CHIRON TRAINING
Volume 3
2007
by
Rory Miller
Published by Rory Miller at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Rory Miller
http://chirontraining.com
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Cover design by Kamila Zeman Miller
Introduction
Presumably, if you picked up volume three of a series, you kind of know what it’s about. Just in case, this is the compilation of the third year of the Chiron Training blog. You can read almost all of it for free at:
http://chirontraining.blogspot.com/
I’ve cleaned up the grammar, put it more-or-less in chronological order and added some new material.
The blog itself started accidentally. That happens a lot with me and technology. A good friend had started her blog and posted about training dogs—she trained search animals and wondered about K9 cop dogs. Hey, she’s a friend, I was a sergeant and search and rescue advisor for the Sheriff’s department and two of the K9 guys were friends… how hard would it be to post a comment offering an introduction.
Twenty minutes later I finally got to post the comment and in the process had somehow created my own blog. Which sat there, empty. For a while.
I didn’t tell anyone about the blog and wrote, originally, to get stuff out of my head or to think out loud. Somehow, it caught on.
So welcome to 2007, where our intrepid adventurer herds a motley crew into a full-service tactical team, spends a year as an internal affairs investigator, considers teaching something similar to a martial arts class and finds the personality flaws that come up under attack. Enjoy./
Bad Girls 02Jan2007
Irena sent a message today: "You have described the BG (bad guys), and the EBG quite a bit. But, your portraits are all male. Any female BGs?"
Oh, yeah.
In general, like most male officers, I don't like working with female inmates. Forget the prison movies, the majority of our female population have had shitty nutrition since childhood, never exercised, have very odd notions of hygiene and (like the men) far too much exposure to drugs and alcohol.
Without the "tough guy" image to maintain, they are also extremely whiny (far more than the male inmates) and used to an environment where offering easy sex is a primary strategy of control and, far too often, making money or getting drugs.
Aside about whining: there are three basic types of criminals. The most common are the low level hustlers- pimps, pros, druggies, dealers, petty thieves etc. They make up the majority of the population in jail. They are not used to doing things for themselves. One of my inmates claims to have fathered "around" 30 children. He thinks he is a good daddy- he brings his kids stuff when he has money (charges are dealing drugs and prostitution). I asked him who paid for the kids’ basic needs: food and clothes and rent and ... he gave me a disgusted look. “That's what welfare is for.”
I wish, in typing, I could give you the inflection of his voice- he wasn't saying welfare would take care of his kids, he was saying that welfare existed for the sole purpose of leaving him free NOT to take care of his kids. That's what welfare's FOR.
Anyway, raised in an environment where basic needs, including your children's, are somebody else's responsibility it seems obvious that if you want something somebody should give it to you. You ask, demand, whine or take. With male inmates, the strategies are heavy on demand and take; with females on ask and whine.
So, to sum up, working a female dorm: imagine 60 sallow skinned, mostly toothless, either meth skinny or McDonalds obese women with bad skin and frequently open sores who are convinced that if they can find the right combination of whining and flirting they can control any man.
Open sores. I was flashed by an inmate once. She yelled, "Sarge, I want you to see something," and whipped her shirt up. I'm pretty sure I know what she was trying to show me, but I've seen those before. What I saw was a boil about half as big as a fist oozing pus all over. Before that day, suppurating pustule was just a word to me....
So yeah, Irena, there are bad girls. Some of them are very nasty and some of the stories are so nasty....
A couple of mild ones- there was a crack whore once who tried to gouge out my eyes with inch-long red fingernails. It didn't work.
And once a three-hundred-pound stark naked woman who had taken all of her dealer son-in-law's meth knocked everyone else off as we were putting her in a cell and some clumsy git of a partner shut the door with just me and the inmate inside. There was a very quick use of force- I swept her legs out and knelt on the elbow like in hiki mawashi (Sosuishitsu-ryu reference, everyone else disregard) and waited for someone to open the door. The worse part of that wasn't the visuals or the force. Really, really obese people with bad hygiene smell like rotten cheese. Women with really bad hygiene smell like rotten fish. Yeah, it was like that. In an enclosed cell.
And hinting at a really nasty story: If an OB-Gyn doctor calls from the prison clinic and says, "Sergeant, I think I found some contraband..." you're going to have a very icky day.
Hiki mawashi is one of the two-man kata of Sosuishitsu-ryu, the jujutsu system I study. It is a kneeling defense against a sword attack, which you wouldn’t think would come in handy all that often in jail.
However it ends by kneeling on the bad guy’s elbow as he is face down and your other elbow presses against the back of his wrist. Don’t worry about picturing it, the point is that it hurts, immobilizes the bad guy and leaves both of your hands free.
It’s become one of my favorite handcuffing positions.
"We Just Disagree" 02Jan2007
It's disconcerting when two people of intelligence with the same basic values disagree on an issue. An acquaintance wrote recently of how hard it is to hold conversations on certain subjects with certain people, mostly because of the emotional involvement. But somewhere in there, he asked a very good question: How can smart people with the same data he has come to such profoundly different conclusions as he does?
The question deserves an answer. Several answers, really.
The first is that different people read information with different levels of skill and understanding. Auto accidents, for instance: "Fifty-two percent reported they were 5 miles or less from home, and an astounding 77 percent reported they were within 15 miles of home." Some people read this and decide it is much safer to be on the highway in another state than to be in your own neighborhood. Other people realize that they do most of their driving close to home. Even if they are driving 50 miles away, they have to pass through the 'statistical zone of death' to get there. The statistic is meaningless.
Not only is there skill in reading the data, there are very intelligent people who filter information through very different paradigms: The war in Iraq has cost more American lives than any war the under-thirty set can remember. It is a huge tragedy and the bloodbath of their lives. A more historical perspective will compare it to single days or battles in other wars and the data, the raw number, will have different meaning and impact.
Then there are sources of information- anyone with access to TV, radio, papers and the internet has access to the same information that everyone else does... but they don't access it the same way. No matter how much you deny it, consciously or unconsciously you are cherry-picking your sources to agree with your worldview. I can find sources that say global warming is happening and is caused by fuel emissions. I can also find articles from many of the same organization from the seventies saying that the same emissions were bringing on the next Ice Age.
(And these two sources of difference, paradigm and choice of sources can blend such that if my primary source on Iraq are e-mails from soldiers there AND I've been reading "33 Strategies of War" by Robert Greene that points out that the best way to beat the US in an altercation is simple to wait until the media turns and, in the cause of better ratings, works to bring down the government that caused the war, I'll be pro-war and anti-media. If on the other hand I've been watching the major news affiliates and reading "Fooled by Randomness" by Nassim Taleb it leads to a 'wait and see, history doesn't decide until much later' attitude.)
But possibly the biggest is that people who live different lives and are exposed to different populations see different results from the same things.
Why are college professors generally for relaxed immigration laws and for government aid and cops, in general are against both?
It's because we see different outcomes. The college professor sees the students who worked hard, took advantage of what was offered and used it to create good and productive lives. Sometimes against great odds and defeating incredibly negative circumstances. They see the good that the programs do.
The cops deal, every day, with the people who took advantage of what was offered to increase their ability to harm or to evade responsibility for their actions.
The programs that allow a young man from Mexico who illegally crossed the border to find a job, get health care for his children, become an asset to his community, pay taxes and have children who go to colleges and make America stronger are exactly the same programs that allow cartels of drug dealers to pack their organizations with relatives from the home country and rule through fear and traditions that were imported right along with them.
The programs that allow a struggling single mother to care for her children and keep them fed and get them to school and give them a chance at a life are the exact same program that enables teen age boys to have contests on who can father the most illegitimate children before graduating from high school, and do so with absolutely no responsibility or penalties.
This is important. Sometimes the argument arises because the friend has a colleague who really made it in life with a little help paid for by the government... and you have either just delivered or just buried a baby addicted to two drugs and underweight with no functioning parent and that, the birth or the burial, were also paid for by the government.
Tragedy 06JAN2007
Normally, somewhere around this time I do a post about the last year. 2002-2005 were in many ways ugly, ugly years. Lots of death. Lots of crud welling up from the past. Lots of realizations about how much the world is not about me. Learning that even with the perfect mate you will still be very alone on some issues.
Last year was good. Not great, not bad, just a good year- the closest I can remember to a relatively normal year. Yeah, my idea of normal is skewed, but I don't think anything happened last year that I couldn't get a reasonably normal citizen to at least relate to. And that's special in its own way.
There were three important deaths last year. Two were tragedies.
Tragedy, I was told long ago, is when the flaws within the hero lead inevitably to his destruction. When you (from the sidelines) can see the train wreck coming but know that because of who the character is, he won't get off the tracks.
Andy died being him. It was fun and youthful and reckless and it was also drunken and stupid and incredibly selfish. He died as what he was, good and bad. If he had been anybody else, he wouldn't have died. Being who he was, it was the best possible way to die... just being Andy.
Brad had fought for years with his fears and inadequacies. He hated losing and he hated competing. He would throw a temper tantrum if you scored on him in training and he would cheat if he could get away with it just for the ego boost and the bragging rights. Yet he stuck with a very difficult discipline for many years (thanks largely to a dedicated and loving instructor) and he survived a knife attack with minor scratches. He was always afraid he wouldn't measure up to some image he had in his head. Always afraid. When he went to attack an aspect of that fear, deep diving, he used up all his air far too soon and when the instructor tried to save him, he fought him off and tried to claw his way to a surface that was much too far away. The fear that had driven so much of his life killed him.
Frenchy alone wasn't a tragedy. He'd survived poverty and war and injuries that he never should have. He'd had bypasses more times than I remember. I wish his death had been delayed and I wish it had been gentler and more dignified. But it was just time.
All three of these men were loved.
In 2011 all three of them are still missed. Andy was my nephew, Brad a colleague from work. Frenchy was the closest thing my children ever had to a grandfather.
Cube Farm 10JAN2007
I haven't been in the jail for three days.
Last year I applied for and was accepted to an off-line position. I just started. It's an interesting transition. For the last several years my identity has been very much tied up in crisis management, dealing with violent criminals, counseling deputies- things that were physical and mental, hands on, where the price of a mistake was blood.
Now, I will be reviewing the deputies’ uses of force, investigating them if they seem wrong, fielding complaints from citizens.
Part of me still keeps half an ear out for a radio I'm not even carrying.
This will be very, very different.
My year as an Internal Affairs investigator was eye-opening, to say the least. Not because of uncovering a bunch of corruption. Our officers were, with very few exceptions extremely professional. In all my time with the Sheriff’s Office I saw little if any evil. I saw a lot of incidents of momentary stupidity.
The big insights came with learning how Headquarters operated. It was disturbing, sometimes. It wasn’t just that perception mattered more than effect and thus how people would see things became part of the decision equation. It was that sometimes how a single person imagined someone might see things was powerful enough to drive decisions that could have real cost in terms of blood and injury.
As much as I still feel that my priorities are the right ones I know, and have been told many times, that my priorities are naïve.
TV Land 17JAN2007
The flu kicked my ass. Or maybe it was food poisoning. My wife says I have the eating habits of a coyote.
So, about four days at home. Reading (finished "The 33 strategies of War" by Robert Greene; "Secret Weapons of Jujutsu" by Don Cunningham and several manuals on labor law and investigative procedure for the new assignment). Also put in some closet shelving, cleaned up.... whole bunch of boring domestic stuff.
In the process, I also watched a lot of TV. One of the cool things about modern technology is that you can sit down and watch an entire season of a television show on DVD and really follow the plot lines. And really be annoyed by the tropes and writing techniques (K and I were giggling about what the parallel plot line would be in this episode of Smallville).
Here are some observations. They aren't about the fantasy world of television so much as about the way the writers see the world. In their commentaries the writers sometimes talk about how hard they work to make the characters real and believable... and in their world maybe some of this stuff is.
TV heroes don't do anything else. They don't seem to do anything to get their families fed or pay the bills or pay the rent. They talk about being poor, but they go through more vehicles and do more property damage in their own homes than I could ever pay for. Most of them pay lip service to having another obligation- school or work- but it never takes any time, certainly not the 10-12 hours out of the day that many of us spend. And poor 18-year-olds with no jobs and an unemployed single parent ride around in $30,000 brand new convertibles.
Does this mean something? Maybe. Maybe Hollywood writers live in a world where they do what they love (writing) and get paid for it and the writing takes up the time that their heroes would have to split between heroing and everything else. Maybe with expense accounts and insurance paid by someone else and stage handymen to fix the sets who are on salary they don't realize that for normal people, this would cost and the price would come out of everything else.
I don't get about the $30,000 dollar car, though. Willful stupidity? Or do they really think that cars are just accessories? (And about cars- there are sports cars, personality cars, upscale SUVs, classic muscle cars and panel vans. That's it. No one drives an economy sedan. Or a dirty jeep.)
In TV land, rich people can do anything they want. The evil head of a corporation can poison an entire small town and cover it up. Just by being rich and evil. The CDC, EPA, state agencies, media, local lawyers (who all live for a high profile and deep pockets target) just... cease to exist. Rich people can wire transfer 57 million dollars instantly. The world is not a cartoon and a rich person's billions are not kept in a vault ala Scrooge McDuck- they are invested to make more money, and invested well, not in a passbook savings account or a checking account.
(Which could lead to two asides- why trickle down economics and the widening gap between rich and poor are mathematical inevitabilities- but not today). They are purposely difficult to access and 57 million leaves a spectacular paper trail.
Perhaps in the insular world of Hollywood, the heavy hitters, the producers and directors, can do anything they want. It seems to be the one industry that actually has the bad habits and snobbish disdain for the common man that they ascribe to all industry. Maybe. I'm an outsider.
In TV land, people don't learn. They do the same things with the same people over and over and over again. It's supposed to be sexual tension, maybe, when the protagonist and the female lead(s) almost get together and then are side tracked by the mission or the villain or the secret in every episode. Real people don't put up with that shit, except in the most abusive of relationships. After a certain time of being jerked around, you move on. Not just emotionally, physically. You quit spending time with that person.
In Hollywood maybe it is an enclosed community and you wind up working with essentially the same people throughout your career no matter how badly they suck. Maybe this really stupid excuse to repeat the same plot lines over and over again is a reflection of their reality. Or maybe it's just easier than originality.
I should just stick to books.
A New Word 17JAN2007
Invented a word a few weeks ago and I want credit for it before it sweeps the country.
For all the LAN administers and IT supervisors out there: "gekherd".
If a shepherd herds sheep....
Balance Sheet 22JAN2007
Melissa noted a while ago that the birth of a child, especially to good friends who have wanted a child desperately for a long time, should balance the deaths of the year.
I don't see the world that way.
Deaths are what they are. They mark the time when the person passes from experience to memory. I can selfishly grieve for the loss of future experiences and I will miss them... but death isn't a negative. It just is. I can no more put a number value (that death hurt as bad as 10 dinners with my inlaws) to the pain of someone's death than I can hold positive or negative feelings for a rock. The rock is. Death is. I can appreciate them or feel sad for what I see in them but I can't put them on a scale of good or bad any more than I can ascribe a color to a flavor.
I don't see my life as a balance sheet or as a scalar in any way. Deaths are deaths. Births are births. Stephen is a miracle, like all babies, and the mystery of who and what he will grow to be is fascinating... but Stephen's birth is a separate thing from Andy's death. They are their own little places in my soul. One doesn't make the other more tragic or more precious. They are what they are, their own things. Themselves.
If I'm an asshole but have a really nice car, those are two separate things. One doesn't offset the other. They may combine to influence whether or not you choose to spend time with me... but a nice car doesn't make me less of an asshole.
There are events and stories and objects, but when we try to put numbers on them, try to say, "On balance, I'm happy" or "everything considered it was a good year" it's an attribution and it is a damn convenient way to muffle feelings just a bit. Maybe even to avoid fixing the things that hurt.
The Blog about Blogging 23JAN2007
First off, you all need to know I'm spying on you. The little counter at the bottom also tracks who has been to the website, where they came from (in the sense of being directed by another website) and the location of your IP address.
It also tracks if a search engine was used to find the site and what the key words for the search were. Evidently "How to break a neck" is a popular search and so are 'testicals + big' and 'testicals + rubber'... which leads to the post on castrating goats, a big Newfoundland puppy and being shit on by baby raccoons. But I wonder what the searchers were hoping to find.
The IP addresses aren't really reliable. My home computer says it's in Utah and Drew's occasionally, but not always, says he's in New York.
But it's kind of cool and I'm curious about the regular readers in Montreal (Mauricio? Theo?) and Virginia and Illinois and Carson, California. And the New Zealand readers. And...
Second, a confession of technical ineptitude. I am not ept. Those of you with blogspot accounts may notice that Chiron has one less "edit-me" link space in the margin than usual. I tried to add a link and the whole thing disappeared. Same with pictures. I'm sure my lovely wife could show me how to add them in a few minutes but blogging is not one of the things that we do together. There are better ways to spend time with people you love.
Third, blogging becomes its own thing. This was originally a place to get stuff out of my head, stuff that I was getting tired of poking at internally. It's transitioned, somehow, from excising the negative to creating something. In a few decades I might know what.
Anyway, welcome to the inside of my head.
I don’t know if it’s interesting to you, but evidently I consistantly misspell testical. It’s supposed to testicle. So not only was the blog attracting perverts, but they were perverts who couldn’t spell.
Never... 24JAN2007
In the jails, working with criminals, in the streets, on patrol... in any emergency services position bad things happen. You will see and feel and be involved in many things, some of them horrible, some of them tragic, some of them funny. You will also be involved in things that are horrible or tragic or funny but also fraught with legal liability.
It's bad enough that you may risk your life to save some piece of shit abusive rapist meth addict from being beaten to death by someone just as bad, but to add insult to injury you may get sued for doing it. In this world, that's just the way it is.
One of the side effects is the "three-year rule". When an officer is involved in a very ugly thing, especially if someone died, he is cautioned not to talk about it for three years. Three years, we are told, is the magic number, the time limit on filing a federal suit.
Aside: as I type this it occurs to me that this is something I was told and it has been passed on through generations of cops and I've never looked it up myself. It may not even be true. Wouldn't that be weird?
The reason for the rule is the concept of "discovery" and how our profession looks at lawyers and civil trials. We hear from inmates all the time that the civil aspect of the legal system is "Money for nothin'..." you just gotta convince twelve people that you are poor and sad and downtrodden and some person or some agency with deep pockets is a great big bully and they will vote for the agency to give you money. (Like many things, civil suits are one of the things that tends to punish good people more. Good people mortgage their houses to pay settlements off. Bad people just say ,"Fuck you" or declare bankruptcy and are rarely ever actually penalized).
Anyway, let's say that on that one bad night things go really, really bad. You're alone, or worse yet with your children and a screaming naked guy with a knife runs out of a house right at you, swinging the knife at your kid and everything is a blur but you tackle him as hard as you can and you hear crunches and something gives and he's trying to bite and you shove your arm deeper in his mouth thankful you're wearing a jacket and you punch and grab and gouge and you're terrified and suddenly things get really quiet. You roll away and check on your daughter who is screaming and then you look back at the guy (for a second, you're afraid that since you took your eyes off of him he will disappear like the villain in a slasher flick and attack again) but you look at him and he's not moving at all and then you realize he's not breathing...
There's a good chance that relatives of the dead guy will come out of the woodwork. They haven't talked to him in years after kicking him out over violent outbursts, but now they will be aggrieved and loving family members saddened by their poor little sick brother's horrible and unnecessary death at the hands of you, you violent, evil.... These people who never spent a dime on the psych meds that the deceased desperately needed will go shopping for an attorney...
And here's the genesis of the three-year rule: You are going to feel terrible. No matter how justified the situation, or depraved the attacker, you've taken a human life and that means something and you will feel bad about it and you will want to talk. Talking is how people heal from this stuff.
If you are honest, you will say, "I feel terrible, just guilty. Sick." and "It seemed like I watched him not breathing for an hour before I realized I needed to do something and called 911"
The attorney hired by the EBG's suddenly loving family will do anything he can to find evidence of these statements and will ask you, in court, "Isn't it true that you said you felt guilty? That you were sick with guilt? Guilt is not something the righteous feels..." and "I will produce a witness that says that you stared at the body for an hour before you called 911. If that is not gross indifference I don't know what is."
So we are taught not to say anything.
The upshot is that in the worst emotional times, you are pretty much on your own. By the time three years have passed, you've either dealt with it or it has dealt with you.
This new job is different. The ugly things that I will learn here I can never talk about. Never. I will learn a lot and I will distill lessons and adapt. I'm doing good things. But I will (and have already) seen things that will stay with me...
(Not the old things, like blood and guts and splatter, these are more emotional, more personal)
...and I will never be able to talk about them. Never.
The thing with IA (and for that matter, if you’ve ever wondered why cops under investigation seem to be treated differently than other suspects) is that the investigators are both cops and employers. The press releases that might be normal in a regular investigation would be violations of labor law. One attorney was outraged that an officer wrote his deadly force report with the help of an attorney. No choice, really, since the report was a work requirement and since it was compelled (under threat of disciplinary action or termination) but might be self-incriminating under the Fifth Amendment, an attorney working on the writer’s behalf was the only real option.
Integration 31JAN2007
Kevin Jackson is a very nice guy. He's personable, charismatic, dynamic and with an ability to sustain a high energy level that is nearly unmatched. He's also a good teacher, a hell of a martial artist and one of the few I know who are both wise and humble enough (sometimes too humble, KJ!) to keep their eyes, ears and minds open.
I will give him the highest compliment I know in self-defense training: I once saw him teach a knife defense class that wasn't stupid.
A couple of weekends ago, Al Dacascos was in town and hosted a mini seminar. Al was teaching and Mac and Sherrill and Kevin so, yeah, I had to go.
Kevin taught a class on biting. I allow biting in my classes and sometimes encourage it and in a rudimentary way can teach it a little: Some places hurt more than others. Nipping for pain and tearing for avulsion are different. Use it to create space. Beware the risk of disease.
Biting has always been a minor tool of mine.
It's still a minor tool. What I learned from Kevin that day was less about technique than about myself and learning and teaching. Okay- I did learn one aspect of technique. I usually use biting to create space. Kevin encouraged me to hold my partner tight so he couldn't escape from the bite, the pain. This was counter-intuitive but it had a wonderful affect. Unable to squirm directly away, the threat almost always broke contact with the ground, giving me a throw.
There are ways to break down fighting. Weapons aside, technique wise there are: strikes; locks; takedowns; gouges/pressure point/pinches; movement; and strangling.
Effects break down to movement, pain, damage and shock.
Skills are unbalancing, immobilizing, clearing and damage.
There are pieces to all of this. Anatomy and physiology; principles of physics and biomechanics; Goal-strategy-tactics-technique; power generation, timing and targeting; Awareness Initiative and Permission... that all effect everything else.
But you can look at a fight at the technique level, the effects level or the general skills level (or two or three of these) very usefully.
I am an extremely integrated fighter. At the technique level that means that usually I can do two or more classes of techniques in a single action eg, the twisting action of a lock providing the power for an elbow strike while simultaneously dragging the threat through a leg sweep. At the effects level, it means I'm not married to a single preference. I'll do damage if it's prudent, force the threat to move if it betters my position, cause pain if it helps the movement or will shut down his thought process and I will shut down his entire system (shock) if it is necessary and legally justified- and when practical I can blend these. Same with the skill level. It's all the same. In my own mind I'm not better or worse at these things or have strengths or weaknesses in them, they are just part of everything else and, in the moment, completely subconscious.
(Does any native speaker of any language ever say, "I'm just way better at verbs than I am nouns?" No, they don't. It's like that. People learning a language, however, say things just like that...)
Working with biting, especially while groundfighting, I found I wasn't thinking that way. I was either brawling or biting. I would transition my partner into position without even thinking about it and then drop out of the mindset, think about biting (all the while not truly in the zone of brawling anymore), bite, and then watch the effects and transition back to fighting again.
Somewhere over the years I had forgotten that every single thing I know, every class of technique, every strategy and tactic, every effect, every skill started this way. It started as a big lump of stuff that needed to be worked in. That's the way it is for all students.
That's not a good thing to forget. Thanks, Kevin.
Digging and Pushing 01FEB2007
I wish there was a rule that would make this easier. A very wise man, Jake Rens, once told an inmate (who was talking a very small issue into a very big one), "Son, when a smart man figures out he's in a hole, he stops digging." Good advice. It's something we hammer in DTs and Officer Survival and Use of Force: If what you are doing isn't working, do something else.
This goes for life and relationships and careers and everything- if what you are doing is not working, DO SOMETHING ELSE.
But.... but... but.... Don't give up. Never, ever, ever give up.
Both these things are true. Both these things are contradictory.
When you are making things worse, you need to stop. But sometimes things get worse just before it's over- sometimes a threat who is exhausted and ready to give up gives it one more burst of speed and power before meekly letting himself be cuffed.
And yet the person who reliably gets hurt is the rookie who got really good at ONE wrist lock at the Academy and tunnel visions on the one technique when he is getting himself slammed. He needs to do something else...
"That's my story and I'm stickin' to it..." people have successfully brazened out things by sticking to a story (no matter how improbable) and other people, who could have saved friendships and careers by simply admitting... burned all their bridges.
Maybe that's a piece of it. Always stick with the truth... except what is the 'truth' is often opinion. New facts are allowed to influence opinion, but 'truth' is above influence. Many people call things truth far too early.
So, when do you push on in the face of adversity and loss and when do you change your tactics? When is change really just quitting?
I really wish there was an easy rule of thumb.
Light and Dark 01FEB2007
Over the weekend a lot of time was spent revisiting darkness with an old friend. It was a time for old wounds and talking about gulfs with someone who would listen and not judge, who would understand what they could understand and not pretend to understand the rest. It's frustrating that so many good people can not see their own beauty and grace.
She said that she wanted to be a creature of the light... and she already is. Look at the lives she touches, the way people that know her feel, all around her is the light that she spreads. Like many things, it's hard to see what you are, it's slightly easier to see what you do. And it's very hard to see and understand effects around you that come from your being more than your actions, but they are real.
Light and dark, and anti-light and anti-dark.
There are good people and bad people. There are some truly evil bastards in the world, people who destroy for the feeling of power, people who kill the spirits of children. And there are just scum, people who make you ashamed of humanity just to be around them. They increase the darkness in the world.
And there are people who aren't truly dark themselves, more of an "anti-light". Passive aggressive jerks who never actively do anything bad but try to increase the friction for those who try to do what is right. Office gossip sabotage. Brainless protests. This is far more common than true evil and its effects can be just as large- the difference between damaging a child and merely not loving one can be negligible.
I'm not a creature of the light- I realized that this weekend. I've been in the presence of the light (the big 'L' LIGHT, the feeling of pure joy as you combine with the universe into a single thing) and in a way I worship it- nobility and kindness and love and caring and beauty... and something far beyond those words. But it's not my role. There's an "anti-dark", too, who deals with the true dark in dark territory and there is very little kind and loving and beautiful about that (though there have been loving moments of violence and even nobility here and there). Someone has to do this to leave the people of light free to be what they are.
Damn, this sounds self-righteous. I'll get over it.
There are certain career fields where you will deal with a ton of darkness or, maybe, a ton of the after-effects. Most of what I write centers around one aspect of this, violence.
My friend had dealt with another, medicine. Particularly, in her case, critically ill newborns and pregnant mothers. No one dies well, not heroes and certainly not children.
That’s her world, and I am happy not to be there and proud to know someone with her strength. But in all this, what came up again and again, from both our worlds, was the necessity of having someone to process it with. No one who hadn’t been there could understand, really understand, but that wasn’t important. To listen, to accept… that was important.
"It's Alive..." 05FEB2007
The present is a product of the past. Sometimes it seems that we don't appreciate our own role in creating the life we live or how we have treated people in the past affects how other people expect to be treated... everything we do leaves so many tracks and repercussions. So many of those are predictable.
A very wise man sat across the table from me. He asked not to be named, so I won't. The subject was a stupid thing that some one may or may not have done that may or may not utterly destroy his or her career and reputation. During one of the breaks this wise man and I were talking about other things. I mentioned how stupid it was for a government organization to impose a five year hiring freeze and six years down the road go into a media frenzy about excessive overtime. The wise officer looked at me and said, "They never learn. You gotta live with the monsters you create."
Yeah. You gotta live with the monsters you create.
Training may be cut this year, because they delayed last year's training to this fiscal year to save (or, rather, postpone spending) money.
Years ago there was a bad officer who finally did something so egregious that he had to be fired and prosecuted... but that was preceded by years of smaller things, never directly addressed by his supervisors.
Politics, violence and money. Even life and love. We create our own monsters and then we have to live with them.
Zen and Deja Vu 09FEB2007
"Ready! Fire!
The weapon comes up, sight picture, sight alignment, front sight front sight front sight, preeeessss the trigger BLAM trigger reset and preeeesssss BLAM. Scan left and right, eyes and weapon together for any possible threat and snapping back to low ready.
"Ready! Fire!" The cycle repeats. Hundreds of repetitions dry fire then hundreds of rounds then hundreds more from the draw...
"Fire!" Left hand snaps to chest as right drops to the holster, breaking retention snaps and then pulling the weapon to the high ready position at my right armpit, cantered slightly out so that if I have to fire from there the slide won't snag on equipment or clothing. The left hand slides around, securing a 360 degree grip and I thrust the weapon forward in front of my eyes -sight alignment sight picture front sight- and preesss BLAM! recover trigger reset and pressss BLAM! scan left and right, snap the weapon to retention and pause for a second and holster.
Then the same, moving forward and back, the universe in one way limited to a two-inch square on a humanoid target, in another way encompassing all that surrounds the range as each scan is a reminder that one shot, one battle, one life happens in the context of the world- to focus entirely on one threat is to miss the enemy on the flank, to focus on one obsession is to miss all of life.
"Ready! Fire!"
Grip. Stance. Aggressive forward lean. Arms locked. Sight alignment. Sight picture. Breathing. Trigger press. It is complex, many things to think about, too much for the conscious mind to handle without letting one facet slip. I decide to throw my mind away. You've done this through enough reps, I tell myself, you no longer need to watch it. I give my body permission to make the shots before I consciously okay it... my groups tighten up. The speed of point shooting with the accuracy of aimed fire.
Caveat and nota bene: The ability to let your body do what you have trained without conscious interference is a primary goal of martial arts, self defense, CQB, the whole shebang. It is very easy to delude yourself that you have achieved some kind of mastery when you let yourself loose like that. Letting yourself loose isn't mastery (though a lot of worthless instructors have convinced themselves and their students otherwise). Here's the deal- if it is the real thing, you will get better when you let yourself loose. You need to consciously and critically evaluate the effect. If you aren't better, go back to reps. You aren't ready yet.
It was good, and for a few hours in the pouring rain it was a deep meditation, touching the core, letting things happen, mind open but focused, awareness locked on a two inch square while simultaneously open to the sphere.
Later that night, the LT (lieutenant) had to leave. Complications with his wife's pregnancy. I offered to drive him, hinted that it would be a very long drive with some very dark thoughts...
Fifteen years or more ago at this very same military base, while I was in the National Guard, I arrived for an NBC (Nuclear-Biological-Chemical) Defense Instructor course and got a message that my wife, shortly after after the birth of our firstborn was hemorrhaging badly. I was instructed to leave immediately. It was a two hour drive alone in the dark wondering what my life would be like without K. Even then, when the darkness was much farther away, she was still safe harbor, still a bastion of sense and beauty in the world. What would I do facing life without her and with a son only days old... dark thoughts, scary thoughts for a long, lonely drive.
I knew the lieutenant would be facing similar thoughts and he shouldn't have to face them alone. He chose to, and he used the time to compose himself to better comfort his wife.
The first part of the first day of training....
Character Flaw 09FEB2007
Good training, especially good scenario training, can uncover holes in your skill sets and a myriad of bad habits. Sometimes what you learn is so heavy that it can only be described as a character flaw- sometimes it's not what you know or what you did, it is who you are.
Second day of the training and we are practicing witness transport and protection. Drive, stay alert, arrive at drop, bail and set up a hasty perimeter, scan for safety or clear as necessary and touch base with the receiving unit, then remove the protectee from the vehicle and escort inside.
First scenario and we took fire. I hear the 'pop, pop, pop' of sim fire from across the street. I turn and engage, closing. I fire three shots from 25 yards to 20 and the threat turns and runs (odd, we are taught and practice even in a scenario to stay in the fight no matter what). Doesn't matter- another threat to my left and I sprint, tactical reload, sprint to the dead space behind the building that the threat is using for cover. He's still firing at my team, tunnel-visioned and I pop around the wall at his knee level and fire three rounds into his belly just below the vest, all angled upward. I turn and scan 360, looking for a third threat and my team is screaming, waving me over. While I've gone off on this little murdering hunt they've kept one vehicle in the kill zone waiting to extract me. I sprint, dive in the window and we tear off.
That's it, my character flaw. One of 'em, anyway. When attacked, I counter-attack. Normally, that's a good response. Not here. The mission, the team, my responsibility as a team leader- all those things disappear and the thing that comes out is what it is- implacable and predatory- just not part of the team.
The goal, now, is to consciously take control. To remember the mission even when this deep button is pushed. To trust my men on the perimeter to do the killing if killing needs to be done. To force myself to look at the big picture. That's going to be hard.
BTW- the guy ran because I shot him right on the tip of the nose. Those suckers can hurt.
Since this is on the edge of true confession time- also at this training I did the most egregious friendly-fire kill ever. We were ambushed again and everyone fell back in good order to the hardened (solid cover- a concrete building) drop. The instructor (sneaky bastard, JJ, but I'll never again back into an unknown or take a safe zone on faith) had put one more threat inside the safe house. We backed into a deadlier ambush. One of my team peeled, trying to find a way down a corridor to flank the room the threat was firing from. The rookie put his weapon and light on the door. I buttonhooked through into the connecting room. The threat was silent, suckering us into crossing the threshold into another kill zone. I signaled the rookie to kill his light and saw the shadow of the threat on the floor. I dove, sliding on my side and fired four shots into the threat’s groin and lower stomach at an upward angle (may be seeing a pattern here). It wasn't the threat. The threat had run to the basement. It was the officer who had run down the corridor to flank. Not only had I shot my own man, but I stalked him and assassinated him.
Lots of things would or could have changed this- if the threats and officers hadn’t been wearing the same armor or if the officer watched the door instead of the stairs... but those are incidentals. This is the purpose of training at this level- to find holes, to get better. This was great training.
Inside My Skin 12FEB2007
A bad moment in the break from training. Took a quick drive off base to buy the things I had forgotten to pack. For almost an hour, I was completely inside my skin. It wasn't good.
Does that sound good, like I was truly in touch with my inner self? But my inner self was tired and sore and dehydrated and still sick: it colored everything. Without a connection to the world, without empathy, everything became about me. Everything negative became personal. Compassion was gone. An elderly lady, having trouble telling the difference between a five and a twenty dollar bill is in line in front of me and it is slow, excruciatingly slow. I feel anger building, for no reason. My normal default, my ability to slip into other people's head is gone. I'm a yuppie for an hour, self absorbed and annoyed... and there's a dark under current of really vicious thoughts as well.
No one knows. When I get like this I'm very careful to pay attention to the social details- I smile and make sure it shows in the eyes, my body language is elaborately relaxed... the bad side effect is that it seems to encourage strangers to strike up conversations.
The gas station attendant tells me in exquisite detail about his old car. The guard at the base reminisces about his training experiences... they were nice people. Didn't matter. I couldn't see it.
The concept of "inner child therapy" always bothered me. Children are very selfish. They need to learn about their connection with the world and the value of other people. These aren't innate. Kindness isn't innate. Compassion and empathy and sympathy are skills and they are learned.
For about an hour, for what ever reason and only at a superficial level, I lost the human connection. It wasn't a good thing.
Perfect Predator Moment 13FEB2007
One last story from the training. This is the other side of my character flaw.
My team plays the bad guys. We're in position, one changing a tire, unarmed. One hidden in the trunk of his car, ready to pop the latch. He's very much armed. One guy on long cover, watching from inside a building. His firing will be the signal (but he's a rookie and has fired prematurely in every scenario so far). I'm waiting behind a door. This time we aren't going to hit the witness on the way in, but on the way out.
I watch from the shadows through a crack in a window. They drive in, wary of the guy changing his tire. They set up a perimeter, move the witness in and fall back to a tight inner perimeter on the 'clinic'. In a few minutes they come out. Someone sees the rookie and the officers respond professionally, firing back, moving to cover, preparing to roll their vehicles out of the death zone, pulling the witness back to the hard cover of the clinic. The ambush is blown.
I step out. One officer is responsible for my sector- he's in the rear seat of the car with a rifle. He's looking right at me but I fire three shots to his face before he is consciously aware that I am there. The team leader is scrambling to get into the car, the passenger seat on my side. Three more shots ,two to the back of the head and one to the neck, then I fire two over his shoulder into his driver's head and turn towards the clinic. Someone is firing his weapon out the door at my long shooter across the street. I put two sim rounds on his hand and he falls back, cursing. I feel my slide lock back and change magazines without looking. I hear the officers inside. One takes command, "We need to get to the truck!" They file out, witness in a protective sandwich between them. Weapons at the ready, eyes darting. They walk out the door directly in front of me like I am invisible on their left flank. Three shots on each blamblamblam, blamblamblam, blamblamblam. Pastel colors explode, all shots in tight groups at the edge of the arm holes in their body armor.
I'm untouched. It was only sims, only a game, but the cold precision of it is settled in my belly. Nineteen rounds, nineteen hits. There's a round in the chamber left and an empty mag in the weapon. I can feel it. The world is huge and fills my senses and at the same time it is exactly the size of the very tip of my front sight.
Tool Boxes 15FEB2007
Giving some serious thought to Martial University 2007 in Seattle. What I have in mind will be very, very conceptual. If it hits the right students at the right stage in their development, it will be fantastic information. If I can't pry their minds open, they won't learn anything. That's the point, really. I don't want to teach anything specific, I want to teach how to think, how to organize information, how to strategically envision your training.
Here's the format for the first class. If you plan on making MU, consider it a preview. If you think that there is no chance of pulling it off, let me know that, too. This is stuff that is important to me at my stage both as a practitioner and a teacher, it may not be what other practitioners need or want.
Toolboxes. Fighting at any level can be described, trained and envisioned in many different ways. Here are three different ways to look at infighting skills.
1) Technique. There are only a few general classes of technique: strikes, locks, gouges/pressure points, takedowns, strangles, wrestling/grappling/clinch, entries ...and biting (for KJ). That's it. In training, you work them all and pay particular attention to the areas you are weak on. Especially practice 'live'- sparring or randori- so that you recognize the technique as well as opportunities to apply the techniques. In a fight, you need to recognize when and how to apply one or more of these and do so, ruthlessly. (As well as stack, be able to apply multiple types simultaneously).
The technique toolbox is a good way to train and great for concrete thinkers. It's also the slowest and least effective in a real fight. There are too many specific options to think about.
2) Effects. You can look at the same situations through this lens. With this toolbox, instead of focusing on what actions you can accomplish, you look at the effects you can produce in the threat. In any given situation you can move a threat (unbalance, takedown, throw, wrestle, misdirect, etc.); you can cause pain; you can damage; or you can shut down the system- shock. In application you do which ever one of these (or combination- remember stacking) that is either easiest or best serves your purpose.
You have to be comfortable with a range of techniques to think at this level, but once you can it is much, much faster than thinking at the technique level. It also tends to broaden awareness because it assumes that the threat is your cat toy and you are the actor in the situation, not the victim or the respondant.
3) Critical skills. In some ways, this is an intermediary step between the last two, but it includes some pretty sophisticated concepts. The critical skills for infighting are: damage, unbalance, freeze and clear. Damage is the same as in the effects toolbox and you think of it pretty much the same way- internalize targeting and power generation and move decisively on any opportunity. Unbalance and freezing are two opposite ways to control the threat's body. It introduces "core fighting", using his anatomy to affect his ability to act 'by remote' such as pressure on his shoulder to prevent his foot from lifting. The fourth critical skill, clearing, is based on using or creating negative space in combat. What this means is that instead of fighting his strength, dealing with the threat's arms and legs, you fight against and move into the spaces where he is not- the space between his arms, off his flanks or under his chin, for instance.
In many ways I think this is an attempt to back-engineer what I am doing now. The technique level is important for learning and training and it was definitely my mindset for my first several fights. Effects is a place I go when I need to get stuff done. At the critical skill mindset the threat is just a toy, an incidental.
There's so much more here. Without the Big Three (Awareness, Initiative, Permission) none of this will mean a damn thing. Without integrating environment, you aren't ready for reality. And these are still focused almost entirely on playing with the body, not the mind.
And none of these are reactive- there's no blocking. I just noticed that. No where in my mind is there any though of preventing the threat from doing something to me, that is all an assumed effect of doing something to the threat. Even thinking about reacting cedes initiative.
Still... what do you think? A good first class for this audience?
Announcement 15FEB2007
Got some traveling coming up. My agency is sending me to attend some classes- the Gracie cop grappling school in Torrance, CA March 19-23 and an AELE conference in San Francisco April 23-25. Any locals want to meet in person?
I’d expected more response from this, but I did get to meet two really cool people for ther first time, Toma Rosenzweig http://www.tomamodernarnis.com/
and Joe, a uechi-ka and federal agent who has since retired and moved back East http://karateandkobudo.com/ . Good times, good talks.