Concrete

Just one example of how life changes training- Concrete.  

If footwork is critical to your style (and I have yet to see one where it isn't) then footing, the ability to trust your connection to the ground and to efficiently move your body when you press the earth is pretty damn important.  Most martial artists practice with good footing as a given. Not always- some take care to play outdoors and on uneven terrain.  Some who frequently practice outdoors in all weather learn about slick wet grass and sometimes gripping mud.  Knee deep snow.  Broken rock.  And good footing isn't always good footing. Almost every judoka I know has broken or dislocated his little toes on soft mats. 

Finished concrete with a light layer of dust is slippery.  Very slippery if you are wearing good boots.

Finished concrete is also a good reflector.  There is an element of hunting or ambush to a lot of fights.  Practice in paying attention to shadows and reflections can give you the edge no matter which side of the dynamic you play.

Falling-   You learn to fall on stuff that is much softer than concrete.  I'm cool with that.  With diligent practice ukemi work just fine on concrete. I've taken a full flip on asphalt at about 30 mph without a scratch and a full power throw on concrete with a 260 pound man landing on top without a bruise.  The skills translate, but mistakes or poor skill has a much higher price when the surface is harder.

Impact tool and pain compliance- the earth is an impact weapon. IMO, it's usually stupid to hit people in the head with your fist.  I find it stupid and inefficient to do so if there is a substance much harder than your fist right next to the threat's head.  Wall or floor, driving a head into it probably works better than hitting with your hand. For one thing, you can get the body weight of both people into the strike. For another you can sometimes entrain the threat's flinch reaction into the force.  Someone flinching into a door jamb demonstrates amazing short power.

Rough concrete also hurts quite a lot. There is a huge difference between kneeling on an opponent's jaw on a mat and kneeling on the same jaw when it is backed by gravel over concrete.

That's all pretty basic and obvious if you think about it.  Here's what I'm really getting at:

There are things that are true on mats that cease to be true on concrete. More than that- the mats imply a lot of other background that change everything.

I trained with a man, one of the best in the world at what he does, who insisted that the ground and pound was the "worst possible scenario."  Probably everyone knows, but just in case- you are on the ground, on your back. The opponent is straddling you and raining down blows to your face.  This 'worst possible' scenario wouldn't even make my top ten.  Five or six guys kicking would make it worse.  A knife would make it worse. Being face down would make it worse.  Being on top could be worse if I think I'm in some kind of wrestling match and the threat has decided it's a knife fight... on and on.

The position has a lot of emotional resonance, though. It's considered one of the most dominant positions in that sport.  Many people have seen fights in gradeschool end up this way. A lot of people feel helpless when they are straddled and go completely defensive, hoping it will just be over.  In a training hall, it is a very bad position. Less so on concrete.

People trying to take your head off don't hit like people trying to score points.  They also don't hit like people who are trying to skillfully maintain some defense and balance. Power and rage. This is one of the reasons why blocks and covers don't work quite the same against an assault (even assuming you can get them in place in time).  Practiced against someone sparring, playing all the details of range and maintaining a defense and a critical distance line and focused on preventing harm to himself as much as on dealing damage, the defenses are more communication than barriers: Punch - parry- 'hmmm, that line is closed, try something else'.  A full power swing will often blow right through this type of defense.  A 'beat' style fencing parry probably wouldn't work all that well on an axe.

 Then the concrete comes into it.  When the backstop is concrete anything that misses has a price to pay.  Fully committed, full power, threat can cause his own crippling injury. You just have to make the threat miss. Shifting your pinned hips is usually enough.

The environment is part of it, but people don't think (much less fight) the way that they train or spar.  Because of that disparity, another layer creeps in- what you are training against is not what you may have to use it against. In some cases, if you recognize it and exploit it, that makes things easier.  The ground and pound is a bad situation in the ring, but it is one of the cases (if you are ready for it) where real life gives you some advantages.

Niggles

"It's not there."

I sighed. "Don't use the search function," I said.  For at least the fourth time.  He hit the search function again, trying to show me what wasn't there.

"It's not there," he repeated.

"Partner, we're looking at source material in three different languages. No one transliterates it the same. I can think of six different ways an American would try to spell the name you are looking for and there's a real possibility that they would mess up the order. Our naming system is different than yours. A computer won't pick that up."

He said he understood, but every time I glanced over I could see the little "find" box. I'll have to redo all of his work later.

How do you teach someone that they are smarter than a computer?  Computers are great for certain types of problems, but there are certain problems- the complex, fuzzy ones and the ones with subtle patterns where the human mind is much better adapted.  But people get these ideas about what is hard, like math, and if computers make it easy and never make a mistake and smart people are good at math and computers are better...

Math isn't easy (clarification- higher math isn't easy for me) but it is simple. The processes are pretty much laid out.  Other problems- like people and conflict and language, most of the human-sized stuff- are really complex, but it is a kind of complexity that our brains are trained to handle  This guy, my partner, is brilliant. Fluent in three languages and working on his fourth, lots of interests, an advanced degree in a technical field and he worships the power of technology.

There's a part of me that enjoys the tedious detail work of analysis. I especially like it when I can invent or choose my own methods and sources.  I've done some work here where just a little niggle back in my brain said to look at something again... it's rewarding in its own way.  Some detail that no one else may ever really see or use, something that will be buried in a long list and filed and probably forgotten. But something a computer would never have caught, would never have felt the niggle at a name that was clearly wrong. Not long enough to correlate strange spellings and common pronunciation errors and how Americans try to write sounds that they can't largely distinguish the differences between* and family naming custom in the native country and BOOM a whole new door opens.  So it's probably useless, but I find fun where I can make it.

* The 's' in Saddam and the 's' in Hussein are entirely different letters with entirely different (to Arabic ears) pronunciations. I can't tell sin from sad (those are the names of the letters) in conversation.

Thanatos

The thanatos is strong tonight. I may edit this later to put in the links that will help this make sense.  Freud said that there were two competing drives, the drive for life and the drive for death, Thanatos. Like a lot of things, Freud got it half right.  Most people don't have a drive for death- most have a drive for intensity, maybe, and the intensity of danger is more alive than most have ever felt.  But...

I walked the perimeter of the camp tonight. Overcast, no stars. Smoking a cuban cigar and listening to music. No real danger, not here, deep on a Peshmerga base. The music is about battle and loss.  What did Oscar Wilde write about the Irish? "...the race that God made mad, for all their wars are merry and all their songs are sad."

I'm feeling it tonight, missing the battle joy, feeling the depression of the inevitability of life, of aging.  Wishing to meet the man who can kill me.  Not to die so much as to die in absolute battle joy, on the very edge of what a human can experience- perfectly focused, every atom of my being in a single strike or a single sight picture and presssssss... then the clean burning pain from the wound I didn't see coming.  I've been close enough to know the feeling (have I really? Wouldn't it be new, more, different than near death?) of burning pain of the wound and creeping cold of the shock and the fear of the big dark... but, tonight I am hungry for it.

There is so much more to see in this world and the world is so beautiful... and yet I am weary.

Hear me, world, for I am weary

I have heard the muezzin at sunrise

And broken the bones of the enemy

Loved well

Lived hard

Seen the sunrise over sands that Ali walked

Been challenged by the Ravens of Odin

And earned the brotherhood of the Wind

Shown mercy

Felt pride

Warriors feel the Death in me and step away

Children and wolves relax

"You are like a fox," Shewar says

Different meanings

In different languages

Orange skies and blue, and the aurora

Green seas, and blue, and stormy gray

The blue white blue white flash, spinning

True brothers and

Enemies become friends

I turned off skype tonight. Kami is the one thing that makes this fade, but it would be too hard to hear her voice. Not tonight, love. I need to feel this, not deny it.  It will pass. There is so much to do. Good works, I am literally saving people, but...

Always 'but'.  The animal in me would wander into the mountains, into the desert. That is who I am. The man in me must help others, fulfill obligations.  That is who I have promised to be.

Stupid Questions and F'n' Morons

Both of these came up while writing the series and I didn't want to break the flow.  A while ago, Johann asked about techniques for breaking up a fight.  In the course of the answer I referred back to the question, saying " No weapons on any side is not only an assumption, but downright stupid. "  It sounded harsh, and Johann took it like a gentleman.

Here's the thing: People ask questions in different ways for different reasons. At some level people know how rarely a martial arts answer is the best answer in a real life situation. Maybe consciously, maybe subconsciously, they tweak the question to get the answer they are comfortable with.

The world is big and full of stuff.  In order to practice specific skills, martial arts usually limits those variables: Clean up the floors, know the number of opponents, it either is or is not a weapon drill...  That is all important to developing a specific skill but sometimes you need a general skill. You need to practice cheating.  You need to practice seeing and exploiting variables.  That makes hierarchical systems uncomfortable, because a good cheat can overcome a big disparity in strength or speed... or skill.  That is very threatening to people who have spent years developing skill.  You hear them sometimes when a champion gets shot or someone racks a shotgun in a demo- "Are you saying this is all worthless?  All meaningless?"

No.  But it's not the whole picture, either.  

My concern, when someone presents the problem as "assume that there are no weapons on either side" is that they are ingraining two bad thought habits. One is assuming what the bad guy does or has.  It is a way to rewrite the question so it is easier to answer, and a way to create an answer it is easy to be lazy with, to feel confident it will work provided one variable (that you have no control over) breaks your way. It is training to rely on luck. I love luck. I don't rely on her.

The second bad habit is possibly even more limiting. The world is full of stuff.  How many places can you sit or walk without something at hand that you can use as a weapon. I've been toying with water bottles lately.  They're everywhere here.  That assumption sets a habit in your brain to not look for better options, to try to find the martial arts solution to the problem.

It's not just in material and space, either.  There's time, too. I was presented with this scenario once: 

It's about 0130, you're walking on the sidewalk. Ahead of you you notice two guys acting suspicious near a parked car. They are squatting low by the passenger side door and looking around suspiciously. As you get closer, about 15 feet away, one notices you and turns suddenly with a screw driver held low in his right hand. What do you do?

Classic fishing for a MA answer. Seriously, you see two guys acting suspiciously and you get closer?  Why not call it in on the cell phone from a distance?  The best answer for this scenario happens earlier than he would accept an answer.  The guy who presented the scenario wasn't going to accept that it would take an idiot for this to happen. He had dreams for his killer kung-fu fantasy solution and he wanted it confirmed by others.

No one will ever see the whole picture, but some see more than others. The earlier you see it, the more options you have. The deeper you see it (terrain, strategically, emotionally, communication level) the more options you have. The clearer you see it, the less likely you are to make a mistake.

So, I've said it before again and again and again: we are all blind to some things, to some degree. Please, please don't practice blindness.  Not when thinking about violence. The stakes are too high.

In the last of the Circles posts, Mike made a comment that he would have fallen into the "Fuckin' moron" category long ago. He wouldn't.  A true FM can't even imagine that he might be wrong. They have the answer, know The Truth- and facts, experience or even common sense are no hindrance to their proselytizing. Ignorance is not knowing stuff. Wisdom is knowing you don't know stuff. Idiocy is thinking you know stuff. FM status is reserved for those few who insist on knowing stuff that's not true despite evidence.

We all have stories about them and it's really not that big a deal. They just make me tired and influence where I spend my time.

So, Johann, there was a piece of your question that could lead to some very bad habits. That doesn't mean in any way that I think you are stupid. And Mike- no worries. 

Aside- I realize that this shows up on Patrick Parker's site which is kind of a family thing, so I edited the title. Sorry, Pat. Hope I caught it in time.

The Seventh Circle

It's all over. The cops have shown up, sirens blaring... or they haven't. The ambulance has rolled away, or it hasn't. Whatever adrenaline you had built up that didn't burn up in the encounter does so now and you might get uncontrollable shakes. It's all over. But it isn't. 

I could divide this stage up easily, by time and by effect, but that would be too much, so I just lump it together here as the seventh stage, the Aftermath.

You may be injured.  Hell, you might be dead, but in that case nothing I write will really have an impact and I hate wasting time. You might be crippled.  There will be physical effects after a fight, usually. I think one of my reasons for preferring positioning/controlling/open-hand arts is that they do less injury to me, and I don't know after one fight if I am done for the night or if there will be more.

So, even if you win you may have to deal with a concussion, a face not as pretty as it used to be, a hand that you yourself broke when you disregarded the big bone/little bone rule.  Those are the easy and obvious things. You might not notice a knife or bullet wound until you collapse.  I've long suspected that a soft spot in my lower abdomen is actually a mild hernia from a long ago fight.  My left eye is blurry years after the encounter where it was gouged. A deputy from my agency died about twenty years after being shot in the head. Complications from the wound. Twenty years.  Sometimes it is never really over.

Who attacked you?  What kind of life did he lead?  Were fights and needle drugs and bad hygiene just business as usual for him and does the blood pouring down his face and your torn knuckle mean hepatitis or HIV?  When your elbow contacted- nice, solid, good technique- and the shattered stumps of his teeth penetrated your skin- did the bacteria cross over that will put your life in danger in a few hours?  Septicemia.

You can't ignore the aftermath in your training- what good does it do you to win if you go slam a beer and get some sleep afterwards and wake up with an arm the size of a watermelon, a fever and red streaks running up the vein?  Have you really won if you knocked the bad guy out but need to choose between death and amputation? (I have some good pics of this, but they aren't my copyright, so I can't post them. Ask, if you see me with my laptop.)

Ignoring all the diseases and potential joint and back injuries and all that weirdness, when you hit someone, two surfaces are contacting at the same speed. Your fist is imparting just as much force to his head as his head is imparting to your fist.  The force on both sides is the same.  The key is that different tissues absorb force differently. Even if you won, significant force has been dealt to your body- even if you dealt it. Something to think about- have you been training to impart this force wisely, maximizing damage to the threat, minimizing damage to yourself?

Then the emotional aftermath.  It hits different people differently and on a lot of levels.  I don't get much of the standard PTSD aftermath. I don't have flashbacks or panic or sweats or nightmares (not yet- am I immune or simply haven't reached my threshold?). On the other hand I can rarely sleep for longer than four hours and don't feel that I have much in common with most people.  For me there is a real sense of disconnect- especially with martial artists and theorists.  It doesn't come up much on this blog but it used to when I was more active on BBSs, I would catch myself not wanting to even engage, just thinking, "Fucking moron, believe whatever makes you happy," and then go strap on guns or body armor and go to work.

The people it does hit hard have had their entire identity destroyed.  I could go into that in great detail with more space and time.  People spend their whole lives figuring out who they are, making up a story.  In an incident of extreme predatory violence, everything they have come to believe, everything they have ever counted on no longer is true.  The world, people and even the self are not what they are supposed to be.  That last is the hardest.  Win, lose or draw people rarely live up to their mental image of who they should be.

There is a lot here, stuff to know for your self, stuff to help others.  There are things that happen at low levels, too. There are prices for walking away.

There are even emotional consequences of fearing violence and not facing it.  That is probably what is being expressed in the kool-aid drinking or the panicked weaseling when a piece of data challenges received wisdom.

So much here.

Physical effects, emotional effects and lastly... legal.

Is there a line between force and violence?  I personally feel that this is one of those things that people hold in their heads to make it more comfortable.  Fist meets flesh, head impacts concrete. Force. Violence. Tomayto. Tomahto.

The same physical action can be criminal assault or legitimate self defense.  How well you understood the first circle can make the difference in the aftermath between having issues and having issues in prison.

Aside- possibly the worst legal advice I have ever heard is to leave and hide your involvement after a use of force. Some instructors actually teach this. A cover-up makes it very hard to prove that there was no intent.

There are two legal systems as well, with differences in evidence and levels of proof.  There may be nothing criminal, not even any question of prosecution. That doesn't preclude a civil suit, or the threat of a civil suit which is sometimes enough.

All three of these are on the table after a big use of force- medical, emotional and legal complications.  Skill in Circles 2-6 all combine to remove or mitigate the potential medical results. If you avoid the situation, no injury.  A good OC, a minimal freeze and fighting skill are all about minimizing damage to yourself.  The emotional aftermath is affected most by three things- understanding your own heart and your own beliefs at level one; realistically knowing and preparing for the after effects (studying the seventh circle before you get there); and how you process the events.  The legal aftermath will depend on whether you understood the laws pertaining to force and whether you had trained with respect to those laws.

To sum up: If you want to call it self-defense, all seven of these circles are important. If any of them are unfamiliar, study up.  Being good at one of them will not protect you from a failure in the others. They all connect.

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Going to be on the move in a couple of days. Yet another language. Should only be for 2-3 weeks but I have no idea what the internet access will be like.  I'll post some more stuff when I can.

The Sixth Circle

Here it is. The fight.

I kind of want to end this post right here. It would be poetic, but incomplete. It's good to read into stuff, to stretch your brain. If this wasn't a subject that stirred so much fantasy I'd feel more comfortable with that.

The fight.  If you have trained well in martial arts now, in this circle, it can come into play. With a couple of caveats. Okay, a lot of caveats.  

First of all, you have to survive the Fourth and Fifth Circles.  If you got gutted and never even saw it coming, all the fighting skill in the world comes into the equation too late. If you stand there frozen telling yourself in your head what you should be doing as the fists and feet come in your skill won't play.  To increase your chances at the Fourth Circle you have to have the second down cold. It all connects.

More addendums and caveats- you won't be at your peak, probably. Assuming you have the lithe carriage of a martial athlete on a good day, almost no one will be stupid enough to hit you on a good day.  That means you will likely be exhausted or injured or sick (or drunk) when you most need your skills.  At minimum, if you do the sensible thing and warm up and stretch before practice... well, you probably won't be warmed up and stretched.  And, of course, when and if you recover from the freeze you will have all those annoying physical, mental and sensory deficits that come with a huge surge of adrenaline and other stress hormones.  So you won't be fighting with the same body that you have trained.

Especially if you missed on Stage Two, the attack may not be like the fights you have trained for. That's just on the physical skill versus skill level. If you've trained exclusively against long range linear punches and kicks the pitcher of beer upside your head or the liverpool kiss may come from nowhere.

The Sixth Circle is also where a lack at Stage One will destroy you.  If you've been trained (and are lucky enough) to disarm the threat and use his own knife on him, you may pass self-defense and step into manslaughter.  If you have been coached again and again to deliver a "finishing blow" after you put your opponent on the ground, you have been training to commit assault (possibly felony assault depending on how you "finish").  Or the inverse- if you have practiced throwing a single perfect technique and waiting for the ref to call it- you will have a tendency to do it here.

There are rules in a fight.  Not only have you internalized some form of moral code since you were a baby, you have seen an etiquette and flow to conflict your entire life and you have internalized a script of how violence works with your martial arts.  So has the bad guy. Even sociopaths have subconscious rules, scripts. Habits.  It won't be a matter of "there are no rules in a street fight" or even that you are hampered by the rules of civilization and the threat isn't. It is an interplay of your (usually subconscious) rules and the threat's.  Your expectations and the attacker's script.  Sometimes of your trained blind spots and the threat's actions.

The environment can be a huge difference. It's unlikely to happen on a mat or in a ring with a good floor and no obstructions and limited yet clear space. That's not a bad thing, if you've trained for it.  The world is made up of weapons and opportunities. The difference between a hazard and a tool often lies in who uses it first.

Other than these little items, and probably a dozen more I am too tired pull up to my conscious brain right now, the fight is pretty much what you have trained for. Hopefully.

The Fifth Circle

If you get hit by surprise, you are going to freeze. How long you will freeze will depend greatly on your training and who you are, but the freeze will happen.  I get the feeling that someone will want to argue that, so I will state it as simply as I can. If your head was someplace else, digging for your keys in your pocket or looking for your car in the lot or scanning the crowd for a friend and something slams into the side of your head it will take you a measurable amount of time to switch gears. You may have to deal with other things, too, which will lengthen the freeze.

Remember that the circles both work together and prevent each other. IF you were paying attention at level two, you avoided the situation altogether. If you missed avoidance but saw it coming on and had a chance to escape or de-escalate (level 3) you either avoided it, averted it, or at minimum knew it was a possibility and hopefully could engage on your terms. If you failed or missed those two levels, you got surprised, already have been injured or grabbed and you will need to switch gears.

That's one of the beauties of the fourth circle, by the way. If you have conditioned properly you will still freeze, but you will freeze after your counterattack. Hormone-induced freezes happen at the speed of blood. Social freezes happen at the very, very slow speed of conscious thought. A conditioned response happens at the speed of nerve.

So if level four works the threat has to deal with the freeze, too. Whoever unfreezes first has the advantage.

So here is the fifth skill you need for self-defense. The ability to break the freeze. Skills and strategies for making yourself move despite some issues of hard-wiring and social conditioning.

All aspects of violence are hard to research.  Wiring people to sensors is a pretty good indicator that something is about to happen and the true surprise aspect is off the table.  Modern ethics in human experimentation means that the feeling of danger won't be quite real.  Self-reporting of what people remember and experience is notoriously unreliable.  A few have been exposed enough to write reliable reports after the fact and at first glance they would seem like good sources, but that much exposure to violence definitely causes some changes in thought and personality.  The best sources may be useless for generalizing to other people.

I wrote a little about this long ago. My best stab so far is a short paper on types of freezes. It will be part of a book someday, probably.  Just in my own experience (direct and people I've trained or counseled) I've identified five different general types of freezes and eighteen sub-categories.  Eighteen different reasons for standing there while you get pounded or stabbed.

Sounds like a lot, I know.  But we've already talked about how simply switching gears is a measurable freeze- and that assumes someone who knows a bit about fighting and has something to switch to.  That's a different freeze than not being able to figure out what you are facing- something so novel that you don't have a reference point, like being shot with a magazine; or something so incongruous that your brain won't wrap around it like a flying blue shark with glasses. Or the very common freeze of wanting to know 'why' or the sudden desire to make a plan when damage is already coming in.  Five different ways to freeze there, but all largely mental.  There are physiological freezes, too, and socially conditioned ones and freezes that cross borders.  Once I started thinking about it, eighteen didn't seem that far off the mark.

Some of the freezes are prevented in training.  The more you are exposed to, the fewer things will trigger the novelty freeze.  What you learned about level two will prevent or mitigate the 'why' freeze.  OC, as far as I know, can't be conditioned as complex responses to changing stimuli but you can train, or merely make it a habit, that if you are being hurt you are fighting.

Some freezing can be prevented or mitigated by giving students a realistic understanding of violence, giving them permission to separate who they are in the civilized world from who they need to be when bad things happen.  That doesn't mean to pretend that laws and ethics don't apply (see the first circle) but to understand that violence and violent people are fundamentally different than debate or a friendly sparring match.  Most people know that intellectually, but when stress hits the human animal has a tendency to look for an equivalent and go with what worked then- even if it was a family argument.

Prevention is good.  I will happily spend five hours in training now, while I have five hours, to save a half-second when I really need it.

But you can't prevent them all. You also have to learn to break out of a freeze.  Breaking a freeze is hard.  Freezing works more often for more prey than running or fighting.  The old part of your brain knows this.  It doesn't have a lot of faith in any of this new-fangled training.  Breaking the freeze directly pits your will against your hindbrain.

This is back-engineered. This is how I remember breaking out of my own freezes and meshes pretty well with others who were aware enough of what went on internally to talk about it.  It also points up  some things that were very common in people who stayed frozen.

1) Recognize that you are frozen.  It's harder than it sounds. Sometimes a really bad freeze feels...nice. Warm and floaty. Crystal calm.  You can feel completely aware of every detail around you and even compliment yourself on how clearly you are thinking and how calm you are.  You might even have very logical reasons for doing nothing. Here's a clue- if you or someone you care about are taking damage, you are frozen. Recognize it and act.

1a) There's another form of freezing, too. I call it the adrenaline loop. It is freezing in action. Doing the same thing over and over even though it is not working or you can see death on the horizon.  This is a direct will vs. hindbrain contest.  Remember how the hindbrain doesn't trust that new-fangled idea of training? It's also not big on the idea that you can think ahead. It can sense death and all it knows, all it accepts, is that what it has done so far hasn't gotten you killed. It will vote to stick with the plan.  Catch me at home or a seminar and I usually have a very ugly video of this in my bag.

2) This is the part I get handwavy about. Once you recognize you are frozen, you make a conscious decision to do something- almost anything- and you do it. Scream. Hit the guy. Something.  This is handwavy  (everyone gets that, right? the one step in a complicated process where everyone just hopes that things work out and the person explaining waves hands around in an attempt to distract you from the fact that he really doesn't have an answer?). I know what I've done. I know this can work. I have no idea if telling you is enough. I have no way of inspiring terror to the point of a freeze in students and then coaching them until acting is a habit.  I can tell you you must take conscious control of your body, but I look around and see how few people seem to have conscious control of any aspect of their lives and I lose a bit of hope.  If you are frozen, act.

3) Do it again. This may be personal, maybe pretty universal. This is deep in that area that is hard to research. In my experience, I tell myself to do something, do it and I'm still fighting the hindbrain. Do it twice, however and the hindbrain accepts that the change hasn't gotten me killed and lets me get to work.

That's the pattern for me. Recognize the freeze. Make myself act. Make myself act again.  Then I can enter the sixth circle.

The Fourth Circle

If it goes physical, the next three stages apply to what would be called 'the fight'. All three of the next stages are very different things. Not all will happen, not in a Monkey Dance or a mutual fight- the dueling thing. But in an assault... yeah.

Stage four I'm going to give you some credit. I will assume that if you see something bad coming you will avoid it. Yeah, that takes some common sense and maturity but I believe in you. Really.  What this means, practically, is that if you got assaulted it was a surprise. Maybe not a complete surprise- you might have known it was bad or it was going bad- but the first contact (fist, stick or boot or...) was a surprise. Otherwise it wouldn't have gotten in.

In case I haven't made it clear, the seven circles are stages of training. They mirror what happens in conflict, are based on that, but this is a map of training, not of the field. Yeah, things will pretty much break down in this order.... I'm rambling. General warning: Models are never reality. They are useful, they are not absolutely real.

So, stage four. The sucker punch.  Given that action beats reaction and all the cool stuff about the OODA loop martial artists tend to hand wave past this stage.  Some traditionalists say, "Mushin will take care of it." and some RBSD guys have said, "You can't do anything about it so there's no point in training for it."  In this case, the traditionalists are closer to the truth.  Closer.

There are some things that any good martial artist will train to reflex.  It will be based on style and instruction and inclination. Sometimes it is simply a block, sometimes a block and counter. Some judoka will respond with their favorite throw before they have consciously registered the opening. A very good ring fighter will strike at openings almost before they appear.

This is basic Operant Conditioning training. Stimulus/response stuff. If you have seen this in the simple things described above you know that it exists and you have an idea of how it works. OC is a style of training.  It is what you need for the fourth circle (I'm still up in the air on calling them circles or stages or whatever. I'm thinking book, so send your suggestions.)

The problem with OC is that it tends to get trained pretty specifically. An overhand right requires, in most styles, a different response than an overhand left or a kick or a straight right.  A sudden assault may be an overhand right, or a kick or a stab or... Training for each possible attack may take years and will never cover all possibilities.

So here is the stage four training- practice one move for most sudden attacks. Sounds too simple and there is more going on, but that is basically it. I'm not going into technique here. I have predilections. So do you. The Stage four techniques that you practice must serve your preferences, not mine. In general a perfect technique will better your position, worsen the threat's position, do damage to the threat and prevent damage to you... my idea of bettering my position is based on being an infighter. If that's not you, my particular favorites may hamper and not empower you.

As I said, it's more complex. I teach each student three techniques. One for an attack you see. Not an attack you identify. That takes too long. Your intuition tingles, the threat starts to move, you move. I only teach one to each student (unless they plan on teaching) and I try to tie the action to their natural flinch. There are two natural flinches for something coming at your eyes. If you find out which one the student has (and on people who have trained a long time it is harder, years of conditioning alter the natural response) you pick a response based on that.

The second is for the attack you feel. Something hits you in the back of your head. Someone grabs for your weapon. Arms come around your neck. Something slams into your kidney. One technique that works for all of these. You've taken the damage, you need to get the initiative back. The technique you teach/train has to respect the fact that if this is a blitz, it won't stop with a single attack.

The third, again, is for an attack that you feel, but it overwhelms you by breaking your balance forward.  I wish I could come up for a single response for attacks from behind that worked for both dynamics, but I haven't.  

So each student gets one response for attacks from the front (defined as anywhere in the visual field, anything you see before you feel) and two for attacks from behind.

They have to be practiced in a realistic environment- that means the stimulus must be an attack, not a sparring lead with feints. One of the things that makes this hard to practice to reflex is that you have to guard against instilling a 'pull'. You are laying something in pretty deep and you can put bad habits, like pulling or stopping, right in with it. Generally, my students practice on me (more experience at avoiding damage) and I wear armor.

Stage four integrates with stage five. If you get hit and you weren't expecting it, you will freeze. You will have to deal with a cascade of stress hormones. However, if your training at stage four was effective you have already counterattacked. This evens the playing field. The threat wasn't expecting this and now may be frozen also. (Part of stage two is understanding how threats think, how they have a plan and experience with a certain type of attack, how that attack is designed to prevent or minimize resistance. A counterattack is rarely in the plan.)

Koolaid drinking at this stage? Part is mentioned above: "You can't do anything so you might as well not train." is the form of koolaid drinking based on, "My instructor didn't have an answer and he is the right hand of god so there must not be an answer."  Expectation of mushin is also a form of koolaid drinking. True mushin does exist but is levels beyond what most people describe. Maybe in another post, a twilight zone post, I'll try to pick that apart. 

But something I call 'false mushin' happens pretty frequently. If the attack looks very much like something a person has trained, the practitioner's reaction will kick in without thought. Because it happened without thought and was successful it pretty much fits the description that most practitioners have of 'mushin'... but it is just an OC response.  It relies on luck, the luck that what you trained for is what you will get.

Something else sometimes happens. Raise your hand if you've heard this story: "I been training for awhile, you know, and this guy was being a jerk and he said some shit and I said something and suddenly he hauled off and just out of nowhere I kiai'd and threw a punch and I pulled it an inch from his nose and he slunk off..."

The person who does this sees it as a major success and it is. Sort of. A drunken idiot who wants to Monkey Dance can be intimidated by a pulled punch and a yell.  What I see in that story is that someone had trained pulling to the point that when their reactions kicked in to a real threat, the pulling came right along with the technique. If they had been facing a predator or even an experienced MD fighter, all the threat would have learned is that he didn't hit, that he had trained not to hit, that it would be perfectly safe to kick the living shit out of him.

Stage 3

Prevention and De-Escalation

In most cases there will be some warning before an attack is imminent. I'm not as optimistic as some authors- snipers and people who kill in the victim's sleep won't tingle your spidey-sense. Nor will some very well skilled and planned assaults and ambushes. But in most incidents there are pre-assault indicators and since the payoff for recognizing them is so high (As a friend put it, "If you talk 'em down you don't even get your feelings hurt.") it's worth understanding.

This stage has a lot in it and a lot of nuance.  What I said about no warning? That's sort of true.  There is a variation of inductive reasoning, like inductive intuition. Deductive intuition ranges from "He just said he is going to kill me and he reached for his waistband." To "things just got suddenly quiet for no reason, something's wrong."  The inductive variation is to have no clues at all but to be aware, "If I was going to pull a blitz it would be right here and I would come from right there."

So there is a level of reading terrain and possibility and an easier level of reading people and intent.  Both are good skills. Both enrich your life in other ways (that terrain reading? I've been able to guess where old villages would be.)

This leads to an array of different skills, but they go right together. Avoiding situations, staying away from bad people and bad places is great. It takes some discipline and those who most need to heed the advice (young people on their own for the first time just experimenting with alcohol, drugs and social life) are the ones least likely to listen.

Escape and evasion, looking at running away as a finely honed martial skill gets lip service, but not much practice. Do you understand the difference between running away from danger and running to safety? In a new place that has suddenly become dangerous what is most likely to be the safe way out?  There are exits you can see, are there exits you can make? In your home and workplace, what walls and objects are cover and which are only concealment?

Then there is verbal de-escalation, "talkin' 'em down."

There is no way I can do justice to this in a short post.  If you haven't read Gavin DeBecker's "The Gift of Fear" read it for no other reason than the list of tactics that he gives of how Charm Predators get close to their victims.  But that is only a piece.

Reading the threat:

Is this about status, or predation?  The body language that can make a predator look for easier prey can trigger a status fight.  If it is about status, is it internal or is the threat playing to an audience? How does the audience fit into the picture as additional threats or as resources?

The 'interview'- if a potential threat strikes up a conversation is it as a predator to gauge the prey? As a Charm Predator trying to lure the victim to a more conducive place or position for the attack? Or, in social violence, is the threat trying to show a justification to his audience or manufacture one for himself?

And, most important- is this an interview or is that stage (NOT always talking, sometimes just observing) already over and this is the distraction preceding the assault?

There are tools for all of this, tools and skills to determine what is really going on and tools to defuse the situation.  This is probably the biggest, most important and most effective skillset in all of self defense. You can't separate it from Stage Two, you need to know what you are looking for, but the skills here are wide and deep. Physical self defense is limited by the physical body. This level is pretty much limited only by your imagination.

There are kool-aid drinkers here, too.  They imagine the crazed killer of a slasher flick as the typical real villain or disdain what they call 'soft skills' because 'they don't work in the extreme, not when things go really bad.'  Sometimes that's true. Don't dismiss it. But the skills work often and they can prevent much badness and they in no way detract from or interfere with physical skills.

Sometimes the kool-aid is a different flavor. There are people, (they are rare) who will teach that verbal skills are all that you need. There are people who hear about officers shooting an enraged threat with drugs on board or mental illness and consider it a preventable tragedy, something that could have been averted "if only the officers knew how to communicate."

If someone is too enraged to listen, you usually can't talk them down.  If they are too unbalanced to understand your words, you can't reason with them.  If the knife is already going into your stomach, it is too late to form words.

Skill at Level 3 is a skill. But it isn't an answer.

Seven Circles Parts 1 and 2

Or stages or whatever. This was a brief section in the book (for some reason two were combined and it came out as six) and here are some more thoughts on it. Violence is complex. It's not just complex in one way, either.  The actual physical skills of martial arts can seem complex, but it is a very uniform type of complexity- physiology, physics, priorities. The human body moves like a human body, but some styles vary over how they choose to move. Many styles vary over how they prefer to develop power or how they compare the value of applying power versus disrupting balance.

Violence takes all that complexity and adds more. Some of the complexity is at this level. The person may be trained or untrained, may value a strategy that you have never seen or rely on one that you ignore because you have been taught that "No one really attacks that way."

There is more at other levels- social interaction. Motivation. (Almost nothing you have learned in sparring applies to a predatory assault).  On and on.  It is complex in a number of measurable ways- over time and technique and environment; and fuzzier ways- the emotional baggage on all sides; and then the interaction between each and every piece.

That's preamble, because I'm going to ignore most of that, just didn't want anyone forgetting it. 

I originally divide these aspects up by time. The idea was that the first stages are things that you need to understand and apply well before anything bad happens, the rest are in the order you will face them.  This is my opinion, but if what you are training doesn't cover these seven things calling it self-defense is wrong.

1) Legal and ethical issues.  If you do not know when it is legal to use force or what levels of force are appropriate or how to justify force you are vulnerable. I have seen people teaching throat chops to a hand grab... and people teaching ineffective  joint locks for situations where deadly force would be not only legal but prudent. You don't want to be beaten, robbed or murdered- but you also don't want to spend years training to put yourself in a state prison. Trust me on that. If you don't absorb Force law with force techniques, you'd better be playing a video game.  There are a bunch of kool-aid drinking reactions to this, most centered on a subconscious belief that the instructor is the next thing to god so if he didn't teach it, it wasn't important. It's far more likely that what he is teaching arose in a time and place when the rule of law wasn't even imagined. It is now, and ignoring that change in environment is as stupid and self-defeating as practicing archery from horseback and pretending it is for modern war. 

Ethical issues are more personal. There are things that a normal person simply can't do, but they vary for each individual. And there are things that a person can do in an instant that they can't make themselves do if they have time to think about it. And there are things that people can do and can't live with.  I don't know where these lines are for you. Neither do you. You know some of them and you suspect many more- a lot of the tough guy blustering is hiding these fault lines (places you might break) from yourself and others*. There is an art to training for this and a good instructor can notice your glitches and start working some of them into the light of day. The kool-aid drinker path with this is, "I'll be able to do it when the time comes." This is pure talisman thinking. If you can't make yourself do it now, you likely won't even think of it when you are surprised and scared. Work out your ethical issues with violence NOW. If you find that you have hard limits, don't waste time training to do things that you can't do or can't live with**. That requires understanding the effects of what you train. I suspect that many people practice a technique and never absorb that it is not just a hand or foot moving through the air but is intended to make a man blind or crippled.

2) Understand violence dynamics.  You need to know how fights start and how predators attack, and those are two very different things.  If you can't see it coming, you can't prevent it. If you can't tell, early, the difference between someone starting a Monkey Dance, setting the stage for a Group Monkey Dance or a Charm Predator closing to range, it is a crap shoot. The body language that prevents one triggers the other. The tactics that are necessary for a predator blitz can lead to criminal charges in a MD; a MD response to a blitz can leave you dead or crippled. Neither works that well in a GMD.  That's big picture stuff. How do bad things happen in your particular area? It turns out that where I am right now, they don't use knives at all like I am used to. Know the dynamics, know criminal tactics. If the instruction doesn't accurately cover these you are rehearsing for your instructor's fantasy life.

There is more here, it is a study in itself, and it interacts with you. If the most violent gang in your area ranges in age from nine to thirteen, does that change the way you think about responding? Why? How?  If the threat is clearly out of it, say lashing out in a diabetic crisis, would you handle it differently? How? Why? Would you even know?

*Once upon a time I was walking into a room with one of the toughest-talking guys I ever met when the electric panel blew out in a series of 'pops'.  He turned and ran, thinking it might be gunfire. Had it been gunfire, I would have been alone to deal with it. Probably better in this instance.

**If you practice a blade or gun art find someone who raises livestock and offer to help butcher. If you can't force yourself to cut the throat of an animal or shoot one (to supply food- this isn't gratuitous violence but simply where food comes from) you will have a much, much harder time with a human being, both in the action and dealing with the aftermath.

The Power of Diversity

As a rule, professionally, I don't give a damn about feelings.  My job and especially when on a team is to keep people from being injured.  If I can go in and leave with the bad guys in cuffs and no one- good, bad or bystander- injured, I really don't give a damn if someone feels slighted or insulted.

Understand- I don't want to insult people and go out of my way to avoid it, but not because I care about their feelings. It's just easier to deal with people who are calm and on your side than people you've been a jerk to.

So when people talk about diversity, I take a fairly hard look. Most are talking about diversity of appearance. There is something there, but only as little or as much as people decide. In almost all of the so-called 'protected classes' I know people who are extraordinary and people who are worthless. It's not the 'easy to quantify' things- race, religion, gender, age, gender identity, whatever- that make people different or special. But some latch onto one of these as a label or a badge or a shield or a reason or an excuse... I don't have a lot of use for that.

I solve problems and I work with teams that solve problems.  The more different eyes looking at the problem from different places the more options I have. THAT is why I value diversity. It has nothing to do with appearance or catering to feelings. It is about getting everyone out alive. So I want the inner city kid and the redneck and the flower child. As long as they agree on the goal (and as TL I reserve the right to set the goal if there is any dissent) the mix will give me more options.

They have issues. I don't know any adult human being who is worth a shit who doesn't have enough bad stuff in their past to be full of excuses and issues... but I choose people who have the stuff and refuse to use it as excuses. In that one thing, perhaps, I don't honor diversity. I see nothing noble or useful about wallowing in the victim identity.

Two men despise each other.  One is urbane and mild mannered. The other is crude and loud- he talks like someone out of the movie "Deliverance". The urbane one has no frame of reference for what is going on here.  Where he has lived he has never actually met a poor southern boy. Everything he has seen on television requires that someone who looks and talks like this must be stupid and ignorant and violent and probably evil.

The southern boy, his whole life, has only seen privileged white northerners with this demeanor, this condescension.  He is used to being talked down to, treated as if he were stupid and dangerous.

The southern boy is smart as hell and deeply compassionate, two things the northerner can't see because they don't compute with his world view.  The urbane northerner is actually brave and tough as nails and the southerner can't see that. Hidden behind condescension he has always seen, or always expected to see, a physical coward.

The team leader strikes the balance. She is a product of urban Texas and has seen "good ol' boys" who were smart as anything and upper-class city kids who would stand their ground in the fires of hell.  It is work for her to maintain the balance. If the northerner and the southerner could see the strengths, it would make a hell of a team.

Diversity is a resource, but seeing it and using it is a skill.

Just a Few Memories

Canoeing through a Mayan burial cave on an underground river, neon tetras swimming in the water below.

Flesh standing up to steel at an ancient vision-quest sight.

Chichu with a reformed cannibal in the Ecuadorian selva.

Sword fights lit by construction lights in a half-finished building.

Climbing through an actual ventilation duct- it's not like the movies.

Fine Islay scotch on the shoulder of a Cascade mountain under the aurora borealis.

Practice pursuit driving at PIR.

Putting on the black armor and checking weapons and coms.

Water erupting from the solid rock in a cascade deep underground.

Falling asleep with a cougar.

Looking into the eyes of a wild wolf.

Running through a desert night with the stars so bright that the sagebrush glowed.

Jumping out: arch, look, reach, pull, check...check canopy and looking at my own boots at 5000 ft.

The plane takes off to go to a new country, a war zone. Glance out the window and all of the airport staff are outside in the hot sun, saluting, sending us off.

Motoring fast up the Rio Napo.  

The first time kissing my lover goodbye thinking I might not see her again.

The tenth time, wife now. Different, deeper, but still spectacular.

Smoking a naghila with orange tobacco at Christmas with the muezzin calling outside.

Midnight crepes in Vieux Montreal with a table-full of strangers, fascinating, intelligent, skilled strangers.

The rough skin of a living shark.

The kind of job that requires a laptop and an assault rifle.

The gift of a t-shirt from a foreign elite unit.

Offered, and turned down, a "temporary wife" in a country where I am told that doesn't happen.

Sitting in a hot spring on a mountain in a desert with snow all around and an air temperature about 10F.

18 year-old scotch with a general who has been fighting his entire adult life as a woman sings in a dialect that neither of us understands.

Speed rappelling into icy cold water and swimming out to a mountain pool.

Bowling in Iraq, forty miles from the Iranian border.

Chess with murderers, and combat too.

Earning the trust of a low-functioning autistic schizophrenic and helping him control his life.

Talking down a 210 pound threat in excited delirium.

Sitting in a class where a nationally recognized expert says that is impossible.

Squeezing through a tight hole that opens into the ceiling of a sixty-foot high cave chamber. Squeeze to rope in a heart beat.

A wild horned lizard in Washington state.

Jumping on a train in motion. Easy if slow. Tried it once at speed, not a good thing.

Making fire with a bow drill.

Wading medical equipment across an amazonian tributary.

Drinking aguardiente and telling stories with close friends.

Seeing my book for sale in the local book store.

Looking down on an eagle in flight from a 5.9 climb.

And, of course, an ostrich in a sweater. Very amazed at my life right now.

Teasers

When I get back I'm going to have some great stories and great pictures. Things that can't be shared now. Some funny, some just cool, some very disturbing.

So, in an old Russian-built fortress, a shaft sealed off. It was probably used to winch materials up from lower floors but is now completely sealed except for the top. Just a midden or, perhaps, an oubliette:

And how in hell will I ever top an ostrich wearing a jacket herding hairy sheep?  Or goats? Or whatever the little capines are.

One Full Circle

This will be another technique post. Yeah. Darn.

Johann asked a question: 

how would you attack someone from a distance (3m-10m), for example someone busy hurting someone else? No weapons on any side.

Which was the incident that prompted my first blog post.  There was more going on there and obviously I was compelled to write the post because of the blood exposure, not the incident itself.  The other question that weighed at the time was what the consequences would be over the long term and whether saving a life is always a good act.

So, Johann, I'm going to start with a couple of caveats and general stuff. No weapons on any side is not only an assumption, but downright stupid. If you are anywhere in the real world you should be able to access something to use as a weapon even if no one else is doing it. I am more or less expected to take people down without hurting them so sometimes I go hands-on when it might not be wise.

When you are going into a situation it can go bad very, very fast. Be ready for that. Both of the people involved and even the audience might turn on you if they see an 'outsider' trying to break up a fight between 'insiders'. If you tunnel vision on one, you might miss the response of the other. There is a lot that can potentially go wrong.

Have a back up plan. Preferably, have some back-up people who can pull you out if things go wrong. It is a situation that can turn from easy to a 2-on-1 in a heartbeat.

Move fast and decisively. This goes for everything, but if there is any hesitation, any half-assed attempt to do a technique it will fail.

This does NOT mean you try to take heads off!! You use the minimum  level of force that you believe will work. If you think you can do it with a lock, you do a fast, decisive lock- no hesitation. If you decide you must strike, even try to take a head off, you do it. You don't give a half-power blow to gauge the effect. If you think of the level of force you have chosen as a place, you must be all the way there. If you hesitate at the threshold you will fail.

Johann's instructor recommends going in hard with fists and boots. IME striking is relatively unreliable. I'll go farther than that. The effects can be downright weird. I've seen people curl up in fetal positions from strikes that others ignored and just glare when hit in the head with a bar. Been lifted in the air by a solid groin strike that didn't effect me at all for several minutes and been put down by one that barely contacted. Put people down twice with a solid left hook to the floating ribs but been on the receiving end from bigger, stronger people and didn't feel it. Fought through concussions and not noticed broken ribs. My experience is that the closer the threat is to a normal state of consciousness the more likely strikes will work like they are "supposed to" --but since the closer one is to the normal state of consciousness the less likely I'll need to go hands on at all-- you do the math. Strikes seem to work best when you need them least.

Those are the warnings, here is some strategy:

 You are not taking damage so you can take a little time to make a plan or get help or get a tool. It might sound cold to ignore the person who is taking damage, but this isn't about justice, this is about resources. You do this stupid and get hurt not only do you get hurt but you can no longer be a resource to save the victim. One of the reasons to plan and train for these scenarios is to limit that damage time

Do it smart. Remember the four basic truths? Use them. The threat should have no idea you are there until you have already acted. Fast and hard/decisive action.  Part of Johann's question says 3m-10m. Without a weapon, you can't do anything at that range. Part of answering this question is closing the range without being seen. Usually, the threat is tunnel-visioned and it isn't much of a problem.

Choose who to help.  This sounds stupid, but sometimes the guy winning is the good guy. You might not know. This is critical if you are considering deadly force.

Can you fight the mind?  In a full-blown berserk rage, probably not. He may not be able to hear you at all and he may not care. Increasing the level of stimulus (trying to distract the threat) usually increases agitation. That said, there are two strategies that sometimes work:

1) Supplying information, e.g. "The cops are on the way." Or, "You'd better stop, I don't think he's breathing."  The more criminal the act is- and by that I mean deliberate and planned and based on a history of successful violence- the more likely these are to work. It's fundamentally fucked up, but career criminals know when and how to surrender and can keep consequences in mind, like a manslaughter conviction is heavier than an assault conviction, that an enraged citizen or EDP (Emotionally Disturbed Person) couldn't. Remember the line about resources, not justice? This is another part. Stopping someone from being violent isn't about justice, only about stopping them.

2) Shocking them. I'm generally soft spoken, but I do have a window-shaking sensei voice. Good thing is that a couple of time it has had almost magical effects on fighters. Bad part is that it ruins my voice for days every time I use it. So really loud noises. I think a bucket of ice water would do wonders (it works on dogs), but I've never been allowed to use it to break up fights with inmates.

Both of these strategies can sacrifice surprise. It's your call.

Take a second, because that is a huge amount of information and we haven't even got to the technique yet. Take that to heart. Technique is the easiest part. Knowing when and how to apply the technique is the second easiest. Making yourself do it may be the hardest and that's the part I'm not sure can really be taught.

All of this gets modified by position.  The example from 2005 the threat had the other guy bent over backwards on a table, was leaning over him with a forearm choke across his neck and gripping the victim's shirt with his other hand. Mount, straddle ground and pound, clinch will all affect things.

Coming up on the threat's right from behind, left hand goes to control the base of his spine (pelvic girdle) right hand held very flat comes up across his mouth and under his nose.

---The spine control assumes he is not laying flat, you only need it if he can move freely from his legs.

--- Keep in a position that if he spins suddenly to either side to throw an elbow the elbow will run into something or you can control the rotation at the shoulder before it reaches you.

---Right at the base of the nose there is a place where it is still bone and not cartilage.  It makes a nice grip, is extremely sensitive to pain and can apply extraordinary leverage through the spine to the whole body.

Pull up and back with your right hand and probably push forward with your left.

---Use the bone at the base of your index finger to maximize pain on the nose point.

---The action is based on the spine. You don't lift his face but extend and arch is spine. That's why it works on monstrously strong people.

---Note on above- in a lot of technique, instead of looking for the circle, look for the spiral. If that makes no sense to you it will in a few years of practice.

---Pushing forward on the lower spine gives a two-way action (one of the basic, basic principles to making things work) and puts him in a position where he can't generate power in any direction other than falling down.

---Depending on position,but especially if the threat is now on his feet or knees, you can 'load' the spine a bit by a slight shift up and to your left with the right hand.

---Be very, very careful with this. Catch me in person to find out why.

Finish.  You probably have him in a spine immobilization, which looks like he is doing a back bend with his hands not touching the floor. I've held people in that position and had chats. It may work and it allows you a chance to keep an eye on the other guy.

You can drop him straight down from there, which may just kick off another ground fight with your back to the other one.

If you have loaded his spine, you can now pivot hard to your right and project him to land face down. That's what I did with the guy in the example. I was able to do it and keep the other in my peripheral vision.

I can imagine ways that things could heat up again and leave you in a bad position. My experience is that if it is fast and decisive enough, no one wants to be in the sequel- and this technique looks like magic. We investigate all Uses of Force and this one got some extra hard looks because all of the witnesses said, "Miller showed up and the guy was on the ground." It had happened too fast for the witnesses, including the experienced officers, to tell what happened or how. That's good, but it makes the reports look fishy. 

Fade to Gray

Got the word today that my old team has been disbanded. Budget cuts. It hit like hearing about a death. They were good men and women doing good things. Sometimes it seems like that is a negative, that something about holding yourself to a higher standard draws condemnation and retaliation from the world. Maybe it isn't the world, maybe it is just petty bureaucrats, the paladins of mediocrity who gnash their teeth and lash out at anything superior. Maybe that is why they are more comfortable promoting a drunk who makes them feel superior rather than a good worker who is not only smarter and braver than they are but also more honest, more honorable.

Or maybe I'm just bitter. It doesn't feel bitter, just sad. If this wasn't an Islamic country I'd raise a glass...

The first operation for the team was a riot in a facility that wasn't ours. Some of us thought it was a practical joke when we got the page. But we were there, coordinated with the local metropolitan SWAT and the Fire Department and it went beautifully. For the first time we heard, "Who were those guys?"

We impressed the other agencies- how many corrections teams have ever been specifically asked to take over a city SWAT op? We have and it went perfectly.

We designed and implemented a plan for 'mobile booking.'  At the time (and still, as far as I know) we were the only people in the nation that could go into the field to support a mass arrest situation and create a temporary jail from scratch controlling the inmates, the property and the paperwork.

That put us on 'the list'. During my tenure on the team we were on the 'first call' list for two Federal Agencies, a state facility and two city SWAT teams. 

The highest rated and most proficient trainers for both Enforcement and Corrections were all on my team. We trained with our enforcement team for a short time, but moved on to the local USM for training. They were simply better. Our enforcement team would go to our training, but wouldn't train with us, "That looks dangerous. We just shoot 'em," they said.  But we shot better.

The first agency tasing saved a life. Failures of different less-lethal impact rounds. Tons of field experience with OC, especially when it didn't work at all. PCP freaks and excited delirium. Talking people down who couldn't be talked down.

We were created and instilled with the values to always do the right thing even, or especially, if it wasn't the safe thing. As the agency changed over time, as they actually wrote into training that it was more important to avoid liability than to do the job, we could see the writing on the wall.

It's still a sad day, even if we could see it coming. They were the best of the best, as individuals they still are, and they have much to be proud of and nothing (except for blowing kisses TH you geek!) to be ashamed of.

Inveniam viam aut faciam

NPNBW

Boxes

I don’t much doubt my ability to communicate with the written word. It is an amazing tool and with practice it gets better. But this is the nature of the beast, the nature of what I teach and talk about: it is scary as all hell. It is death and annihilation.  Not just facing your own demise, that’s easy, but the fact that you may face your final years blind or crippled or with the memory of having crawled or begged.

Teachers don’t talk about it, usually. But we all know that this is what it is. This is where it all might go. Because of that, because of its nature, people are almost infinitely creative in ways to NOT think about it. If you read “With the Old Breed on Peleliu and Okinawa” E. B. Sledge describes it perfectly: “…men had squared away their gear and had done their last-minute duties: adjusting cartridge belts, pack straps, leggings, and leather rifle slings—all those forlorn little gestures of no value that released tension in the face of impending terror.”

Fiction, movies, martial arts, late night fantasies- putting this impending terror and pain into boxes, pretty boxes small enough to hold in your brain.

This is the busy work of the monkey mind.  The obsession with perfect form, the martial arts politics, the bickering over lineage, treating instructors like gods and your training as The Truth are all just different ways to hide your brain from what this is.

I don’t doubt that I can describe the technique in the written word. But this isn’t about technique.  This is why I teach individuals and in person- because I have to be there to see when the mind wanders, when developing a skill becomes an obsession to hide behind or when they are doing something to avoid seeing something else. I have to hold what it is and what they are doing before them at all times. In the written word, no matter how strong the truth or how limited the bullshit, there is always enough weasel room that it can become a place to hide behind surface knowledge, a way to ignore while pretending to see- or just fodder for a fantasy.

Because this is my amulet- to hold up what I know about this by its slimy neck and look at it without flinching. Knowing it will kill me some day and refusing to look away.  I choose to believe that if I poke at the dark places and wade in the shit I will understand it, at least a little. And that will let me control it, at least a little.

The Morning Show

I call it the Morning Show- a group of heavily armed men (3 native languages in my vehicle of four) make the short trip to the workplace.  Two of the team keep up a constant stream of talk- crude, hilarious, insightful.  It is the kind of talk, phrased in the kind of way that paranoid feminists think all men talk, all the time.  The primary subjects are sex and violence- who they would kill and how and why. Who they would fuck and how and why.

It is like a bad script of "man talk" but it is sometimes astonishingly funny and sometimes even wise. "Explosive thigh sweat" and "That there is a rare chinchilla" are phrases that will stick with you.

Despite the scripting, neither of these men is like that. Despite the sex talk, if you catch him alone one will speak with quiet earnestness about his wife and how he would never do anything to hurt her feelings. Both have had opportunities. Neither has acted on them.

To one degree or another, everyone in the truck is experienced at violence. They tell stories of wild uncontrolled anger and flights of fantasy vengeance but in the real deal they are professional. Controlled. Cold.  They are good enough to teach it- not just teach violence, but teach control- in a country torn by perhaps millenia of war.

What brings this on, the talking role?  I'm used to wannabes who talk tough. They are mildly amusing. These are true tough guys who talk like wannabes on steroids. Are they playing out a script, something that they learned somewhere is the way talking is 'supposed to be'? And if so, where did they learn to separate their worlds from their talk?  Are they spoofing the people who try to imitate them?  Does it ease some of the tension of being good all of the time to talk bad some of the time?  Or is it just because it is funny?

So I'm a little puzzled today about the why of it, and wondering how many others would see past the words to how these men act.  "Words and actions in accord" are one of my usual signs of heart. If these mens acted like their words, I wouldn't like them. But I have seen them take risks to comfort a stranger, show compassion to people beneath the notice of most (by the social rules of this culture), and show the utmost politeness and cultural tolerance.  The tolerance was clearly a habit, too, the default value.

Only locked in the rig in the early morning do they vent like teenage boys with a radio show.  It is funny, but puzzling, too.

---------------------------------------------

Sometimes you have to share what can't be shared. Years ago, I drank chichu with a reformed cannibal in the jungles of Ecuador.  In a very real way, that summed up my life at the time. I have a new summation now.

Template

The details vary a lot, but I think I can put down in a very few steps what I do in a sudden close contact assault.

First of all, what I don't do and what I'm not talking about- sparring. If a bad guy puts his fists up and starts dancing around or extends both his arms and tucks his chin to his shoulder and his eyes go dead or he brandishes a knife, I don't play. Not unless I want to play that is, and that's a different thing. I've only failed to resist a few times. (Unprofessional, maybe, but validating.)  If someone sends you signals that they "want to fight" the signals are a gift. Get distance. Or a force option. Or friends. As Howard Webb at the academy used to say, "No intelligent man has ever gotten his ass kicked by someone who said, 'I'm gonna kick your ass.'" You have to be stupid enough to let him choose the game before you can lose an announced fight.

Watching a martial arts movie the other night it hit me. The set-ups were pretty realistic, but the responses were based on sparring. It was interesting, but frustrating, too. Things lasted too long. The director had to artificially hold back people so that the multiple opponent scenarios could work. The weapons stuff was stupid...

Variations on a theme, but this is the template for how I move when bad shit happens.

1) First point of action. Something is coming at me. Foot, fist, blade... don't know, don't care. Drop into the threat, back or side of my lower forearm(s) targeted to the outside of the threat's lead elbow.  Drop-step closing reliably neutralizes kicks. If the attack is high, my arms contacting his tend to deflect him in a circle. Low, they tend to pin the arm to his hip bone.

What this has going for it is that there are no fine motor skills, nothing to grip or coordinate. I don't need to know whether it is a weapon or not- I'm not dealing with a specific attack but with a direction of force. It doesn't even matter if the lead hand is the attacking hand. The back of the elbow is a leverage point: if the arm was high, I'm already behind him, if his arm was low, I will be behind him in the next motion.

2) Second action, and this is a continuation, there is no hesitation- the rear leg follows the drop step and I am either completely behind the threat if he gave me force high or at his rear flank if it was force low.

You understand that if someone is attacking, they are giving you force, right? Any other option I've experienced falls under 'brandishing'.  Nothing described so far is more complicated, or any different, really, than stumbling and recovering- something monkeys are wired to do and very fast at. So far no thoughts, no decisions.

3) Decision point. You shouldn't stop and think here, but in some cases you probably could. Even a guy with two knives can't do something to someone who is behind him and has control of his elbows. Not until he changes the equation, at least. So you don't give him time to change the equation. Nowhere in this template do I stop to evaluate. Anyway, this is the decision point and will depend on your goal and your parameters.  You can simply push and create space to possibly escape or draw a weapon, as Roger did. I prefer pushing into hard objects- a door jamb will break a clavicle far more efficiently than my best strike. With tall guys a hand slips up to the philtrum leverage point and the other stabilizes or blasts forward the base of the spine resulting in a harmless take down, neck sprain, severe concussion or spine fracture with a very slight change in body mechanics.  Those are just example, trying to demonstrate very fast things from both extremes of the force continuum. Everything else is there, too. Half-nelson take downs, knee stomps, kidney shots, cervical spine or just holding them by the jacket and shaking the threat like a terrier shakes a rat. Or throwing him into his friends.

4) Follow up, which can include just leaving.

Discussion-

First of all, this is back-engineered. I'm not trying to come up with something that should work so much as finding the common thread in things that have worked a lot.

Weapons do change things and they don't. A knife vastly changes the stakes, but if you change your strategy for high stakes, it sounds to me like you are fighting stupid when the stakes are low.  There's also a good chance you won't be able to tell if the fist coming at your stomach has a knife in it, so train so that it doesn't matter.

Again, though I feel like I've said this a million times: If the threat is good with a knife and plays at the right range and wants to whittle you into pieces, you're pretty much screwed UNLESS YOU LEAVE. Or use a weapon yourself. Or attack his mind directly. This template is for an ambush. The sucker-punch. "Buddy, you got the time?" And something flashes at your stomach or eyes.

You can tell that this is almost entirely positional. There is little more going on here than "Eeeeek! Get to my Safe Place!" My Safe Place just happens to be behind the threat.

The critical skills are the drop-step to close (including bringing the rear leg in, too many people leave it or their hips behind); learning to use the back of the arms (fewer tendons and vessels) to close and control; no-hands control of the leverage points; using leverage points and spine manipulation to control the whole body.  Maybe some on goal setting.

Unless you want to draw it out (I usually have to finish with cuffing, which adds a lot of steps) this is almost as fast as a "block and strike" combination or a "defang and counter". The steps leading up to getting to the safe place are at least as fast, since the footwork is essentially the same.

This is body contact range. It seems that many, nearly all, people equate proximity with danger. That depends on who owns the space. But this is close range stuff. I know some very good Filipino and related stylists who consider what they do infighting. I fight closer. Shoulders and pelvis touching is good for me. That is what makes the safe place safe, I think. The threat has to step out of the bubble before he can turn to get his weapons into play. That gives you that much free time to do as you will.

In most environments, the damage potential is great. Driving someone into a wall head first with the combined body weight of two people has a tendency to do the trick. This makes the template a faster finish than a block and strike, strike, strike... it can take a lot of strikes to make someone quit playing.

Last thing- I haven't done a lot of multiple threat fighting, but most of my fights involved tens of potential threats. I was almost always able to perform this and face the potential threats immediately. Since it happened to fast for most to register why Billy-bob was suddenly face down on the floor, the thought of jumping in rarely made it all the way across their minds. Since this template can be done running through and away and takes so little time... but that's all theory until I do it. If I get involved in an ugly bad one with multiple threats I'll let you know how it worked out.

Running With The Wind

The sky is immense here, the land barren. Mountains tower in all directions. Wild dogs howl in the night.  Hail, rain and thunder shot with flashes of brilliant sun and a sky as blue as my son's eyes.

I shake scarred hands and ask the story. My shadow is always there, covering my rear flank. Unobstrusively skilled, I hand him a short staff and he grins. He's a fighter on a lot of levels. Good to have my radar confirmed.

The half-adopted stray wags her tail. Her ears are cropped, the custom here with stray dogs (that puzzles me, neither killing nor adopting strays but taking the time to mutilate them). I scratch behind her stubby ears and share my breakfast- flat bread and cheese, usually, but sometimes garbanzo soup. Nasty.

I can run and I do. Sometimes the mud sticks to my shoes and I stop after only a hundred meters or so. Each foot weighs several pounds too much and I am standing inches taller. It will take forever to get all the mud off my shoes.

"A king was executed on that rock."

"That is the ruins of one of the oldest villages in the world."

"Would you like to buy a hunting falcon?"

"All the bullet holes are so high because they had to shoot from outside the walls."

A man with disfiguring scars does mundane business with a breathtaking beauty across the counter of a shopping gallery.

Just a minute, really, allowed to swing a hammer in a forge that has changed little since the dawn of the Iron Age. It is his heaviest hammer and I am trying to be precise, not show off muscle. He makes his living at this and I don't want to mess up his job.  The hammer rings, lift and stroke and it rings again. Yeah, I could do this and be happy for a very long time.

Living and Learning

In the last couple of days I've read some opinions on blogs comparing martial arts and military combat training. Very old stuff, soI'm not feeling compelled to source it. One mentioned that BCT (Basic Combat Training) was more about instilling confidence than skills. Another said that the weeks of combat training could not compare to the depths the average martial artist would reach in his or her years of training.

Both of these comments came from serious martial artists. Neither, as far as I know, has been involved in the military.  Obviously, I feel different. Here's why:

If time in training matters (and sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't- 100 hours doing bullshit does not outweigh 1 hour doing something worthwhile.) I'm not sure the argument would hold. A regular MA (not a fanatic like all of you probably are) goes to  two classes a week and, from the ones I've checked out over the last two years, the classes last for 90 minutes. 

ASIDE- There will be a lot of generalizations in here. For everything I bring up, from training hours to how systems develop to what is put in or left out of a system, I am aware of exceptions. So, if you feel compelled to point out how whatever I said doesn't apply to you, just be aware that you are writing it to feel special, not to enlighten me.

It used to be two hours, when I was a pup.  So, assuming no missing but no extra work either, this mythical average martial artist gets 156 hours of training a year. My BCT ran eight weeks. For six days a week we would get up at 0400 and, if we were lucky, hit the racks at 2200. Was all that time training? Damn near. You could argue that PT (Physical Training) are not skills, but I think the conditioning time from a martial arts class would be a bigger percentage. Meals? You learned how to eat quickt... but for arguments sake, we'll take the 45 minutes to an hour a day that we were allowed for eating out of the equation.

So, a MA gets about 156 hours of training a year. A recruit gets damn close to 816 hours of training in eight weeks. Even if my times are generous. (Marines get more.)

But that's really not the big deal.  MA instructors teach the same things, generally, that they were taught. If it's good enough for the 18th century, it's good enough for you.  It is enough to validate a system if your instructor or instructor's instructor successfully used it. Simple fact is that nothing pushed to the edge is always successful. That's how you know where the edge is.  There will be failures in dealing with violence and chaos. If there are no failures either someone is lying or it is not being used. Live with it.  

The military specifically uses failures to re-evaluate training. Every branch of the US military has a "Lessons Learned" or equivalent program. The troops coming out of BASIC now are getting skills that were learned by and/or reserved to elite forces in Vietnam. My training dates from just before the first Persian Gulf war and it is clearly outdated.  New recruit training, such as the CLS (Combat Life Saver) course is light years beyond anything we had and has (much to my sorrow as an old 91B) made the Combat Medic MOS obsolete. BCT is always changing but the changes are carefully based on necessity, not ego or fantasy or untested theory.

In martial arts, time is spent on warm-ups, basics, forms, sparring. That's not too different. It seems like it, maybe, because so much of MA time is spent on unarmed, one on one, non-lethal conflict. That makes it easy to specialize and focus.  A recruit's basics, forms and sparring include communication, small unit tactics, riflery and weapon maintenance, first aid, chain of command, operational security, and the law and rules of modern warfare. Plus a bunch of things that I may be forgetting.

BCT is a global approach to violence. Too many martial artists learn how to punch, but never learn when to punch. They don't get lessons on identifying an enemy or the legal parameters of force.

More than that- there are some very old systems that put a lot of stock into what I sometimes call the 'trivia of combat'.  It's important stuff and sometimes it is those little details that can tell a combat art from a fantasy. How do warriors walk in enemy territory? That's okuden in some Japanese arts. Basic marching order for soldiers.  Kuatso/Kwappo the 'lost' healing arts of jujutsu... I have a jujutsu manual from the 1940's that states categorically that there was no point in including them anymore because western first aid (1940s level!) was superior.  Bringing up eating- how do you eat in a war zone?  Set up meals? Schedule a rotation?  Probably a very esoteric aspect of koryu, but something you did and learned in BCT without even noticing it was a lesson.

'Eating Dirt'- one of the the articles I read extolled the value of "eating dirt": not learning anything useful but simply proving yourself through repetition and exhaustion. I found that insulting, frankly- the kind of bullshit that someone makes up to brainwash students before they give them whatever dribbles of real information that they actually have.  But there is value in exhaustion. Because sometimes you won't win by technique or power. Sometimes you will win by outlasting. By eating dirt on a level that most  of the MAs who extol the value would piddle in their little pants to actually have to endure. Six consecutive 18 hour days of training trumps any 8 hour black belt test that I've ever heard of. I notice that the guys who have been in BCT don't brag about their 'grueling' belt tests like others tend to.  Other, advanced training, like Ranger School or SERE takes this to a whole other level, but we're just talking about Basic, here. Nothing but basic.

Here's where MAs tend to get full of themselves- The hours spent on UAC (unarmed combat) in MA clearly trump the hours spent on it in BCT. But this is the deal- UAC is one of the things least likely to help a soldier. Just like in civilian life, dealing with predators, awareness trumps fighting skill and weapons trump unarmed skill.  Weapons are superior. They are better tools for stopping a human than a fist or a takedown. That's why we have them.  For the recruit, spending the hours on UAC that a MA does would simply be a waste of time. It would be confidence building in a useless and largely ineffective venue. Confidence building and nothing more.  They can get their confidence in other places.

Honestly, UAC is one of the things least likely to affect your safety as a civilian, too. If that's not self-evident let me know and I'll write about it another time.

Okay, so I'm a little bit of a cheer-leader, I'll admit that. When I was in I thought that the men and women I served with were special. They were intelligent (for the most part) dedicated, hard working... they were smarter, stronger and more honest than the whiny little rat bastards who delighted in talking them down.  This new crop is better in every way than my generation. I have the opportunity to watch them interact with a native populace that in any other time or venue would be denigrated and insulted. Not here. I can count the pejoratives I have heard in six months on three fingers and none of those were from soldiers. They exhibit respect and restraint and honor that the politicians who control them don't even dream of. At the same time, they are more technically and tactically proficient than we were.

I can stand here in this dry and sandy place and look at kids half my age and feel honored to be here with them.