art. It doesn’t matter if the art gave you, for the first time, the confidence to view the world as a pacifist. It doesn’t matter if you studied as a window to another age and culture. It doesn’t matter that you have found enlightenment in kata or learned to blend in harmony with the force of your attacker. It doesn’t matter because you are about to teach a martial art, an art dedicated to Mars, the God of War. A MARtial art. Even if somewhere over the years you have lost sight of this, your students have not. You wear a black belt. You are an expert on violence. You kick ass. You are a priest of Mars.
The simple truth is that many of these experts, these priests of Mars, have no experience with violence. Very, very few have experienced enough to critically look at what they have been taught, and what they are teaching, and separate the myth from the reality.
The Super Star. Do you ever notice that weight lifters don’t look like boxers? For that matter, if you watch fencing matches you see a lot of tall skinny guys, Judo matches tend to be won by short, stocky judoka—basically, none of them look like body builders. But action stars usually do. Unless they want to appeal to the goth/techno market, in which case they are really skinny, pale-complected, and wear a lot of black.
The idea is the same—pretty sells. In the media world, everything is about attraction. The fighters look pretty, not the gnarled, scarred up, sometimes toothless fighters that I know. The fights look pretty, too— you can actually see the action and even identify specific techniques.
They are paced for dramatic content. A movie fight doesn’t end when the hero or villain would naturally be lying in a pool of bloody vomit, clutching his abdomen and gurgling. It ends at the moment the director thinks the audience is hyped and not bored yet.
Even when they try to be realistic, it’s about the spectacle. The very fact that the camera can see what is going on is unrealistic. In smoke and dust and rain and the melee of bodies or the flash of gunfire, the person right in the middle of it can’t reliably tell what is going on.
And the fighting caters to the audience’s idea of fair. It’s almost always a close fight to the very end, won by a slim margin…I’ll tell you right now that as a public servant who runs a tactical team if I ever, ever play it fair, if I ever take chances with my men or hostages in order to cater to some half-assed idea of fair play, fire me. Fair doesn’t happen in real life, not if the bad guys have anything to say about it and not if the professional good guys do, either. I always wanted to see a movie with Conan talking shit in a bar and looking down to see a knife sticking out of his stomach with no idea how it got there.
The Story. Maybe this is a metaphor, maybe it is a model: Things are what they are. Violence is what it is. You are you, no more and no less—but humans can’t leave simple things alone.
One of the ways we complicate things is by telling stories, especially stories about ourselves. This story we tell ourselves is our identity. The essence of every good story is conflict. So our identity, the central character of this story that we tell ourselves, is based largely on how we deal with conflict. If there has been little conflict in the life, the character, our identity, is mostly fictional.
I present this as a warning. You are what you are, not what you think you are. Violence is what it is, not necessarily what you have been told.
This book is about violence, especially about the difference between violence as it exists “in the wild” and violence as it is taught in martial arts classes and absorbed through our culture.
Couple things first…
I get paid (and paid well) to go into a situation, usually alone and usually outnumbered by sixty or more criminals, and maintain order. I prevent them from preying on each other or attacking officers. That’s the job. Now, since I don’t fight every day, or even every week (anymore—I’m a sergeant now, one step behind the front line) most of the minutes and hours of the job are pretty easy, far too easy for what they are paying me. But every once in a while on a really, really ugly night, I more than earn my keep.
The fighting happens less, partially from moving up in rank, but even more from the fact that almost every criminal in the area knows me, and I’ve become better at talking. At CNT training (Crisis Negotiation Team—sometimes called Hostage Negotiators), Cecil, one of the instructors, recommended reading books on salesmanship. In the intro to one book, the author stated that everyone, every single person in the world is engaged in selling something—no matter if you were building a car in a factory, performing medicine or changing oil.
I thought, “Bullshit. I’m a jail guard. I’m not selling jack.”
Shortly after, there was an extremely stupid and crazy old man who very much wanted to fight five times his weight in officers. It took about twenty minutes to talk him into going along with the process. It was then that I realized I am selling something, a product called “not getting your ass beat” which is very hard to sell to some people.
Here’s the resume and bona fides. Feel free to skip it.
I enjoy teaching people who have already trained in martial arts how to apply their skills to real conflict. I like teaching officers—people who might need it—the simple, practical skills they need to stay alive or the equally simple and practical skills they need to restrain a threat without getting sued…and I like teaching the difference.
I have a BS degree in experimental psychology with a minor in biology from Oregon State. I’d planned on a double major, but Biochem killed me. While at OSU, I earned varsities in Judo and Fencing, and dabbled in Karate, Tae Kwon Do, and European weapons.
I’ve studied martial arts since 1981. I’ve been a corrections officer since 1991. As of this writing, that’s fourteen years, twelve of them concentrated in Maximum Security and Booking. In 1998, a lot of things happened. I earned my teaching certificate in Sosuishitsu-ryu Jujutsu; I published two articles in national magazines; I was named to the CERT (Corrections Emergency Response Team) and was made the DT and Hand-to-Hand instructor for the team. I was also promoted to sergeant. By the end of the year I was designing and teaching classes for the rest of the agency, both corrections and enforcement. I’ve been the CERT leader since 2002.
CERT has been a huge force in my life and career. By 1998, I already had lots of “dirt time” in Booking, something over two hundred uses of force, some ugly (PCP and/or outnumbered and/or ambushed and/or weapons), but I’d only had to take care of myself. Suddenly I was responsible for teaching rookies how to do what I did. I had to really think about what made things work.
CERT also allowed me access to huge amounts of training—I’m currently certified with distraction devices (flash-bang grenades), a wide variety of less-lethal technology (40 mm and 37 mm grenade launchers used to fire everything from gas to rubber balls; paintball guns that fire pellets filled with pepper spray; a variety of chemical munitions and shotgun-fired impact devices; pepper spray; and electrical stun devices). I’ve had the opportunity for specialized high-risk transport EVOC (Emergency Vehicle Operations Course) and have trained with the local U.S. Marshals in close-combat handgun skills. More importantly, I’ve had the opportunity to use some of these tools and learn what was left out of class. There has been other agency training as well—I’ve done CNT classes, though a CERT leader won’t be in that role; been through the introductory Weapons of Mass Destruction class from FEMA; attended school for the Incident Command System; been certified as a Use of Force and Confrontational Simulation instructor, and recently received a certification as a “Challenge Course Facilitator” in case anyone wants to walk a high wire and do some team building.
