One of the reasons that it is hard to find an experienced instructor for real violence is that it is hard to survive enough encounters to learn what worked and what didn’t. As odd and weak as I sometimes see these experiences, how many “experts” in bladed weapon defense have had five or more encounters? Five is a very large number in this field…but would you train for a kickboxing tournament under a coach who had only five matches? Especially if he freely admitted that of those five he cheated on two, got lucky on one, had one opponent back out, and won the first against an opponent below his weight class? Hell no…but in this field, five is a lot of experience.
Sometimes, it’s not only discounting real experience but taking experience from bad sources and labeling it “truth” that can mentally cripple you.
One of my students was concerned that she couldn’t hurt a large man. I told her to imagine a two-hundred-pound man holding a small cat. Could the man kill the cat? Sure.
“Now imagine I throw a bucket of water on them. What happens?”
“The cat goes berserk and starts scratching the guy up.”
“Does the guy let go?”
“Probably.”
“So the cat wins?”
“I guess. Sure.”
“So you’re telling me that an eight pound cat can hurt a big man and you can’t?”
“The cat has claws and teeth.”
“And you don’t?”
She thought for a minute. “But I’ve wrestled with my boyfriends before and I couldn’t do anything.” Aha.
She had taken a situation where she had no desire to cause injury, no fear, probably wanted to strengthen and deepen the relationship, and she had chosen that incident to base her assumptions about combat. Those assumptions nearly made her give up on training.
There are fads in the law enforcement community and we love experts. When the UFC started and the Gracies were winning everything, “Tactical Groundfighting Courses” started springing up all over the country. They were barely-altered aspects of Gracie Jujitsu or wrestling. Many of the classes I saw showed a fundamental ignorance of the job. Sport grappling immobilizes opponents on their backs; LEOs immobilize face down, for handcuffing. Sport grappling takes up space with tight body contact; in law enforcement, at that range the threat can kill us with weapons from our own belts.
The goals of the two are not the same. In many ways it was as if LEOs were attempting to improve their ability to fly fighter jets by taking lessons from the best submariners in the world.
One last story: It is said that when a baby elephant is first trained, a rope or chain is tied around its ankle and it will struggle and pull and fight against the chain. When it learns that it cannot break the chain, the chain can be replaced with a bit of twine and the elephant will never try to break it. The elephant assumes it can’t, and so a full-grown elephant can be held by a piece of string.
Many of your assumptions came from childhood. You are no longer a child.
Many came from earlier in your training—you have grown and changed since then.
Many came from unreliable sources. You can make up your own mind.
Do not let yourself be crippled by something that only exists in your mind.
section 2.3: common sources of knowledge about violence
We are, all of us, both teachers and students. As teachers, we give our students information. As students, we learn from our teachers. The teachers give us knowledge. This knowledge came from somewhere, from one of four sources:
• Experience
• Reason
• Tradition
• Entertainment and Recreation
I like experience. It helps to winnow the BS from the truth. It allows you to pass on a little of the mindset, a few of the tricks, some of the obstacles that they will face. It leads to a perspective that is unique. But realistically, how many instructors have enough hands-on experience in real violence to pass anything along? Very few. The instructors who have experienced enough violence to be able to generalize are even more rare.
Additionally, violence is extremely idiosyncratic. I honestly don’t know if my experience will match yours. I don’t know if our bodies and minds will react in the same way to the cascade of stress hormones. I can’t honestly tell you how much of my survival is based on judgment or skill or luck.
I was discussing this with one of my students, explaining that unlike almost anything else, the more experience of violence you have the less sure you are that things will work out. Jordan put it in perspective: “Sounds like a case of the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.”
Experience, in my opinion, could not give rise to a new martial art. Given the idiosyncratic nature and the improbability of surviving enough high-end encounters, it would be hard to come up with guiding principles or even a core of reliable techniques. I am painfully aware that things that worked in one instant have failed utterly in others.
Decapitating goats and the limits of reason. When I was very young I read a book called The Far Arena by Richard Sapir. The premise of the book was that a Roman gladiator had been frozen in arctic ice and miraculously brought back to life in modern times. One section stuck with me for many years. The gladiator was ruminating on decapitation. He explained that it was rare, that in all his time in the arena he had only seen it done once, by an enormous Germanic barbarian. He explained in great detail about the different layers of tissue, the toughness of the muscle, and how things that cut muscle tend to be poor at cutting bone and vise versa. It made perfect sense. I filed it away in the back of my head and believed, without challenging it, that beheading someone or something would be a very difficult task indeed.
Years later I was asked to help a friend butcher some goats. The first step, of course, was killing the animal. We wanted to minimize pain and panic. Cutting throats can work. A gunshot to the brainstem can work (but the other goats tend to get scared and are harder to control). I’d been practicing with sword for years. Both the owner of the goats and my wife write fiction of the sort where details on beheading might be useful. I volunteered to lop the goats’ heads off.
Mary held a rope and the goat pulled against it, stretching its neck nicely. I used the sword my wife had given me for our first anniversary, a single-edged hand-and-a-half forged by Cord. The Far Arena firmly in mind, I prepared for a power stroke. All of my skill and all of my power…The sword went through the neck like it wasn’t there. In all the animals we butchered that day, I only felt any resistance once—we didn’t use the rope and I did a backhand horizontal stroke. That goat died instantly with its spine severed but the blade didn’t go all the way through the front of the neck. Later, there is a stage in the butchering process where you normally use a saw to cut the spine in half lengthwise. Mary started the job but the dead animal was floppy and hard to work with, so I volunteered to finish it with the sword. Without a stroke of any kind, just letting the weight of the blade fall off my shoulder, the steel went through about 18 inches of bone.
Hope that wasn’t too gruesome for you. Here’s my point; just because something makes perfect sense doesn’t mean it is true.
Reason is weak. Most people don’t recognize the sheer chaos of survival fighting or the effects that the stress hormones dumped into your bloodstream will have. Seeing a need for training in this area, instructors have a tendency to look at an area they are familiar