March 2008
SFC HEADQUARTERS DOCTRINE
"Read by Thousands Round' the World!"
"Dedicated to the need for soldiers, citizens and law enforcement to realistically consider
the physical, biological, physiological and psychological realities of human performance when formulating doctrine and training for combat. "
30 March 2008: Your Husband is Dead! Dead, I Tell you Damnit! DEAD: Part Two
I telephoned the police station and asked for our forensics guy, Russell Lewis to come out and take some 35mm photos of the wounds on the body. I ordered an autopsy. I called the evening shift detective sergeant Howard Kelly, as protocol, and informed him of my little mess. He too, was eating dinner at home and there was no need for him to stop. Then I girded my loins for the trip to the Shan house and the death notification.
I rehearsed the speech in my mind as I drove across the city. The lines are pretty short and unsweet. My guess is, anyone who is at home, has a loved one not-at-home, and then has the police show up with a grim, sober expression at their door, is already expecting bad news before the officer opens his mouth. I often wonder about the miserable job of doing this chore for the military. Imagine having a full time job of making death notifications? Anyhow, I kept in mind that the Shan house may contain the secret source of the wounds, so I would approach this as investigator AND as death notifier. A greasy tightrope.
The Shan house was a typical residence in a middle-class housing edition. Cars in the driveway. Grass cut. Clean. I parked, took a deep breath and approached the door. Listened first. Nothing. Then rang the doorbell.
Daughter Shan answered. She recognized me and smiled. No surprise on her face. Just a genuine half-smile.
“Is your mother home?” I asked.
“Yes,” she turned to summon her and left the door open. I stepped right in and scanned the joint. Clean, orderly, Nothing out of the usual, just a lived-in house with some lived-in clutter here and there.
Mrs. Shan walked in with a welcoming smile and a curious expression. I was glad the daughter was there because they could comfort each other when they heard the news. Always good to have support handy.
“Mrs. Shan,” I started, “I have some bad news. Your husband had a car crash. I hate to tell you this but…he is dead. He crashed into a telephone pole just two hours ago." There is was. Boom.
She stared at me with the same expression. Unchanged. The curious smile. The daughter was a little more serious.
“Oh, Hock, that is funny,” she said.
“Ahh…funny?”
“I know what you are doing,” she said.
“What am I doing?” I asked. Then I noticed a wound on her neck. That same oblong shape, cut and bruise.
“You are trying to make the peace.”
“Peace?”
“But, it is a cruel joke for you to play. I will not forgive him”
“I am not trying to make any joke, Mrs. Shan.”
“Ooooh yes you are!” she wagged her finger in my face.” The smile disappeared.
“Momma!” The daughter said and stepped back into the dining room. I remember her moving or crossing her arms in some way that she was getting nervous and believing me.
“It is very cruel for you to do this favor.”
“Favor? Mrs. Shan your husband was killed on Mingo Road in a traffic accident.”
“No, he was not.”
“Yes, he was.”
“You are here to scare me for him,” she said. She was getting angry. The lips curled.
“His body is at the hospital.”
“ No it is not. He has asked you to do this.”
“And, it is full of round bruises and cuts, just like the one on your neck,” I proclaimed.
“Momma!” The daughter declared.
“You are trying to make me feel bad about fighting with my husband. I know he has asked you to come here and tell me he is dead, to make me feel bad. This is such a rotten trick.” She said. As her words progressed the anger grew in her face. Lots of teeth. Red skin. She started moving around.
“He is dead,” I insisted.
“HE IS NOT DEAD!”
“HE IS DEAD!” I shouted back.
“Where did he get those bruises? How did YOU get those bruises?” I demanded. My eyes shifted from the mother and the daughter.”
“We had a fight! You know this! He told you this!”
“A fight with what?”
“Belts! We…we had a fight with belts.”
There was a belt on the floor and one laying over the back of a living room couch. They both had large buckles. Oblong in shape.
“Belts? You were swinging belt buckles at each other?”
“Yes, this is how we fight. It is not the first time. We have these fights. I will not forgive him with this evil lie!”
“Well, he is dead. Dead at the Westgate Hospital Emergency room.”
“YOU are lying! LYING. You are just as bad as he is!” she screamed with a banshee face. “LIAR!” She went for the belt on the couch.
“LADY! If you hit me with that belt I swear I will shoot you down!”
How did it come to this? I wouldn't shoot her of course, but DAMN! This all went to hell in less than two minutes. It is not too often you threaten to shoot the surviving spouse in a death notification.
“He is not dead!”
“Your husband is dead! Dead I tell you. Dead.”
“No! Liar! LIAR!”
“Come down to the hospital with me. Right now. And I will show you. Both of you.”
The daughter convinced the mother to go. The daughter was in a state of shock. While they grabbed their purses, I decided to grab up those two belts. I had many legal reasons to do so. I was there on an official death notice. Heard a spontaneous admission from the wife. Belts in plain view. My safety issues. I had many lots o' reasons to seize them belts, so seize em' I did.
It was now nightfall. We got into our cars, me in mine, the mother and daughter in theirs, and I lead the way to Westgate. I was a bit steaming and all pretense of me caring about her feelings was pretty much gone.
We entered the ER and I walked them straight through and into the operating room. Mr. Shan was still there. Naked. Gray. Deader than hell.
The daughter stopped at the doorway and gasped. The mother marched right up the body.
“Wake up!” she shouted, inches from his face.
“This joke is over. I will never forgive you. Stop this joke!”
She started beating the body and the face, and a nurse and myself pulled her off.
“Momma! Momma! Daddy is dead! He is dead!” the daughter shouted to her, gushing with emotion and tears. She helped us pull Mrs. Shan from the body.
The mother began emitting that shrill scream of the middle-eastern woman we hear on the news these days. She ran down the hallway, bouncing off the walls, swinging her purse wildly, and striking her back and chest in an act of self-flagellation. Some of her purse items flew through the air. She dashed outside on the parking lot. Needless to say she was indeed the main show of the emergency room. The daughter scooped of the items and chased out after her.
The nurse and I just looked at each. I could only mumble, “Iranian,” as some sort of excuse for the behavior?
About 20 minutes later I had a quiet conversation with the daughter and the ER doctor. She told us that her parents had a vicious belt buckle battle that afternoon at home. She said he left the house in a fit of anger. And then and there he crashed. I asked her if he had a heart condition. She said no. Anyone in her family have one? Her grandfather did – Shan's father. In the week of her grandfather's 54 th birthday, he dropped dead of a heart attack.
“And how old was your dad? I asked.
“He was 54. His birthday was just 4 days ago.”
Father and son! Both men died in the same week of their 54 th birthday. Sound amazing? This coincidence is not all that amazing and is not medically uncommon. I knew the syndrome existed but in my final reports I had to do a little research to support my findings. The doctor nodded. Of course, he knew right away. That's the kind of stuff docs know.
Within a week the autopsy results were in. Mr. Shan died of a sudden heart attack while driving and coasted right into a telephone pole. Did he also die from the rage of his belt buckle fight? I don't know and I couldn't prove it if I did know.
When I left the hospital that night, Mrs. Shan was in the dark, leaning against the wall outside the hospital. Exhausted. Crying. Mumbling. Her daughter was inside taking care of the paperwork. I guess I could have stopped. You know…said something. Apologized. Sympathy. Whatever. But instead I passed her right by and walked to my car, got in and left. I am not a social worker or a psychiatrist. I'm a detective. I just investigate shit.
I got home and indeed the dinner was cold. My second wife started ragging on me for some insignificant thing I did or didn't do. I poured a shot of whiskey and grabbed the cold pork chop off the plate, and stepped out into the back yard. In the pasture out back, some cattle were up and moving slowly about. I strolled up the barbwire fence and gnawed on the chop. I missed the kids going to bed. Missed this. Missed that. The complaining droned on and on behind me.
I hoped I'd get called out again.
Adios, Amigos - Hock
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27 March 2008: Your Husband is Dead! Dead, I Tell you Damnit! DEAD: Part One
It was tough being Iranian in Texas after the embassy hostage takeover in the 1970s. We had a warrant officer, Merle Culbert, who spent his workweek arresting people with active traffic warrants. After the hostage grab, Merle declared a personal war on Iranians and put any Iranians on the top of his hunting list each day. It did him great personal pleasure to shackle up an “a-rab” like this and toss him in jail while our hostages were blindfolded and held  captive. BUT, the happy Iranians in the USA were the exact opposite of those radicals in the homeland!
Iranians started calling themselves Persians, and most of us dull-headed Americans - who could barely learn to drive to the big city, shopping mall - were not historically and geographically hip enough to make this Iran/Persia connection.
“What? Persia? Ya' mean that place where they make them pointy slippers?”
As a young cop while off-duty, I frequently hung out in a nightclub called the Esalom. The slightly upscale bar and restaurant with sort of a Casablanca look, owned by a “Persian” named “Matt.” American nicknames like “Matt,” were common. Inside each night, a clutch of interesting characters like an airline pilot, a biker, a few cops, and a few others whom I can't recall from alcohol, brain damage, drank and caroused as “the regulars.” Later in the evenings I might troll some of the country western bars in the city if I was feeling horsy. Well, that about wraps up about eight years of my elite, social life! But Matt would often run the bar on some weeknights and on quiet ones he would tell me stories about his Persia – Iran. Crazy place. Very Americanized and modern, except for, as he would put it, “very crazy, religious people.” I had no idea how crazy. Matt did. That is why he left his homeland. I began to discover that Matt was highly educated from several American colleges. In fact, most "Persians" were here for college, and tried to stay.
During and then well after the Hostage Crisis, there were many educated and successful “Persians”…living and working amongst us (as McCarthy would say)! Americanized or not, there were still unshakeable, cultural differences. One such Persian family ran a hair salon and nail shop in main shopping center and through the years, and cops and detectives generally get to know many business people in their areas and cities. I got to meet the Shans. Momma Shan, Daddy Shan and 18 year-old daughter Shan. And it is here, in the 1980s, in the political, multi-cultural maelstrom that my tale begins one Spring evening...
“Hock, there is a dead guy at the hospital from a traffic accident,” Patrol Lieutenant Walter Keene told me on the phone. It was about 6 pm and I was eating dinner at my house, with second wife and first and second kids. The evening shift detectives left town on a case and I was on call for the week, so call started at 5pm, not 11 pm as usual. “Traffic?” I mumbled with a mouthful. I don't do traffic.
“Well, the doctor at hospital said when they looked over his body, his body has about 20 large, fresh circular…wounds all over. He says something' ain't right about it.”
“Fresh, circular wounds?”
“Enjoying that dinner are ya'?” Keene chided, hearing me chew. He loved interrupting my life for call-outs.
“Was.”
“Well set it aside and you can eat it nice and cold later,” he laughed out loud. It was just a routine he and I had. When he woke me at night, I'd answer the phone and would hear his gravely voice ask, “sleepen' good are ya'? Haven ya' a real, nice, sleepy time, dream, are ya? HAHAHA-haha”
Within about 20 minutes I was at the hospital, emergency room. A patrolwoman was finishing a fatality accident report.
“This is a mystery crash, Hock, “ she said, showing me her diagram on clipboard. “He was driving south on Mingo Road, and veered off, smack into a telephone pole at a high speed. When we got there, he was dead.”
She handed me a poloroid of the car. It was totaled. A giant, v-shaped crash wrapped around a telephone pole. “No skids. Just straight into the pole."
“Who is he?” I asked.
“Ahram Shan. The guy who owns the hair salon on University Drive in the Johnson Center.”
I nodded, and we walked to one of the ER surgery rooms. I was no traffic investigator and frankly I deeply despised all aspects of traffic work – the tickets, the endless accident reports, all that. My version of hell would be an assignment in a traffic division. Well, at least one layer of hell. Another layer would involve my second wife. But, I knew that often these kinds of crashes involve sudden heart attacks, passing out, sleep deprivation, whatever glitch that causes a feller to black out and drive high speed and straight into their smashing death.
Shan was naked on a metal gurney. The doctor followed us in.
“Look at these,” the doc pointed out to me. Sure enough there were tens of fresh, circular cuts and bruises all over his body. On his face, arms, chest legs and we turned him over, on his back. All about the size of small jar lid. One side worse and deeper than the other. I took a real close look. They were not complete, perfect circles. They were somewhat oblong. What the hell? This was before Scully, Mulder and the X-Files otherwise I'd called them for help.
“Did…something blow up in the car that…”
“Nope,” the officer said.
Did a really odd beating happen just before the car drive that caused this pass-out? What would cause these oddball wounds? Some kind of sex, fetish deal? What?
“Well, I guess I need to find out from whence he was a coming. And I have to start at his house. Where does he live?”
She handed me his drivers license AND with it, handed off another major, nasty responsibility - the dreaded death notification. Before our county organized a medical examiner's office in the 1990s, we used our nearby Dallas and Ft Worth offices for autopsies and major forensics, and these modern offices now have investigators who come to the scenes and make the death notification. But back then, death notices were performed by patrolman and detectives. Detectives did it when it might matter in their investigation. Such as now.
There is an art to death notifications. There are police schools for death notifications. I have been to them, and it is touchy, touchy business, I am not "Mister Warmth," but am not cold-hearted enough not to try to do a good job with it. Good God what a terrible thing to have to tell people. I have delivered many and this unique, American/Persian one here I am telling you about was the worst I have ever had to do, and the worst I have ever heard of anywhere else! So, get yourself ready for this ugly ride.
Part two coming soon…
Adios, Amigos - Hock
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22 March 2008: Newton's Laws Moves Me Gunfighter Gene Hackman is shot. Right in the head. The beautiful Sharon Stone beat him to the draw in the grand finale scene of the Quick and the Dead western. To accentuate the drama, Hackman flips completely over in the slow motion macabre of a spaghetti western. How many viewers thought that such a flip could actually happen? Or just think bullets can move people around? Do bullets move people? If so, how much? What do we tell our officers, our practitioners and students about this in training?
In 2007, a police officer published a disgusted tirade in police journals trashing Hollywood and these acrobatic misrepresentations of gunfire. He stated that cinema action misrepresents the truth, confuses the public, the media, lawyers, juries and well…even some police administrators about shootings and what does and doesn't happen in a gunfight.
But this irate officer is not alone in voicing his opinion on the subject. There is always a healthy argument running somewhere about it. On one extreme, experts say that bullets hit and move people. On the other end, some argue that bullets do not and cannot move people. Semantics and science are involved here, as well as – some people just like to argue. So we have two groups, the Movers and Non-Movers.
Many of my complainants and my friends who have been shot, and research I have looked up, have repeatedly used interesting phrases and symbols to describe their wounding. Baseball came up a lot.
“It was like getting hit by a baseball.”
Or your hear, “…like getting hit with a baseball bat.”
Two SAS officers on a CNN special described being shot as “being hit with a sledge hammer.”
And the responses do run the whole gamut from being “knocked back, knocked down” to “a slapping feeling.” Knocked back or down? What say the Non-Movers about all this?
The Non-Movers quote Newton's Laws of Motions and what I nickname the Newton Impact, on this. Ol' Sir Isaac Newton has some lasting impact on the world with his three laws. His second law states in summary, that for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction. In other words, if object A exerts a force on object B, then object B also exerts an equal and opposite force on object A. When this comes to shooting people, many will tell you that the force – the recoil of a weapon in your hand, or on your shoulder is equal to the force striking your target. In short, if you don't flip over when you shoot the bad guy? The bad guy will not flip over when he is hit. This would mean that if you fired a perfect kill shot, such as one by a successful sniper, 100 times, 100 bodies would drop straight down dead. They would not be the slightest tumble or turn to one side from the impact. President kennedy's head did not move when shot. Nothing. Cold. Ballistic block science. Algebra. The Newton Impact: Equal in the hand/equal on the body.
The Movers: Conversely, the Movers cite other variables than cold science, like the situation, flesh, blood, and psychology – that cause people to move in the split seconds before, during and after actually being shot.
Before: People may well be already moving in a gunfight. Also, people about to be shot at often see the gun up and aiming at them. They physically react to this presented gun by ducking, dodging, diving, spinning to run, etc.
During: The human body contains bone mass, mobile joints and a central nervous system. We yank our hand back from the hot stove. We move our arm from a bee sting. We flinch from an insect on or near our eye. Our nervous system reacts from simple touches, to bug stings or higher levels of pain and impact. When bullets strike this anatomy, live body parts react differently than ballistic clay. Explosive sound alone may make the body move. Since the 1930s there are piles of research on the startle reflex and audible responses from shocking explosions. Dr. Robert Simmons has documented as many as 25 different body responses from audible shock in what he calls his Startle Museum (24 of them are not fighting stances by the way). In these cases the bullet's sound at least, may cause movement.
After: After being hit one or more times, shooting victims often do not die right away and therefore act like wounded humans, continuing to move. Once downed, there may be "after-death" throes.
There is quite a bit of motion involved with the before, during and after of being shot. The threat of the bullet, the impact from the bullet, even the sound of the bullet causes it.
The Hackman Flip -But, since we started out with the Gene Hackman western movie sample, has anyone ever really done a “Hackman flip?” In the 1990s I discovered another Hackman-style Flip. I did a considerable amount of research for my book called, Military Knife Combatives and hunted through recent history and biography books for actual knife fights in this modern age of repeating firearms. While doing so, I incidentally came upon hundreds of personal recollections of people being shot.
I was reading a Vietnam War memoir and a soldier talked about a fellow troop of his being shot in the helmet. The troop told him "it knocked the life out of me," and that he "saw his toes flip up in front of his face" then he blacked out. The author saw his friend flip almost upside down and the helmet was destroyed, virtually split in half. The guy immediately recovered and appeared unhurt. (but, the writer mentions the man died back in the states years later from a brain aneurysm?)
I Read this from the non-fiction book. Code Name: Copperhead. My True-Life Exploits As a Special Forces Soldier, by Sergeant Major Joe R. Garner, U.S. Army (RET.) "In Ban Me Thuot, a friend who had been wounded told me, 'Joe, you just cannot believe the impact that the AK-47 has. I got shot in the leg and it knocked me head over heels. My rifle went ten feet from me. The NVA came up, and if it hadn't been for one of the other men killing him, I was unarmed and the NVA would have killed me.'”
These are two Newtonian, equal-force, flipping, head-scratchers! Did both these shooters flip too when they shot these flippers? What say ye, Mr Newton? More interesting is that these two shots are complete surprise shots without warning. So the bodies were not id dodge or dive mode.
But, aside from the dramatic and unusual Hackman flips, is there more science and math than this the simplistic equal-equal force, Newton Impact equation that explains these bodily reactions to bullets? Dr. Sean Ross of New Mexico is a government scientist who works on various weapons projects for the U.S. Military. He reports: “Newton's laws of motion do apply here, but Newton's 2nd law applies to forces - force isn't what knocks a person down unless the force is crushing. Momentum transfer is what knocks something down. The correct way to analyze this is using the time integral of Newton's 3rd law F=mA, namely I=delta P, the "impulse momentum" theorem. The Impulse is the integral of the force over time, F=-delta T. That impulse is equal to the change in momentum imparted to the body.”
Okay! Got that? The 3rd law explains and allows more than the 2nd law. Even if you don't get this now, before you use “Newton Impact” line again to defend your non-moving, equal/equal argument, you should school yourself on the 3rd law, else the experts will cluck-cluck and chastise you as uneducated and ill-informed. Don't just regurgitate what some old gun magazine article or some range instructor...had regurgitated to him...and so on.
There is no questions for me. As an investigator in the US Army and a detective and patrolman in Texas stomping through hundreds of shooting crime scenes and investigations for three decades, I have been in some and around a lot of shootings. I have seen a few people actually get shot. For me it is painfully simple, a no-brainer. Bullets can move people. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they do.
Which leads me to Sir Hochheim's Law of Violent Impact, the 7th Rule: “No one can guarantee what a punch, a kick, a stab or a gunshot will do to you.”
And another truth I hold to be self-evident? The 1st Rule!
"Who wouldn't flip over Sharon Stone in leather chaps?"
Adios, Amigos - Hock
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21 March 2008: Hockio, Hockio, Where for Art Thou Hockio? I am still in Germany, here from a stretch of seminars in Finland and I am working or traveling in "trains, planes and automobiles" every day to get to them. The load has caused me to be absent from these blog digs and even absent-minded for while, and distracted me from writing. I shall return.
Adios, Amigos - Hock
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13 March 2008: Wrestling with Lightning
You might find Hunter S. Thompson and William F. Buckley an odd pair to be to be mentioned in the same breath, least of all, the same paragraph or blog. But they both have been together in spirit my life. You see, they are both idols or icons of mine since the 1970s.
William F. Buckley is called the father of modern conservatism and succinct, political thought. He is the granddaddy of the political TV talk show with his PBS Firing Line program - a show I absorbed avidly whenever I could. Brilliant, amusing, satirical, prolific with a touch of bizarre. He set a standard of conservatism ideology that has not been properly followed. But Buckley was no mere political mortal. He could and often did wrote about anything. At the end of one of his anthologies, Buckley wrote an essay about the death of his mother. In a perfect piece of writing, musical, deep and cleaved into precision, it touched upon that elusive element of great work that resembles all great works of art. (I have read a Kinky Friedman essay on near the same subject and he caught this lightning in a jar also. You know it when you see and read it.) When you saw him? Grab a pen and paper. Line for line, moment-to-moment his every word had the potential of a worthy quote. You'll want to note how he asked for a cup of coffee.
“It had all the earmarks of a CIA operation; the bomb
killed everybody in the room except the intended target!” -Buckley
Hunter S. Thompson was the chief sperm donor of "Gonzo Journalism," a subjective, first person narrative that involved the reporter's actions and thoughts interwoven with the subject of the article or book. He was whacked out. Whacked out! NOTHING was taboo to him as he spoke, burped-up or vomited observations and tirades about sports, politics, sex and...well...what else is there? Hunter was a very dangerous man. He spoke, lived and wrote with danger. In my mind I found a poetic genius lurking in there, and not too deep below the surface. He was world famous for a reason. My favorite times were when tv host Charlie Rose would spend an hour with him on the Rose show every year or so. Many people will remember Thompson from the Johnny Depp portrayal in the movie, from the book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Whacked out trip! But there was much more to this typewriting Hemingway on acid. He too, often produced perfect, cleaved pieces of artistry.
"When things turn weird, the weird turn pro." - Hunter S.
Literary magic - this kind of lightning in a jar is an art as diverse as the Sistine Chapel in Italy or graffiti in Philadelphia. Good is good. Great is great. Lightning. How can Buckley and Thompson be in the same breath? Admired by me? Two of a kind? They both wrangled and wrestling with the lightning. They often won.
Thompson died a few years back. His ashes were blasted over Colorado from a freaken' cannon. Last month, Buckley died. His body will be ensconced in a traditional family grave surrounded by good Catholics. Perhaps they represent two extreme ends of a continuum to me? I don't know, but Lord, I miss them so. I really mourn their passing. I miss those electric jars.
Adios, Amigos - Hock
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9 March 2008: Strike While Holding
Did you know that there are studies that prove a tennis player shows greater agility when he has a tennis racquet in his hand than when he does not? How then might this observation translate over to combatives? How well will a person perform physical acts while holding a handgun? Or a baton/stick? A knife? In reverse, how well will these weapons-dedicated experts perform WITHOUT holding these tools, as the aforementioned athletic performance tests show?
This even translates from sport to sport. One morning at Camp Pendleton, CA. I was teaching a large contingent of US Marines and after watching many of them play basketball for a morning PT session, I got them all at 8am sharp for knife training. Their overall physical moves were not sharp and athletic. I stopped the class and reminded them to knife fight with the same athleticism as they did an hour earlier while playing basketball. With this verbal tip, I noted an immediate improvement in their actions. Their knees were now bent, they became fleet of foot. They connected.
Tool-to-tool adaptation. Sport-to-sport adaptation. Abstract for sure, but it is a building block. The hand/tool shift also includes the empty hand mind set. This is why "God made smart coaches." When I organized my "essence of combat," hand, stick, knife and gun training programs in the 1990s I instituted mandatory drills and practice sessions that forced practitioners to kick and strike WHILE holding weapons, all as part of their basic training. I call them "Strike While Holding" drills. Strike while holding...what? That's just it. Anything! In the knife course, it means a knife. In the stick course, a stick, and in the gun course, a gun.
I noted that an empty hand fighter could jab and cross punch with power, but when holding a pistol in their one hand? There was a distinct loss of power in the empty hand punch. The weapon may be a distraction, or ergonomic experts might say that the specific grip used in holding the weapon is different than an empty hand position and therefore has a negative, holistic effect on the performance. This must be overcome with practice. Another set I do inside the Strike While Holding drill is a pulling test. I tie a string to the weapon the student is holding. Then I flash the focus mitt and the student strikes the mitt with their empty hand. Usually around the 6th strike, kick or so, I yank hard on the string and can often pull the pistol, knife or stick right out of the student's hand. Not good. Not only must the student hit hard, but he or she must also maintain a proper retention of the weapon. Different skill sets during striking or kicking. This is especially important practice for pistol retention, but an inadequate grip on a knife or baton may allow for an impact disarm inside any struggle. The impact on the weapon-bearing limb may be accidental or on purpose.
Breaking news in science, psychology and medicine? Often ignored? I have found that many superior martial artists of yesteryear and some still today, got that way for two main reasons. Superior genetics and/or accidental, high-quality training programs. Accidental? Oh yes, there are a number of programs that have cobbled together intuitive and abstract doctrines that surprisingly cover many of the bases.
What do I mean by intuitive or abstract? For example - all agree that endurance is a key element in a fighter. Some fighting systems have their people run barefoot in the cold ocean water off the coast of Japan. They confuse this Japanese ocean run as an important mandate for fighting, while the real point is just running under duress. You could run with duress in the Mojave Desert. This is a obvious, blatant example, but fighting systems are cluttered with these abstract ideas, founded on solid principle, yet confused by practice. Everyone of these intuitive and abstract programs would benefit by understanding the big, real, root science of the basics.
When we see the genetic wonders of these cobbled programs perform, it can confuse us. This harkens back to my old saying: "Never evaluate a fighting system on the performance of its best athlete.
He will make everything look good."
Instead, it is really about doctrine. Doctrine, doctrine, system doctrine. The superior system is about excellence in doctrine. People come and go. Accidental, random, abstract cobbling will never build the thorough structure and doctrine that breaking science and medicine will construct. That is why studies like the "tennis racket and agility" ones are important for us to examine.
"Okay, okay, don't get me too wrong here.
It can still be a lot of fun to play tennis!"
Hey! Concentrate on the message here! Concentrate! This is a test!
Adios, Amigos - Hock
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6 March, 2008: "There Must be 50 Ways to Leave Your Fighter" (with apologies to Paul Simon)
There are actually not that many in terms of concept. There must be 5 ways to "win," or to "finish" a fight, whether soldier, citizen, security or cop.
1) You leave. You escape from the opponent (hopefully using the "Orderly Retreat" concept)
2) He leaves. You use threats, demands and actions to make the opponent surrender and/or desists and leaves.
3) He stays. You inflect less-than-lethal injury upon the opponent. Injure and/or diminish to a degree that
the opponent stops fighting and chasing you.
4) You and he both stay. You control arrest, contain and restrain. You capture and escort the opponent. Or, you detain/capture the opponent and await the proper authorities.
5) He dies. Lethal methods. We fight criminals and enemy soldiers. Sometimes we kill them.
Adios, Amigos - Hock
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 3 March, 2008: The Face Mask Murders Part 10: Irony - The Harsh Mistress
“The moment you need me I will be on a plane,” I told Borlan, gripping the phone with not-able-to-be-right-there anxiety.
“We will go back and stake out his house and arrest him there. See what's inside. We will use your Texas arrest warrant and all your PC (probable cause) for a search warrant. The D.A.'s office may need to interview you. Give me all your phone numbers.”
I gave him the office phones, the dispatcher's non-emergency number so they could call me over the radio if I was out, and my home phone. He needed them all. The dispatcher radioed me later that afternoon. She told me to call a prosecutor in the San Diego county District attorney's office ASAP. I did. I spent about an hour on the phone answering questions, with Borland on another phone extension. This way he could testify and sign a search warrant right there based upon what I, ol' reliable and solid me, told him.
Later that night, hanging out with my kids at my house, the phone rang. It was Borlan.
“Hey Hock!” he said. I could tell he was excited beyond a simple arrest. “ We caught Crane at his rent house. Searched the place. Guess what we found in his refrigerator?”
“What?”
“Faces. Three faces in formaldehyde jars.”
“Faces. Faces like….”
“Faces like people's faces. Their faces. He's killed some people out here and skinned their faces off. Did a nice job. We assume our bartender's face was looking right at us from one of the jars when we opened the refrigerator.”
“Wow!” I said. I listened intently about every aspect of the arrest, search and weird seizure. “The arrest was pretty routine. Crane just threw his hands up and surrendered. We are going to sit him down and talk to next. He is acting very calm. I think he may confess to all of faces.”
“Keep me posted!” was all I could do or say. I knew I would hear something new until the morning. I took a deep breath and returned to playing with my kids.
The next day I learned that Crane confessed to all the faces in his fridge. Borlan felt like there were more killings, but Crane, like so many criminals, would only confess to the ones we could prove up. Borlan mailed me an envelope of crime scene photos. Inside the collection was a photo of the open refrigerator and the giant glass jars of faces. I hadn't seen that before!
Fast forward about one year. After a postponement, Mr. Ichabod Crane was due in court for the first murder. The DAs office decided that they might need me to testify to the probable cause that cracked the case and arranged my appearance. I flew out on a Sunday night, was at the courthouse in San Diego, Monday morning at 9am. As we congregated in the halls of California justice, the courtroom itself was empty and silent. Then, the judge stepped in and out handled some other quick matters for other cases, shuttling attorneys in and out. Something about the Crane case was indeed afoot.
Lunch.
At 1:30 we returned and we were all quickly ushered into the courtroom. Two bailiffs escorted Mr. Freak to the defense table. This was the first time in years I laid eyes on him, since that brief moment in the hallway of my police station. His eyes glanced over all of us, over me. They lingered on me. He knew well by now that my groundwork laid the foundation for his demise. I think he just wanted a better look at me, to put a face with his demise. It was a cold look. No doubt he would like to carve my face off with his favorite knife. Oh well. I in turn, would sure like to shoot him dead with my .45.
The morning delay was over a back office, plea bargain agreement. Crane took 3 life sentences to run in succession, not concurrent. The proceedings were over in 25 minutes. Dallas to San Diego, a long way to go for 25 minutes, but I wouldn't have missed it for the world. With these findings, my county would close the Texas Mars aggravated assult case and I would clear my file "by arrest."
The next morning, on the plane flying back to Dallas, I stared out the window at the great southwest canyons below and experienced my usual, post-case depression. My daily life was mired with the muck of common crime, punks and thugs, and a good, challenging case come only so often. I miss them so. I hashed over the more ironic moments of this whole nightmare.
Irony can be such a harsh mistress. I'd lie if I said I still wasn't disappointed at myself for not immediately identifying Crane in that one, hurried moment at the police station. But I got off my own back, when I recalled that no other officer or investigator recognized him either. I just have to let that go. Then I thought about that dark night, a wounded William Mars hunched over in Crane's Cougar, another perfect victim for him. Why didn't he turn down a dark country road and make Mars…disappear into small parts? Why instead did he turn west and take his victim to the Westgate Hospital?
I could only guess that when Crane got back to the factory, he began to doubt Mars and his word to their little pact, and Crane decided to call the police and spin his burglar story. Mars was damn lucky to be alive. The grand canyons below me dissolved into my deep, hypnotic thoughts. Day became night with a picture of a bleeding Mars in the back seat of a black car and the gray face of Ichabad Crane behind the wheel. HIS thoughts. His options. His inhuman cravings. His eyes. MAN! I shook that freak scene loose from my brain.
Many a murder has a moment just like that. An animal moment. Critcal seconds. The victim. The killer. The choice. The Irony. Damn, she's a harsh mistress.
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