A Fine Distinction

Over on the Uechi-ryu forums http://forums.uechi-ryu.com/index.php a guy who uses the name 'fivedragons' made a great point. It was more or less a throw-away comment and may not have meant as much to others, but it resonated:

"I don't think "karate" is really meant to teach someone how to fight. I think the deal is that someone decided that it would be nice to know how to break another person. "

Sometimes we look at things on too grand a scale. To teach someone to fight we teach strategy and tactics, how to read an opponent, how to move, what to do and even how to think. To teach self-defense we add violence, predator and crime dynamics; awareness and intuition; action triggers; escape and evasion; legal requirements and psychological survival and recovery. Throw in martial arts and it gets even more complex: philosophy, ritual, history and (too often) politics- sometimes even a value system with its own code of conduct. Add sportfighting and you need to teach rules and rankings (you exploit the rules in a tournament exactly the way you exploit any other aspect of the environment in any fight)... ideally there will be something about sportsmanship in there, too.

But when it comes to that ohnomoment you are going to use your human body (or a tool) to break another human body. That is a deadly simple set of skills.

Drilling with my son a few days ago I asked him to characterize what I was doing, trying to get him to see the theme- that in each movement I was trying to find the most efficient line, the fastest way I could get a weapon to a part of his body that could injure him (side note- this winds up with some pretty peculiar positions, so training time is spent elsewhere on the heavy bag or the striking post to figure out how to maximize power- so not only can you hit from three inches away while bent slightly backwards and twisted to the side but you can break something from there).

Another drill- G is short and I forced her head down and she tried to fight it. There was too much leverage for her to have any hope, but it was an instinct. By simply accepting what was, she could snap my knee from the inside with either her shoulder or her elbow. She was trying to fight, trying to maintain a comfort level of maneuverability and options that she was used to...when she could and should have just broken me.

Not fighting: breaking people. Keep it simple.

The Bay

The criminals in San Francisco, the ones I met anyway, seem pretty stupid. The second time one tried to sell me drugs I wanted to shake the little weasel, "Pay attention you moron: I'm a middle-aged guy with short hair and no accessories except a functional watch. Do I need to tatoo 'cop' on my forehead?" The panhandlers were pretty good though, almost always telling a story instead of just asking for money, throwing out lines for a hustle but usually smart or sensitive enough to tell when the fish wasn't biting.

The city itself was beautiful, especially from a distance. The weather was perfect, clear and windswept. The architecture was fascinating. The palace at the Exploratorium stunned me for a few minutes: I could imagine a hundred years after the passing of our civilization this building becoming the American Angkor Wat.

Close up, the city was less appealing- people sleeping on sidewalks (but wearing new designer tennis shoes), much dirt, bars on many windows and almost all shop doors could be gated, the smell of urine everywhere and in the corner liquor store the few bottles of good whisky had dust on them.

I walked for miles over two days- Chinatown streets and alleys (pornographic pre-paid phone cards and tourists getting some early afternoon action behind a massage parlor); North Beach (Little Italy, but I didn't stop for cannoli); The financial district and BART (I confess- I was looking to see how many buildings I recognized from GTA3 San Andreas); a single long loop from Nob Hill through Haight-Ashbury (a good IPA microbrew served by a stunningly beautiful six foot waitress who had eyes that were bright and clear but I couldn't tell if they were green or blue); through Golden Gate Park (with the stupid drug dealers and the slightly clumsy guy practicing spear kata); Up to the Presidio and through it on the hiking trails; down to the lagoon and the Palace of Fine Arts; over to Ghirardelli square and then once again up to Nob Hill and the hotel.

So- been away for awhile. Hostage negotiations training in Central Oregon, one day back on the computer (only a few hours, the rest spent hunting for missing dogs) then off to San Francisco to learn about the legal aspects of Internal Affairs investigations. Home late last night.

Words and Music

This story won't be perfect- I'm far from my library at the moment:

Once upon a time, Mark Twain's wife grew disgusted with his cussing and decided to do something about it. After an especially voluble and eloquent outburst from Mr. Twain, Mrs. Twain repeated back every bad word. Twain looked up from his breakfast and paper and said, "My dear, those are the words, but you don't have the music."

The last two days have been spent at Hostage Negotiations and Survival training. The instructor has an impressive resume. An incredible resume, really- he has been teaching this for longer than I've been in the business, connected with some of the most impressive law enforcement agencies and organization in the nation for almost as long as I've been alive... but listening very closely as he told his story nowhere does he mention ever actually negotiating a hostage situation, never actually surviving as a hostage.

He's an incredible speaker, a raconteur (hope I spelled that right) entertaining as hell... but everything is just slightly off. For the first day, it wasn't that the information was bad, it was just that it was thin. Paraphased concepts from other sources I recognized, and some other things that are disputed by experts presented with great personal conviction. It was the words as he learned them, but it was missing the music of experience.

Today was bad. The Viginia Tech tragedy came at a timely moment, as he saw it, and he worked hard to connect the events (sketchy as the details are at this time) to his teaching. It didn't wash. The more he talked the more it became clear that he planned for a clean and theoretical world where the existance of one double murder would somehow automatically presage an active shooter scenario two hours later; that he just wasn't up to speed on current active-shooter procedure.

He presented information on debriefing hostages that at first made no sense to me. There are basically three types of debriefings: tactical debriefs, where you get the information you need for further negotiations or tactical assault/rescue; after-action debriefings, where the stakeholders figure out what went well and where to improve; and critical incident stress debriefing, where you do what you can to mitigate the psychological impact of the events. All three of these have distinctly different goals and protocols and they require different training. He had jumbled them all together as if they were the same thing.

He then moved on to his own special and copyrighted classification of hostage takers. It was bad. Not just a little wrong or a bit off, but actively dangerous to implement. A sociopath is not the same as an antisocial personality disorder. And Hannibal Lector was not a great example of how either of those really operates in the world. Grrrrr.

There were experienced officers in the class and some seemed to be eating it up. I worry for them, and for the people that they will train. Other officers who had a lot of experience in booking or psych were also perturbed. Today we were told with authority that you can't talk people down in crisis. Not every time- but I've done it scores if not hundreds of times.

I turned to Bob, "Are we special? Are we doing the impossible every day and we don't know it? Or is he just flat fuckin' wrong?"

He shook his head, "I know what you mean. I don't think we're special but the others look like they buy it."

I don't have a good answer for this one. This guy is one of the most acknowledged experts in the country. I don't believe a thing he says.

At the same time, Matt and Bob and I aren't special. We've dealt with a lot of crazy and violent people, a lot of emotionally disturbed people in crisis- what would be called Crisis Negotiations- but we've never negotiated a hostage situation. Direct supervision jail + booking + tactical team + years as the point sergeant for the mental health inmates... that's not special, or at least it shouldn't be.

No good answer for this one.

What Might Have Been

Sitting across the table, she talks of the time, over fifty years ago, when she was brought to LA for a screen test and how her mother forbid it. I've seen pictures of this woman. In her teens and early twenties (even now, in her seventies) she had a bone structure that would make Lauren Bacall weep with envy, an infectious smile, elfin beautiful and a dancer's fitness.

She talks of the end of a promising professional ballet career when her ankle was damaged beyond complete repair. And she speaks of her plan to join the Navy and become a Registered Nurse and how her mother forbid it because, "Only whores and lesbians join the Armed Forces and you will not drag your family name through that." One culture's view at one point in history.

So she sits and she wonders how her life would have been different- money, fame, meaning? Whether she would have accomplished something. I am biased, of course, because I feel that she did accomplish something by giving birth to me and any change in that delicate web of chance would mean my non-existance.

It reminds me of my father at a time when I was barely old enough to remember- he'd been offered a job in Borneo. High paying, great responsibility, great adventure. I was excited about it, mom did her research and looked forward to it... and Dad decided, in the end, that the risk was too high and his family deserved and needed the security of a life in America. But sometimes, when he was drinking, he would think about what might have been. And that would make me think: what might I have been? What languages, what cultural knowledge, what advantages and skills and experiences from a childhood far away? Or just malaria and an early death?

On the same day I talked to my mother, there was AJ. AJ was, without doubt, my first mature love. The first woman that I loved as a man instead of a hormone-raged adolescent; the first time that the love was combined with a deep respect and liking- had there been nothing romantic, she still would have been my best friend. But I was young. We were both young and neither of us had the skill to make the relationship work through the whirlpools and rapids of learning how to be adults. We didn't know how to deal with our own histories and intensities. It ended (badly? any end would feel bad).

AJ visited, spending time with my wonderful children and beautiful wife (they like her almost as much as I do) and just for a second in the midst of this, there was a wave of what might have been. It hit hard. Less for me, I think. Just as AJ was my first mature love, Kami is my last. And I owe my marriage to AJ, because it was in realizing I didn't have the skills to keep her that I worked so hard to develop the skills and make the decisions to keep my marriage to Kami strong and deep and true. Love is piece of it, but even love requires skill and insight and maintenance.

We can drown in the might have beens. Sometimes it is sweet, and bitter, to think on them. But cherish what you have, because that is real.

Winning Creates Reality

When I was a pup, one of the questions that newbie martial artists would argue over for hours was, "Which is more important, speed or power?" The arguments would cover everything from physics to strategy. The answer was obvious to me. Speed is more important. I almost always won and I wasn't strong but I was freakishly fast, ergo...

Bodies change over time. As I age, my speed has decreased and my strength has increased. To make it worse, I frequently spar in slow motion with younger guys who are going full or nearly full speed (to work on my efficiency)... and I'm still winning most of the time.

The Gracies insist that fights end up on the ground.

I insist that fights happen at close range with great brutality.

John Anderson finds almost all of his fights finish with a hook punch.

Barry McConnell insists that the fight goes to the first one who can get a weapon in to play.

There are many, many good fighters and they all have a secret: "Destroy the base." "Control the center." "The firstest with the mostest is the bestest." "Take your time." "Finish it quick."

That's a lot of secrets and they even contradict each other.

Here's what's going on: a superior fighter creates the kind of fight he will win at. A Gracie will take the fight to the ground, and they will do it reliably and often easily. A less skilled person with the same strategy may get knocked out trying.

I think infighting is the way things happen, but that's largely because I am an infighter and I force the altercation into a close range affair. With Barry, he will win a knife fight because he will damn well turn it into a knife fight. See the pattern here?

Winners win. Good fighters are good fighters. In most instances a good wrestler would have been a good boxer if he had put the same amount of effort at the same age into the other art.

People who become extraordinary fighters tend to be disciplined and creative both. Disciplined people work hard and get good at stuff. Creative people tend to figure out how to use the stuff they are good at.

Many years ago, when I was young and fast and a kicker, I would spar two people at a time while handcuffed. (I know, bragging again, but there is a point). I had speed, I used speed and I did everything I could to manipulate sparring matches (I didn't have a lot of real fights back then) into games of speed. When I developed skill at throwing and grappling, I manipulated the fight into games of balance and space. In the transition I found out that I was far more comfortable than almost anyone at infighting range and for years I have successfully manipulated fights to resemble what I like best.

Just like the Gracies, and John and Loren and Mac and Mauricio and Mick and Barry.

See the transition- person to skills to strategy. This is who I am, this is what I'm good at, this is how I will use it...

Funny thing about people, though, they always want it to be logical and seem like they scientifically worked it out from a logical strategy first. You got some little dude who challenges all comers and is tough enough to keep fighting with a broken arm. He does what he's good at, he arranges the matches and each individual fight to take advantages of his strengths (who wouldn't?) and he wins... but when he teaches the awesome unbeatable strategy comes first, then you fill in skills for that strategy and believe that it will work no matter who the person is... though it clearly doesn't.

People are funny.

"Milles Enfantes"

Which either means "a thousand babies" or "baby steps". For a long time it was our unofficial motto. When Ron was first putting together the tactical team he had to fight a beauracracy that didn't like change; other agency members who didn't want an elite; people who felt it would be 'unfair' and possibly a violation of labor law to only include people in good shape who could fight; and a huge lack of information. Very few other corrections systems had teams. Most of those were little more than getting the biggest guys, putting them in armor and giving them big sticks.

The fact that there wasn't a lot of information didn't prevent people from trying to sell it. One of the vendors Ron interviewed included MBE in the alphabet soup of letters after his name.

"What does that stand for?" Ron asked.
"Member of the British Empire," the vendor said proudly.
"You're a whack job," Ron said, "get out of my office."

The vendor we originally went with was worthless, but we didn't know it for a while.

Here's a thing, as I try to shepherd this motley crew in a transition from an extraction and riot control team to a full service team that can handle anything up to technical hostage rescue: If we define a successful hostage rescue as one in which the tactical team had to go in, none of the hostages or team were injured and none of the hostage takers escaped, name an agency that has had two successful hostage rescues. Then go on-line and do a search for, say, "hostage rescue training". Where do all of these experts come from?

Starting the team was like that- lots of ignorance and lots of people willing to sell imaginary knowledge.

Baby steps. As we learned and trained, Ron would say it often. Baby steps. "You guys will never be activated." Then one day we got the pagers. Baby steps. "Well, you got the pagers, but you'll never get a budget." Small the first year, but we got a training and equipment budget. "You guys will never be called out." Six months after the inception, we had our first call-out. A full scale riot. We coordinated with another agency for the breaching capability and it went well. Tactically perfect. Upper management in our own agency were overheard saying, "Who were the guys in black? What do you mean we have a team for stuff like this? Why didn't I know about it?" Baby steps.

The training and recruiting picked up piece by piece.

A large scale disaster drill: "That's all well and good but who around here has the capacity to hold and control a large group of people in an uncontrolled environment?" "We can," Ron said, "It's basic jailin'"

"What resources do we have for high-risk transport of high-profile offenders?" Ron raised his hand: he'd arranged specialized EVOC and training with a Federal unit who handled those missions.

Urban disaster rescue and body search from the Office of Emergency Management. WMD classes from FEMA. Instructors for almost every less lethal platform on the market. Combat lifesavers. First responders. Commercial driver's licenses.

A sergeant from the enforcement tactical team- within our agency but outside the jails- had his feelings hurt. A neighboring jurisdiction had asked for my team, not his. "You're nothing but a cell extraction team," he sneered (or maybe pouted.)

"Look around. Every one of your officer survival classes is taught by one of us. My team is teaching you to shoot, to fight and to search buildings."

Baby steps.

Craig's going away party was this morning. He's headed for greener pastures and I hope the best for him. In all the years we've bled and sweat together I never once had to look over my shoulder to see if he was there.

Part of his farewell speech (we're mostly brawlers, a long speech from us is about ten sentences):
"Over the years, we've experienced something that very few people in this world have," he frowned a bit, "and they probably shouldn't..."

Henry the Fifth's St. Crispin's day speech was in my head: "We few, we merry few, we band of brothers, for he that sheds his blood with me today is my brother..."

Good roads, my brother.

Through the Looking Glass

You have to deal with what is, not what is supposed to be.

Thinking about rape survival and teaching self defense and we all skirt the edge of the real problem. Everyone has defensive strategies and skills for dealing with conflict. These skills have been honed over a lifetime and they are efficient and well-practiced and trusted... and they are keyed to an environment and a specific society.

For most women- for most people- these defenses are social. They are ways of avoiding confrontation, not solving it. Ignoring. Appeasment. Flattery. Self-deprecation. "I'm on your side"- teaming.

When the environment changes from a social situation where conflict is pending to a violent or predatory situation where the battle is on, every single one of these sets the victim up for failure, more clearly labels the victim as a victim. Possibly worse, when it is all over and the bruises have healed, these failed strategies will be remembered as cowardice or compliance and compound the survivor guilt until the victim may even convince herself that she 'deserved' or 'wanted' the attack.

So there is the first challenge in teaching: how do you teach students to recognize when they have stepped through the Looking Glass? It is a new world on this side and everything you think you know, all the ways the world is supposed to work no longer apply. What worked for you all those years on that side will not work for you here.

Explaining this is one thing, but that's the easy part. You can read books and watch movies but the old part of your brain is very smart and very cautious. It knows what has worked in the past. It sticks with what it knows. No matter how bad the situation is, the old part of your brain only knows that what you have always done has never gotten you killed and any change might. The old brain doesn't accept that the world is different on this side of the Glass.

How do you teach this? How do you get even trained people to do dangerous things (and any action, including doing nothing, is a potentially dangerous choice in an attack) while fighting their own survival instincts? Make no mistake, the caution of the old brain and all the various adrenaline effects are survival instincts and were better options through most of human history when the danger was being eaten by predators than a spinning back kick or a nifty fingerlock.

Comfort level- everyone has a lifetime of experience in the normal world. Very few have more than a few minutes in the other. We understand and know the rules in the normal world. We don't understand the rules or the physics or our own perception in the other- we just don't have enough experience to figure it out.

I have more experience there than most, but I've never been deluded enough to think that I know the truth or that I can predict anything beyond the most basic things. Think about this- I've had well over three hundred jail fights. Big number, huh? That's probably less than five hours of experience, in a subject that is probably as complicated as language. Far more complicated than driving.

How do we get students to see when the world changed and how do we get them experienced enough to function in a world we hope they will never see?

Ism

One of my friends wrestles daily with the problem of racism. He sees it in voices and attitudes, in movies and audiences, in economics and every single person's world view. He is logical and clear: it's not a one-way problem; There is a measurable distrust of anything different; Even if that distrust leads to 3% misunderstanding or 5% of taking extra precautions, it is real and it adds up and it can multiply over generations.

5% of mistrust in business over several generations can result in a profound lack of positive adult male role models. That compounds, too, like interest on a bad debt.

I think he is also aware of the "racism double-binds". Crack and flake cocaine are chemically the same. The penalties for posession and distribution, in many jurisdictions, are wildly different. Is it because crack is used more often by poor black folk in the US and flake tends to be used by richer white people? Is it racism? Or is it because for every death associated with the flake cocaine trade (often a user, richer and whiter) there are at least twenty in the crack trade (almost always poor and black)? Would it be racism to treat the drugs as the same and do nothing to prevent these killings? Can it be racism both ways?

Which will do more damage in the long term- the repressive racism of Jim Crow or the paternalistic racism of Affirmative Action? Treating men like dogs or treating men like children?

This puzzled me, especially with my friend, because he is truly extraordinary on many levels. He is largely responsible for me not just drifting in life, distracted by shiny objects. He is succesful and grounded; a celebrity in some circles; fit.. and still experimenting with his art, his mind and his body. He has shattered barriers... and I expect someone who is so himself to no longer see the labels other people put on him. But he does and sometimes it haunts him. He wonders what he and his life would be like without that three or five percent mistrust and with a strong male role model... I'm pretty sure it would suck- he doesn't do 'easy' well and thrives on challenge and being told 'that's not possible'.

Monday, my new boss set an expectation- the training at the end of the month is going to be very 'cerebral' and she really wants me to pay attention because she knows it will be hard. It will be 'academic' and she knows that 'will be hard' for me...

I have a degree. I write articles. I do statistical analysis (including for her) and read about two books a week (just finished two on terrorism and am in the middle of books on labor law, criminal prosecution and WWII history).

All that pales before the fact that I beat people up (completely aside how often I talk them down or how rarely I injure anyone). Yes I teach and design courses for defensive tactics... but I also do it for crisis communications with the mentally ill.

She sees what I do and who I am every day and I really thought I was adjusting and blending in very well- but for just a minute, I felt something similar to what my friend feels every day. No matter what he does, the people he helps, the world he changes, certain people, maybe most people, maybe everyone, will always see a black man and all their interactions, all of their interpretations of his actions will be seen through that filter, even if it only distorts 3%.

For just a second it was clear that my boss wasn't seeing an investigator or a teacher or a writer. She was seeing a thug, someone whose capacity for violence obviously precluded the ability to learn or think. Obviously.

Worth the Time?

Here's a contradiction in my behavior: I'll fly across a continent to meet a martial artist I've only typed messages to; pick up one at the airport and feed and house him or her for the duration of stay; give up precious sleep and even more precious family time for a few minutes or a coffee with a practitioner...but have absolutely no interest in visiting a couple of local places that are considered to be incredible.

Another invitation will be coming in soon, a cyberwarrior/fanatic has just noticed that I'm located in his hometown and he's eager for me to see the fantastic, wonderful, unbeatable system and world class instructor. I may show up just to be polite, but reaching deep into my soul I'm not picking up a glimmer of interest.

What's the difference?

Simple fanatacism. In religion or martial arts, you have to voluntarily blind yourself to large sections of the world in order to convince yourself that you have the complete truth. Right and wrong changed between the Old Testament and the New ("Blessed is he who dashes the brains of the babies against the rocks" versus "Turn the other cheek"), even things as simple as dietary laws changed just within the Old Testament. Does Universal Infinite Truth change? Which leads to the common dodge, "Human understanding changes." Babies, brains, rocks- not hard concepts. Human understanding hasn't changed that much. And it wasn't a "Stupid humans are going to do it anyway, might as well turn a blind eye..." it was an instruction.

Same with martial arts. Tapping a world class athlete doesn't have any bearing on safely approaching a possibly armed murder suspect. Fighting from the clinch is not the same as drawing a weapon from the clinch or preventing one from being drawn. There are no points for de-escalating the situation in a boxing ring. Facing off and sparring someone is not the same as breaking up a fight between two convicts with seventy more watching.

So I'm eager to meet Fabien and Joe and Toma and Mike and George and Van and Bill and Robert and Tony and Cliff and Mauricio and.... They are all experts (or dedicated students) in what they do. And not one of them, not even once, has gone the kool-aide drinker route and tried to convince me (or themselves) that they know THE TRUTH.

And I'm not eager to spend my precious time with the people who are convinced that if they just show me their special new shiny thing it will somehow revolutionize over twenty five years of training (not counting weapons, military and all that stuff) and over fifteen of experience (only counting jails, not bouncing or barracks brawls or any of that).

Seriously, people- what are the odds that you are going to show me something really knew? I dabbled in muay thai when others were in love with American Kickboxing. I've played with and against Filipino, Indonesian, Chinese, Japanese (of course), and European arts; civilian and military; weapon and unarmed; mystical and pragmatic. The last really new thing I remember was a Yanagi ryu technique for increasing your peripheral vision from about 180 degrees to 270. That's useful.

A couple of hours of playing or rolling or just talking is good (and I've had more better insights over a cup of coffee in one meeting with Joe Graziano than I've had in hours spent with an instructor who was wasting time trying to prove he was a "true Master"- whatever that is). Same thing: I love talking about religion, but not with people who are so locked into their tiny world-view that anything outside their experience is treated as an insult. It's just too much work to protect egos.

No Time for More...

"If Not Me, Then Who?"- Motto of Spetznaz counter-terrorism team Alpha.

"The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.”
—Sir William Francis Butler

"We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm." - Attributed both to George Orwell and to Winston Churchill

Inveniam viam aut faciam - my team's motto: "We will find a way or we will make one."

"This is the true joy in life - being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy." - George Bernard Shaw

Trust is the greatest reward for the fighting man- Niccolo Machiavelli, "On War" (from memory).

"Men don't follow orders, they follow men."- ?

"The right thing to do is rarely the easy thing to do."-?

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother"- William Shakespeare "Henry V"

"Bones heal, chicks dig scars, pain is temporary." - Evel Knievel

"The unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly." Theodore Roosevelt

Some Advice for Life

Last week was spent at the Gracie Academy in Torrance getting certified as a LEO grappling instructor. It was good training. Like all training run by civilians there was good and bad. There were disconnects- many times where their experience fighting the best martial athletes in the world didn't match my experience fighting PCP freaks in slippery cells.

At one point, Rener was demonstrating a technique and one of the students asked about controlling the opponent's free arm. Rener said, "That's irrelevant! It's a detail. He can't do anything with that arm but you can exhaust yourself chasing after irrelevant details. Ignore it."

That's some solid advice- for fighting, for martial arts and for life.

What it is, What it isn't

I tend to think of most training and all competition as 'unitary'. There's one definition of a win. There's one environment it can happen in. You face one type of opponent and he is limited in what he can do.

Unitary training is important. It's hard to concentrate on learning technique if you can't trust your footing. If the students think they are learning about knives and the instructor pulls a gun, the kool-aid drinkers (my word for the semi cultists who believe their instructor or system is IT) will talk about innovation, but in the end he has programmed his students to fail. By making it too complicated in the beginning to succeed, they only learn different ways to give up.

So training individual things and individual skills is important. Training them in a clean environment with limited chaos is important to learning- it is even important to learning about chaos itself. But that's what training is, not what fighting is.

Fighting is it's own thing. Chaos but sometimes with a plan; mistakes but mistakes made by adaptable creatures. Simple actions with sometimes complex and far-reaching results.

When I first started teaching cops, I knew it wasn't unitary. I went one step up for binary: "There are two basic ways a cop has to fight- either fighting for control to get cuffs on someone or fighting for his life. The two are not the same." It was true and clear and helpful and still too, too simple. It explained why people who were good at wrist locks and arm-bar takedowns at the academy were getting pummeled on the street- they were trying to use type 1 fighting in a type 2 situation.

The same thing can happen in each type of fight and mean completely different things. Imagine you are wrestling with a guy to try to put cuffs on him. (Shouldn't have to say this explicitly but by definition if you are wrestling for cuffing it means he is not trying to harm you and you know it). The threat makes space and breaks away. What do you do? Probably tackle him before he runs.

Same situation, but you're fighting for your life, down on the ground, the threat biting and clawing and wrestling for your gun. The threat breaks away. What do you do? You let him run if he runs. Access a force option, get on the radio. If the battle is for your life and the threat leaves, that's a win. Re-engaging when it was in doubt the first time jeapordizes that win.

Nice example of binary, right? But what if he breaks away to grab a beer bottle or a kitchen knife? That could happen in either of these fights. That changes everything. Binary is an improvement, but it is still too simple.

Chaos elements enter the equation. In a unitary environment everything possible has been done to limit them. The martial artists in that environment wants to develope skill in training and test specific skill in competition. In real life, chaos is always there, luck always plays a role and the longer it lasts the more chaos is introduced. Dealing and adapting to the chaos is a skill in itself, one ignored by the koolaid drinkers who already have their answer.

Training Towards

Been away for a week. It was a good week of training, working with some superb athletes and instructors. There will be a lot of fodder for future writing, many things to think about.

Many of the best things happened outside of training. I was free for two evenings to meet with an old friend on one night and some people I only knew from on line on the other. The training itself was weird- it was very, very good but at the same time came from a world completely alien to the one I live in. It was like trying to learn how to run a submarine better from jet pilots. The dinners and talking helped put things in perspective.

One of the big problems in self-defense or combatives training is trying to define what we are training for. Different situations require different mindsets and different tactics. If you look at it too small (what do we do for a punch? A jab? A hook? Left? Right? Uppercut?...) it's overwhelming. There are more scenarios and more possible responses than your brain can hold, much less sift through and act on. If you look at it too big, on too grand a scale (the interaction of dynamic energies in this encounter...) you tend to get your ass kicked because damage is always very particular and specific.

In the end you need something very quick and reasonably universal. You need to learn all the little slices of particulars and then digest and forget them. Maybe you need to forget training, too. At least the idea of training for.

Wrapping our heads around this while eating canoli in Santa Clara, Joe Graziano, a Uechika and retired agent, laid it out: a new way to look at the whole training thing. He didn't think about training to any particular task or for any particular thing. He just trained to be better. To be better day by day, incrementally. Always moving slightly closer to a perfection he will can never achieve. Just better.

Better at what? Let that thought go. A little smarter today, a little more aware tomorrow, a little more insightful or flexible or strong down the road...

Because fighting is very, very complex- but so are you. Your complexity is a match for the problem's complexity. Since you can't know and collect exactly what you'll need, just get better. At everything. Not training to a standard or for a problem, training to be. Training towards perfection, a little at a time.

Thanks, Joe.

The Best Defense III

The best anything is relative. Everything depends on other factors.

The best best defense, of course, is not to be there: avoid likely bad places, avoid bad people, learn to see trouble approaching and step out of the way.

In a real ambush, the initial defense has to be trained to reflex. It must be a conditioned response that is simple and effective for a wide variety of attacks. It must disadvantage the threat and advantage you. It must be paired with realistic and appropriate stimuli. It can not be complex and it won't work in the later stages of a fight and is unlikely to work outside of an ambush- it's hard to plan to use a reflex.

So in this context, I'm talking about the best defense after it's too late for the real best. Follow me?

The point of a defense is to stop him from hurting you. One of my preferences is to make him want to do something else. Palm heel to the face.

He swings a punch, palm heel to the face. He reaches to grab, palm heel to the face. He starts to kick, palm heel to the face. I can show you the mechanics of how a center-line strike spikes most attacks, how by controlling your own elbow you can cut the line even on a centerline strike from the threat... but that's window dressing. The simple fact is that most people will abort their attacks to save their faces from impact. It stops him from hurting you by making him decide not to be hurt himself.

So what does this do? Primary purpose, prevent damage to you. But it also does damage to the threat, can better your position if you follow it up with footwork and, most importantly, it is an action. It steals initiative. With one move you have gone from passenger to driver.

It's a simple example but an easy one. Easy to demonstrate, easy to convince yourself of how well it works, easy to trust.

I prefer 'entries' (irimi), being an infighter and classically trained in jujutsu. These are a combination of movement and structured position that tend to damage and unbalance the threat, bring you to halitosis range and blow through most attacks safely. They give me everything I want, plus putting me in charge and doing so at a range that very few people really know how to fight from.

The thing about both of these attacks is that even more than physical domination (or reversal of domination) they disrupt the attacker's OODA loop. They directly attack his decision making process and freeze his mind.
See: http://chirontraining.blogspot.com/2006/01/ooda-introduction.html
and: http://chirontraining.blogspot.com/2006/01/ooda-insights.html

This continues once you have closed to combat range by constant aggressive action. We used to call this the "flies on shit" or "stink on shit" technique... ( classical jujutsu training, yeah, but I was raised redneck). Constant action with knees, feet, hands, elbows and head, an overwhelming flurry of damage, lots of it aimed at the face. Overwhelming is the key word. I've done this without contact and had the threat freeze because all of that incoming was too much information to assimilate and respond to. That's cool.

And this, at close range or in a clinch, crosses into the realm of core fighting.

Core fighting is the ability to deal with your opponent as a unit. Legs and arms are connected through the shoulder girdle, pelvis and spine. Pressure on an arm or shoulder can prevent or force the movement of a foot. Pressure on the knee, shoulder, hip or spine can abort a punch. The combination of constant aggressive pressure that not only damages but also unbalances and immobilizes is, IMO, the best defense at this stage of conflict

There you have it. The thoughts of an aggressive infighter on defense.

Limits

The Beslan lecture hit hard. Not in an emotional "saw too much icky stuff" way. Icky stuff isn't that new.

People are vulnerable. The very things that make our lives open, free and fun; the very same things that make it safe to be a sheep and graze contentedly without ever once raising your head and looking at the dark forest or the gathering storm clouds leaves us vulnerable. I've always known this. Always accepted it. I've understood the vulnerabilities and I've mapped them. Never planning to become a bad guy but the nature of me- whether it's personality or job- is to explore the problem from both sides.

Sitting in my comfortable sheep-permeated world I've always been aware that other people think that way, somewhere, but I never saw them or their actions. Now I know. Other people are thinking this way. More than that, they are planning this. They are planning not only to take and kill children but to use all of those vulnerabilities as well as the training the protectors get to increase the body count. They plan on using MY training to make sure they kill MY kids.

So the training was big and hit hard. Everything needs to be re-evaluated. I have to deny them predictability (while simultaneously surviving in a bureaucracy).

I talk about big things with Kami. She is the one constant. Not with this, though. She hit her limit with this. Normally the parts that bother her are the details. A particular child, a particular pain or death. The parts that bother me are the implications- what to do if a written policy is a critical piece of the threat's plans? When operators have this information and administrators don't, how do you keep them out of the decision process?- stuff like that.

So I can usually talk about the stuff that bothers me without burdening her with the stuff that bothers her. Not this time, and it felt strange. I don't think I realized that so much of my mental strength and resiliency, the stuff that lets me do things again and again and again when my soul is screaming, "It's somebody else's fuckin' turn!" is something that comes from her. Maybe I did. Losing it right now felt like slipping on an icy rock above a frigid river.

This time, I think the implications got to her, too. Have you ever sat down with your children and discussed what to do if armed gunmen storm their school assembly? The people they will be looking to in that situation- school teachers and counselors- aren't really prepared for it. It's almost worse if they think they are. Talking to teenagers about how hostage takers will try to cow them into submission (shooting any authority figures or people who show leadership, including trying to soothe and calm down the children; demonstration rapes and crippling tortures) and percentage chance responses where some will die but some might live and that's better than staying with the threat's plan...

It's all good now. A couple of days for both of us to let it settle. I have to respect her limits and not take her compassion as infinite or take it for granted. Lesson learned.

The Wrong Audience

I'll get back to the series on defense, but it's core-dump time.
Friday I attended the "Terror at Beslan" seminar presented by John Giduck of Archangel
http://antiterrorconsultants.org/

It was intense and rough and brutal. It was a lot of good information about bad things. Activities of known al-Qaeda cells in America. al-Qaeda training and doctrine. One officer passed out while watching Chechneyan videos and I had to wonder: if he faints watching a movie is there any chance at all that he will be able to keep it together when he can smell the blood and hear the gurgling and it's the face of a child he might know?

I have to re-write one of my chapters on hostage survival now. Everything in the original is still true, provided the hostage taker is a basic criminal. When the bad guys have no advantage in keeping the hostages alive and have trained and studied how police and military units respond, everything changes.

So much big stuff- the chance of saving all or even most of the hostages are nil. Everything I've been taught about hostage rescue will be used against me. Bureaucratic indecisiveness and turf wars will cause bodies. The al-Qaeda analysis of the United States- what we expect, what we will do, how we will respond is terrifyingly accurate (I write as Congress moves to do exactly what the enemy predicted five or more years ago).

Small stuff, too, personal stuff. A little girl crawling back into a burning building because the gunfire outside is loud and scary. A man shot who does nothing but look at his executioner with a dazed look and try to carry on a polite conversation until he is shot againg and his throat is cut and his head taken off, slowly.

There was more. I listened for seven hours and could write for ten.

But the big thing, the terrifying thing, was that this was the wrong audience. Almost everyone in the room was a cop or a soldier. We know there are evil people in the world. Few that we deal with are trained or particularly smart, but we know them. We learned a lot in this class, but the core message was not new to us: There are people in the world who will hurt and kill your children. Somebody has to protect them. If not us, then who?

The amazing thing was the people who were not in the class. Where were the school boards and principals and school administrators? Even on the soldier/cop side, where were the administrators and policy makers? (Derrick showed up, at least). The people who need to see this weren't there. The politicians in Washington and the Hollywood advocates need to learn that the world is not all composed of their country-club friends who believe that contracts are binding and there's always a win-win somewhere and people will like you if you are nice enough and pretty enough.

They need to learn that there are people in the world who would slowly cut off their head with a bowie knife and then give it to their children to play soccer with. That is the mindset we are facing.

If not you, then who?

The Best Defense Part II: Foundation

Let's lay some ground rules so that we're on the same page. In any given fight, one side is driving and the other is along for the ride. One is acting, doing what he or she or they wants, and the other is reacting.

First objection: "But I'm trying to survive! That's doing what I want!" No, it isn't. Survival is an outcome that you hope for, it's not an action.

In order to prevail, you must act. It doesn't always mean take the initiative and bring the battle to the enemy. Sometimes it means take the initiative and run. Sometimes it means scream or hide. But if you are getting out in one piece it will because you took action. You started to drive.

So this is about defensive driving- active defensive actions that do not require you to see and understand what the bad guy is doing. Aggressive defense, in Joe Lewis' immortal words.

In order to understand defense, you must understand offense. I'm going to simplify it a bit and talk about damage, though a skilled fighter can also use unbalancing and freezing techniques.

In order to hurt you, the bad guy (BG) must put three things together- Power, Timing and Targeting.

POWER: If someone barely reaches you or tries to hit while they are falling backwards or just uses shitty body mechanics they can hit you in the throat or the balls or the eyes and you'll be okay...probably. There are many systems of power generation. Most require speed and speed takes distance to develop. Not much distance, with training. Most require solid contact with the ground- the key to a good punch is leg strength, not arm strength. Some use rotational power and snap- the power of the opposite hip snapping back to drive the fist. A few use gravity in a controlled fall. A very few use short range whipping action and bone bounce for shocking short range power. The most common power generator overlooked by martial artists is tool use. The knife is the exception to many defenses- you can kill or cripple while falling or with bad body mechanics.

TIMING: Of all the skills in martial arts, this is the one, in my opinion, that gets most over-complicated. Timing is simple in real life. You hit someone when you can get away with it or when you need to stop them from doing whatever they are doing.

TARGETING: Some places injure easier than other places. Would you rather take a stomp kick to the thigh or a snap kick to the base of the patella? A power punch to your upper chest or a light jab to your throat? This changes too, though- with enough power the whole body is a good target. Some things that are poor targets with a fist aren't too bad with a blade.

Those are the pieces of any attack. Here are the requirements for any movement.

Every action you make in a fight should do three things:
1) Decrease his ability to harm you.
2) Better your position.
3) Not get you hurt.

1) Decrease his ability to harm you: If you knock him out, you're golden. If you knock him flat, take away his wind or destroy his balance you've accomplished this aspect of the mission. If you sprint out of his range, you have decreased his ability to harm you.

2) Better your position. In fighting this means getting into a place where he can uses fewer of his weapons and/or you can use more of yours. One of my primary skills is the ability to get behind a BG in the middle of a fight. It's not hard, it's just that so few people train it because they aren't allowed to do it in competition. BTW- Running fits here too. It doesn't increase your weapons but it does decrease his.

3) Not get you hurt. If you do hit the guy on the jaw, step behind him for absolute control...and look down to see a knife sticking out of your stomach, you probably aren't going to have your best day ever. Offensive fighting and offensive mindset are important, but they are only one aspect of driving. You have to protect yourself and you have to do it actively.

The Best Defense Part I: The Weak Ones

The best defense, of course, is not to be there. Don't be in places where bad things happen or bad, stupid, angry or drunk people congregate. Next best is to alter the relationship between you and the threat... I've written about this elsewhere.

For now, I want to talk about physical defense: about not getting hurt when the fight is on.

Most martial artists learn blocks (and passes and parries, etc.) and evasions (ducking, slipping, weaving, bobbing, cutting the line...). For the most part, these are ineffective. Not because the actions are inefficient or the movements don't have a valid application, they are ineffective because of timing, because they are reactive.

Remember the OODA loop? In order to respond to an event, you have to perceive the event (Observe, the first O) figure out what it means (Orient, the second O) decide (D) what to do about it and then Act(A). If the event you are responding to is a punch, the threat is on Act when you start on Observe. You start three steps behind.

If your strategy involves responding to the opponents actions, you are always behind the curve. You are reactive.

Note- in sparring, like in chess, you can see a few moves ahead. You can tell from foot, body, hand and head position what an opponent is likely to do. This gives the appearance in a good practitioner that the block is faster than the strike.

In an unfamiliar situation, the Orient step is thrown off severely. The attack probably won't be what you are used to and the precursor clues (the telegraphs) also will be very different. If you plan to block the incoming attacks you need to wait to see what they are. You are waiting, he is acting. You are in trouble.

This isn't just in personal combat. Remember 9-11? Planes smash into buildings... how do you defend against that? You don't, because it has already happened. At the point that we saw it (O) and figured out what was going on (O), it was over. Intelligence services than went into a spate of Monday-morning quarterbacking, and that's good. They were looking for the clues, the telegraphs that could have warned us earlier. Now they watch for them.

At it's best, reactive defense is iffy. It requires thinking. Thinking takes time.

Next up are static defenses. These are defenses built in to your stance and hand positioning. Look at your 'fighting stance' in a mirror and pay special attention to the holes. Where would you hit you if you stood like that?

(Note: the quotes around 'fighting stance'- when I think things are about to get shitty I stand in what I call a modified Columbo. Feet more or less in sanchin stance, right hand scratching my right eyebrow, right elbow resting on my left hand, left hand up against my right floating ribs over the liver and middle of the forearm covering the solar plexus. It's conversational, non-confrontational, great for asking slightly slow-witted questions and I can explode out of it for three simultaneous attacks and move into the threat's dead zone.)

Static defenses are as simple as remembering to keep your hands up and keep your elbows in. The hard part (go back to the mirror again) is maintaining them while you are moving. Especially when you are attacking. The static defenses are shells, but the shell is composed of your weapons. Whenever you apply a weapon you open one or more holes in the shell.

Better are zone defenses. If you play or watch basketball, the two basic defenses are the man-to-man and the zone. In the man to man, each player of team A is responsible to cover one member from team B and prevent him from scoring. For man-to-man to work, team A must have better players than team B... and team B can still defeat it with superior team work. Reactive defenses are like man-to-man. If you are better, faster, know what is going on AND the threat isn't tricky you have a good chance of making it work.

Zone defense, on the other hand, is a kind of moving static defense. Each time you attack it opens a hole, but each attack opens a predictable hole. If you know where you are likely to get attacked, you can move move some defense there. Throw a high side kick and the lead hand elbow goes down almost to the hip bone, chin is protected by shoulder, lead hand covers to just under the eyes and the rear hand drops under the kicking thigh to protect the groin. Zone defenses, by pairing a defensive action with your attack, allow decent protection without the slow down of the OOD part of the OODA loop. You're only Observing and Orienting to your own actions, which you already knew and the Decide step was done in training when you paired your left jab with ducking your chin, raising your left shoulder and covering your right ear with your right hand.

The good stuff next post.

Differences

This guy is, without doubt, one of the best in the world. Highly trained. Vastly experienced. Well known and well respected. Also flippant, irreverent and sarcastic. These are a few of my favorite things. He started training about the time I was born. Deep down, I think that he thinks that I'm an arrogant puppy. That's okay, too.

In his living room, talking about fighting and writing and people we know, he brings up a "revolutionary, new" thing: he describes it. It was basic to my early training. It's, in a way, what jujutsu is. Old style jujutsu, anyway. I say words to that effect and his eyes narrow a bit.

We're both products of our training. Not just in what we do or the way we handle problems (and this man has handled a lot of high-end problems) but also in the way that we see things. He learned distance and timing in the ring and reinforced it with the careful attention that road officers pay to proper proximics. My distance and timing comes from a closer range based on an ambush paradigm... and it has been reinforced in a crowded jail. It works for me, very well, just as his has worked for him. But it's different, not just in movement but in thinking.

To illustrate a point he shows a combination- cover, startle blow, damage blow. Cover, not a block, because he knows damn well how rare it is to make a block work in a fight.

NB- This does not mean you give up defense. The best analogy I can make is that your brain is too slow to play man-to-man defense and you must learn to play zone.

Continue: Watching him, his body mechanics are superb. The cover is rock solid, the 'startle blow' is perfectly aligned, bone-to-bone conduction from his knuckles to his rear heel. It could do far more than startle. The action of the first blow ballistically loads the torso muscles for a crushing follow up. In three short moves you can see how good he is.

But it's nothing like the way I would move. Something similar to the same cover, but drop-stepping in to close on the threat. Same hand used for the first blow but because of the distance more circular than linear, designed more to spin the spine than to impact and to lead my feet in to raise my center of gravity so that the power blow would crash...

Differences from early training- he was taught to see conflict as a matter of strategy and timing. I was taught to see it as strategy and controlling the center. His hands were his tools and he learned all the ways you can create speed by messing with the threat's mind. My own body weight was my primary tool and it was drilled into me how to use it as a force and speed multiplier.

We're both experienced enough to see and appreciate the differences and use them sometimes, too, but the differences are deep.

And that's very cool. Because there are very many ways to be good and it's an honor to hang out with someone who is that extraordinary in such a different way.

Sticks and Stones

You used to hear that a lot. Our parents would tell us, "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words cannever hurt me." That's changed. Now you hear: "Words can cut through you like a knife. Words can hold such venom or poison that they can damage, destroy or kill more effectively than a physical weapon."

I can't help but think that this person has never been cut by a knife, or seen anyone destroyed by a physical weapon. Maybe there's a scale, or maybe more: people assume that the worst they've ever been hurt is at the very edge of what humans can feel. So if the worse pain you've ever felt is an unkind word, you think it must be worse that the third or fourth or fifth worse pain I've ever felt which was probably lying on my back after a good fall unable to breathe trying pathetically to scream or at least squeek for help. Or maybe running on a broken leg. Or frostbite (no, recovering from frostbite was the worst or second worst).

Maybe it's just me, but lying on a couch for a few days trying to wrap my mind around the fact that I might be blind in one eye was way worse than being embarassed or insulted or demeaned.

Part of me wants to go into the damage to the body versus damage to the ego talk. (I mean ego as sense of self, not the modern sense of hubris) Your self-image being restructured can be damaging, even crippling. It is a mostly imaginary thing but it is also our life's work.

What I really want to write about, though, is our complicity in damage, how we learn to be hurt. Neither of my kids are cry-babies. If you have young childen, you watched them fall a few times in very early childhood. It was a shock to them, a big new sensation. If you were paying attention, you saw them look at YOU trying to pick up on what the new sensation meant. If you ran over in a huge concern, "Oh poor baby! Are you okay?" the baby learned falling was bad and started to cry. If you looked over and in a neutral voice said, "You okay?" The baby probably just crawled on. (I usually said, "So, you feel stupid now?" which probably warped the kids badly.)

I taught my daughter early that if she had a minor injury, she only had to put pressure on it and breathe out and the pain would lesson. It still works for her.

Psychological... but physical, too. In martial arts one of the things that has always amazed me is the huge difference in ideas of pain and damage between different people. When you start in judo, you take a lot of falls. You go home and your hand is swollen and tender from slapping the mat and your body feels like one huge bruise. But if you stick with it, you eventually do the same number of falls (and harder, because they quit taking it easy on you) without the swelling or the pain. I've taken hard falls on hard surfaces (a 12 foot face plant off a cliff, a bicycle flip at over thirty mph, thrown on concrete with a 260 pound man on top) without a scratch- (okay, forearm bruises in the cliff fall, but I was out of practice). Judo taught me to deal with impact.

Football in highschool, too. (And a little rugby in college). You get hit hard and you learn to hit hard with your whole body and get up and do it again, all the while following a plan. It made the crashing of judo an easy transition.

If you watch a karate or kung fu class that doesn't regularly do hard contact, people freeze when they accidentally make face contact. The first real hit in the face can come as a completely mind numbing shock. Contrast that with someone who hisses, "Sweet!" when he gets hit in the face because he knows the rest of the brawl will be fun.

So a face punch can be freezing or fun and it seems to be a matter of experience and attitude. A decision? How much does this affect the damage incured? What are the variables in a strike? Is it simply a matter of power and placement? Why is it if you hit ten people in the exact same place with the exact same strike some will faint and some will curl up in a ball and some will get angry and one will look at you like you're an idiot?

How much power do we have in accepting or refusing damage? And how much more so when the damage isn't even physical?