August, 2007
SFC HEADQUARTERS DOCTRINE
HOCK'S Web Log
"Read by Thousands Round' the World!"
30 August 2007: Where have All the AMERICAN Cowboys Gone?
I see that within weeks a new western movie will be gracing the international theater screens - The 3:10 from Yuma. I remember the original movie and it was a pretty good film, but from the looks of the previews, 
there will be a much broader plot with this new version than in the old Van Heflin film. This one stars Christian Bale and Russell Crowe. Top notch folks.
Now, if you know me, you know I like westerns, well certain, good westerns. Special, unique ones. They are scarce these days and have been for many a year. I think the financial killer for them is they are not big, “date night movies,” at the megaplexes. When finding financing to make these pictures, the money people want to finance the next Bourne or cartoon flick.
I know many rant and rave about the 1990s movie Tombstone. Fans even get religious about it! And, while I thought it was entertaining and watch-able, as far as westerns go, I preferred Wyatt Earp with Kevin Costner as a more realistic epic. All this leads me to the real subject here. Who do we have to star in westerns anymore. Kurt Russell (all 4’ 2” of him) played a decent Earp in Tombstone, sure, but what other leading man action roles has he done lately? Kevin Costner’s flame has flicked out too. But come on...was he ever a John Wayne? A Clint or a Randolph Scott? Who is left? Sam Elliot is too old. His buddy, Tom Selleck is a great cowboy, but he dodges the parts.
Instead, American has produced a bunch of uninspiring, skinny, half-hippy, pantywaists for its half-heros. Clooney? Naaah. Brad Pitt? Not really. (soon to in a Jessie James movie. He fits the part well). Keanu Reeves? Matt Damon? Good Bourne, bad anything else. Chuck Norris would actually kick all their asses at once, then feel bad and buy them ice creams. Chuck Heston would say a prayer for them. Charles Bronson would just take a piss on their legs.
Actually, Bruce Willis does do a good job in action movies and would make a decent “cowboy.” Has anyone seen Last Man Standing? A remake. From Samurai flick to Eastwood-Spagetti to his blazing .45 semi-autos version. This plot was a remake of a remake that was not more than a plot- less, shoot’ em-up of a late western/early gangster film set in the southwest. But Willis was good. Willis is pretty much, always good, isn't he? Tears of the Sun. Die Hard this or that edition.
But where are the WESTERN stars?
The last western, a darn good one was Seraphen Falls with Pierce Brosnon and Liam Neilson. Interesting, classic plot with odd moments and events that were different. Now, the next big western, this The 3:10 from Yuma comes along with Christian Bale and Russell Crowe. Notice anything? A trend? Brosnon a Brit...Neilson a Brit...Bales a Brit (Hell, he was even Batman and many other movie heroes. We couldn't find a freaken American to play Batman?)...Crow an Aussie. These guys are great actors. Cultavated heros for sure. But, ever wonder what in tarnation happened to leading American men? No wonder no one wants to make or see regular westerns.
The Picante sauce always seems to come from New York City.
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27 August 2007: Training Mission Nine is Ready
TM 9 is ready.
4 discs.
3 hours and 40 minutes.
It has Unarmed versus the Knife, Unarmed versus the Stick and the Gun Ground Fight Module.
For more, click on: http://www.hockscqc.com/shop/product281.html
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26 August 2007: The Zone, the Formula - Call it What You Will
It is hard to find the proper term today, in amongst the catch phrases used in the martial world, to capture a training intensity method I would like to canonize. In the health and fitness world, they call it a “target heart rate.” You work out until your heart rate hits a certain numerical zone that the experts have deemed, for your age, is achieving progress.
Whatever shall we call it for reality fighting training? We know that the best training is force on force training. This is often mistaken for full-bore fighting/full-out fighting sessions. These types of methodologies create two kinds of fighters:
- always injured ones
- unskilled ones.
If you always fight full bore, you will always have injuries. If you always fight full bore you will never be able to take the time to develop skill yourself through a continuum of increasing force. Many, if not most of the so-called full, force-on-force fighters are really just wild, “asses and elbows” young people who know they cannot really bash their friends in the optic cavity so they have to…wrestle. If they do bash their friends? Then they fall into the perennial injured category.
I know of a ground fighter in Chicago that is sort of famous in a low scale kind of way. Infamous I guess. On average, he only has about three regular students - two on the mat with him, one with a cast somewhere on his body, on a bench watching, wounded from an injury in this brutal class. Then they seem to rotate the cast through the three regulars. His legacy will be a small-student base of injured people in rotation, who also do phase away from the class. Some might say, “he is real hard core! He is the real deal. He does it like it should be.” Me? I think he is stupid. A wasted, small, stubborn legacy. Normal people, who are interested in this training, shun this guy and guy's like him.
Like we reach a “target heart zone” in fitness workouts, we should work out and get into a “target reality training zone” where get the benefit of steady improvement, without long-term damage. In our business, the word “target” is used in striking and shooting. It is confusing and unclear for us to call it a target “reality training” zone. Call it a training formula, but call it what you will, touching into it AND NOT STAYING TOO LONG” in this zone regularly will help you still advance and at the same time not get you on the monthly, injured list; or mold you into a wild-assed, semi-skilled wrestler.
The coach, the instructor is the coordinator of all this. He or she is in charge of each person's growth. Look how the best boxers are cultivated, how the pre-season players are handled in pro-football. How great athletes “maintain.” They do not kill themselves in every workout, every time, for the full exercise session. They do not wear out or wear down.
Who survives the longest in combat? The one whose mind and body survives the longest. I am tired of seeing our talented in casts, or with canes and even in wheelchairs, or becoming punch-dunk, babbling idiots. Tired of hip and knee replacements. Accidents in training are one thing. Balls-to-the-wall full contact all the time is what I am talking about.
I am a proponent of pushing the envelope just a bit. Your fighting system must allow for individual growth, as each student's potential is different. Get into and out of this target zone in every work out. Pace yourself properly. You will accomplish goals, have a decent student base, and have a long-term, positive effect on the people of your community, not just the emergency room budget of your local hospital.
Any comments? Continue the thread on the talk forum! http://www.hockscombatforum.com
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23 August 2007: David Hackworth Fun in the Late Afternoon in Indian Country
For our guest author this month, here is an interesting clip from Hack's non-fiction, memiors Steel My Soldier's Hearts -
"At the end of each day, (as company commander of a Firebase in the Mekong Delta) I'd try to snare a LOH (a "Loach" or light observation helicopter) and fly from the outer ring of barbed wire in ever-increasing circles looking for signs of the enemy. Then, pilot willing, I'd go hunting. One day, flying around the wire, I looked down and saw a guy with green shorts and green shirt in the prone position right at the last strand of our outer wire. Probably a scout, I thought.
We circled around him to see if he had any buddies with him, and went down to a few feet off the ground as soon as I was sure we could scoop him up without getting our butts shot up. I jumped from the chopper, pointed my pistol, picked the guy up and threw him in the backseat of the LOH.
I can't imagine what he was thinking - one minute he was trying to crawl into an anthole, the next he was in some kind of flying machine with this wild-eyed American pointing a .38 pistol at him and telling him in English to sit quietly or he was dead. He must have been scared shitless because even with my pistol pointed at his head, he leapt from the backseat of the bird.
"Geronimo" - a twenty-foot drop, and he took off.
I didn't shoot him as he was unassing the LOH: I worried that my slug would go through him and smack right into the engine. We flared down on him again, and he grabbed the skids and started swinging back and forth like a trapeze artist. The brave fucker must have thought he could pull us from the sky? Then he dropped off and started running. It was getting dark and I realized we were going to lose him, so when Ken Carroll swung the bird around, I hit the VC square in the head. A 40-millimeter shotgun shell from my trusty M-79 grenade launcher peeled his face to the bone, leaving only a twitching skull.
One more for the body count, but I'd lost a POW because I hadn't buckled him in the bird. I was pissed at myself. A POW was far more important than a faceless stiff, especially a scout who was probably from a recon outfit."
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22 August 2007: Startled - Compiled and in Order
After a few emails on this subject, I have decided to organize the sections into one chronological piece...and erase the spaced-out, individual entries. Here she is....
Imagine if you will, lounging out in your living room watching your favorite comedy on television, and then suddenly in two seconds being thrust into playing a professional basketball game, or more to the point, a UFC match. Your entire metabolism must race from zero to 100 miles an hour and perform or be crushed and die. The utter shock of such a transportation is not unlike...the dreaded ambush.
A Startling Study in the Startle Reflex
By W. Hock Hochheim
The late author Kurt Vonnegut called the surprise of “Boo!” as, "the ancient game," one we played on each other since antiquity. How we react to this sudden “Boo,” has been called by experts, startling. If truly startled, the body will thoughtlessly react in some manner. The Britannica defines the startle pattern as:
"...an extremely rapid psycho-physiological response of an organism to a sudden and unexpected stimulus such as a loud sound or a blinding flash of light. In human beings it is characterized by involuntary bending of the limbs and a spasmodic avoidance movement of the head. Musculature returns to normal in less than one second, although elevations in heart rate, breathing and skin conductance persist slightly longer."
Everyone startles, unless they have maladies in their nervous system or are under the influence of fatigue, drugs or alcohol. In the last 20 years, military, police and citizen self defense trainers have tried to calculate just how this startle concept should fit into combative training programs. I, and others think they have confused and overdone their expectations. With this essay I hope to explain how these instructors have misunderstood and used misguided information to form doctrine and policy. This misinformation affects all aspects of combatives training, hand, stick, knife and gun.
Much has been written and preached about the startle reflex. Laboratory studies have been interwoven with drug testing, disease effects, hearing loss, post traumatic stress and a host of topics as their goal, not directly related to combatives. Still, modern combatives trainers have absorbed these findings and concluded that the well-known responses, typically listed as:
• arms raised in the shape of a triangle - or at the very least, lifted upward,
• clenched hands,
• bent arms, bent knees,
• ducked head,
• squinted eyes
are the central, gross, motor movement, core of self-defense training versus an attacker. They believe that your body will naturally assume this position when assaulted and therefore self-defense fighting systems must be largely based on the startle reflex.
As a result of this dogged preaching, and enhanced by some apparent sense it seems to make on first blush examination, the term “startle reflex” has filtered into the minds, dogma and doctrine of most martial, police and military fighting systems. Some fighting programs have been completely constructed around this “startle reflex” concept.
Unfortunately, most of this comes from regurgitated, streamlined versions of an outdated and stale study by C. Landis and W.A. Hunt's concluded in 1939, The Startle Pattern . Landis and Hunt used very primitive lab equipment, cameras and only sound , not physical stimuli. They first reported the very typical, body motions previously listed. The difference between sound stimuli and visual and physical stimuli is critical and plays a major part is the confusion, misinterpretation and practical application of the startle work.
In the subsequent decades, much research, study and advanced lab gear have dissected the startle into a full roll call of responses, which I would like to share here. The research I quote and capsulate is from two renown and respected sources from the 1990s, the 10-year work of Dr. Robert C. Simmons and several decades of what experts call the splendid work of Dr. Michael Davis for his book Neural Mechanisms of Startle Behavior. Keep in mind that these two sources also include all the prior results of all other decades of work.
The following will include Dr. Michael Davis, of the Emory University School of Medicine, was the first to identify the entire brain circuitry for the startle response and its habituation as recent as March, 2006. My goal here with this essay is to better prepare the individual for what has bio-mechanically happened to startled people in the past and what might happen to you if suddenly ambushed and startled.
Situational and Positional Combatives and the Startle Reflex
Technically, a startle usually involves an ambush of sorts. A surprise. Some of the greatest militaries of the world have been defeated by ambush. All fighting is situational and positional, and in answering the universal who, what, when, where, how and whys of a fight, we must ask, do all fights always involve being startled? The simple answer is no. Crimes, mutual-participant fights and assaults often unfold in such a manner that no party involved is actually ever startled. No "Boo!" And then one must remember, if once startled? That startle only lasts so long.
Experience tells us that a startle does not have to originate from a blind corner in a dark alley. We might be startled by a person standing calmly before us. We can be sucker-punched. We can suddenly be pinched into Wolf Pack Attack positions by a clever group of multiple opponents. A good surprise attack will startle you, but, how will you then react? In the 60-plus years since the Landis and Hunt study, clinical experts have collected soem 30 or more common, startle responses and categories - some with sub-categories. What does the actual research show? It is hardly what modern, reality-based instructors pontificate!
Dr. Simmons nicknamed such a list of startle responses as “The Startle Museum” and the following are a collection of observed reactions from all prior research. Since the 1930s the stimuli for research has almost exclusively been sudden, audible bursts and some lesser experiments with blinding flashes, often called "acoustic startle-inducing stimulus" or " acoustic 'go' stimulus."
We would be safe to say that some of these in-the-field, "Boo experiments" did accompany various aspects of physical motion stimuli, such as sudden hand waves, surprise touches or pinches from the sides or rear (based on photographs in these research books). There is some visual stimulus used in the "Boo experiments," along with the sound. The below museum list also includes the obvious, incoming physical stimuli such as objects being thrown at the subjects and hand, arm strikes and lunges (probably no kicks) at the subject. I have tried to note where possible the audible, visual and physical stimuli used when I could find it in these studies.
The Startle Museum
The “museum” includes: (and in no specific order)
1) Two arms up in some manner (possible from audible and/or physical stimuli. Blocks versus incoming physical stimuli will be directional-specific to counter the perceived attack - such as in the following versions).
2) One arm up and one arm down (if the subject detects even the quick and remote possibility of a physical attack coming in high and/or medium-height. This reaction is decided in milliseconds.
3) One arm up and one arm down with a knee raise (if the subject detects even the quick and remote possibility of a physical attack incoming in high, medium and low. Decided in milliseconds). Body will support movement.
4) Knee raise (if the subject detects the possibility of a physical attack incoming very low, such as snakes, animals, insects - often the prized test tools and subject matter of the clinical psychologist. The arms may hardly move ).
5) Arm or arms may bend. They may not bend (from sound stimuli. Incoming physical objects will usually be quickly blocked by arms instinctively. This may cause the arm to bend or not bend).
6) Dropping items (from both physical and sound shock. The hands are just as likely to open as they are to clinch when the body is shocked).
7) Untargeted throwing as hand-held objects randomly leave the opening hand (from both physical and sound stimuli. The hands are just as likely to open as they are to clinch when the body is shocked). .
8) Targeted throwing at the subject that first caused the initial startle (at source of stimuli).
9) Striking out intentionally at source of audible or physical stimuli.
10) Flailing the arms wildly (usually from audible stimuli).
11) The wave - where the body and arms rock up and down as if a vertical wave passed through them (usually from audible stimuli).
12) Jumping up, forward, back or to the sides (from both audible and physical stimuli) The arms may or may not respond.
13) Knee bends and knee buckling (from both audible and physical stimuli).
14) Falling down.
15) Ducking and/or cowering (from audible and physical stimuli).
16) Fainting.
17) A kind of sudden, temporary heart attack.
18) Clutching of one's own throat (explained as an instinctive protective reflex).
19) Clutching of one's own face, palms on the sides of head.
20) Clutching of one's own chest about the heart.
21) Freezing into the pre-startle position (usually from audible stimuli. The body usually, reflexively blocks an incoming physical stimuli).
22) Blurting out and talking nonsense, or cursing.
23) Matching or mirroring – the startled person instantly matches the arm pose and body position of the person startling them.
24) Over 40 different, recorded facial expressions
25) A practiced fighting stance (from sound stimuli surprise. If physical attacked, the subject is likely to forego a stance and instantly respond/block the physical stimuli).
26) Obedience – in some cases, people are subject to instantly following the orders of the ambusher.
27) Cultural – experts have recorded responses that are uniquely culturally, as in family, tribe, region and/or nationality.
28) Idiosyncratic, individual specific responses (sometimes unexplainable. One main conclusion drawn from this list is that many startles are highly idiosyncratic to an individual).
29) Customized responses. Clutching a rail or furniture when falling. Puling away from "hot stove." The body quickly adapts with motions to save itself that do not resemble other motions.
30) Some combinations of the above.
Responses may vary depending upon the condition of the person. People may be tired, sick, under the influence of fatigue, alcohol or drugs. Dr. Landis reported as early as 1937 that “the pattern varies in degree of manifestation among individuals and in any one individual from time to time.”
Three combatives-related questions are raised from this trip to the museum:
1) How can training programs massage startle reflexes into fighting responses, least of all make them the source, gross, motor movements of a combatives program, given the wild continuum of responses?
2) Do these current program authors even know that so many startle responses exist? (My guess is not). Or, do they pick and choose from the responses to fit a marketing program?
3) Third, do current program authors even know the source material they like to use is really from non-visual, non-physical stimuli, usually audible shocks like sudden blasts of sound? The reactions to sound do not directly relate to reactions of physical attacks.
Tactical Review
From a tactical standpoint, some startle issues must be highlighted.
Review Issue 1: Apples and Oranges
Probably the most significant point is that many modern instructors have taken the audible/sound responses and turned them into solutions to physical attacks. You can't make orange juice from apple juice. Normal, healthy individuals will reflexively block or duck in the direction of incoming attacks, no matter the direction, or next in probabilty, they also respond in a sliding scale from the Startle Museum list.
In the mid-2000s, the aforementioned Dr. Wood really separated the stimuli response from sound to physical movement. Dr. Wood reports, “The (official) "Startle Pattern" may be briefly described as follows: "In reaction to a sudden loud noise. Much has been done with acoustic responses. Since the 1930s, when reviewing the test data, one begins to take note that startle testing is almost always about audible shocks. There is little testing on incoming, physical stimuli as those physical responses are usually and naturally blocked and/or dodged by people, at the perceived height and direction of the attack. This is called directional-specific reaction – natural blocks or customized ducks and dodges in response to incoming threats.
Much has also been done in physical, reflex, rarely if ever are these physical tests ever referred to as startle pattern or startle reflex as such belongs to acoustic categories, not physical responses. Classic responses from sound! Not incoming, physical attack. Creating one-stop-shop startle reflex moves for combat, because “it is based on the startle reflex” from sound is a scientific mistake.
Review Issue 2: Fighting Stances
In the 1980s the US Army conducted some experiments and learned that people can be startled into their favored, trained fighting stances, no matter what those stances were. I have really tried to gather exact information on this Army study but, thus far, I cannot locate the specifics, such as - how many people were tested? Under what conditions? So, the results are sadly anecdotal to us here. However, almost all martial practitioners can relate to this response as they have experienced this shock/sound event. In Dr. Simmons's book, he does have extensive interviews of people who have studied Judo and karate and reported these “jumps into fighting stances.” The clinicians used a term to explain this as over-learning, to describe why this happens. The stances were deemed over-learned by the subjects from repetition training.
Review Issue 3: Fist Clenching
Another subject martial practitioners concern themselves with is fist clenching as a result of a startle. How many times have you heard a self-defense instructor order you to fight with your fists clenched because hand-clenching is the natural reaction under startle and stress. Yet, studies show that clenching the hands is hardly a universal given. Research shows many startled persons actually open their hands, drop objects and even throw objects accidentally or on purpose in milliseconds.
Some respondents have open-hand-slapped or pushed their ambushers. Indeed some have also punched them. I have taken particular interest in watching the candid camera style, funniest video programs on television for decades now, and pay close attention to the segments when the subject of the tape is surprised, shocked and ambushed by a gag. There you see the true startle reflex in action as men and women shock into a full plethora of responses, some not even listed in our clinical museum. The gags are sound, visual or physical and/or all or some. Some of these hapless TV victims run the gamut from dropping to the floor. Some strike and attack of the ambusher with slaps and some closed-fist, punches and hammer fists. We simply cannot declare with any clinical confidence and certainty that all startled people naturally clench their hands into fists when startled.
Review Tactical Issue 4: Arms Rising
A fly dashes at your eye and your hand and arm zip up to protect it. Your head dodges sideways (not down). Your hand and arm vertically flee the hot stove. You swat at a ball headed to your face. You raise your leg against a low-line threat and your arms do not lift at all. All these startle response motions from physical threats are not really the classic Landis/Hunt reactions because they are threat/pain-protection-specific and not from acoustic stimuli.
The arm-raising startle movement - the cornerstone for so some many combatives programs - is not a mandatory startle at all, but one response in a continuum of many from the startle museum. If a person perceives a physical medium to low attack, the arms may cover low. A head attack? The arms may wrap the head. The arms may flail up and down in a wave-like motion or flail wildly. They may match and mirror the arm positions of the ambusher. They may instantly strike or shove. They may not move at all. Training people to raise their arms in a protective fighting stance is one thing, selling us that the move is an absolute mandatory startle reflex is incorrect.
Tactical Issue 5: Startles and Gun Fighting
Since close quarters gun fighting involves audible explosions, the startle reactions to intense sound may play a part in a gunfight reaction. Fighters may frequently copy the classic, Landis and Hunt, loud sound responses. They same may be said for artillery or mortar fire.
In Summary
The startle reflex/pattern is interesting to study, discuss and research. In the most technically sense, the startle reflex is a study of reactions to sudden sound and some bright light. In a semantic and looser sense, it has come to mean for many, a point when someone is shocked, surprised, assualted or ambushed. Herein lies the confusion. in summary, one cannot build a fighting system around the old, acoustic-based research.
First, even the audible, response continuum is really too large to predict.
Secondly, not all fights include startles, audible or otherwise.
Third, once startled? The startle only lasts so long. Musculature returns to normal in less than one second, although elevations in heart rate, respiration, and skin conductance persist longer. Milliseconds in fact and there are 1000 milliseconds in one second.
Fourth, too many modern fighting systems are drawing conclusions and doctrine from audible stimuli, not physical stimuli, and are unaware of the lengthy list of idiosyncratic responses research has uncovered.
False foundations may accidentally create some good structures, but at some point in system doctrine, a false crack leads to major mistakes and a subsequent collapse of the building/program. Fighting doctrine must start at the real root of research and construct responses from there.
What then to do for training?
Who? What? Where? When? How? And why? The big questions police officers must ask at every crime investigation. The questions military experts when reviewing the battlefield. Who is the enemy? Then, what do they want? Followed by, where are we when attacked, when is this attack, how will you attacked? Why are they attacking you? When you calculate these points, you can best prepare for encounters and limit the shocking aspects you might encounter. The answers to these questions differ for the soldier, the cop, the guard or the citizen. Prepare for the hot zones you pass through in your life. Predict and prepare for the likely ambushes you will face in your profession or in your lifestyle. Fortune favors the prepared. But know this - prepare way less with acoustical and audible-based solutions to solve physical attacks. Do however, keep audible, startle reflex studies in mind when instructing close quarter, firearm combatives, where they may play a unique part.
One major solution is to practice defending yourself against high percentage attacks in as real a setting as possible. Exercise these with an escalation, a continuum of increasing force. When the force becomes too dangerous to practice, then the instructor must introduce a level of realistic acting, to reward the practitioner for proper responses, even though a padded, protected attacker can't really feel the pain through his protection. An element of acting and simulation is absolutely essential in reality training, else everything degrades into a wrestling match. In the military, much time is dedicated to the ambush, by the preparation of crisis rehearsals called “immediate action drills.”
The startle stance/the fighting stance? I once had a combatives instructor who warned me, “There is no such thing as football scoring stance.” I am a military and police veteran and a martial arts black belt in several systems. I have come to believe that a formal fighting stance is more a position than a stance and is more about balance and power in motion - a moving film if you will - than a still photograph of exacting position where everyone's knuckle, chin and foot heel are in the same statuesque position. Exact fighting stances are used for classroom, group, line training and also to intimidate opponents. When the fight starts, it is all balance and power in motion. Keep your actual fighting stance/position, loose, "uncommitted" and very flexible like a football or basketball player in action. When the real fight starts, the statue stance is gone.
Take solace that your body may well snap into blocking and ducking motions that protect you EXACTLY in the direction you need it too, and in milliseconds. Proper training and physical fitness helps this nerve and muscle “firing.” Contact fitness experts for available programs. It is important that your muscle memory is free to respond directly to the threat, not snap into a rehearsed pose, then respond to the threat.
Who? What? Where? When? How and why will you most likely be startled and ambushed? Answer those questions to counter the surprise and startle of an ambush, it would be smarter to use studies on physical stimuli, not audible stimuli. Research abounds on this and experts agree that most people simply block in the direction of a sudden, incoming attack, or dodge and duck.
Prepare. Fortune favors the prepared.
Any comments? Continue the thread on the talk forum! http://www.hockscombatforum.com
Report back to Headquarters! http://www.hockscqc.com/
19 August 2007: The Finger Pointee/Half-Assed, Lame, Hand-Grip Mistake
This topic came up again just last weekend in a seminar. It took me mere minutes to find a sample on a martial arts webpage. I always worry about instructors and then their students doing joint locks and limb catches with the showy, prissy, dangerous mistake of, when doing said joint locks and their related takedowns, using their pointer-finger as a directional guide and then barely grabbing the limb they are manipulating. See picture. Look at grab.
This is a sample of someone proud enough to use this photo on his webpage. Look at the pointee finger. Look at the lame, three-finger grip on...a KNIFE-BEARING LIMB!!!! (You might call this thumb-up pose another version of my coined phrase "Knife Cancer Grip.")
Why? Why? Why? What sense does this make? Real people fighting need ALL their fingers involved in a fight. especially against a knife.
Any comments? Continue the thread on the talk forum! http://www.hockscombatforum.com
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9 August 2007: Bullet Moves/Downs a Troop
I am get rather sick to death from hearing from stubborn, short-sighted people that claim bullets can't move people or just can't "knock people down." They use cold, paper equations to explain that such force cannot be generated by normal firearms, forgetting that the human body is not made of paper. In seminars, there is frequently a blockhead who argues with me that bullets can't move people around. Impossible, they say. Science they say. Here is a compelling photo fresh in from Michael Yon in Iraq of a troop shot three times, once in the thigh. His thigh bone was split and snapped in half. He...guess what? Ahhhh... MOVED! Dropped right down. This bone-breaking bullet somehow seemed to have...moved a person.
His thigh bone was snapped in half by a rifle round. - Michael Yon. (Please read and support Michael Yon's unique and up-on-the-front reporting at http://www.michaelyon-online.com/)
Any comments? Continue the thread on the talk forum! http://www.hockscombatforum.com
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1 August 2007: Some Up and Coming Major CQC Group Camps and Seminars
(Look to the upper, right-side for the rest of 2007)
Hock and McCann
Laurel, Maryland USA 8, 9 September
http://www.hockscqc.com/shop/product267.html
Romeoville, IL USA 29, 30 September
http://www.hockscqc.com/shop/product265.html
Dallas, TX USA, Jan 12, 13 Fire and Brimstone!
BIG Survival Ground Fighting Seminar
Knife/Counter-Knife, Sept. 15, 16 Ft Smith, Arkanas
Military Knife Seminar, Frankfurt, Germany, Oct 6, 7
Gun/Counter-Gun, Cincinnati, OH. USA - Oct. 26, 27, 28
CQC Group Camp, Gent, Belgium - Dec. 7, 8, 9, 10 2007
CQC Group Camp Sacramento, CA. USA, Jan 24-27 2008
(all seminars build the ranks for the CQC Group AND
the SFC Hand, Stick, Knife, Gun and PAC courses.)
Any comments? Continue the thread on the talk forum! http://www.hockscombatforum.com
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