer service.  If you can't do the basic job, it very rarely works just to be there.

And communicate.  Teams work.  Most of the time. A team of dedicated professionals devoted to the job who train together and communicate well can accomplish things far beyond what the individuals could do by themselves.  Sometimes you run across a team where one or two members are carrying the rest-- there are bad teams. But a good team is amazing.  A good team composed of good people can do miracles and make it look easy.  That all takes communication.  Sometimes communication = 'shoot' in the sense that for CNT (or other salesmen), communication is the skill that they need to do the job in the first place.  But it is separate from the commo that they need with the rest of the team.  Commo is how people get to the right place at the right time.  It is a primary source of intel, also. Without communication skill, you will never know where and when the right place and time are.

Again, at magnification, it ranges from knowing yourself, being honest with yourself, dealing with your own emotions and limitations; through basic active listening; reading people; communication equipment and all the way up to advertising (and other forms of propaganda.) Move, shoot and communicate.  The three essentials.

Another tripod- people, equipment and intelligence.  The status of these three things define what you can successfully do.  

Select (and work to be) the best people you can find.  Train them as well as you can.  Challenge them and test them and let them know when you are proud.

Then give them what they need.  Not necessarily the cool, gee-whiz stuff (I personally am leery of anything that my life might depend on that relies on batteries, but that's a personal quirk).  But reliable, effective stuff.   Ideally, the team should have easy access to what they might need and what is available can limit the mission.  Cave rescue and dive rescue and fire rescue have different equipment.  In a lot of ways I think equipment is the least important of the three aspects because really good people will find a way.  There is an old saying, "All you need to be a cowboy is guts and a horse. If you have the guts you can steal the horse."  Every high-end team I know has a scrounger or two. 

And intelligence.  You need to know as much as you can about what is really going on.  Why you are needed, what you are expected to accomplish, what you are going up against, what little things like temperature or terrain might be stacked against you.  Whether reading an individual to evaluate a potential threat or responding to a major situation in the next district there is a skill to getting data, to knowing where to get it from, how to prioritize it.  I didn't realize until recently how common it was to wait for pre-packaged (and often out-dated or compromised) intel from above or to decide to figure it out when you arrived.  The transport time that we had always used to establish commo with someone who had eyes on and put together and refine a hasty plan isn't always used that way.  A puzzle.

Just some ideas. Play with them if you want.

Guilt

Messaged for a while with one of my colleagues from the old agency.  Things are not better there, worse, if anything.  He said I was missed, just for the common sense I used to bring to the situation.  I felt a stab of guilt.  Would things be better if I had stayed?  Maybe.

There were good friends there. We have shared a lot over the years.  Blood sweat and tears? Yeah.  As much as we protected each other's safety we also, when we could, kept each other sane.  It's easy to spend so much time with killers and hustlers that you start to confuse that place with the world.  Seeing good, honorable, men and women every day gave us all permission to be better than the dark.  When something, either a particular event or just the mass of stuff, got to you there was always someone to talk to.

Some people did get damaged. They were usually the ones who didn't talk.

Keeping them safe and keeping them sane was the job.  Everything, every last thing, centered around that.  Even taking care of the prisoners, dealing respectfully and humanly (you can be humane without being human, being human is both). That is what sergeants were for.  Directives would come down, some of them breath-takingly out of touch with reality... and it was the job of the sergeants to find some way to make it work.  Safely.

The number of truly bad decisions, and their impact, had been steadily increasing.  Some of them would have made satirist Jonathan Swift proud:  "We are NOT lowering standards, sergeant. We are simply changing the standards so that more people pass."

There was more.  I was burning out and wanted more challenge, but like most people, that alone wouldn't have been enough to make me leave a job I loved.  It took more.  When the last line was crossed...

But I had to leave people behind. People I still care about.  People who have to deal with stuff with a little less support.  They'll be fine. I know that. One person left (more, now- some fine officers have left as well) but there are still many, many good people there. And they will take care of each other.

But every so often I still feel guilty.

Middle Ground

I read something recently, a short essay. It was very sincere and it was well-reasoned and it touched a lot of people.  About how violence was toxic, how dark things not addressed would boil out, how people with that darkness in them who toyed at things like martial arts would eventually become something dark.  How no one who deals with that can remain untouched and how violence can never solve anything, only creating needs for more violence in the long run...

It struck me very much as a reaction not to violence- there was nothing in the essay to indicate that the author had ever had any direct contact with what I would consider violence or evil- but as a reaction to the concept of violence.  A reaction to thoughts about violence.  A logical response to quiet the fears through insight. Another reaction to fear as opposed to danger.

The other side of the argument- the violence groupies and virtual tough guys and 'ultimate deadly street fighting systems'- are just as toxic, just as based on imagination.

For both sides it is about fear and control- if you fear violence, you can try to convince everyone it is a Bad Idea(tm) and they will all move to the light and you will be safe... or you can decide to become, or imagine yourself to be, a master of violence yourself.  Then you control the thing you are afraid of.

It doesn't work like that.  Violence between humans exists because it works.  It has been reliably used to get money for drugs for generations. Ending slavery (relatively, the institution still exists) was a bloody business.  When someone is breaking into your house with intent to rape and kill and you have retreated to the last room in the basement, violence (countervailing force, to be PC) is the only thing that will solve that problem.

Violence works.  The rarer it is in a society, the more powerful it becomes because fewer people are prepared to do what it takes to prevent it.  Bullies get the reward of control.  Protests, even when called 'peace protests' are intimidation, and look at that one carefully.  Little weasels wrecking a downtown area have not swayed a single person to their point of view so the reward comes from elsewhere and that reward is likely the satisfaction of scaring other people, feeling powerful.

Once a human gets used to using violence as a tool, once they learn how easy and safe it can be* the only thing that will stop them are fear or force. Physically stopping them (force) or the clear ability to stop them (fear).

Back to these two points of view- the violence groupies and the dark-side pacifists.  You don't see a lot of either of these points of view in professionals.** They rarely say "Violence never solved anything" because most have clearly, personally, solved stuff with violence.  Sometimes the problem solved was their own survival, which is kind of hard to devalue.  They do (often) wonder if the problems they are solving will stay solved; if the plans were really thought out; or if the perceived problem was worth the real cost.  

The trope that 'you will turn evil if you are exposed to enough violence' doesn't play very well.  I have heard it from a few professionals- mostly from people who felt themselves drifting that way and recovered- but I don't actually see a lot of it.  Most of the people who got in trouble over their uses of force were asses long before they ever put on a badge.  There's also a common comparator here that doesn't work very well.  You can't use cops and soldiers interchangeably on this one.  Soldiers use force on other soldiers- possibly an eighteen-year-old kid who doesn't want to be there and doesn't even understand the issues that led to war.  Soldiers wind up killing people very much like themselves and most recognize that.  That's hard, and I suspect far more likely to damage the psyche than an officer using force on someone who has already done an act that clearly separates the threat from the rest of society.

There is a cost to using force and professionals realize that- you can't do it much without facing your own mortality (do you drink that hard truth away?)  You learn that luck can screw up your best tactics (do you go the lop route and just always try to be a little slow to respond?) You will almost certainly find that the more comfortable you are with violence the less other people treat you like a person (do you go hermit, or just hang with others who 'get it?')

Those three things are powerful in another way, too. Understanding mortality is enlightenment, if you can handle it.  The ability to risk your life in full awareness of the power of luck is a greater faith than any religion can simulate.  And feeling isolated is exactly the same thing as feeling special...and any of these can be deep and liberating or just egotism.

Same from the other side, the violence groupies, what Jim Raistrick calls the 'warries'.  They want control and domination and freedom from fear.  Artificial or vicarious, it doesn't matter.  They love the feeling of victory, the accolades, the glory and dream of saving the willing maiden.

Just like the other side, there are similar things with pros, but not these things and not to this extent.  Victory is cool primarily because losing sucks, even if you live.  Winning and losing both hurt.  Accolades?  You might get some from your coworkers.  Your supervisors will just want reports and might even give dire warnings.  Medals go to the people who get stuff written about them.  And willing maiden?  More likely a toothless, smelly, meth addict.

But there is stuff here that the pros get. Not dying is a big payoff.  The respect of your peers is harder to earn and worth more than a medal from a bureaucrat. And the glory.  It's not glorious.  But sometimes on that very edge for a few seconds everything is real and you are exactly what you are and everything, mind, body and spirit come together in a perfect thinking animal.  There is no feeling like it.

It can be addicting.  It can put your trained values ("Violence is the last result of the ignorant.") in conflict with what you experience (Shooting at a distance is the only way to stop a vest bomber).  It can purify your values, and that can enrich your life while simultaneously severing your connections with others.  And you might or might not care.

Both of the points of view, the toxic pacifist and the warries, are slightly twisted, but they've touched on some old truths.  Just misunderstood them.  In the end, the extremes come together in a sort of shared fantasy, a skewed view of the issue that they fear, like the things a child imagines in the dark.

*A former bad guy who read an early version of "Meditations on Violence" said that I gave too much hope- he boasted that no one had ever gotten out of one of his predatory assaults.

** Maybe we should talk about professionals some day, because there are many different kinds and levels.  A Vietnam draftee with intense experience is clearly a professional, but is very different than a voluntary enlistee who re-ups through multiple combat tours.  Cops are different than soldiers, COs different than road officers, lops and posers very different from meat-eaters.  They all process similar experience differently.

Wife and Gun Club

This is probably going to be my weird thought for the week.

Long guns aside, I was raised on wheel guns and Colt semis.  I learned handgun on a Smith and Wesson K22, moving up to a Colt Police Positive.  Then the .45 Mark IV series 70.  They pretty much defined what a handgun should be to me- solid, reliable, very fast from holster to hand and (with the exception of the K22, which was a kid's gun) they made big holes.

Over the years I played with other guns.  I loved the sleek Browning Hi-Power.  Giggled at the deadly accuracy of the Ruger Mark II.  Had a passionate crush on the Sig Sauer, but she was out of my league, far more gun than I could afford as a starving student.  During these swinging years of my life I often found myself falling back on revolvers, like a Smith 686 or Ruger GP100.  Reliable, accurate, and they felt like a gun should feel.

Then the Glock.  It was an arranged marriage.  The team was going lethal. The Captain (was he still a lieutenant back then?) wanted everyone to have ammo and magazine compatibility.  He wanted reliable and, with his bureaucrat hat on, he wanted cheap.  We went with the Glock 23 in .40 caliber.  

I hated it.  It felt like a toy, too light to be a real gun.  The grip was too big for my hand.. but it was a done deal.  The way it was.  And it was one of the things that I might never need, but if I ever did it would be the most important thing in my life.  I didn't like it, but we were stuck with each other.  So I practiced and came to learn that it was reliable.  No matter how hard I shot or how much dirt I dragged it through, as long as my form was good, the Glock would fire every time.  And she was accurate.  If both bullets didn't go through the two inch square, it was me.  As long as I did my job, she would do hers.  It was never really love, but after a few years we got along very, very well.

My second arranged marriage was with the Beretta 92 (M9).  The Beretta had a bad reputation around the barracks- unreliable and puny.  Failed consistently to do her duty.  Fit my hand better than the Glock, though, and that was something.  On the range, she lived down to her reputation- it was mostly bad magazines and I had to ruthlessly cut those out when found.  She was picky and didn't care much for getting dirty and this can be a dirty place.  Accurate, though.  Moreso even than the Glock.  The rangemaster kept my qualification target around for months to scare the locals.

Picky and unreliable, but accurate and fit my hand.  That was enough to work with, since we were stuck together anyway.  I would just have to supply whatever she couldn't in the relationship.

Most people have comfort foods.  I probably have comfort weapons.  Blades aside, the revolvers are probably closest.  Comfort isn't enough, though. You and your weapon are a pair.  Without your weapon, you are unarmed and can only do what meat can do. Without you, your weapon is an inert lump of metal.  Together is all that counts.  Comfort isn't enough for that. It takes work and practice to make that pairing effective. Even more work to be phenomenal. 

There are certainly passions as well.  I love the way the Browning Hi-Power feels, the way it comes up on line effortlessly.  But it still takes work to be good and no weapon is so thrilling or so reliable that you can ignore basic maintenance forever.

And there is commitment: "This is my rifle, there are many like it but this one is mine..."

I was a little heavy handed above, but I noticed today that some people act towards the weapons that their lives depend on and the mates (that sometimes their soul depends on) in very similar ways.  

Some won't commit until they find the one that is 'just right'.  Some collect as many as they can but never really work on any one.  Some get stuck with one they aren't interested in and instead of getting to know each other, leave it rusting in the holster until they retire.  And some, whether it was a love match or an arranged marriage practice, work hard and never neglect maintenance.

I don't know if there is a correlation, if the officers with serial divorces are the same ones that go from weapon to weapon.  If the same guys who notch bedposts are the ones with a room full of guns that they have almost never fired.  If strong, stable marriages are the same households where the guns are quick and steady from long practice.

But it is an interesting thought for the day, and I never would have thunk it without an exposure to the local custom of arranged marriages.

You Get Used To It

The drink is rotten milk (technically sour yoghurt, but that doesn't seem like a very strong distinction to me) with water, heavily salted and blocks of ice.  It is drunk with a communal ladle.  It is the traditional hot weather drink here, like iced tea in some places or gin&tonic in others.  It is also used to make restless children go to sleep and it seems to work for that.  I got very, very drowsy shortly after my first experience.

Which makes me wonder about fermented milk. I have read of fermented mare's milk in Mongolia and Yak milk in Tibet... does lactose ferment to alcohol?  What form of alcohol?  Surely not ethanol.  Is there a sharia decision on fermented milk?

It tasted awful, the first time.  Evidently, most Americans don't take to it and drinking a whole bowl was worth a lot of cultural points.

I'm starting to like it.  What originally tasted like salty rotten milk has come to taste more like liquid sourdough.  And this all reminds me of the aguardiente/chichu stories from Ecuador... another time, maybe.

One note- Al Siebert in "The Survivor Personality" wrote that the single strongest correlation in survivors, the one that almost all had in common (disaster survivors, death camp and POW survivors, violence survivors) is that they would eat anything, try any food- not just in survival situations.  Even as kids they weren't afraid to try new foods.  Picky eaters are doomed.  Good to know.

Just rambling- I'm a little written out (finished the first draft of Citizen's Guide a few days ago) and most of the things that really intrigue me right now must be held under the Cone of Silence(tm). 

Information Management

Good people get the job done.  Even if they are out of the loop.  Even if they are "not important enough" to have access to critical information.  I'm having that 'someday' feeling- someday I want to teach a class on information flow.  There are some things that are so obvious, and yet every day I see them being violated.

• Information not shared is worthless.  In every organization, people hide and horde information.  Operational Security demands that some data have a limited dispersal, granted.  But you are gathering the information for someone to use.  It needs to get to that person.  It needs to get to all the people who need to know.

Corollary to this: you need to know who is actually doing the job.  The boots on the ground are doing the job.  Cops, soldiers, factory workers or primary health care providers are the ones doing the job.  Nine times out of ten, they are the ones who need the information.  After all, the information is all about doing the job better and safer.  If your subordinates are the ones doing the job, they don't work for you. You work for them. You can direct, guide, supervise manage or even (gasp) lead but it is not their primary purpose to make your life easier. It is your job to make their job easier.

• Know your sources and know your sources' motivations.  The big boss will eventually hear what he or she rewards.  There are a hundred different ways to discourage information you don't like, even if it is the truth.  Strive never to discourage honesty. People that come to you with information are doing so for their benefit, not necessarily your benefit or the organization's.  Always ask 'why'.  This will eventually tie back to the intro and the last point- one of the most critical pieces of information you can have is to identify your good people.  Not your politicians or your suck-ups or your resume padders.  Look for the boots on the ground that the other boots turn to when they have problems.  The men and women in charge of the quiet areas that you never hear about because they are running smoothly.  That's maybe another corollary- people being productive often make less 'noise' than people having problems or people trying to inflate their numbers.
• Information management can get complicated in the middle stages.  Things can affect multiple databases.  You need a good gatekeeper or information triage person or system to make sure that the data goes to all the people that might need it.  At the most basic, you arrest a guy for possession and reports need to go to the courts, the jail and the precinct.  They need that stuff.  But it's possible the gang task force might want to know about someone wearing those colors in that area.  Narcotics might be very interested in a new dealer in the area. Maybe local businesses need to know if a new shop has opened...  If none of these databases are shared, and even if they are, it is very possible for important data to only go some of the places it is needed.
• So, learn thoroughly where the gathered data is needed.

Aside-  I'm not talking specifically about intelligence here in the military sense.  With enough technology gathering data is easy.  Interpreting and prioritizing is not.

• Format the information for the end user.  Too many people gather, store and disseminate data so that it is easy to gather, store and disseminate.  Not bad things, but not the same as easy to use.  The end user is who and what the information is for.  "Dangerous, likely to be armed" needs to be verbal because you don't want your troop taking his eyes off a dangerous armed guy to read the warning.  It is easier to put data in order, say: name, identifier, second identifier, comments.  If the comments are the really critical information it has to be easy to see- especially if the other stuff are things the officer already knows because he had to enter them to get to the comments.  It takes a little more time for the information gathering and storing team, but it saves time for the boots on the ground and that is the entire purpose.  You can't lose sight of that.
• Like in most tasks, it's usually easier to plan from goals backwards, if you are lucky enough to be able to design a system from scratch: Who needs the information? What do they need and in what format?  That drives how it will be disseminated and that in turn drives how it will be stored and correlated and analyzed.  That need drives how it will be gathered and what the sources need to be.

Damaging

Damage changes almost everything.  Not just the fact that when things start (at least, if you're the good guy) you might well be injured before you are fully aware it's  jumped off.  There's a lot of denial, but that's actually pretty obvious if you think about it.  And it's not just that too many people can't seem to differentiate between pain and damage in their minds and think that both are equally likely to stop a bad guy or equally are reasons to stop or quit.

It's far more than that.  You have to get close to reliably injure people.  Sure, sometimes you can flick the eyes or break the little bones in the back of the hand at a relatively safe distance but to reliably damage someone so badly that you can safely escape is close-in work.  There is a pretty specific zone where your strikes have maximum power, and inside that zone there is a sweet spot where everything works better.  And it's close, baby.  Unless you are behind that guy, there's no safe way to be in that range.  If you can finish him, he can finish you.  That takes a different mindset than playing a game of speed tag.  In most sparring, the biggest fear is looking silly.  Being so outclassed or doing something so stupid that your fellow students start laughing.  Damage is different.  That is a fear of being crippled, a fear of blinding and memory loss.  Possibly, you will face the deeper fear of where your line is: how much damage you will take before you beg for it to stop.  Most men would have a very hard time living with the memory of begging.

The close range changes some things, but even systems that spar at close range sometimes don't produce students who understand damage at close range.  Infighting I can tag you, steal your balance, let you know in many little ways how good I am or am not.  And I can do all that sloppy.  To damage takes a more precise, more coordinated body mechanics.  You can practice to show that you are good, practice to be good, and never master the differences of body mechanics you need to break bones.

When Mac set up the boxing sessions for enforcement he tasked me as one of the sparring partner/instructors.  I am not a boxer.  Still, boxing with J, a former college football player, who outweighed me by at least forty pounds, was wearing body armor and both of us wearing 16 oz. gloves, I broke two of his ribs with a short right hook.  Yeah, bragging again.  Maybe. But that's not the point.  Boxers do this all the time, most are stronger, more fit and spend far more time practicing strikes than I do- their injury rate should be astronomical.  But it isn't.  I finally had the opportunity to ask one why.  He said, quite reasonably, "There wouldn't be any boxers if we always hit like that."  Yeah, if I was boxing every day there would definitely be an unspoken agreement not to take each other's heads off.  It wouldn't take long for that agreement to seem like going 'all-out'.

There's also an element in sport that both is and isn't present in other venues.  'Not losing' in many ways, drives more strategy than a desire to win does.  Boxers and MMA fighters and anyone who plays with contact has to protect themselves.  The clinch can be a big part of strategy and there are lots of things you can do with it, but it exists as a 'not losing' strategy. The goal is to prevent him from harming you.

People are free to disagree with me on this, but when damage is the point, the offensive becomes the defensive.  When someone is trying to injure you the most efficient way not to get injured is to shut him down.  This is more obvious with weapons.  Unless you are very lucky (and having a stupid, clumsy attacker is the ultimate in luck) if you try to stay on the defensive against a knife, you will be cut to ribbons and then finished off.  Unless you are in a hardened site, hunkering down or trying to dodge when people start shooting at you only works until you get picked off.  To stop someone from shooting you (if they are coming at you for damage- see, not pray and spray to keep you head down or blazing away as they run away, this whole post is about damage, both from you and to you) you pretty much need to shoot him. Blowing up works too.

Because people can take more unarmed damage than armed; because many can't distinguish between pain and damage and; most importantly, because most have never really been in a situation that was about damage, they can choose to believe that defense and offense are both 50% of the equation.  And they can be, if both are playing that game.  If both are trying not to lose.

It feels, it looks, it is very different when one of the parties is there to do damage.  Range, body mechanics, mindset.  All different.

One Year

A year ago tomorrow, give or take a few hours, I was at the airport waiting to fly out of Fort Benning.  Dead tired, a little bored with waiting, not really sure what I was getting into.  It was a long wait.  It was the fourth of July and as part of the tradition, the company chaplain read some of the stories of the battle streamers on the guidon.  He said something that I confess I have never checked- "Only one-half of one percent of the citizens of the United States have ever served in her military."  I find that chilling and disturbing, if true.  Not 'serving now'- have ever served.

When the plane rolled out, it was a hot, humid brutal Georgia day... and the entire company was out on the runway, saluting as we flew off.  We were flying high over Boston in the dark and far below we could see the little pops of the Independence Day fireworks. Little pops at 30,000 feet but a beautiful sight from the parks and the harbor.

It's been a big year.  I can now claim stumbling incompetence in even more languages.  Found out things about myself, and things about the world. Rocked some of my "must be trues" and "obviouslies".  Have an entirely new set of things where the educated point of view about what a people believes doesn't match what happens on the ground.  More, too.  Stories that I can't tell.  Things that, I think, would make many of you very proud but silence is one of the rules of this game.  Someday, perhaps.

Not just here.  My lovely wife and remarkable children (really a young man and woman now) have also had a big year half a world away.  Full of challenges and things that might have been disasters.  Watching and listening from a distance I've been awed by their strength and adaptability. They don't need me, which makes the love that we share more true.  I admire them, so that even if there were no ties of blood, no years of shared time, I would still want to know these people and would feel honored to spend time with them.

Yet every time I see her picture, K takes my breath away. Still. After nearly twenty-three years together.  That's not bad.  Friendship and trust and admiration are nice. Passion doesn't hurt, either.

You, too, reading this. You've been a part of this year for me as well. Thank you.

I'm Being the Bad Guy

I feel like a blue meanie.  Normally, I like initiative.  Normally, I think I'm pretty good at finding the common ground and getting dialogue and change.  Not this time. This time I just want to cut my losses and move on.

The problem child came to me through at least two other people who tried to work with him and failed.  First impressions are pretty positive- intelligent, friendly, tries to be helpful.  Over the weeks it has become abundantly clear that every last one of those virtues can be perverted into a vice.  Super intelligent guy... but absolutely incapable of accepting that he has no knowledge of the specialized field we work in. None. Nada. Zip.  Since he can't accept that, he just keeps trying to help.  Like by telling the specialists how to do the job.  Or explaining to others what is going on when he doesn't have a clue himself.

Very, very friendly... which means he has no boundaries, and that doesn't work when you are surrounded by criminals, officers and soldiers. He is completely incapable of understanding when he is getting on someone's nerves even when he is explicitly told.  If you say, "You're getting on my last nerve. Get out of here and leave me alone."  He won't- he will sulk and whine and demand attention.  That was the last straw with the last team he worked with.

And helpful?  He's pleased and honored to make command decisions for you and tell everyone else what you've decided. Without asking you. Just to be helpful.

My usual tactic with this is to be very explicit about what I am doing, what I am saying and why.  Communication is about passing information.  The information is important, the method or my feelings or your feelings are secondary... but your feeling will affect how you listen, so they become a part of the question.  Basically, I use a completely different communication style with a young, eager, up-and-coming junior leader than I do with an old political player who is jealous of his position and worried that someone might know something he doesn't.

I explained the reasoning behind this, pointed out how much progress I've made in some dead zones.  My little friend says, "No. You complicate things too much. You should just talk the way that makes you comfortable."

"But they won't listen."

"Doesn't matter as long as it is easier for you." Which, of course, means easier for him.  Better to fail easily than to win if it takes effort. The pay is the same either way.

I had to give the 'expectations speech'- a list of behaviors expected and lines not to cross and the consequences.  I'm hoping he will listen, but I would place a large bet that he will alternate between sulking and sucking up for several weeks.

On the good side, he's inspired me to write an article on how to utilize an interpreter.

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555th post, according to my dashboard.

55th review on Amazon and the latest is by Bob Orlando.  My head swelleth somewhat.