Students

Good students are rare. They may not even exist by themselves. The good student is really a matter of "fit" between student and instructor. Dave, my sensei in jujutsu, was an extraordinary martial artist and an outstanding teacher... for me. Years after he retired I ran across another of Dave's old students who felt Dave was a terrible teacher: "I never understood a word he said."

Some of that was what made him such a great teacher for me. He never told me everything, just enough. He always left things for me to discover. He always set the bar right at the edge of my ability. Despite the fact that the other student felt Dave wasn't a great teacher, the student developed a lot of skill, which says something. Which may be a subtler distinction, that teaching students and teaching subjects are different and it is possible to be good at only one of those... except with some students.

Some instructors are extraordinary and can form a connection with almost any student. A small number of students are extraordinarily adaptable and can learn from many different styles of teacher. In that sense, being a good student might be a skill.

Poor students have a struggle. There are some students who have trouble in any study. Maybe uncoordinated in a physical skill or their brain doesn't process information the way the teacher transmits it. They may have difficulty learning by seeing, or hearing or touch. Maybe poor memory or poor cognition... they have a rough road. But occassionally you get a poor student who sticks with it and that long, slow road can produce a deep and durable practitioner. Moreover, the best teachers were often poor students: the extra practice, the extra explanations and ways to envision add up, and often leave someone who knows more ways to explain than anyone who struggled less. I, for one, most value the skills I learned in the subjects that didn't come easily.

The gifted student has a talent- speed or coordination or the right attitude for the study. They rarely last long. It's a cliche but what comes too easily is valued too lightly. If a student is too successful early, they often quit or decide that they know more than they do. It's a natural thing, people want to be 'good enough'. Training after all is tedious and hard work. It takes great inner discipline to try to improve and refine when you are already winning. Some confuse victory with skill. They may be successful for awhile and may even convince others- but all these talents fade, some with age, some with injury. When the talent fades the skill is shallow.

'Promising' is almost always a euphemism for lazy. The promising student has the coordination or the intelligence or the (insert attribute here) to be GOOD... if they would only get off their asses and practice. You shouldn't get these if you only teach people who want to be there.

If you teach martial arts, you will run into damaged students. Some are victims of violent crime or early abuse, and for them what goes on in class has extra inner dimensions. It is challenging and requires, from the teacher, discipline, compassion and insight. It is really not a job for amateurs. Other damaged students have been damaged by previous training. Sometimes it is physical- old injuries. Sometimes tactical, as in the student has been taught that a style based on dueling is exactly the same as self-defense. Sometimes it is more sinister. I've had instructors in other styles give a conspiratorial smile and say, "The secret is to hurt them the first day, dominate them early so that they never get up the balls to challenge you." Teaching the students to lose in a bullshit dominance game. More subtly, the student who can't stand to lose or can't stand to lose to a woman is a particularly dangerous form of damaged.

Bad students are thankfully rare. In the business world they are called "poisonous personalities". These are the ones that aren't satisfied to be unhappy themselves but must spread it. The ones who hurt other students or complain rather than train or try to set a personal agenda. Again, very rare unless they are attending unwillingly.

There are another category, too- the special students. Sometimes they fall into one of the other categories. One of my friends has alway had a "project student" a completely hopeless case that he would spend years and unlimited energy trying to bring up to an acceptable skill level. I assumed he was doing it for penance, but in retrospect he was probably simply paying back the instructors who never gave up on him when he felt hopeless. My special student was the Friday Student- who taught me about teaching.

Futures

Long talk today with Mac, sipping coffee in the autumn sun and talking and thinking. It's always a priveledge- his insight and experience are vast, but that's only a part of it. He looks at problems in different ways, ties them in with different phenomenon than other people might. Talking about an old subject with Mac is new. Talking about a new subject is extraordinary.

He wanted to explore the idea of creating a martial art specifically for and by law enforcement officers. It won't work. Every black belt with a badge has done it or tried to do it to some extent. Too much territory is staked, and it's not really that new anyway, and the very idea triggers scepticism... That said, there are some unique aspects to what we have been teaching our officers over the last years. Not new things, necessarily, but new ways to teach them and new ways to think about fighting, survival, and defensive tactics.

So we thought and talked today about what was critical, what was core, what is unique about our approach and how it could be presented.

The pages of notes I brought were soon over-written. Concepts. Advantages. Lesson plan design. Thoughts on teaching. Thoughts on ranking. Mac focused on core principles, one step deeper than I usually think, trying to get the concept of structure put into words. Structure, if you don't do it, is a way of moving (easiest seen in striking), where the bone and tendon, not the muscle, does the work. Start from structure. Utilizing yours. Disrupting the threat's. The handful of principles that apply universally, and only then moving on to technique... not individual technique, but intuitive classes of technique. You can learn over three hundred named wrist locks, but in the end, there are only three ways to do it, which can be combined into 3x3x3 and compounded... everything else is window dressing. (Or eight ways, if you want the simple version). People literally spend years on locks, but every real thing there is to know can be taught in an hour or less. Same with takedowns. Entries. Striking takes a little longer because there are so many ways to generate power and some compound and some contradict.

It might work. Not as a system or a style. That would be impossible to make unique and would run into ego problems. But we have proven a new way of looking at, thinking and teaching: one that works very well in the chaos of combat (and not just for us, relative rookies have used it with success). It might work.

Agencies are beauracracies- they can't help it. They are like organisms. I wonder sometimes if our agency realizes just how far out we are on the cutting edge of effective teaching, or what they did when they let a small group with probably a hundred years of martial arts training, a thousand+ actual encounters between them and some very unorthodox, practical ways of gaugung success and set them free to design.

What we've done is awesome (modesty check, but I've seen the standard and we are so far beyond that ball park that you can't see it). What we will do has the potential to change verything.

The Brotherhood

We trained today, the team. We have new members and they were getting a first introduction to some of our basic skills. Just a taste. There are a lot of obligations coming up and time is limited. They needed the basic skills for the most likely scenarios and they needed to feel the intensity, the speed and the chaos.

Everyone teaches on the team, everyone learns. I sat back at one point and just listened and I had to marvel at the skill and the insight and the experience of this small group of men and women.

"Raise it to here and all the force focuses on the shoulder."
"Spread them out and they lose their leverage."
"You don't need to worry about the hands if you take their legs."

Out of context the simple phrases won't mean much, but in action these are secrets and observations that martial arts masters dream of.

To be part of a team that no longer gets tunnel vision in an ugly fight; a group of people where it is just obvious that you will learn to control your sense of time and slow things so that the action seems to be in slow motion; that can see nuances of opportunity and shift gears as a team in action without a word spoken...made extra special by the fact that new members are coming into this arena and it might (probably will) change their lives and their ideas of possibility and impossibility forever.

There are other types of elites that share a different world. A LRRP veteran will get information from a smell that I will miss. A veteran paramedic will identify a problem that will be invisible to me. Each of these elites and each type of elite share a bond, a brotherhood.

Don't misunderstand- 'brotherhood' is used in broad ways by criminals. I mean it literally here, not as some kind of thuggish cult. Just as people raised together understand the subtext of family dinner conversation and share much of a world view, people who depend on each other in teams and share intense experience become a sort of family, sometimes stronger than the birth family.

We have a good family. A strong sense of mission, a strong sense of ethics, a strong sense of compassion, all aimed at solving sometimes unbelievably violent problems. The new ones will be good. Welcome to the team.
NPNBW!

Refinement and Nuance

Competence is quick, nuance is slow. Going from zero to sixty, metaphorically taking a completely new student from no skill to useable skill is relatively easy and relatively quick. Everyone makes huge gains when they start a new study- the learning curve is steep, and that can be addictive.

It takes a different kind of teacher and a different mindset on the part of the student to take that competency to a higher level. Perhaps yet a different one to increase the skill still more.

Some go into 'refinement' and that can be rewarding or a trap. You can look at anything through steadily increasing powers of magnification and find endless variation and information. The rock at normal sight is a rock with a given shape and substance. At ten times magnification there are previously unseen cracks, stresses and topography. At a hundred there are many different crystals in complex matrices.. and on and on until you are dealing with particals at the edge of comprehension, or dealing with things that can only be experienced indirectly (aside- this also happens in long-term relationships with spouses or coworkers: things too small to notice in the early months and years become glaring in the selective memory as the easy parts become unnoticed, taken for granted).

Refinement is rewarding in that it is a life-long endeavor of improvement and discipline; a trap in that these details can become more important than the basics and the original reason for studying at all can be forgotten.

I separate nuance from refinement. Refinement can be achieved merely by looking harder. Nuance requires looking in a new way. An example is 'fighting emptiness'. At close quarters it is usually instinctive to attempt tp match strength with strength and a lot of skill training goes into maximizing the use of leverage or exploiting subtle vagaries of momentum and balance. Fighting emptiness is learning to see where the opponent _isn't_, where he has NO strength and begin working in and from this space. It usually requires no new skill, but opens up a vast world of application. Nuances can jack up the learning curve (especially as measured by successful application) back to a beginner's learning speed.

In fighting and martial arts, your competence can be my nuance and vice-versa. If you have studied a system based on delivering crushing power, manipulating the threat's balance and momentum may be an advanced study for you, possibly almost mystical. It is right there and always has been but is invisible until you are taught to see it. Conversely, if my style centers on balance and momentum, the application of crushing power may be a mystery. Both competencies work, both nuances increase the effectiveness.

You will find advanced nuance in many things, some are the same with different names. The concept of fighting emptiness is familiar to me from judo, jujutsu, aikido (thanks SOL), Chen Taiji (thanks, Ted), Japanese swordsmanship and even once in a karate class long ago. Searching for nuance is one of the big advantages of cross-training. There are only so many ways to move a human body- but there are an infinite number of ways of understanding, explaining or teaching the ways. And there are a near-infinite number of ways of prioritizing them, often based on what the skills were dealing with: your village worries about being unarmed against a sword? Better not be there. Your tribe carries out duels with knives on sloping muddy hills? Better learn to slice while crawling. Your culture has hundreds of years of unarmed one on one duels? Gonna have lots of nuance and refinement in those systems... but the nuance will be different than the clans who have spent hundreds of years in a perpetual civil war.

The hard part, when you quest for nuance, is integration. Refinement can be hard too. When you are playing with atoms and crystals it is easy to forget that the problem is human sized. Nuance, though, must be integrated.

It can be hard. The most common example is teaching grappling to strikers. They immediately stop striking the second they hit the ground. They create an artificial separation of these skills: in this situation, these skills; in that situation, those skills. It happens with cops, too. They take a "tactical groundfighting course" and completely forget weapon retention, available force options, radios, the environment and sometimes the mission, going for the submission instead of either the escape or the cuff.

The skills must be played with, the insights allowed to play off of each other with gentle reminders from the teacher when an area of nuance is missed. In most arts, going from zero to sixty, the instructor is teaching you to move. At sixty to eighty, the instructor needs to teach you to see.

A Tradition Dies

We were too late for the early morning ferry, so we left Victoria very late, driving down through Washington State in the dark. It was late and everyone was hungry but we held off for an extra half hour to hit one of our traditional places.

The last couple of years have been very quiet in some ways. Obligations and on-call stuff at work have hugely eaten in to leisure time. Injuries make rough country hiking and caving and climbing and anything cold far less pleasant than it used to be. Shift work makes it hard to connect with old partners for long adventures. Most have matured into respectable jobs with very regular hours...but they don't have nearly as much fun! The people I do spend time with, family, for some strange reason like comfort and 'touristy' stuff- museums and shopping and cuisine.

Anyway, a couple of years ago, this one restaurant was our after-adventure stop for anything we did in northern or north central Washington. The death march to Cave Ridge? Oh yeah. Olympic Peninsula? Mt. Ranier?

It was a 24 hour prime rib joint. It looked like a dive- dimly lit with a questionable salad bar, cranky waitresses and a menu heavy on meat. Paradise. We had a lot of good meals there (ever had a cajun-blackened slab of prime rib? Too hot to eat, too good to stop.) A lot of good times. DGM threw caution to the winds and tasted alcohol. LG was slightly less vegetarian there.

I don't remember all the times we would walk in grubby from crawling in caves sometimes with tattered knee pads around our ankles, shredded jackets and occassionally bleeding; or still soaking wet and cold from rafting or diving at Hood canal. the waitresses wouldn't even blink. Sit us down, menus, coffee without asking. Honestly telling us what was good...

So with hungry kids and all, we put off eating a little longer.

There's a new owner. It used to look like the place a truck driver would go to get his heart broken. It's now a family restaurant, too bright, too much light. Smaller booths with lower backs. The salad bar still looks questionable, but it's no longer charming. The wait staff is all young. They don't argue and barely talk. Cajun-blackened steak and their in-house steak rub are no longer on the menu. The owner is there, too talkative to the (very few) patrons and mean, almost viciously insulting to his staff. And the foods not even good. I actually bent a fork holding down a rib eye steak.

It was a little sad. I could imagine ghosts of old conversations and laughter drifting by on their way into the past. Never again to be.

Maori

On the ferry from Victoria, by chance, we were treated to a dance troup from New Zealand- a demonstration of Maori dances and singing. It was a privelege and an education.

So much there and so few of the tourists (I feel) saw it.

Long ago, the Maori were one of the most sophisticated martial cultures in the world. Not technologically- their tools were of stone, wood and bone. Perhaps not even pragmatic- though they had missile weapons they eschewed them for combat with humans. But their children were taught to fight and to kill from an early age. They were a society without writing that had formal schools- not just for the military arts but for many things. One of the early European explorers stated categorically that no fencing master in all of Europe would stand a chance against a Maori graduate of their stick-fighting colleges. High praise from an enemy who considers you a savage.

So I watched the dance- beautiful fluidity of hula suddenly broken with staccato violent action and stamping and war faces. Defensive positions of arms and legs that would be familiar to any fighter. Breathing patterns that only a handful would recognize combined with strikes to their own bodies... for rhythm, of course. Far removed from the kote-kitae toughening exercises and the Sanchin testing they so strongly resembled (Sarcasm).

One dance, a challenge dance, was one of the few where dancers touched each other. Plain as day in this dance was a strangle and spine twist... with the short stabbing motions of a dagger from the off hand. It was from behind, swift and controlled. A pure killing technique preserved and taught in dance. So many little things- marching in step, with and without noise; war faces; exploding from peace to battle action; no separation- the fertility dances also had combat...

Unsure how the others in the audience saw it. Unsure if even the dancers really saw it (but I watched one move, later, separate from the dance and it's hard to believe that he didn't know he was a fighter). The elder who was escorting them was more concerned with their survival and future, I think, than their culture's past. He'd watched too many destroy lives in crime or drugs or stupidity (a too common thing in the aftermath of a colonial world) and was more preaching connection. In our culture it sounded like family value platitudes to many of the audience... but it was what a wise man saw as the best hope. Time spent with family. Connecting to something greater than one's self. Service. Discipline.

Did the audience feel, on some level, that they were watching a tradition of a truly fierce people? Of all the native cultures I have read of the Maori alone were not afraid of or even impressed by the muskets of the explorers. Had a Cortez or a Pizarro attempted a military victory over the Maori, their expeditions would have simply disappeared, footnotes in history. It was slower with the Maori. They were allowed to trade for tools and weapons. They liked the steel tools and the muskets. Like many colonized people they used them on each other to settle old feuds rather than standing together against the new threat.

And so their children's children's children dance for the amusement and donations of a crowd. It was a precious gift for those who looked.

Limited Time

Swamped right now. Barely been near a computer for the last week and will be heading off for vacation (anybody in Victoria BC?) for a week soon.

Have also been asked to condense an 8 hour DT class into a two hour class for the media. Sigh.

I'll try to post if I get access- already have some things on the back burner. Maybe talking about evil. Or why people poke bears and then get surprised when they are bitten. The difference between teaching good students and bad. The difference between a poor student and a bad one.

Stuff.

Be careful, all y'all.

More on Heart and Freezing

These are works in process, more questions than answers, so take them for what they are worth. In the last post I talked about heart or spirit as the ability to act and the fact that it is a quality easier detected in its absence than in its presence. We know when people run or freeze or frenzy... we rarely know why they didn't. If anywhere, heart is in those 'whys'.

But everyone freezes. Do a search for "Half-Second Freeze" and look at the post of that name (the new program doesn't seem to allow me to link to a single archived post). I still freeze sometimes. One of the things I teach is how to break out of a freeze 'cause I've done it so often in so many different circumstances. Everyone freezes if the circumstances are right and even the most hardened veteran still harbors a fear he will freeze again, and maybe next time just a little too long.

Maybe if we look at the ways we freeze?

The OO bounce. Search for the posts on the OODA loop, especially 'OODA Introduction' and 'OODA Insights'. If information/stimulus/action is coming too fast to grasp it, if you never finish Orienting before another action that is Observed happens, you brain freezes. This is reliable as hell... except through training, luck or conditioning I have a habit of shutting down stimulus that overwhelms me. The fact that you are in an OO freeze becomes an Observation itself with a programmed Decision and Action. It works but... there is no guarantee that multiple sources of stimulus or novel types of stimulus won't overwhelm it. So, in a limited way, you might be able to train this one.

Novelty. The inability to Orient at all. If you see something and can't tell what it is, you can't Orient so you can't Decide so you don't Act. This alone accounts for the reason why veterans freeze less than rookies and recover sooner... but there is no one who has 'seen it all', there's too much 'all' out there, so everyone is vulnerable. Combat non-sequitors are another level of this- present something so unusual that the Orient stage takes more time and you buy a little freeze. Feinting on another level does the same thing, the person must Orient to whether the attack is real or a distraction. Training and experience work for this one, but only to an extent. There are things so big and bad (or just weird) that you won't be ready for them. Boxing match does not equal soccer riot does not equal firefight.

Lack of Confidence. A big one but vague. If you don't believe you can prevail, you probably won't try. Losing can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most insiduous are the people who were taught as children that failure was inevitable so trying was stupid. Many people are dealing with that lesson, and losing to it, well into their adult life. I almost wish this one wern't so easy to alter. There is almost no correlation between confidence and actual ability. I want to believe "train the skills and trust the skills" but I know damn well that a cult leader personality can turn a mouse into a fighter much faster than I can.. and much, much faster than they can learn the skills to be successful fighters. High confidence and low skills never ends well.

Permission. Read the post on "The Big Three". Simply, most people have never worked out what they are willing to do and when and why. They have glitches and inhibitions and issues that they are not aware of. Who ever says there are no rules in a street fight is an idiot. There are layers and layers of unconscious rules, some social and some genetic, that I am just beginning to unravel. Until you have identified and faced your unconscious rule sets you will have freezes that you are not aware of. Can this be trained? Perhaps in some deep psychological counseling way. A good instructor may notice some glitches in training and bring it out in to the light. That may be enough to fix them and it may not. Some permission glitches are ugly: the bank manager in the last post didn't want to be rude. Compare that to "Betrayed by the Angel" where the author was brutally raped ...partially because she didn't want to be rude. Experience again can break part of the permission freeze. For some people things like killing or fighting that were very hard the first time become easier the second, third fourth... time. NOT (IMO) because they have changed their internal rules. It just gets easier. I think the ones who suffer the most never address the rules (and it is the rules, again in my opinion, that are a big part of the pain). The ones who examine their rules and permissions- "this is normally bad but under these circumstances it was necessary, just and good." Recover better. Maybe.

The Looking Glass. This is related to Permission, probably a subset of it, but worth looking at. There's a post on this, too "Through the Looking Glass". Simply, we all have skills in conflict management that have worked for us all our lives. But there are situations and types of violence where those skills and rules don't apply. Nothing you learned about managing dinner table arguments with your fractious family will help you in an ambush. Nothing you learned about protesting corruption will help you in a gang stomping. Those are social skills that rely on something resembling a society. When those rules go out the window, almost all of those skills are counter productive. There is no win/win solution or teaming strategy in a torture/murder/rape- trying only identifies you as a compliant 'good' victim. The Looking Glass freeze comes from the inability to tell when you have crossed the line and are no longer working under the rules or even in the world that you are used to. This is the "Why is this happening to me?" freeze. The "What do they want" and "But I haven't done anything wrong!" freezes. Training? I think you can teach about this one. Once aware, it's not that hard to recognize. Permission to act then becomes a separate issue. How to act becomes a third.

These are off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more.

To the issue of 'heart' it seems more and more that is a fuzzy word, not an absolute and maybe not a quality at all. There are certainly limits to it.

More to think about.

Encounter

He's tall and lanky. Crack skinny. Almost toothless. Homeless couture and homeless smell sitting in a plush chair in the bank lobby. The bank manager is bringing him coffee. The other bank workers are staying well away, avoiding theis man who might well be crazy and dangerous. They expect the manager to 'deal with it'. In this context it means that they expect the manager to make the person leave.

He is not a customer, barely a citizen. He is playing on reluctance of most polite, civilized people to say ugly truths, make demands, be rude.

The manager plays right into it: being polite, bringing the man coffee, hoping that the intruder's 'sixth sense' will kick in and he will understand that he is not welcome. The manager doesn't understand that the old con is perfectly aware he is not welcome, he just doesn't care. He will milk it for coffee and a chance to rest out of the wind. The fact that he is making richer people with more social sense than he has feel scared is just a bonus. It makes the game fun.

When the manager finally gets up the nerve and asks him to leave, (maybe orders, later, but he will try polite first) and threatens to call the cops (much later) the old con will pretend to be hurt and indignant. He will twist the knife all he can to bring a lasting guilt and self-doubt to this pseudo-authority figure. That will be partly for fun but it is also calculated: the evil men of the world know that if you make people feel guilty for taking a stand, there will be fewer to take a stand every year. It is one small, constant step in creating a culture of willing victims.

Don't get me wrong, I know this con, recognize him, and the in ocean of evil he is a very small fish. Not brave enough to be physically dangerous most of the time, not smart enough to do much damage, not foresighted enough to see much beyond the next rock.

So he sits there with his coffee, talking non-stop to the manager who pretends to listen. His filthy shoes are propped on the glistening coffee table with the pink inmate socks (stolen when he was released from his last custody) clearly visible around his ankles.

Spirit, Mind and Body

It would seem that mind and body would be enough, wouldn't it? There are your physical actions and your decisions- what more need be said? You hear about spirit a lot in martial arts and in the military and even in sports. Some talk vaguely about training or forging spirit but no one seems to have a hard definition.

Mind and body aren't enough to explain it. Spirit may be vague, but it is there. It is one of those things you see in negative space, see in a strange action or the absence of an expected action. Like astronomers finding a planet they can't see by the wobble in one they can.

The simple fact is that if mind and body were enough to explain human behavior in combat, people would do the right thing. At least they would do the sensible thing. But after you have watched videos or experienced yourself a moment when you know that if you do not act and act now you will surely die and you were unable to move, mind and body alone don't explain that. Hence we talk about spirit.

It may be many things or one thing or a combination of things. Body includes the chemical responses to fear that affect cognition and the brain. Spirit may be as simple as a quality of the grey area, neither body or mind but how they effect each other. In this case a strong spirit may be as simple as a weak chemical flow or a neural insensitivity. Strong spirit may be a side effect of greater separation between mind and body.

(Aside: I've often wondered about pain. If I can run with a broken fibula and another person is crying and can't stand am I dealing with the pain better? Or just feeling it less? Is 'toughness' a mental strength or a sensitory weakness?)

Is it the matter of pre-conscious social conditioning? Is it voices in the head from early childhood telling you not to hit and how good children behave?

Do people have different resistances to new things? Lonnie Athens talks about stepping off the blue print, that no matter how often or hard you have trained, you are subconsciously aware that none of that was real and this, the real deal, is. Hence the hesitation and that all people to some extent, are reluctant to push their envelope. Is this reluctance variable? Everyone is afraid to do X but some people find the fear different or less inhibiting? Or some find acting easier than others (sounds similar but actually very different, a 'brakes weak' versus 'engine strong' comparison).

Do different people find training more real than others? Does blind faith in your system increase your ability to take chances with it? Can spirit just be (or just be mimicked by) an ability to ignore facts and trust what you have been told? I find that thought disturbing.

How much of spirit is inate, how much conditioning? How do genetics and experience interact?

When three people stand when thousands run, perhaps one read too many King Arthur stories as a child; one was afraid people would talk; and one was too adrenalized to know that the others had run and didn't have enough brain working to think of it himself. From the outside, all would look like courage (not exactly the same as spirit but one of the signs) even though the reasons and internal states were very different.

It would be interesting to see what each of us have done to forge our spirits and determine which of the possible conditions we were subconsciously trying to affect. Maybe see how well it worked and where, when and how it didn't. Hmmmmm.

Heart

Here's a question: Can heart be trained?

Some of the answers are sure and glib, but leave me unconvinced. Heart can be faked...

What do I mean by heart?

We always watch rookies, because until the first big fight there is no way to know who will run to it, who will run away and who will freeze. Size and gender don't seem to matter. Military training and a wall full of martial arts trophies don't seem to matter. Most freeze and the good ones force themselves to engage in their first fight. A few scatter. A very, very few jump in.

It's not the same as the ability to hold the line. The military trains and we know very well that the fear of being seen as a coward, the herd instinct, the need to belong is what keeps people in the fight under fire. They will hold together... but when they break and run, they will all run together too. The real heart is shown in those very few who stood when the rest of the herd ran. The few great leaders that rallied a broken unit who had lost and were running. Whether he was a good general or not, George Washington did this when the colonial army was lost. Maybe not a good general- but a great leader.

It's also not the ability to return violence with violence. If you are raised in a dangerous environment you can be conditioned to respond hard and fast to scary things. These are the street fighters or combat vets who hear a noise and attack immediately and all-out. A handful do it with an amazing ferocity, but for most it is a fear reflex often uncontrolled or even blind. How many can face incoming fire and stand and aim, precisely, efficiently?

And this is not the same, either: spraying automatic weapons fire into the general area of a threat is a fear reaction and not at all the same as looking in the eyes as you close in, knowing only one will walk away.

Can it be trained? (Should it, for that matter?)

From the comic book ads of yesteryear to modern seminars, the promise really hasn't changed that much, "Fear No Man!"

I've seen heart grow. The rookie who freezes and forces himself to act and does it again and again, starts to act as the default, stays calm with experience and can become a hell of an operator. But I've never seen a training that can make someone brave or dedicated. I have seen training that can get them to panic in a more useful direction, running through the threat rather than away... but only the people selling it pretend it's not panic.

Details

Sometimes, when you practice an old art a detail will jump out at you and it slowly sinks in... this was used for killing people. We have separated that killing so far from martial arts that it is almost an alien concept, but what does martial mean? Dedicated to Mars, the God of War.

The early practitioners, in a time when there were no such thing as "Peace Officers" and people with strength did take what they wanted at will, lived and tested and remembered and used these skills in ways that are sometimes hard for us to envision. When we do see it, or at least when I see it, it is almost always in the details.

Why are men's shirts buttoned left over right, just like a gi? Because the hilt of a weapon tends to hang up on the draw if you do it otherwise. Found out that little detail practicing left-handed draws.

In a Filipino system learning a knife form there was a peculiar hand position with the free hand, it made no sense in sparring and seemed pointless in drills... someone had learned the hard way that it kept the blood from splashing in your eyes.

In our old jujutsu kata one of the assassination forms has confusing witnesses built into the technique. The old bastards that came up with this stuff weren't playing a game. They knew killing the enemy was only part of it- you also had to get away.

Is the karate low chamber with the off hand for power? A grip? Or just because that was where fishermen carried a knife?

Just a few little things, and I don't see or hear it in the grandiose explanations of instructors or the fervid fantasies of enthusiastic practitioners... it is in the small movements that don't make sense until blood begins to flow. Walking styles for slippery footing. Ways to hold the head to increase peripheral vision. Left hip forward on the draw. Stepping well out of the range of the 'dead' opponent before re-sheathing. Shortening the grip on the weapon...

Three Layers

This started as a simple idea, then another idea and then a third idea that tied them together. Really, this should be three posts, but the connection seems very powerful and important right now.

1) HEROES Our agency is getting a lot of flack right now. Some from the media, some from our own members, some from the public. In any big group, people will make mistakes over time. In any high stress situation, people will make mistakes... the people who make money by focusing on the mistakes and screaming for change will never know what we do every day.

Our people are exhausted. After a five-year hiring freeze, we are very short handed. There is a lot of overtime and a lot of money to be made in overtime, but the people who do it regularly are exhausted. Some are working three or even five extra shifts a week. Every week. Others are given no choice- the operation requires a certain number of bodies and when no one volunteers, somebody has to be ordered to stay. The public outcry, however, is about OT expenses and sick time abuse. I'll be honest, when I've had 34 hours of sleep in the last seven days I've been tempted to call in sick just to sleep, and I have burned a vacation day for eight hours of sleep and it felt like a vacation... and I do relatively little overtime.

We've cut our beds drastically from the past. That doesn't mean we have fewer criminals... when jail beds are cut crime goes up because punishment is less likely. What this means for us is that we have a higher concentration of more dangerous people in custody, the ones who are less likely to be dangerous are the ones left out on the streets. More dangerous people supervised by an exhausted skeleton crew... Yes, staff is assaulted more frequently and more seriously than ever. No one hears about that.

They don''t hear about the officers who talk down severe psych inmates in crisis every day.
They don't hear about the officer who walks into a tense situation (between inmate and inmate or even inmate and officer) and gets everyone to calm down and talk.
They rarely hear about the officers in a situation where deadly force could be used who risk their own lives to handle it at a lower level.

This blog is called Chiron because, like the centaur, I am aware that I do not train men or women or officers. I train heroes. Every day I am surrounded by people who deal with dark, dangerous and depressing situations so that no one else has to. Men and women who deal with life and death decisions in split seconds with only partial information. Men and women who are castigated by the people they protect for any perceived departure from perfection. They hold their heads high.

Remember the song, "The Impossible Dream"? Here is a line:

"And the world will be better for this: That one man, scorned and covered with scars, still strove with his last ounce of courage..."
That's who I work with. Scorned and covered with scars...

2) YOU ARE WHAT YOU SEE People respond to the world as if the world was like them. When reporters or citizens assume or declare that anyone in power must be corrupt, it is because they believe or fear or know that given that power they would use it for their own ends. When someone warns you that no one can be trusted, watch out. When someone treats strangers as trustworthy or takes risks, they are often safe to take risks with.

This is mirroring, and it is reliable. We assume, until proven otherwise, people see what we see and evaluate the information in much the same way- one of the reasons why some people are offended by others who disagree on subjects like politics. If we come to different conclusions from similar information and (the assumption) we process it the same, the only way we can have different conclusions is if you are stupid... You see this all the time, yes?

The other side effect is that people tend to hang with people who are much like them. If you are aware that all of your friends are jerks, I hate to be the one to tell you, but so are you. When you look around at your friends and feel lucky to be in such awesome and inspirational company, you are doing well. Your friends are looking at you the same way. When someone on the outside says, "No one is that honorable, they're covering deep, dark secrets," that person has only told you about himself.

3) See the tie in? Maybe it is a chicken-and-the-egg (layers in the post title. Get it?) thing. I am surrounded every day by heroes. How could I NOT step up when I am needed? How could I not do the right thing? My life is largely spent trying to be worthy of the people I see all around me. Not just the officers- their day to day heroism is expected. We get paid for it and we deliver. But even inmates some of whom I've written about here who have struggled to cope with trauma from early childhood or Vietnam; criminals who have tried; people who have dealt with levels of mental illness that might have crushed anyone else in despair but they kept fighting and trying and surviving, maybe not even understanding why. And my friends, who have been strong and honorable and faithful, have met challenges and disasters and just kept going. Friends and family who bring light to the world no matter how dark it gets...
How could I not strive to live up to what is all around me?

Deer in the Headlights

Complex things are simple, once you learn to deal with what they really are. Fighting is simple. You already know how to move, you've been doing it your whole life. You already know how to read people to ascertain their intent and motivation and strengths and weaknesses- you do it in conversation a hundred times a day. But if you focus on the trivia, obsess with the things that are different, you can paralyze yourself to complete inaction.

It's like people. People are pretty much all the same (even in their need to believe they are unique) and pretty simple creatures to boot (including in their need to believe that they are complex). There are some that are more different than others, schizophrenics for example, but people are pretty much all the same. If you work with what we have in common, you can get amazing things done. If you obsess on the differences, the paralyzation can be disastrous. This could be another post in itself- the great political and social divides between cosmetic differences. Enough.

We were trying to get a new instructor up to speed. There's a weird way that cops become instructors for other cops. They ask to be. You kind of expect that if someone wants to be a firearms instructor they have some experienmce with shooting or a DT instructor has some training or experience in fighting, but that's not always the case. Sometimes the people that ask just want to teach. Or are padding a resume. Or just want a break from the regular job. Or think it will be easy overtime...

The second step is where the instructors get selected. Sometimes it is formal, but in many agencies it isn't. When informal, one of two things happen. If things are going well and the agency is healthy, the instructor candidate gets the nod based on the needs of the agency. For instance I prefer small, female DT instructors. A 240 pound gorilla making a technique work doesn't really mean all that much, but when a 140 pounder shows that she can roll a gorilla or hold one down that gives confidence in the technique.

In an unhealthy agency the person making decision might be afraid to say "no" especially to a ruthless (but unqualified and ill-suited) resume padder; or might be inclined to say 'yes' to an unqualified and ill-suited friend. Or pick someone based on ease of working with instead of actual teaching ability.

In healthy and unhealthy agencies, once you get a core of good instructors they sometimes forget to bring new blood into the instructor cadre. Teaching cops how to put people down is not always physically easy. It's much less fun as you get older and fewer of your joints are original stock.

Long preface, but essentially we had a handful of experienced instructors and one rank beginner who had to get up to speed on teaching the DT curriculum for this cycle.

The information I give the instructors isn't the same as the students get. The instructors need to know "why" the students need to know "how". Sometimes you need to have the "why" down cold to explain the "how".

So the instructors get the overview- violence dynamics; how assaults happen; adrenaline effects; how to break out of the freeze; three critical stages of the physical fight; the OODA loop; tying everything back to use of force policy and law.

On the mat they needed to know the drills, but also the reason behind the drills, how to use the drills for coaching and what to look for. One experienced instructor from another discipline immediately latched on to the flaw in the drill (every drill has a flaw- if you are training to hurt people without hurting them, there is a safety flaw built in) and questioned it until he agreed that it was corrected elsewhere and addressed directly and the least damaging flaw we could use.

It's a lot of material, but it is dead simple and works specifically off of the student's natural actions and reactions. There's a lot here but not a lot to understand. Been afraid before? That's not new. Answered a phone or shook hands? Those movements aren't new. Tripped and been tripped? Not new.

The new instructor was overwhelmed. The blank stare of a deer caught in the headlights. Trying so hard to memorize every detail. Disconcerted by the way the others (with far more fighting experience) were casually clicking- "Right, I've seen that. That's good."

For the new instructor it was new information being crammed in. For the veterans it was new categories that allowed them to dump some trivia and classify what they already knew into a tighter, faster package. The exact same information to a new guy was complicated and complicating. For the veterans, it was simplifying.

DSM-IV

Finishing up my degree in psychology I had to look into the publishing policies of the APA. They disturbed me at the time, and they still do. My opinion has usually been that science is a search for truth and that truth is rarely comfortable. I don't need to get into the details. Suffice it to say that sometimes things change between editions of the DSM and sometimes those changes are not based on research.

There are some old classifications that I really like because they make quick useful distinctions. One example is neurosis, psychosis and schizophrenia. The first two no longer exist as discrete diagnoses and the third has become very specific. Everybody has problems or unusual habits. When the habits were only noticed by you and didn't effect the rest of your life, you were healthy. When they did effect your life, it was a neurosis. When it started affecting other people's lifes it was a psychosis and when you were no longer playing in the community sandbox, when the world you responded to wasn't the same as everyone else sees, it was schizophrenia. Scientifically robust? Maybe not. Useful shorthand? Definitely.

Setting up the latest training for crisis communication with the mentally ill I had to look up some stuff in the DSM-IV and saw something that really disturbed me- the sociopath has been tacked on as an alternate name for the Anti-Social Personality Disorder. In earlier editions, there was a distinction and there was a physiological test to show the distinction, a negative GSR (galvanic skin response). GSR is part of the "lie detector test"- your skin's conductivity to electricity changes under stress. Lying is stressful. A true sociopath didn't even have a GSR response to pain. Pain was not stressful.

Personally, I see the difference in action and it is an important and a qualitative difference. It is not quantitative, it is not a matter of a sociopath being more antisocial that an APD. An APD cares more about himself than you. We all do this, but the APD takes it to extremes, and there are gradations of it. An APD who decides that what he wants is more important than what you want will take your stuff and feel no guilt. An APD who feels that what he wants is more important than your life is more severe and will rob and kill. An APD who feels not being bored is more important than your life will kill you for fun. More extreme yet.

The true sociopath doesn't think any of this (you, me, the world) is real. I'm split on whether they think of themselves as real. They are essentially playing the biggest, most complex video game ever.

If you've played video games (I'm thinking GTA: San Andreas here) they are fun, exciting, you might get a little trickle of adrenaline- but there is no remorse, not even to your own characters death. Slaughtering is a technical skill, not an act of will or desperation. To live life this way can be powerful, even liberating- but it is very alien.

Probably the only saving grace is that the world is so complex that there are many ways to win, so few sociopaths become serial killers by deciding that the points are in the body count. Instead they may shoot for business or political success... or suspecting that there is an emptiness inside try to fill it with the artificial emotion of drugs and destroy themselves.

Unloading

Impact arts- karate, wing tsun, TKD and the like have a serious disadvantage in live scenario training. In real life, you hit someone hard or hit someone a lot and they either stop what they are doing or they don't, but you know. In live scenarios with the emphasis on safety you can't hit for real. Even in baton training, the practice baton is light and padded and the threat can take more harder hits than he could hope to survive if they were delivered with a flashlight or a piece of hickory.

Grappling and locking arts have less of a disadvantage. A guy is pinned or he isn't, locked or he isn't and there isn't much difference in the end state between real life and playing. (There are differences leading up to the end state, trust me, but a threat choked unconscious looks almost exactly like a competitor choked unconscious).

What this means, in training, is that the students see grappling (using real technique) stop the fight and they rarely, if ever, see striking (using pulled or padded or otherwise safe techniques) stop the fight.

It also means that strikers rarely get to unload. When they do unload, they don't know what to expect.

To an extent, that's realistic. You can line ten people up and hit them in the head as hard as you can (taking your own broken hand out of the equation) maybe two will lose consciousness; six might go "ow" and/or fall down; one will hit you back without thinking and one will look at you and smile. The effects of striking are really idiosyncratic and unpredictable- which is why if somebody is worth hitting, they are probably worth hitting a lot.

I've used armor to offset this a little. This goes back to the last thread on the knife thing. Every so often you run across a pure striker with a lot of faith and they do very, very well. They power in continuous damaging strikes, usually with a nice loud kiai. They ignore the weapon, don't try to block, defend or grab and they do very well. The constant attack tends to freeze the guy with the knife, defeating the mind first (and thanks, Mac, for being the first to figure this out).

Even armor doesn't do it though, it's not quite enough to make things safe. Armor is impact reduction, but the person wearing armor has to be able to defend himself. He must be sufficiently more skilled than the striker to protect his joints, especially his neck; take take some pretty unorthodox falls; and still allow the student to impact.

There's also a mental switch and levels of unloading. My dream day used to be playing the bad guy for cell extraction practice with my tactical team. Five to eight skilled fighters, fully armored. I could unload, but not all the way. Ribs and noses still broke, hands bounced off walls and other helmets... the dream needed to be toned down. It was unloading, but not completely slipping the leash.

When my students go after me in armor, I get the same feeling. They are unloading, and some think they are giving me everything they have, but there is a whole other level they don't touch. It reverses, I have a student (big and skilled preferably) put on the armor for me to unload and everyone gets hesitant. Wearing armor is the sign that there will be an ass beating. That probably sounds like punishment, but it isn't.

This is hard to explain. Contrast:
Students practicing non-contact.
Students striking, me in armor- tap, tap, set hard with a grunt of effort, another hard strike, a follow-up medium, get distance, tap
Me striking- close range, hard; drop step for one strike, leg scoop for the next; multiple directions to make it hard to set, unbalancing to combine and offset with the strikes... It's overwhelming and it is supposed to be: speed + power + multidirectional + integrated throwing, striking and locking + kicks closer than most have trained, multiple striking surfaces (fist, elbow, hand, wrist, inner elbow, shoulder, hip, knee, head, feet).

The students know how to do this, they've seen me do it, they've practiced each piece of it... but they hold back. Their unloading isn't the same as my unloading. And my unloading on a student isn't nearly the same level as my unloading on the team and a far cry from slipping the leash when I think my life is in danger.

But they seem to think it is all they have.

Why I Don't Pretend to Teach Knife Defense

This is the title of a seminar that I've done a couple of times over the last few years and I recently read someone describing 'safe and efficient' knife disarms. It made me a little ill and a little scared that some people believe in this, believe it enough to teach it and can find students naive enough to swallow it.

The class starts with some pictures I've collected of knife wounds, empasizing that one set was from a prison shank, just a piece of metal that had been scraped on a floor, not some custom fighting knife sharpened to a razor edge. The most gruesome was a single cut from a kitchen knife. Gives them a very basic idea of what the hell they are talking about. What the stakes are if they choos to gamble in this arena.

Then I ask for someone with no experience or training with a knife. I take the volunteer aside, hand her the training knife and whisper, "Keep the knife moving, get it in to them any way you can. Cut anything they stick out, if someone grabs your hand switch hands and keep stabbing and slashing. Got it?"

I then turn back to the students and say, "This person now has less than thirty seconds of knife training. Who in here teaches knife defense?"

At this point, with the put up or shut up time, there are no volunteers. I pick somebody.
The first time I did this drill (for those who don't recognize it, it is Tony Blauer's Manson Drill) the volunteer was a sixteen-year old female green belt in Uech-ryu karate with no knife training. The expert (and, honestly, the Uechi guys didn't need to be picked, they did volunteer- they have consistantly been both braver and humbler than most martial artists, in my experience) was a sixth-dan and 20 year veteran police officer. He only got hit twelve times. ( We count the stabs and usually end it at twenty, which is just a few seconds).

In a big diverse group, it quickly becomes clear that almost nothing works against a fast moving, aggressive knife. The guys who have spent years with knives get slaughtered just as fast as people who have never tried it before- faster, if they really believe it works- they practically jump on the blade.

Then we talk about how knives are actually used. I demonstrate some prison shanking techniques and some mexican gang assassination techniques and the one Japanese tanto kata I know and they all have a lot in common- very close, from surprise and using the other hand to freeze the target before the knife come into view. Are those the attacks you train against? If not, too bad, because those are the attacks that happen. This brings up one of the big rules: Knives aren't used for winning fights. Knives are used for killing people.

Then the Reception Line drill. One student is picked out and I joyfully announce that he or she has been elected governor. It is now time for the inaugural ball. You first duty is to shake hands with all the people lining up to congratulate you- contributors, friends, political allies and rivals. You have to be nice, friendly. By the way, your security detail has information someone plans to kill you. Have a nice party.

The governor then faces away and one of the other students gets the knife. All the students are given instructions. Be happy, be friendly, shake hands, hug, then mill around behind the governor. The assassin can attack at any time- while shaking hands, later, after everyone else is done, while the governor is getting a hug...

The students cycle through the governor role. At least once, time permitting, there is no assassination attempt and the whole class gets to take a good hard look at how stilted and weird the body language of someone who is afraid can be... good education.

But in the end, the critique is almost always the same. No one yelled for help. No one ran. No one yelled, "He's got a knife!" No one used the mirrors all around or the weapons lying everywhere (we usually do this at a MA seminar, remember)... in the end, people were trying to come up with martial arts solutions to survival problems. As much as we want to pretend otherwise, that is rarely a good fit.

At this point someone usually gets frustrated (which is fair, they've been there for almost an hour getting told nothing works and they've wasted sometimes years of training- not exactly the message but what many choose to hear) and asks what I would do.

I tell them what has worked for me in the past, and caution them that if five real-life knife defenses seems like a lot it isn't- no one in there would put up with a judo coach who had only had five matches. Then I show them my highest percentage shot (in either scenario, it doesn't matter). Sometimes I get stabbed up to three times, often I don't... then I let it sink in that what worked was fighting minds.

This is frustrating- by only hinting it feels like I'm jerking you around, but the nature of fighting minds instead of bodies is that it quits working if the person has time to think about it. Hopefully, this is a drill I'll do with some of you in the future. Don't want to spoil it by letting you think.

Instinctive, Conscious and Unconscious Fighting

A question I threw out elsewhere and I want to discuss it here. There are three (actually four) discrete ways that people respond to fights. Not all fights are the same and not all violence dynamics are the same and not all people are the same... etc. Violence is an infinite thing but sometimes you can categorize it- and sometimes the categories are even useful.

Martial artists train to develop skill. They train to be skilled fighters. They train to bring clean and efficient skills into a messy environment. Often it doesn't work. Sometimes it does.

In "Angry White Pyjamas" Robert Twigger writes of his year training in the intensive aikido course taught to the Tokyo riot police. Not going to comment on the book, read it yourself and make up your own mind about the book and the author. In one scene, however, he supplied a big clue. He happened to be training when the founder of this particular branch of aikido died. He was able to participate in a mourning 'pub crawl': the highest ranks of this system drinking their way from bar to bar. He got to watch them get into a mass bar fight.

These were some of the highest ranks in the world, extremely skilled practitioners of a system that has constant interaction with officers who test it hands-on. What Twigger saw was these masters rolling on the floor and swinging wild punches.

This is the way that people instinctively fight. This is why "control goes out the window" when a martial arts instructor ramps things up and pushes the students out of the comfort zone. This is why when martial artists go through simulation training they tend to flail and can't make things work. This is why some of my officers, with the best range training in the world, couldn't hit the broad side of a barn the first time they did a ConSim.

When instinct goes head-to-head with training, instinct will usually win unless you have a deep, down to your bones belief that your training is better than your instincts. That's hard, because instincts start bone deep. The two situations where I see training win out is when the training has been cultural as well as technical- in other words where the teacher was a veteran who could say what you will feel, what he had felt and why things worked or didn't. In essence, you borrow experience to create faith. The second is a student who has an almost cult-like faith. Blind faith can give courage and knowledge where healthy scepticism can give opinion and hesitation. It's an ugly truth, but fanatics tend to fight better than thinkers.

Conscious fighting can be good or very bad. Martial artists train for fighting -sort of- but they do it safely. There is no safe way to hurt someone. A handful of people are aware enough that training is not reality and disciplined enough to tell themselves, "This isn't a game, I'm going to have to do it differently" and then do it. It's rare and the balance lines are many and fine. Thinking too much is slow. You will never cognitively be able to analyze and make decisions in time to prevent a flurry of strikes- so how much of the process will be conscious requires balance. Where to focus requires balance, too, because the deadliest mind freezing questions "Who is doing this, why me..." etc. are also conscious.

Unconscious skilled fighting (instinctive fighting is unconscious and unskilled. The aikidoka Twigger mentions had skill but didn't use it, hence brawling) breaks down in two ways. One can be very good or very bad, the other is very good and very rare.

Skilled flinches can be very good or very bad. Someone swings and you act before your brain has caught up. It is blindingly fast, the cornerstone of ambush survival and the product of repetitive training in stimulus/response e.g. attack/counter. It can be really good if you trained a response that worked. Really bad if you trained one that didn't. My favorite example of this is Bryan who was surprised from behind and turned and fired three punches into the threat. The punches were so perfect that they made loud snaps against the threat's jacket and never touched his skin. Had there been a judge present there is no doubt that Bryan used winning technique.

This level of skilled flinches is limited. You simply can't flinch a complicated response. So it serves for the first few seconds of a fight and is critical in the first fraction of a second of an assault... but then you might be left either thinking, which is slow, or standing there getting hit or cut.

The rare good type also works on faith. I do not personally know anyone who got here from training alone. It took extensive experience. It is the ability to say, "My body knows what to do," and step aside and let it. It's not really your body, it's still your brain, but it is getting your conscious mind out of the way and trusting that everything will be okay.

It requires IME proven skill on two levels. If I know that I can handle likely situations, that my physical skills are up to the task I can let go without micro-managing myself. But that's only half. I also need to believe, absolutely that the decisions I make and what I do when the leash comes off will be decisions I can live with. I have to know that just as much as the fighting skills are internalized, part of who I am not just something I do, my ethical base is just as internalized. I need to know and trust that the subconscious decisions will be the same as the conscious ones would be if there was sufficient time.

This allows me to fight without thinking, or even to fight while thinking of something else, like paperwork or transport contingencies.

Short and Simple

The fourth day of training wasn't for the team. Saturday morning I got up and hit the road before first light and made the long drive to Seattle. Still feeling sleep deprived, but I wanted to do this.

Bob had asked me to come up to his dojo and be a guest teacher at a clinic. He said, "I'll do some judo, we'll have some aikido guys there and you get to do the tactics part."

What the hell does that mean? The tactics part? Entries? Team fighting? I asked and he wouldn't answer. Bob is just that laid back: "Whatever you want to do. You're good, everyone will have fun and I'm cooking barbecue."

It's a dojo where he sets up the grill outside and keeps beer in the fridge with the bottled water. It's perfect and I hope that you can understand this because it is powerful and wonderful: whether he ever realizes it consciously or not, Bob doesn't draw a distinction between his dojo and his home or his students and his family. He acts on the mat the way he acts with his best friends. There is no pretention at all. That is rare and special.

I generally like playing with judoka. They know their stuff, they know what they are doing (judo) and know what they aren't doing (self-defense fantasies). This tends to make them better at self defense than people who think they are training for it.

BTW- You didn't think 'Short and Simple' referred to this entry, did you?

The aikido bothered me and I was finally able to put my finger on what usually bothers me about aikido. A good aikidoka develops, in my opinion, two skills that are awesome in a real fight (caveat- they need to practice in a real fight before they can apply them, but the foundation is there): 1) aikidoka can find the empty space. They practice moving to where the sword or the fist isn't and where it's not going to be. It sounds simple, yet very few martial artists every practice it or think about it. 2) They can be masters at using gifts of momentum when they are presented.

The cool/weird thing about using momentum (with the exception of using it to increase force in a strike) is that it is effortless. The threat halls off and tries to take your head off with a straight punch and you gently touch the moving hand on one side and he fractures his fist against a wall. That's effortless and awesome. I think a lot of what I see and dislike in aikido comes from equating the feeling of effortlessness with effectiveness.

What I saw was a lot of long and complex chains of action. Each link in the chain was effortless, but by the time you had gone through eight links...

One in particular struck me, because it started with a spiral pass parry to a wrist lock that was then reversed, passed and wound up with a bent shoulder lock... and the exact same shoulder lock was right there from the initial spiral parry if you just frigging stepped in instead of focusing on blending so much.

Later, in the course of my piece, we talked about knife defenses. One of the aikido instructors had been a witness to a stabbing some time ago. It was an ambush and pretty well matched my knowledge of knife attacks. Using that real example, did it look like the knife attacks they practiced against in classes? Why not?

It's like practicing defenses against elephant charges. You know anyone who has been charged by an elephant? Why do so many martial artists practice against X when they know that Y happens? Why practice dodging imaginary elephants instead of real cars?

Kris Wilder (goju-ryu karate) was the star of the show. He's been doing something with spine alignment and structure that is pushing both his striking power and his body's ability to withstand blunt trauma to some interesting places. I've seen a lot of these things done in static positions. Kris can do them moving and seems to apply it in his judo as well as his karate (important note- I've seen some 'tai chi secrets' that were basic body alignment skills from judo; the judoka could use them moving, the 'tai chi master' couldn't).

His structural striking embodied the concept of short and simple.

More to work on.

Dialed

It's been a long week. Anybody miss me?

One day of training in a classroom- weapons of mass destruction recognition and familiarity; new protective suits and masks. Still trying to get the hang of the electronic radiation detector. We had the class two years ago from FEMA. Now it's from the Department of Homeland Security... so we sat through much of the same stuff again. Some was new- the instructor this time was a veteran HAZMAT officer and he had experience, which leads to unique insight and good advice.

Then two days on the range. I felt out of practice, tired, hungry and like I hadn't slept well in weeks. Hot, glaring sun. It was the worst shooting I can remember doing... so to feel better I would walk over to the other range where instructors from across the state were getting a refresher course. Instructors. One look at their targets and my pathetic shooting didn't look so bad. The worst target on our team (and we were practicing from the draw, often moving and transitioning from long weapon to handgun) looked better than the best on the instructor's side...

It was still pathetic, though. To our standards at least- to my standards.

Walking and shooting on a boardwalk, changing magazines and firing while moving backwards on the balance beam (not a regulation gymnastics balance beam, wider so that our feet could stay at a good fighting width, and only a sudden eight inch drop if you slipped off).

Shooting silhouettes. Shooting one silhouette with a weapon painted on it that was surrounded by other 'innocent' silhouttes. Down officer drills- running in small teams while other members provided cover fire and perimeter protection to snatch up a limp officer. Deployments from vehicles.

Ended with mixed team entries: lethal and less-lethal weapons coming together through a door in a fast, tight team.

That went well. The first round I was third in the stack, which doesn't mean I entered third, the first three come through as a single body, clearing the door instantly. Entered and saw the 'bad' silhouette with 'hostages' in front and a gap of three inches between them at about five yards. The handgun snapped up, front sight right where it should be and two rounds pinged off the bad guy before the metal silhoutte could fall.

Shittiest shooting I can remember, but when it came to the complicated moving stuff, we were dialed.

Intro

It is the opposite of writer's block. Working on the introduction to the citizen's guide to police use of force, I find myself wanting to say three distinct things. Three solid, powerful reasons that the book needs to be written and, more importantly, needs to be read. Yet the ideas don't blend in an easy way and I'm also unwilling to let any of them go.

The obvious thing to do is to skip the introduction and get to the meat. The obvious on how officers are trained, what they are taught about the use of force continuum and how they are taught to make those decisions will practically write themselves. The deeper chapters on how experience with violence enhances and deepens the training will be easy (and fun and probably therapeutic) to write. Skipping the intro is obvious and I will do it if I need to, but in the past I've used introductions as a sort of mission statement- here's the problem, this is who I am and why I'm writing it, this is why you need to hear it. It not only sets the tone for the reader but I use it to set the tone for my writing.

It's just hard to choose. All of the facts and images will be used, but which should be the first one that the reader sees? Here are the options:

1) Contrasting caribou and wolf with living rooms and grocery stores hits the theme that violence is the natural environment of life. Violence is and from the very richness and abundance of our lives we have the luxury to pretend that it is an aberration. We pretend that it is horrible and wrong, think that it is odd when it happens but we know we are lying to ourselves. This cognitive disconnect drives us to create theories that are little better than fairy tales or whistling in the dark. Worse, when faced with the people who do deal with violence, citizens tend to marginalize them, pretending that the officers and soldiers are somehow broken and unreliable. The equivalent of putting fingers in one's ears and going , "lalalalalala I can't hear you!"

2) Society has largely decided that violence is bad, but isn't quite stupid or suicidal enough to have forgotten a basc truth: force is the ONLY thing that can stop violence. This possibility would talk about the long term effects of other strategies, such as appeasement and denial. Our solution is to create a profession who exist primarily for the application of force for the good of and protection of society. This also creates a cognitive dissonance. In other societies with recognized warrior castes, this wasn't a problem- but where we recognize the need for good force, but still feel that force is inherently bad it separates the protectors of society from the society that they protect- to the point that they don't understand the officers and soldiers.

An aside, and something that I am afraid will drive some people up the wall: I absolutley consider the officer's point of view to be superior to and clearer than the citizen's. All officers have been and are citizens; few citizens have been officers. If someone has lived on both sides of a line, I feel that their conclusions about that line are inherently more valid than someone who has only seen one side.

3) Judging from ignorance- this is one of my personal drives in writing the book so I may be too close, or maybe close to the bone is just what it needs. If a plane crashes, the people who pass judgment are pilots and aircraft engineers. If someone dies on an operating table, doctors hold an inquiry. If someone dies after a use of force (the wording is deliberate, there- sometimes officers kill people, but sometimes people crash cars or their heart gives out or the balloons of meth in their belly pop) reporters, politicians, citizens groups most of whom have never been in a fight; many of whom would have no chance at keeping their temper after just a few minutes of verbal abuse... feel perfectly free to judge.

This might be the key. I don't mind being judged. I am aware that I am an instrument of force for society (possible intro 2) working with dangerous people (possibility 1- see why I am having a hard time writing it? Everything blends) and the people have a right and a responsibility that the force I use is in fact for the good of society. My problem is with ignorant judges. People who don't know the policy, keep confusing a use of force or a shooting with a "fair, clean, fight" or a John Wayne movie. People who get their ideas about either crime or violence from entertainment: TV, books, movies. When force is used, it must be used to professional standards. The people evaluating it must be familiar not only with the professional standards but also the environment.

Partly, I'm even more concerned that the people who need to read this book either will not or have too much ego entrenched in their point of view to listen. But that's just despair. That won't slow me down.

Party

It was a smaller group than in the past. Too many old friends with obligations, plane tickets and scared significant others couldn't make it. More 'friends of friends' than in the past: a newer phenomenon, disquieting yet interesting.

Once a year, in August, under the pretext of a mass birthday party we hold a bash. It's about friends. There are traditions- experimental cooking, the Lobster of Shame, new scotches, home brew, "The Parting Glass", the Baraka book. Some traditions have fallen by the wayside. We don't heal the way we used to, so the six-on-one tackle football has slipped into the past.

We are getting older. The party used to last for three days, from sometime Friday night until late on Sunday. Saturday night we would tell stories, sing and sip scotch until sunrise as the beauties belly danced and some of us drummed or played instruments. This year the last person left at 0130 on Sunday morning.

Good stories, good friends. The friend of a friend thing- at this party I used to be able to look around and realize that almost everyone there had saved my life or sanity at least once. The group was tight in a way that only sharing lots of heartache and/or danger and/or blood can make happen. This year there were people that I barely knew. A short time ago they probably would have been sitting with their backs to a wall with wide eyes twitching looking for exits... but we've mellowed with age. Most of the intense stories we've lived and told and re-told enough and now we tell mostly the funny ones. Some of the ones that weren't so funny at the time, like Curly Creek Falls, have become funny in the retelling. I think the strangers felt comfortable there, and safe. Which is really odd.

Barbecued kangaroo, steak and sausages. We had yak, too, but as usual K had provided enough food for a bigger army than we had, so we didn't get to the yak. Ardbeg is still the best scotch ever and Boodle's is still in first place for gin. You can load scotch into a seltzer bottle and carbonate it- that was the culinary experiment for this year. Previous experiments included scotch milk shakes (good); beer milkshakes (good); and making espresso with beer instead of water (bad, really, really bad).

We've been doing this for a long time now- there have been many changes. From comrades-in-arms to couples. For a few years there were many babies and small children. Now teen agers (and one baby!). Rules used to include "No throwing knives or axes after drinking", the rules are unnecessary now, just, "Take care of each other" which is the one lesson we have all learned in life. In a few years or decades, more of us will be walking with canes. Children and then grandchildren will take over the planning and will tell the new stories- and maybe repeat some of the old one, "Blue-White-Blue-White" or "What Friends Are For" or "Suffocation in Dynamited Cave" or "Rick's Bachelor Pary in a Ghost Town and how we Almost had to Fight an Entire Town and Wound up Eating Sardines".

Good times, good friends. Amazing how often those go together,

Ueshiba, Kano and Futagami

Ueshiba was a martial genius. When I want to tease aikidoka I just say, "Aikido is what happens when a really good jujutsuka gets religion." But Ueshiba himself was a martial genius. Don't let the pictures of the little old elf fool you. In his younger days he was a very dangerous man, trained by a very dangerous and vicious man. He was not a theoretician and experienced a significant amount of close quarters combat- he has even described some of the things I think of as "twilight zone stuff", things, such as seeing bullets in flight, that happens on the very edge of human experience.

Kano, on the other hand, was a master instructor. He was a good jujutsuka, but first and foremost he was an educator with a vision. The art that he created, judo, was one of the first effective examples of applying modern (at the time) training methodology and learning theory to a martial art.

Ueshiba did get religion in a big way. He had (alert- my conclusions based on my reading and observation, I'm no expert here) seen that the core of his personal and very effective fighting style (in this instance, 'system' is what you are taught, 'style' is how you as an individual fight) was to misdirect and slip forces. Sword, knife, bullet, punch, tackle... all forces. All things that at high enough skill you can simply choose not to be in front of. When he got religion, he saw that this worked for the world too: conflict only exists if you oppose forces. By misdirecting forces you can win, even destroy an opponent without engaging in a clash. Victory without conflict. Aikido was an expression of what Ueshiba had learned in personal combat aimed towards making a better world.

Kano's art has very similar principles. He had less experience (if any) with personal combat. He had much more experience with how things are learned. Judo was Kano's expression of using martial arts to make a better person.

Our style of jujutsu has a few techniques that look like echoes of aikido- spectacular throws based on locks, stuff like that. But each of them is taught as an assassination. They are things you do as you are walking past an unsuspecting victim. The primary training methodology is based on making a trained warrior reflexively kill when surprised or suddenly 'disadvantaged' (there isn't a good word for it- when a weapon breaks or you are disarmed or, more modern, when you expected your gun to go 'BANG' and it went 'click' the common reaction is to stop and stare at it for a second... and die). Most of the techniques fit this model and are 'rougher' than the assassination techniques.

Working out last night- close and spine control (it can be an immobilization, a takedown or a kill) Close and spine control. Close and spine control. Stan (one of my favorite martial artists and teachers- primarily Small Circle but he has done many other things) noticed that because of flukes of distancing, many students were in a position for one of the aikido-like throws, but no one was going for it.

I approved. There are ways to use the principles of aikido- all good fighters use them, whether they know it or not- but the techniques, especially as echoed in our style, demand perfection. There is no room for mistake in snatching the weapon hand of an armed man out of the air and throwing him. There are some that will say it is not possible. It is possible, but it is hard as hell and there is no room for error. For the style founded by Futagami, who had no interest as far as I know in making a better world or a better person, just a more efficient killer, slop is built in to it. We use the techniques, but we use them from surprise. When the threat is unsurprised or we are recovering from surprise the techniques are "grosser' more respectful of the slop, chaos and mistakes that make up most fights.

152...

Doing some research for the next book and I ran across a reference to Amnesty International's 2006 study on Taser use. The reference claimed that AI had implicated the Taser in 152 deaths in the US. Hmmm... the paper itself was available, so I read it.

Does anybody read these things? Everyone reads the press release that blares the number 152, but who reads the actual paper? That number is not in any way related to the actual causes of death named by the coroners.

AI's definition by itself appears to be fishy. They seem to label any death preceeded by Taser use to be "Taser related" even if the death happened days later or even if a different cause of death was clearly listed. Hey, I was tased a couple of years ago. If I have a heart attack tomorrow will my name show up in Amnesty International's next report?

152... but only 23 actually listed the Taser as even a possible contributory cause of death. One of the actual cases states that the Taser may have contributed to the fatal abnormal heartbeat in addition to the other causes of meth and bleeding out from a cut wrist. Clearly the electrical stun device was the culprit. Sure.

So 152 is down to 23, except really only 7 had the cause of death listed as primarily taser. Seven in five years. In at least one of those the ME recanted, having put Taser down as a cause of death before actually performing the autopsy... but that's not mentioned in the report. Very few of the deaths mentioned in the report have much detail, but what detail there is tells a story. If a plaintiff's attorney in a case says the death was caused by Taser and the medical examiner says it was NOT the cause of death, AI still lists it. What about the case where it took three autopsies to get the result that AI wanted: "In all it took three autopsies to conclude that taser had been a contributory factor in his death."

I've seen this report cited for over a year. I finally read it. I have a hard time believing that anyone else who cites it has actually read it.

There's more there and it points to the gulf between people who want to fix the world from ignorance and those who deal with it. There is a difference between pain and injury. Every mechanical means that approaches the level of pain produced by the Taser risks injury- broken bones and dislocated joints. Compare that to two 1/4" pin pricks (not two inches of penetration, as the report says).

The report says ..."tasers in dart firing mode may be a preferable alternative to deadly force..." May be? WTF? Here, more than anywhere, the agenda might show. Killing with a gun is old hat, comfortable tradition. Hurting with a new device, even if it saves lives (and it saves thousands, I've saved one myself and so I might be biased- everyone has an agenda. Even me.) that is new and scary. This isn't about force or government power or corruption or even rights. Just like the Inquisition, this is about making sure that the status quo is preserved. Though it often gets labeled as 'liberal' AI is conservative in the true sense of the word- terrified of change.

There is more there, some truly awful misunderstandings of force policies and the effects of drugs on behavior and how violence operates in real life. The authors seem to feel that since so many of these deaths involved excited delerium (they always use quotes around "excited delerium" to give the impression that it doesn't really exist) the Taser should not be used on violent, insane, naked, sweaty, blood-spitting people that can throw around five officers. Do they really think that beating them with clubs or putting so much weight of officer on them that they can't move or breathe will be safer? Hasn't anyone compared the numbers between these so-called taser deaths and ICDS (In-Custody Death Syndrome) which, strangely enough, also happens primarily to excited delerium cases?

It comes back to the same question: Did anyone ever critically read this pile of horseshit?

Frustration and Love

Taught a very small class yesterday: two new officers and two instructors from another division who wanted to get a handle on this 'new way'. This is the basic course, eight hours. It is imbedded in just a handful of drills that are free-action (no scripts, no attempt to clone the students into instructors) and also (really appreciated this yesterday) carefully designed to avoid both the dangerous game habits of sparring and the equally dangerous belief that the drill is the fight.

The drill is taught, and they play. If you know how to move, you know something about fighting. They do the drill first with what they bring to the table. Then a short class/demo/practice on generating power in linear strikes; then they return to the drill. Then short range circular strikes and return to the drill. Long range circles. Close range kicking. Leverage points and spine controls. Locks. Everything goes back to the drill, just continuing with their natural movement but with some new ideas, new efficiencies.

A short change as they work an operant conditioning system for ambush survival. The drill changes here, instead of interactive chaos it becomes far less interactive: someone attacks you and they become meat, never given a chance to recover and interact.

Then the ground. How to move a body in three easy principles, which leads to a new drill. Application and limitations of pain. Remind them to apply the skills from before- locks, leverage, spine- in addition to the basic skill of moving another person. Striking from the ground. Strangles and neck breaks. Debrief, clean up and go home.

There's extra time written into the lesson plan. (aside: that seems like a lot to cover in eight hours but the skills are very simple if you look at them right. Joint locking is the most complicated and takes forty-five minutes to cover all the principles, how locks work, types of locks, experimenting with each type and a drill to start to learn to see the opportunity to apply a lock when the threat presents it. 45 minutes.) During breaks, the students hydrate and the instructors address any issue they think the students need to hear. Some of it is pretty standard- almost all of us go over the OODA loop, types of assaults, fighting the mind versus fighting the body, different reactions to adrenaline and how to read it in the threat, how to control your own.

These were new hires and I got to talk about the job and how much I love it. The nobility of being surrounded by dark and refusing to become dark. The restraint of using force for good in a world that seems to believe that all force is bad (because most have never felt or seen the effects of the small percentage of the population who use force for pleasure or convenience and can only be stopped by force). The unbelievable, supernatural feeling when training, experience and adrenaline intersect and you become a force of nature, something beyond human, doing things effortlessly that are clearly impossible. The thrill of sharing with students that they have entered one of the few careers where this is possible is... almost as good as the battle joy itself.

It's scary, too, because it is a glorious thing that can only be found in dark places. As horrible as violence is, if it were ever erradicated humanity would lose this experience also.

But there was a lot of frustration. It was petty compared to the love of teaching, but still it was there and it gnawed for hours. Why do people need to be taught to see? They have eyes, they have touch. The left hand is four inches from the threat's ear and the right hand is a foot from his ribs, yet they hit with the right hand because they have decide the left is their 'blocking hand'. They see that their knee is right behind the threat's and a slight pop will put him on the ground... the eyes see but the brain doesn't. The fact that the threat is off balance and a concrete wall is right in line with his weak line of stance is obvious and seemingly invisible at the same time.

If people could only see what is right in front of their faces and play with it a little, there is nothing special about fighting. It is seeing (sensing, really: many people, including me ,fight better by touch) and moving. That's all. So simple. So invisible.

Inflow and Outflow

I watch my wife typing away on the computer and marvel at how different we are. Writing is a flow for her, an art, an act of creation. The enthusiasm brightens her already beautiful eyes.

It is almost the opposite for me- a dredging. The soul sometimes need to be cleaned and writing is one way to do it. The clearer her spirit is flowing, the more she needs to write. As mine flows clear and the world around feels like a place of purity, the less I write. The more I absorb.

It won't last, of course. Nature of this life that I have chosen and I do love. It's easy to be noble when life is easy. Easy to be a saint in a monastery. It's far more worthy to be a good man in bad places. It's more fun, too.

That made writing Rhino easy- there was a lot of stuff to dredge. The other projects are more constructive and so I feel less ned to write them. Time for some discipline, I suppose.

The Six W's

Who?
What?
When?
Why?
Where?

And now:
What the hell?

That's the kind of stuff you learn in investigations

Can't really talk about it but damn, people, if you file a report that's fine. But if you want to do a follow-up at least remember the alias you were using when you filed the first report. How hard is that?

Teaching to the 2s

This is one of the inane results of the collision between bureaucracy and training. I first heard the expression "Teaching to the 2s" at the academy. The instructors explained that they had no control over who was hired and that the current process of civil service examinations to fill emergency services jobs left many cadets who were tempermentally, physically and mentally unsuited for the job. That left the academy instructors with the obligation to train them as best they could. This became known as "Teaching to the 2s" designing classes in an attempt to reach the lowest common denominator. Make the classes simple for the stupid ones; non-threatening for the timid ones and never pressure tested for the weak ones.

The fallacy of this is obvious, of course. You can't teach the lowest common denominator. By the time someone is an adult if they have any desire to learn or improve, they have done so and are no longer the lowest common denominator. By trying to reach the people who have no desire to be reached, you lose them. You bore the good students and even the mediocre are shafted because they are taught not what they need, but only what the instructors think the 2s can handle.

Training wasn't about the needs of the job or even the students. It became about liability coverage by showing you taught something. This is where you get the cadets who memorize an eight-step wrist lock which only works on other students and only from one position.

This tendancy was compounded by the way the academy was staffed. The people who teach and design the courses are largely administrators. A mediocre deputy could decide to apply to the academy. If he was selected, he would suddenly be called a captain or lieutenant and could come off like a grizzled veteran to a room full of fresh-faced rookies. Unless you knew the instructor from their previous assignment or agency, you didn't know who or what they really were.

It hasn't changed much in the state and probably won't, but within our agency there has been a big change. Most of the credit goes to Mac (but I want some too!). We were able to convince the agency that there were unused resources: classically trained martial artists with years of teaching experience and hundreds of real fights. We knew how to get it done and we knew how to teach others to do it.

I'd been working on 'principles based training' basically instead of teaching students a dozen wrist locks just teach them what wrist locks are and let them create their own. Same goes for takedowns, striking, spine controls, pain... (as an aside, I can teach pretty much everything there is to know about locking in under an hour- or you can take three or four years of aikido or jujitsu. Your choice). Mac looked at it, added his umpteen million years of experience, combined it with a mind blowing insight and we had Awareness Based Training. (The first of the Big Three).

Principles is still big, but combined with live drills that teach the student to recognize and exploit targets as they become available. To see the principles in action. It's been great in many ways. Our agency has 2's as well, but they pick up something here. They play with it instead of trying to memorize it, and that's a big bonus. The best and the medium learn too, and some learn a lot. They are given permission to experiment and improvise and play at speed.

The courses weren't designed by administrators but by line officers and we have a very real stake in the product: On some dark day these folks, including the 2s, will be my backup. I want the best backup I can create. We knew the job and the problems and how hard it is to take pretty classroom skills and make them work in chaos. It was, and is, a good system.

Baton Training

This one's for Jeff. My first three-day training with Deputy US Marshall Jeff, he made a comment that in order to be useful any combat training must have three elements:

1) It must have a tactical use.
2) It must work under stress.
3) It must work moving as well as standing still.

Point number three has come up a lot lately. I've watched too many instructors teach escapes from grabs without seeming to realize that an assailant doesn't grab you and just stand there- he grabs you to make you move, destroy your balance. The dynamic of a moving escape is different enough that many of the techniques don't work.

Friday we had recertification training in the expandable baton. I noticed a couple of things right away. First off, I'm not particularly big or strong. In the static drills I hit faster (that's a technique thing, most of the officers were swinging with the arm, I was using the finger closing grip from sword work for speed) but several of the big guys were hitting as hard as I was. However, when it came to hitting moving during the scenarios almost everyone had a huge power drop off. I didn't (and my armored bad guy paid for it. Sorry, D.)

Do many martial artists practice hitting while moving? Striking fast and hard while angling forward, back or straight retreating? If not, why not? I've never not practiced that way, so it seems weird when I hear people talking about the difficulty of it. Same for shooting, too. If you have to freeze in place to get a good shot off you turn into a big target.

So that's for Jeff. If you can't do it moving, you can't do it effectively- no matter what 'it' is.

There was another drill, striking with the closed baton. We practiced on kicking shields. The strike was to 'go through', essentially scraping the surface of the shield to set up a recovery strike from the complementary angle. The exact same motion could either be a pain compliance technique (scraping the ribs and sternum to drive someone back) or a "level 5" technique, breaking the clavicle or separating ribs based only on a slight difference in wrist angle. I asked the instructors about it... they recovered nicely but they hadn't really considered it. They were teaching to a lesson plan and hadn't really thought about what they were trying to do to a human body, or how that would change the recovery for the second hit or all that it implied about centerline targeting versus peripheral or...

The last drill was to go into a room with a bag over our heads and a padded baton. We were spun around and then the bag was pulled off and we had to deal with whatever we saw. What I saw was an armored threat in full attack at biting range. To be fair, one of the instructors had given me a special brief beforehand: a personal reminder that it was a baton class and I wasn't to throw, lock, knee, elbow...he tried to make the list comprehensive.

That was a problem. The essence of this drill (probably based on Tony Blauer's Night of the Living Dead drill) was for the armored attacker to give constant pressure, a constant barrage of attack. It predicates on a combination of good armor and a soft padded weapon so that the weapon can't stop the threat. But I've trained myself for years that if option A doesn't work, you switch to something else without hesitation (thanks, Mac). So I was good- I only kicked once to buy distance and didn't aim at the knee. I was going in for a throw when the instructor stopped it, however. The stick wasn't working and I was getting a little tired. If you can't knock someone down with a stick...

On the plus side only four of the thirteen students remembered to (and were able) to access their radios under the attack. "Did I enunciate clearly?" I asked.

"It was eerie calm. If someone was killing you, we wouldn't be able to tell from your radio voice."

That's cool.