Later, as I massaged my sore hand and wrist, I wondered what the heck had happened. I had a history of dropping people with my big punch, both as an MP and in training, but not only did Sampson not fall from my rainstorm of blows, he barely acknowledged that I was in his space. Talk about a direct hit to the ego.
That was my first experience with a person who could tolerate pain. As shall be discussed throughout this book, there are several reasons why some people are this way. In Sampson’s case, he was padded with fat and muscle, and he was flying high on drugs. I’m guessing if that slap with the steel gun had hit him in the forehead, cheek or nose it wouldn’t have slowed him at all. However, the MP’s gun slammed into his temple, possibly injuring the middle meningeal artery, which resulted in his heavy crash to Earth.
There would be other incidents during my MP duty in Vietnam, a place where so many GIs drank hard, consumed copious amounts of drugs, and were bombarded by inner demons created by the horror of war. With the ironic task of keeping the peace in a war zone, my fellow MPs and I found ourselves brawling with these folks nearly every shift. Of course, not everyone under the influence was impervious to pain techniques, but those who were made up for all the relatively easy physical arrests.
Working 14-hour shifts without days off didn’t allow time to develop a system for dealing with these people other than to dogpile them with as many MPs available at the moment. While this isn’t a bad technique, it’s not doable when the situation is one-on-one. One guy makes for a pitiful dogpile.
A year after I got out of the Army, I was patrolling the streets of Portland, Oregon as a city cop. The intensity of the job was considerably less than in a war zone, but there were always people who were mentally ill and violent, people who had intoxicated themselves into violence, people who had worked themselves into a violent rage, and extraordinarily fat or muscular people who were both violent and resistant to the usual control techniques.
Now that I was once again training in the martial arts, teaching defensive tactics to police officers, and getting lots of hands-on experience working the street, I was able to experiment with ways to deal with people who tolerate pain. This book contains many of the techniques and concepts that I’ve found, and my friends in the martial arts have found, work most of the time. Most of the time is the operative phrase here.
As I discuss in the following pages, there are no absolutes in a physical confrontation. Just when you think you have a sure-thing technique, one that makes everyone in your class groan and writhe, you’ll run into someone who, for several reasons that are discussed in a moment, shrugs it off. So what do you do then?
Read on …
CHAPTER 1 THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF FEELING NO PAIN
There is a truth in the world of hand-to-hand combat that too many martial artists aren’t aware of or refuse to believe: Every time you discover a sure-thing technique, one that makes all your training partners groan and writhe in agony, there exists out there in the mean streets, a host of people who won’t feel it. If you haven’t dealt with such a person, understand that the sudden realization that your technique isn’t working can create an instant pause in your thinking and in your actions.
Consider what martial artist and author Steven J. Pearlman wrote in his excellent book The Book of Martial Powers:
The opponents who challenge us do so first and foremost through a mental action, an act of will or intention. As long as their will remains, we will need to contend with them. We can strike them, lock them, grapple them, shed their blood, and break their bones but if they still possess the will to continue at us, they will do so. In this sense, we apply physical martial arts techniques to their bodies in an effort to reach their minds. We interact with their body-mind through pain, injury, or submission until their body convinces their mind to relent.
Pearlman talks about an attacker’s will to continue, even after we strike them, lock them, grapple them, shed their blood, and break their bones. Sometimes the attacker’s will remains as a result of not feeling the pain from all these things you have done. His brain has blocked the incoming signals. Therefore, you must either change your technique to one that is so painfully acute that it penetrates his dulled brain, or forego pain and opt for a technique that incapacitates his ability to attack you.
Before we examine these people who might be tolerant to pain, let’s look at three objectives to keep in mind when dealing with such formidable attackers. In short, your task is to control the violent person, control the situation and control yourself. All three are interrelated because without any one of them, there is no control of the other two.
CONTROL OF THE ATTACKER
Control is established by a strong, confident presence, the application of calming words, control holds, punches, kicks, strikes with environmental objects, or any other technique that incapacitates the person’s physical ability to attack.
CONTROL OF THE SITUATION
You control a situation by your confident presence, calming words, use of your surroundings, strategic positioning in relation to the threat, help from a friend, and an understanding of your own physical vulnerability.
CONTROL OF YOUR ACTIONS
Sometimes a defender, out of fear, anger or lack of confidence, will overreact and use more force than a situation requires. So this doesn’t happen to you, know that when you’re in command of both the situation and the attacker, you’re more likely to control yourself, even when you discover that the threat has a high tolerance to pain.
A martial arts friend says, “Fighting is about chaos and your objective is to bring order [control] to it.” This objective and mindset must guide your actions so that you do what needs to be done for your safety and with minimum injury to the attacker.
Note: Although many of the techniques in this book are designed to debilitate an assailant who hasn’t responded to other control measures, you must always strive to affect minimum injury. It’s the legal thing to do and it’s the honorable thing to do.
I know I’m preaching to the choir here, and that’s okay. We all need to be reminded from time to time of these three control factors since they are never more important than when dealing with a violent person who doesn’t react to pain.
It’s easy to become conditioned to the way training partners respond to our techniques: their frantic slapping on the mat, the way they cry out in agony, how they clutch desperately to whatever hurts, and their comments about your mother. Your training can so condition you to this that when a street attacker doesn’t respond similarly—he only mildly reacts or he doesn’t react at all—it can cause that aforementioned physical and mental freeze. It’s happened to me and I’ve seen it happen to others.
Here are the categories of attackers in which there are always a few who can tolerate pain to some degree.
Attackers who have large fat or muscle bulk.Attackers who are intoxicated on alcohol.Attackers who are under the influence of drugs.Attackers who are out of control with rage.Attackers who are mentally deranged.Attackers who feel pain but like it.
People carrying excessive fat or muscle bulk are often tolerant of certain pain techniques simply because their mass prevents proper application, or it literally pads the pain receptors.
On