debris of shattered wood and brick still littered the floor, the headmaster was blindfolded and a student was placed in front of him with an apple set atop his head. The old teacher crouched down as if winding his muscles up, cocked his head briefly, then launched into the air, executing a spinning back-kick that smashed the apple off his student’s head to the wild applause of the crowd.
In the car, Baker asked me what I thought. I reflected for a minute, remembering the sight of the hapless student standing stock still, balancing the apple, and squinting in anticipation as his teacher launched himself into the air. “I think,” I told Baker, “that sometimes the measure of a really good teacher is what they can get their students to do for them.”
“You sound like you speak from experience, Dr. Burke,” he said. “But that wasn’t what I meant.”
“Yeah, I know,” I told him.
“So? Do you have any comments? About the troopers.”
I shrugged. “Seemed pretty solid stuff. But I’d probably need to see a greater variety of attack scenarios to really evaluate it.”
Baker nodded at that. “We routinely have various experts do that sort of thing for us . . . look for areas we can improve on.”
“How’s it worked out?” I asked.
Baker made a shaking motion with his hand. “Sometimes it works, sometimes . . . ” He looked up at the stolid driver in the seat in front of us. “Remember that last guy, Hanrahan?”
“Permission to speak freely, sir?” Hanrahan asked.
“Sure,” the Colonel said.
“What a cluster-fuck,” he told me, looking briefly over his shoulder.
“I know that the Special Forces did an experiment with some aikido training a few years back,” I said. “It was like two groups of people speaking completely different languages.”
“Before my time,” Baker said. “But I read the book.”
“Me too,” I said. “It was good comic relief.”
Baker smiled. “I hear positive things about you, Burke, but I want to make sure you ‘get’ what we’re all about . . . ”
“Locate, close with, and destroy the enemy,” Hanrahan said. It was the kind of thing he didn’t say at high school recruiting events. The parents would swoon.
“What did you think of the tae kwon do today?” the colonel prompted.
I shrugged. “They sure can jump.”
“That’s it? You’re not impressed with their skill?” His eyes had an intentness about them that I hadn’t seen before. And, ever so faintly, I got the tingling sense of an energy field pushing against me.
I waved a hand. “I don’t know. They’re impressive athletes, but fighting? It’s so much smoke.” I thought about the time Yamashita had squared off against a student of ninjutsu. The guy could do handsprings across the room. Yamashita had told us ahead of time that such techniques were mostly designed to throw you off balance because they were unexpected. If, however, you weren’t flustered . . .
During the match, the ninja had tried to leap across the room. Yamashita simply waded in and caught him by the throat in mid-cartwheel.
“But didn’t you see that last technique?” Baker pressed. “The blindfold?” He sounded incredulous, but the eyes were still watchful. I noticed the subtle twitch of Hanrahan’s neck muscles and knew that he was listening carefully as well.
“Baker,” I said wearily, “it’s a good stunt. It takes a lot of practice. But in the long run, you know what?” I paused.
“What, Burke?”
“I don’t train to fight fruit. And I bet you don’t either.”
The Colonel sat back in the seat and smiled. “What do you think, Hanrahan?”
“He’ll do,” the sergeant said.
He’s not talkative even at the best of times. Yamashita has spent a lifetime following the path of an art that prizes efficiency: the slamming precision of a strike or the smooth, pivoting projection as you find and take hold of the fulcrum that’s present whenever two bodies meet in attack. So when I told him of Baker’s proposition he didn’t react. My teacher prizes timing as well as technique: he would comment when it suited him.
I was worried about his reaction. Yamashita seemed preoccupied lately. I was doing much of the instruction and, although he was present like a predator gliding around the edges of the class of straining trainees, he sometimes seemed focused on an interior reality the nature of which I could not fathom.
I didn’t know what was going on with him. But I rarely did. Part of the warrior’s art was to give away as little of yourself as possible to the world. You remained always watchful, guarded. And even after all this time and all that we had been through, in many ways my teacher was still a mystery to me.
I had waited until the last of the students had left the dojo and the lights were turned down low in the cavernous training hall. Yamashita drifted up the stairs to the loft area and beckoned for me to follow. I ascended into the soft lighting and simple décor of his living area. It was a familiar view; there were a few easy chairs and lamps. The walls were white and dotted with framed sumi-e paintings—the stark and elegant ink drawings of Japan, and resting on a table in pride of place, his swords.
The daisho, the two swords of the old samurai, are emblematic in many ways of the art Yamashita follows. They are a melding of esthetics and functionality, highly refined products of master artisans whose ultimate purpose is savage beyond description. I’ve seen their use firsthand, and wondered how such danger can be contained—or justified. Once I had asked my teacher this question. His eyes narrowed and the answer was brief. “Discipline,” Yamashita told me. “And wisdom.”
It’s a hard path to walk.
Sensei lifted his swords out of their rack and set them down on a table. He brought out a small wooden box, slid back the lid, and removed sheets of fine, soft paper, a small vial of oil, and a stick with a round fabric ball at the end. Yamashita knelt by the table and, bowing to the blades, began to inspect them.
When handling swords, there is an unyielding etiquette. Any time a sword is unsheathed, the potential for danger is released as well. For this reason, Yamashita held the long sword horizontally in front of him and slowly drew the blade from the scabbard with his left hand, pausing after a few inches of steel was revealed and then slowly continuing. The katana, the long sword that people typically think of as a “samurai sword,” is usually drawn with the right hand. By using the left, and removing it slowly from the glistening black scabbard, Yamashita was symbolically demonstrating a lack of offensive intent.
Once the sword was fully drawn, he set the sheath down and raised the blade to the vertical. The handle was wrapped in sharkskin and silk cords and the metal fittings were simple and balanced. The blade itself was an arc of deep silver, wrought centuries ago by skilled sword-smiths laboring in an atmosphere made dense
