CHAPTER SIX
THE BEST TARGET IS THE ONE YOU CAN GET
While we stop to think, we often miss our opportunity.
—Publilius Syrus
Bonnie (not her real name) was one of the 70 percent. By the time she showed up at one of my two-day live training seminars, it was too late to prevent her from becoming victimized by frightening violence. It had already happened. She had been violently assaulted and become a statistic. Her experiences made it more difficult for her to learn and digest the material I was throwing at her and the other class members because it dredged up fearful memories of the attack she was still struggling to overcome. It was so hard, in fact, she needed to come back and go through the seminar a second time.
Between the two sessions, Bonnie was diagnosed with PTSD, got a concealed-carry permit, bought a gun for protection, and was given a therapy dog to help her manage the anxiety of daily living. It seemed to help. The physical elements of training were easier for her to grasp and execute the second time around. Still, she was nervous about applying in the real world the principles I was trying to teach her. Because she had been attacked, attacking seemed unnatural (she had absorbed what I would call a victim’s mindset) and the whole concept of using violence felt immoral and uncomfortable.
After the last session on the second day, I pulled Bonnie aside and had a conversation with her that was equal parts “heart to heart” and “come to Jesus.” I reminded Bonnie that she was a good person, that she hadn’t deserved what happened to her, and that every principle I taught was designed only to be used to save her own life. More important, I told her that she had found herself trapped in a violent situation because, for whatever reason, her assailant had identified her as a target. What she needed to understand now was that those reasons might become more pronounced if they weren’t addressed. And if she were to ever find herself in another encounter, she had to be able to turn the tables and identify him (or her) as a target if she wanted to survive.
A few months later, Bonnie was at the Home Depot near her home picking up some gardening supplies. She was in the parking lot, preparing to load her purchases into the trunk of her car. Bags of potting soil, flats of begonias, stakes for the tomato plants she was going to grow. Normal stuff. She had them on one of those orange pallet carts you see contractors rolling around the lumber section at seven a.m. every day. The cart was flush with her bumper so as not to stick out into the parking lot and impede other drivers. That’s the kind of considerate person Bonnie is.
As she had done since her PTSD diagnosis, she brought her therapy dog, a German Shepherd, along with her. She had the dog by her side. She couldn’t load the trunk with the pallet cart in her way and her dog on her arm, however, so she put him into his kennel in the backseat of the car and shifted the cart to the side. As soon as the dog was safely stowed and she’d closed the rear passenger door, she heard a voice from behind.
“Hey there, can I help you with that?”
“No, no, I’m fine, thank you. I have everything.” And she did. Bonnie is petite, but she is also a strong woman. A forty-pound bag of potting soil is no problem for her.
There was a moment of silence. And—given Bonnie’s past experiences with violence, combined with the innate sense most have for those moments when something doesn’t feel quite right—probably sheer terror. I can never know the thoughts and emotions that raced through her head, but I would imagine they began with the word, Again?!
Suddenly, the man offering help grabbed Bonnie around the waist and picked her up. Her purse, which held her gun, slid off her shoulder and fell to the ground. Her dog began to bark wildly, but he was stuck in his cage, in a closed car. Neither was of any use.
Much the way Sara described the instantaneous thought process she went through when she woke up to find a strange man on top of her in her dorm room, Bonnie described a sort of checklist she went down as her petite frame hung suspended in the air.
I can’t get to my gun.
I don’t have mace.
My dog is locked up.
Being much smaller than the man who now had a hold of her, the top of her head was barely at his chin level. You might not think that being shorter than your attacker could be an advantage in a violent encounter, but in this case, it was. Bonnie realized that her arms had a much greater range of motion down lower than if he’d hoisted her so her head was above his. She immediately considered how to put this counterintuitive advantage into play.
I can get to his neck.
Bonnie torqued her torso, folded her arm into a V so her elbow was as pointed as possible, and untwisted like a corkscrew in one smooth, lightning-quick motion, ramming her elbow into the man’s throat as hard as she could.
The blow forced the attacker to release his grip on Bonnie and drew his attention instinctively to the site of the trauma as he reeled backward, unsteadily.
Having gone through our training twice, Bonnie knew that the encounter was likely not over. Or even close to over. She had the advantage, but how long would it last? The man was still mobile. He was still her opponent and would be until he was deprived of the ability to move. She had to use her advantage to the fullest.
What else can I get?
Staggered, his hands around his throat, the man’s lower body was vulnerable. He wasn’t thinking about his legs at this point—not as weapons or a means of escape or, unlike Bonnie, as targets.
She took a step, planted on her left leg, and stomped straight down through his kneecap with the heel of the shoe on her right foot until she heard a pop. He screamed in agony and collapsed to the ground, completely incapacitated. The whole thing took less than twenty seconds. A few minutes later, the police arrived, the man was cuffed, and Bonnie was safe.
After the incident, the police went back through footage from the surveillance cameras in the parking lot. It quickly became apparent that Bonnie’s attacker had planned his assault. His van was nearby—unlocked and running. He had been circling the parking lot for some time, looking for a victim. When he spotted Bonnie, he figured her for an easy target. He was bigger, faster, and stronger, and she didn’t look like someone who’d fight back. She was petite, she had her hands full, she seemed distracted. So he made his move.
But looking like a victim and being a victim are very different things. Whatever his perceptions had been, the man was no match for Bonnie. When he tried to pick her up, his fantasy met the full, sharp-elbowed force of her reality. Bonnie knew exactly what to do, not because she was an expert martial artist, but because she had studied the tool of violence.
Bonnie knew that the human body comes equipped with bypass points—targets—where a focused effort can negate an assailant’s size, speed, and strength. When she was faced with real asocial violence, her emotional baggage and hesitation took a backseat to the fact that, in this moment, the only way to flip the situation in her favor was to put trauma on one of her assailant’s bypass points.
What’s available to me? How can I injure him?
Those were her first thoughts, and they were the right ones. They helped her immediately identify her attacker’s most accessible target (the throat) and then spot another vulnerability (the knee) once the initial trauma had been inflicted. She did not stop after one blow—she followed through. Those two injuries, back-to-back, produced a non-functional attacker. If only for a moment, she became the attacker she had been so reluctant to be in our first session together. Fortunately, it was the right moment—the moment between life and death.
Bonnie’s ability to identify accessible targets, and to do it in an instant, gave her an advantage. Her appreciation for the fact that when you’re facing violence in real life, you may not get to pick your target, and you may not get to pick your tools, saved Bonnie’s life. Her dog was locked up, her gun was out of reach, and she was being restrained by her assailant, but none of that mattered. None of it could stop her from identifying accessible targets and inflicting an injury.
But what exactly is a target? And what is an injury? We’ve already talked a bit about how the presence of natural vulnerabilities in the human body—every human body—is the great leveler when it comes to violence. Now, we’re going to dive into those vulnerabilities in more detail; I’ll spend the rest of this chapter equipping you with the information and tools you need to identify and disable as many of those targets as necessary when your life is at stake.
IF IT BREAKS, IT’S A TARGET
A target is an anatomical structure that can be crushed, ruptured, broken, or otherwise rendered useless, thereby rendering your opponent useless.
That is the definition of a target. Read it again. It’s simple, but there are some hard concepts and visceral images associated with the words in that definition. Reread them until they don’t make you wince, until they are simply facts. Equally as important as getting comfortable with this concept is becoming familiar with the characteristics of those targets that generalize across the human body. The more familiar you get with them, the faster you’re able to identify what you can get in the heat of the moment, and the easier it is to embrace what your job is once you do.
Targets are places that are critical to normal functioning. The eyes, the throat, the genitals, joints, motor nerves, just to name a few. These are the structures the body can’t do without if it’s going to run around and function at peak performance. You can punch someone in the stomach or kick them in the butt and it can be painful, but it won’t incapacitate the victim because the area of trauma is non-critical and non-specific. Some of these areas are more vulnerable than others, and require different angles or amounts of force, but they are all critical for normal human function—walking, breathing, seeing, grabbing things—which means they are critical to stopping your attacker.
Targets are the entry point for a vector of force. Most people imagine a target as a point, a circle or dot that could be drawn on the skin that means “hit here.” A target is not simply a dot on the skin around the critical, injury-prone area. It’s not the pointy part of the Adam’s apple or the round part of the kneecap or the iris of the eye.
This is really, really important. If you get nothing else from this section, remember this: a target is an aim-point through which you are going to visualize putting all your body weight, with the goal of creating an entry wound. And every decent entry wound has an exit wound, with a tunnel of wreckage between the two. This is what bullets do and it’s what you must visualize yourself doing (more on this later). You are going to throw yourself through the target, to make whatever tool you’re using come out the other side, whether it’s your thumb, like in Sara’s case, your boot heel, like with Bonnie, or your fist, like Jorge Orozco.
When you look at a target, your mindset should be biased toward action and your point of view should be set to a three-dimensional, vector-infested picture of your attacker’s anatomy. You should be looking into the future, through the tunnel of wreckage you are about to create, visualizing where your enemy has folded and broken from the injury you are about to inflict. Bonnie didn’t just hit the surface of her assailant’s kneecap, she struck it as if she could drive her heel all the way through it, pinning him to the concrete like the tail onto the donkey. That degree of force, and the visualization behind it, made the difference between hurting her assailant and injuring him to the point of incapacitation.
Targets are places where injuries occur. There are parts of the body that are most prone to injury when human beings collide with each other or with the ground. One way to learn about these natural targets is to pay close attention to combat sports like boxing or MMA, and contact sports like football or rugby, where these collisions most often occur. Sports have less to teach us about real-world violence than you might think—they’re governed by rules in ways that real, life-or-death encounters never are—but they do have something to teach us about the vulnerabilities in the human body. They are a rich source of injury data.
Sure, sports injuries are still delivered under artificial circumstances by highly trained athletes—but the human bodies on the line are fundamentally the same as human bodies anywhere. The forces that caused these injuries are forces you and I can replicate if we need to defend ourselves, so they’re applicable for our purposes.
In 2004, Bernard Hopkins and Oscar De La Hoya met in Las Vegas for a unification bout that would finally decide the undisputed middleweight champion of the world. Hopkins was 45-2-1, De La Hoya was 37-3. The promoters billed the fight as “History,” and it would live up to its name.
Like many fights between evenly matched fighters, this one started out slow. Over the first eight rounds, they fought a fairly boring, tactical fight, not doing much damage to each other. Going into the ninth round, Hopkins was ahead on two judges’ scorecards, De La Hoya was slightly ahead on the other’s. Coming out at the bell, Hopkins finally took the initiative and started pressing De La Hoya, getting aggressive. Hopkins found his way inside and started working angles, moving De La Hoya around the ring. Then, at almost exactly the halfway point of the round, Hopkins delivered a picture-perfect left hook to the lower margin of De La Hoya’s right rib cage. It was so quick you could barely see it.
De La Hoya’s body froze up, his eyes got lazy, then he folded over and dropped to the canvas writhing in agony. He pressed his gloved hands into the canvas, with his head between them, like he was praying for the pain to stop. He made no effort at all to respond to the ten-count being issued by the referee two feet above his head. He probably couldn’t hear the count over the sound of his brain sending its focus to the right side of his abdomen. Hopkins had just leveled De La Hoya with a textbook liver punch. If a boxer can slip through his opponent’s defenses, it’s one of the most devastating punches he can deliver.
In their entire careers up to that moment—eighty-eight combined fights—Hopkins had never knocked a man out and De La Hoya had never been knocked out. In this fight alone, they’d exchanged and weathered hundreds of jabs, hooks, crosses, and uppercuts. Yet with a single well-placed body shot in close quarters, Hopkins brought down De La Hoya like a sack of potatoes.
Of course, De La Hoya wanted to keep fighting. He wanted to win—but he physically couldn’t. In that moment, his brain had been taken out of the equation. He couldn’t will his body into action. He was dealing with totally incapacitating injury, one that was telling his brain to shut everything down, to focus all available resources on the damaged zone and forget about anything more complicated. For Oscar De La Hoya, it was his very first knockout blow; for us, it’s data on a vulnerable part of the body.
Over all my years of watching and studying combat sports, sports injury data has proved to be a treasure trove of insight when it comes to understanding exactly where to use the tool of violence against a bigger, stronger, faster adversary. What you learn is that just trying to hit an adversary hard wherever you can reach is almost never the best approach. Heavy force to a specifically vulnerable area should be the goal.
Joe Theismann’s famously gruesome broken leg on Monday Night Football in 1985 is a quintessential example: Lawrence Taylor brought the full force of his body through a weak spot in Theismann’s planted front leg and snapped it like a tree branch. Theismann went down in a heap and never played football again. Of course, LT was one of the greatest athletes to ever play football—but you don’t need to be a great athlete to destroy a knee like that. A knee is a knee is a knee. The force that destroyed Theismann’s knee was a force you and I can easily replicate with proper leverage and intent. That is the force of injury.
It might surprise you to learn that this is just how the military thinks about inflicting harm, even with its most sophisticated weapons. As military technology improves, our bombs and munitions haven’t gotten bigger—they’ve gotten smaller. It’s our targeting that has gotten better. We’re increasingly able to put explosives exactly where we want—in the most vulnerable part of the enemy’s defenses. There’s a lot to be learned from that. Just ask the members of the Mexican Mafia I discussed in Chapter Four, who study and learn the vulnerabilities of the human body, and understand that a 250-pound martial artist has the same inherent vulnerabilities as a twelve-year-old girl. Violent criminals already think in terms of targets, and when they need to, they can incapacitate those targets in brutal fashion.
Injuries of the kinds we’ve been discussing—ones like the kind that disabled De La Hoya and Theismann, and stopped them in their tracks—turn up again and again in the sports medicine literature. Most of us (especially in the United States) already know this, whether we realize it or not. From football alone, we’ve watched players laid out on the turf gasping desperately for air after a hit to the solar plexus. We’ve sat breathless ourselves as defenders lay motionless with neck stingers after traumatic high-velocity collisions in that exposed region between the bottom of the helmet and the top of the shoulder pads. We have a kinesiologist-level understanding of the structure of the knee—ACL, MCL, LCL, patella tendon, meniscus—thanks to years of watching running backs collapse to the turf in heaps after planting wrong or taking a hit from the wrong angle. If you’re looking for a list of places to incapacitate a person much bigger and stronger than you, you could do much worse than the Injured Reserve list for a typical NFL team.
Everything stops on the field when these injuries occur, right? It’s not so different out in the real world. When Bonnie struck her assailant in the throat, it was only enough to get herself free. It wasn’t until she sent a disproportionate amount of force through his knee ligaments at the optimal angle that he was truly incapacitated and the action stopped.
Another way to think of this is that targets are “virtual injuries”—places that are injuries just waiting to happen, that you can visualize when you think about them in three dimensions. The “knee target” is a potential broken knee, bent backward or sideways, until it makes a loud, bad sound. It’s falling and not being able to get back up. The “spleen target” is broken ribs and a bruised (or ruptured) organ. It’s the inability to breathe and internal bleeding that can lead to shock. If direct trauma to your target cannot produce a similar kind of incapacitating injury, then it is not a target.
We started this section with a definition; let’s end it with a full description. Targets are entry points for maximum force at places on the body that are critical for normal functioning and are often prone to injury.
Just remember: they don’t become injuries until you make them so.
WHAT TARGETS AREN’T
Just as important as understanding what a target is at a practical and an anatomical level, is knowing what a target isn’t.
Targets are not “weak points.” To say that targets are “weak points” is to imply that it is easier to break them than other areas of the body. This point of view conflates weakness and vulnerability. Just because something is more vulnerable does not mean it’s any less difficult to injure. Time and again I see this fundamental misunderstanding lead some of my students to give less than their all when they train to attack particular regions of the body. Whether you’re lacerating a cornea or tearing a hip out of its socket, it’s going to take everything you have, if for no other reason than humans are wired to aggressively defend those places we instinctively know are more vulnerable. When bracing for a car collision, for instance, our instinct is to shield our faces in the moments prior to impact. We do this reflexively, even when we know that trauma to the eyes and face are never the causes of death in fatalities. The same general rule applies to violent confrontation, which means to use anything less than the full force of your effort is deadly stupidity. Your attacker has no plans to pull his punches, so neither should you.
By the same token, thinking of targets as “weak points” implies that if only you could strengthen them, you could make yourself impervious to harm. Let me be very clear about this: there is no amount of size, strength, or speed that can make what we have defined here as a target not a target. Not for you, not for your opponent, not for anyone. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has massive forearms and biceps. In between them is an elbow joint that is roughly the same size as any other grown man’s elbow joint. And it snaps the same way with roughly the same amount of force if you wrench it the wrong way. No amount of bicep curls is going to change that fact.
Take the human skull. It is perpetually vulnerable in violent confrontations, but that doesn’t mean it’s weak. The skull is resilient, flexible, and hard as all get-out. It takes a considerable application of force to create an incapacitating injury—whether that’s the force of concrete and gravity, or a tire iron, or something as simple (and ancient) as a stone in the hand. You have to give it your all. Just ask Goliath. Or rather ask David, since he won that famous little confrontation despite the overwhelming size and strength disparity.
Targets are not “pressure points.” Thinking of targets as “pressure points” implies that simple pressure (pushing, pinching, squeezing, or poking) will produce the desired effect. Does it hurt to have any of those things happen to a target? That kind of thing might work when rough-housing with a sibling as a kid, or on television if your name is Mr. Spock, but in the real world the difference between pain and injury is an insurmountable gulf. When it comes to incapacitating your opponent—to breaking physical structures or shutting off sensory systems—“pressure points” are a myth. Each condition can exist independent of the other, and while pain can be a result of injury, injury is never the result of pain or pressure. Injury is the result of trauma, of breakage and the tunnel of wreckage you endeavor to create through the entry point that every true target represents. Whether something “hurts” your opponent is irrelevant; what matters is whether it breaks and incapacitates.
Poking a “pressure point” gets you nothing. Giving it your all gets you everything.
THERE IS NO TOP TEN LIST
Asocial violence is random, and it’s unpredictable. Survival is its test. To pass the test, you must understand its underlying principles. A list of facts and a few neat tricks and shortcuts will rarely be enough, because things rarely ever go the way you want them to. If they did, you wouldn’t have to know all this stuff in the first place, now would you?
And yet, the most common question I get from new students and seminar attendees is: “What are the top three places on the body to cause an injury?” In a lot of self-defense literature and instruction you will read or hear about the big three: eyes, groin, throat. And indeed those are three targets on the human body, but to say those are the “top three” is a dangerous mindset based on a faulty premise.
First, it assumes there is some kind of list sortable by magnitude of damage or effort required or size disparity—like a matrix. More critically, it presupposes full access to the opponent’s body. And in a case of real-world violence, there’s no guarantee that you’re going to have that. Bonnie sure didn’t.
Neither did another of my students, whom I will call Shawn.
Shawn is a doctor. One day after his shift, he went to the grocery store to pick up some things for the week ahead. Much like Bonnie, he was attacked in the parking lot while loading items into the backseat of his car. When he straightened himself to shut the door, out of nowhere he felt the barrel of a .45 caliber pistol pressed against his right temple. It was dark, and it wasn’t immediately clear where the man was positioned in relation to Shawn’s body, so he needed a second to get his bearings. Frozen in place, Shawn caught a glimpse of the man’s shoe pointing in his direction. Immediately, Shawn recognized that the man was on the other side of the car door, that there was a shield between them, and that the man’s foot was his vulnerable target.
Shawn dropped, directing his body weight through his right knee into the joint where the attacker’s ankle meets his foot. It was a textbook knee-drop. By doing this, Shawn compounded his chances of survival by clearing his head from the trajectory of the gun as he simultaneously inflicted an injury. The knee-drop broke a bunch of bones in the man’s foot, causing him to instinctively reach down and drop his gun. Shawn then quickly grabbed the back of the man’s heel and pulled it toward him, using the car door as both shield—from the upper half of the man’s body in case he had another weapon—and leverage, bracing himself against it to pull the attacker to the ground. Now with the man’s entire leg exposed under the car door, Shawn re-secured his grip on the man’s foot and thrust the lower leg up into the bottom of the car door, shattering it. The blinding shock of trauma caused the man to pass out. Finally, Shawn called the police.
When Shawn felt the gun against his head, most of his body was shielded by the car door… but so was the attacker’s body. His groin was behind metal and glass, and his eyes and throat were well out of reach. If Shawn only knew how to inflict injury on the “big three” targets, he would have been in trouble. That’s why I don’t give my students a rote list of targets to memorize. I give them tools and teach them principles to identify the best, most vulnerable target at any given moment, to help them quickly figure out their own answers. Those tools include asking the right questions:
Can I reach the target?
Can I disable it with my bare hands?
From my position, can I generate enough force to cause severe injury to the target?
If I injure it, what ability do I strip from my opponent?
Will injuring it be enough to shut down my opponent’s command center?
The chain of events that resulted in Shawn’s survival began with a knee-drop to the top of the foot. As targets go, the foot is not as sexy as the eyes, throat, or groin. “Smash the guy’s left foot” is not going to appear on any listicle or YouTube self-defense video you may encounter. In the movies, you rarely see the hero go for the foot in the climactic “all is lost” moment when he’s at the mercy of the villain and needs to seize the initiative. Instead, you most often see the foot targeted in cartoons, as a punch line. The little guy pulls out a mallet and slams it down on the big guy’s foot, then the injured guy hops around on one leg and everyone laughs.
Those jokes have a kernel of truth to them: in reality, the foot is a great target. It’s full of bones and ligaments, which are wrapped in nerves. Foot-whipping has been a popular form of corporal punishment for hundreds of years because of the hyper-sensitivity of the plantar fascia tendon and the nerve endings that run along the longitudinal arch of the human foot. As a doctor, Shawn had a deep understanding of anatomy like that. He knew all this about the human foot. He knew that the top of the foot was full of small bones connecting to the ankle, where you can fairly easily create a disproportionate effect (i.e., excruciating trauma that destroys the integrity of the foot) in relation to the amount of force required.
In addition to knowing that the top of his attacker’s foot was a viable target, Shawn recognized that it was his only target. It was the most accessible area on his body given their physical orientation. Going after it allowed him to move his head out of the path of the gun at the same time. If he inflicted an injury to the area, he also figured he’d gain access to other targets as a result. So he went for it.
Shawn started with a single strike, and once he seized the initiative, he continued to incapacitate his attacker. But he was not successful because he’d trained his strikes as a series of techniques related to an armed robbery or carjacking scenario. He succeeded because he’d trained to identify targets and to internalize the mindset that your best targets are the ones you can get, and you go after each one in turn with the intent to create a tunnel of wreckage until your attacker is incapacitated.
That’s the difference between someone who understands the principles of violence and someone who only understands techniques. Shawn knew the same eye-gouging technique as Sara and the same throat strike as Bonnie. Had his focus been solely on those techniques he would have been looking for specific targets that weren’t available to him, to the exclusion of the opportunities that his principles exposed. It would have been a fatal mistake.
THINK LIKE A BULLET
Identify targets. Act first. Give it everything you have. Those principles are what you should be thinking about when it comes to asocial violence. But how should you be thinking about them? It’s a seemingly complicated question with a surprisingly simple answer:
Think like a bullet.
A bullet flies straight, fast, and true. It goes in, through, and out the other side of whatever stands in its way. That should be how you think about applying the principles of violence in a life-or-death situation. If you can do it, it makes everything simpler. It simplifies an ethically complicated issue. It strips away the kind of emotional and moral baggage that held Bonnie back initially. It eliminates the kind of hesitation that nearly cost Officer Jeter her life.
It also makes learning, training, and perfecting the tool of violence much easier.
At one of our evening training sessions in San Diego several years ago, a young Navy corpsman* dropped in unannounced with less than an hour left in the session. Someone told her that we could teach her to fight “like they do in prison” and she really wanted to learn. Under normal circumstances we would have asked her to come to the next class, but we were so taken by her enthusiasm that we decided to go for it and see what we could do in forty-five minutes.
San Diego isn’t as crazy as it was in the 1980s when my buddy Mike nearly lost his life on the other end of an ex-con’s switchblade, but it still has its tough parts, especially for a woman. Plus, if she ever got deployed into an active war zone, she needed to know how to handle herself, while at the same time taking care of the soldiers in her unit. We could tell this woman was a fire-eater, and that is a huge advantage when it comes to learning, absorbing, and training the tool of violence. It means less time explaining the little things that often only matter at the margins, and more time focused on the fundamental things that produce the biggest returns.
The class was turned over to another instructor and we got to work with the corpsman. When I began my career as an instructor, I found that it took more than a week for my students to get a handle on the material and get ready to simulate inflicting real violence. It took that long to get them to “unlearn” the rules of social aggression that don’t apply in a fight for your life, and to get their mindsets to the point at which they could really visualize doing real harm to an adversary. As I grew as an instructor over the years, I refined my methods and delivery systems for all the key information and found that, by focusing intensively on mindset first, I could compress the key points into as little as ninety minutes. And now we were going to give it a go in half that time.
The good news was that, as a trained medical professional, the corpsman knew her way around anatomy and debilitating injury. We didn’t have to explain to her how a body breaks or what an injury is. That helped shave off a good chunk of work. On top of that, as a trained member of the military she had no problems throwing herself into the mix. She wasn’t quite thinking like a bullet—more like an unguided missile—but with focused work on tools and targets, we dialed in her aim in no time.
We assembled the eye target I use to show my students how to deliver a proper gouge, using the thumb, fingers, and heel depending on the orientation of the attacker—standing, kneeling, and on the ground. Then we worked on the neck, breaking it and crushing the throat, again from all orientations—vertical to horizontal. After that, we attacked the groin target—rupturing testicles with elbows, knees, and boots from all angles. And finally, we went through the principles for breaking ankles from the front, side, and behind.
Then we demonstrated how to string these injuries together, one after the other, leaving the exact sequence up to the corpsman: gouge an eye, put a boot through the groin, break an ankle, then stomp the throat. Or fist through the groin, forearm hammer through the back of the neck, gouge the eye.
It didn’t really matter, we told the corpsman. What mattered was putting herself all the way through each target to wreck it, then picking the next one and repeating the process until she was satisfied that her attacker would be nonfunctional. What mattered was thinking like a bullet whose force is self-directed and self-controlled.
We were done with this part in thirty minutes. For the last fifteen minutes of class we left her to her own devices with a training partner. She took to it with the same fire and enthusiasm she walked in the door with.
I know that most students won’t take to this material as quickly as that corpsman did, and that’s fine. But some of what made the material so intuitive for her will work just as well for any student. What works is simplicity. Protecting yourself in life-or-death situations is fundamentally simple, and we only waste time by adding complications. That’s the difference between training to learn techniques and training to learn principles. And that’s why I tell my students to think like a bullet: set your intent, remove complications from your mind, and go straight through the target you can get.
TO INJURE OR NOT TO INJURE
Most people, especially untrained people, see the different means of inflicting injury as a progression, as a scale extending from least effective to most effective. Bare hands are, in this way of thinking, the least effective means at our disposal, because they require more direct physical effort on our part. Impact weapons (sticks, clubs, bats, batons) and knives are better. Firearms are the end-all be-all, because they pre-package the requirements for injury and require nothing more than a trigger-pull and a moderately clear shot to get the job done. One, two, three. Big, bigger, biggest. Good, better, best. The progression feels natural.
There is another way of thinking about violence, however, which is far better suited to equipping the average person with a weapon that is impossible to disarm. This way of thinking dispenses with shades of gray and exists only in the binary world of black and white. In this world, there is either injury or there is no injury. That’s it.
The mindset I am trying to instill in you is unconcerned with the means of inflicting injury, it’s only concerned with whether you are successful. In this way, a firearm isn’t the goal, or the end of the line, but rather just an excellent example of what is required in the successful execution of life-saving violence. If you don’t have a handgun, that’s fine. All that matters is that you end up at the same place: on the other side of a tunnel of wreckage.
That’s why your goal is really to be able to do the work of a bullet—to injure a critical target, to incapacitate—with your bare hands. In a life-or-death struggle, you want to be able to effect the same end result whether you shot him, stabbed him, broke him with a stick or “just” your bare hands.
We’ve discussed how to think about causing injury quite a bit—but all of this may come into greater focus for you if we give some more thought to exactly what an injury is, and what it does to the injured person. What, exactly, does it mean to “injure” someone?
Our bodies have built-in systems for responding to physical trauma. When a trauma stimulus is triggered in the body, the sensory impulses are delivered to and from the brain via what are called the afferent and efferent nervous systems. At one point or another, we’ve all experienced mild versions of these “knee jerk” reactions—flinching when being tickled, or yanking our hand away from a hot stove, for instance. In cases of severe trauma, our bodies will react before conscious thought even kicks in, inducing a spinal reflex reaction that occupies the brain and takes away our power to choose how to react (this is how the liver punch in boxing and MMA is so incapacitating).
I can’t stress it enough: in self-protection, our goal is not to block or prevent this kind of damage to our own bodies as much as it is to exploit these reactions in our opponents’ bodies and inflict disabling trauma whenever necessary, wherever possible. We can’t give the enemy the choice to fight through the pain and use adrenaline to continue attacking. We need to incapacitate him.
Where are some of the specific areas that easily trigger spinal reflex reactions? We’ve already heard stories about attacking the eyes and the throat and the tops of the feet. We’ve discussed the joints—elbows, knees, ankles—as prime targets, as well. Remarkably, there are more than seventy anatomical areas on the human body that can trigger the same incapacitating reflex if injured.*
Inflicting enough trauma on any of these areas will shut down the brain or, at the very minimum, occupy it with the site of trauma to the exclusion of effectuating its prior will to attack you. When the ability to make that choice—or any decisions at all, frankly—is stripped from your enemy, he becomes a sitting duck. Take the brain away, and it no longer matters that your opponent is bigger or faster or stronger, or if he’s a jiujitsu master or an MMA practitioner, or if he’s skilled at using a knife or a gun. Without a brain, he’s helpless.
That is what it means to injure and incapacitate.
A reactive, hesitant person locked into a victim’s mindset does not see the empowerment that can be derived from the understanding of how injury works. Instead, he looks at the array of violence survival methods we’ve touched on in this chapter and fixates on their differences. He sees a gradient of effort and difficulty, and with it a whole host of nasty things that might go wrong in between each method if he tries, as I suggest throughout this book, to create an injury and short-circuit his assailant’s brain. This is because he is focused on the means, not the ends. And it is the ends that make every method, every target, and every injury similar. Achieving those ends is based on striking with a singular goal: incapacitation and survival. The correct means to that end are delivery of the largest amount of kinetic energy you can muster through vulnerable anatomy. The knife, the stick, and the ends of your skeleton are all driven by your entire mass in motion, just as the bullet is driven by energy stored in chemical bonds.