unit. Swing shift or not, I’m a peer counselor for my deputies.
I was a medic, NBC defense instructor, and rappel master in the National Guard; studied EMT I and II a long time ago; bounced in a casino for a couple of years; and attended Tom Brown’s survival and tracking basic course…and I grew up in the eastern Oregon desert without electricity or running water.
That’s just a list. Here’s the truth:
Violence is bigger than me. There’s more out there and more kinds of violence than I’ll ever see…and certainly more than I could survive. I’ve never been a victim of domestic violence and I’ve never been taken hostage, but in this book I will presume to give advice on those two subjects. I’ve never been in an active war zone or a fire fight. Never been bombed, nuked, or gassed—except by trainers.
Violence is a bigger subject than any person will ever understand completely or deeply. I’ve put as much personal experience into this as I can, along with advice from people I know and trust to be experienced. I’ve also quoted or paraphrased researchers (many of whom have never bled or spilled blood in either fear or anger) when the research sounded right.
In the end, this is only a book. My goal in writing it is to give my insights to you through the written word. It will be hard to write because survival is very much a matter of guts and feelings and smells and sounds and very, very little a subject of words.
Take my advice for what it is worth. Use what you can use. Discard anything that doesn’t make sense.
You don’t know me; you’ve never seen me. For all the facts you have, I might be a 400-pound quadriplegic or a seventy year old retiree with delusions. Take the information in this book and treat it skeptically as hell.
Never, ever, ever delegate responsibility for your own safety.
Never, ever, ever override your own experience and common sense on the say-so of some self-appointed “expert.”
Never, ever, ever ignore what your eyes see because it isn’t what you imagined. And strive to always know the difference between what your eyes are seeing and what your brain is adding.
The format of this book. This book is divided into chapters. The first section, the Introduction, gives a brief overview of what the book is about, who I am, and why I wrote it. You’ve already either read it or skipped it. Fair enough.
Chapter 1: The Matrix, is an attempt to clear up the language of violence. It addresses the many types of violence, especially how different they can be and how the lessons from one type do not apply to the needs of another.
Chapter 2: How to Think, addresses assumptions about violence, about training, and introduces training for strategy and tactics.
Chapter 3: Violence, describes the dynamics of violence. It is focused on criminal violence—how it happens and what it is like. It will also cover the affects of adrenaline and stress hormones that accompany a sudden attack and how to deal with them.
Chapter 4: Predators, is about criminals—who they are, how they think and act. What you can expect from them, and what knowledge is not important in a moment of crisis.
Chapter 5: Training, will give advice and drills to help adapt your training to the realities of violence.
Chapter 6: Making Physical Defense Work, is about physical response to violence—not about effective technique but about what makes a technique effective.
Chapter 7: After, discusses the after-effects of violence—what to expect and how to deal with the psychological effects of either surviving a sudden assault or long-term exposure to a violent environment.
Group kata at Cape Cod Courtesy Kamila Z. Miller
You all know the story of the blind men and the elephant, right? It was originally published in a poem by John Godfrey Saxe that was about the silliness of humans disputing the nature of gods and religions.
The blind men, each very famous for wisdom and intelligence, walk up to an elephant, touch a piece, and begin to explain and describe the entire animal. The first touches the elephant’s side and declares that an elephant is just like a wall. The second, happening to grab hold of a tusk, knows that an elephant is just like a spear (okay, dull and curved and too thick but otherwise exactly like a spear…I don’t think this was the smartest of the blind men). From his short experience with the trunk, the third decides that an elephant is just like a snake
I don’t need to go on, do I?
Not to hit you over the head with the animal metaphors, but violence is a big animal and many people who have seen only a part of it are more than willing to sell you their expertise. Does someone who has been in a few bar brawls really know any more about violence than the guy who grabbed the elephant’s ear knows about elephants? Bar brawling experience is real and it is exactly what it is, but it won’t help you or even provide much insight into military operations or rape survival.
A truly devious mind that understands the principles can occasionally generalize from one type of conflict, say flying a combat mission, to very different types of conflict, such as crime prevention, debate or tactical assault. But that skill is both rare and limited. No matter how good you are at generalizing, there is a point where it doesn’t work and you descend into philosophy at the cost of survival.
Many martial arts, martial artists, and even people who fight for real on a regular basis have also only seen a very small part of this very big thing. Often, the best know one aspect very well, but that is only one aspect.
Some of the experts who are willing to sell you their insights have never seen a real elephant. Many people, almost all men in my experience, are willing to talk at length on the subjects of fighting and violence. They will lecture, expound, and debate.
Know this: Watching every martial arts movie ever filmed gives you as much understanding of fighting as a child watching Dumbo learned about elephants. Learning a martial art often teaches you as much as a taxidermist would know about elephants. Watching boxing or the UFC teaches as much as a trip to the zoo or the circus. Really, really studying the best research available gives you an incredible amount of knowledge about violence or about elephants, but there is always one detail missing.
When you are standing next to an elephant, it is huge. It could crush you at will or tear you in half, and there is nothing you could do. The advantage of being blind, of only knowing a part of this beast, is the comfortable illusion of safety.
section 1.1: the tactical matrix—an example
Violence isn’t just a big animal. It is complicated as hell. If you ever really wanted to get a handle on just one piece—interpersonal violence—you would need to understand physics, anatomy and physiology, athletics, criminal law, group dynamics, criminal dynamics, evolutionary psychology, biology and evolutionary biology, endocrinology, strategy, and even moral philosophy. In this great big complex mess, if you want to survive, you need a quick and simple answer. That’s hard.
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