Читать книгу Fighting the Pain Resistant Attacker - Loren W. Christensen - Страница 5

INTRODUCTION

I gripped the sides of my seat as Dan zigzagged our Military Police jeep through choked traffic on our way to check out a large disturbance call involving dozens of people in one of the many bar and brothel sections of Saigon, Vietnam. Such calls were as common as the damnable humidity in a city of millions where American GIs overindulged in alcohol and drugs and fought over pretty girls, where racial tensions split the military, and the threat of snipers, bombings, and rockets was a constant. But there was nothing common about the disturbance call Dan and I were about to confront.

We didn’t find a bunch of drunken servicemen tearing up a bar, as was the usual disturbance call, but rather one man, an extraordinarily large, black American soldier, standing in an intersection in the middle of total mayhem. It wasn’t a racial incident, as was so common in late 1960s Vietnam, but rather a bloodbath without prejudice. It was a moving image of that Biblical painting where Samson is smashing a thousand Phillistines with the jawbone of an ass. Only this Samson, who was as big as a FedEx truck, was armed with a ball peen hammer; his “Philistines” were people of every color.

Dan and I moved toward Sampson, our hands on our holstered guns, shouting at him to drop his hammer. He ignored us, either because our commands didn’t register in his disturbed brain or because he didn’t hear us with all the screaming going on. He did look toward us, though his glassy, unfocused eyes seemed to be looking into another galaxy where he had been proclaimed judge and executioner.

Not wanting to draw our weapons because of the crowd, Dan lunged for Sampson’s hammer as I simultaneously moved around behind the monster. I stand six feet in Army boots but my head barely reached the mountain range he had for shoulders. He flung Dan off his arm as if the MP were an annoying fly and commenced swinging his hammer at people, oblivious that I was dangling from his back like a guy hanging from the ledge of a building. I tried to take him down backwards with a strong jerk on his shoulders, but he didn’t notice.

I was 23 years old the night I found myself hanging from Sampson. I weighed 195 pounds, I’d been lifting weights since I was 13, and I’d trained in the martial arts for several years. If I may boast, I had developed a powerful cross punch that would send even the heaviest hanging bag bucking and twisting. Nonetheless, my punches into Sampson’s back muscles didn’t slow his hammer action, nor did he even glance in my direction.

My partner again latched onto the giant arm in an effort to slow his jawbone-of-an-ass techniques, but once more he was sent flying. In desperation, I began punching the big man’s spine, wailing away with at least a dozen hits, trying desperately to dislodge a few of his vertebrae. He ignored me, and trudged deeper into the panicked crowd with his avenging hammer.

Just as I was thinking that I was close enough to shoot him without hitting anyone else, a third MP burst into my peripheral vision and slammed the side of his Colt .45 semi-auto against Samson’s skull, which sent the giant to the asphalt like a 350-pound sack of cement.

Later, as I massaged my sore hand and wrist, I wondered what the heck had happened. I had a history of dropping people with my big punch, both as an MP and in training, but not only did Sampson not fall from my rainstorm of blows, he barely acknowledged that I was in his space. Talk about a direct hit to the ego.

That was my first experience with a person who could tolerate pain. As shall be discussed throughout this book, there are several reasons why some people are this way. In Sampson’s case, he was padded with fat and muscle, and he was flying high on drugs. I’m guessing if that slap with the steel gun had hit him in the forehead, cheek or nose it wouldn’t have slowed him at all. However, the MP’s gun slammed into his temple, possibly injuring the middle meningeal artery, which resulted in his heavy crash to Earth.

There would be other incidents during my MP duty in Vietnam, a place where so many GIs drank hard, consumed copious amounts of drugs, and were bombarded by inner demons created by the horror of war. With the ironic task of keeping the peace in a war zone, my fellow MPs and I found ourselves brawling with these folks nearly every shift. Of course, not everyone under the influence was impervious to pain techniques, but those who were made up for all the relatively easy physical arrests.

Working 14-hour shifts without days off didn’t allow time to develop a system for dealing with these people other than to dogpile them with as many MPs available at the moment. While this isn’t a bad technique, it’s not doable when the situation is one-on-one. One guy makes for a pitiful dogpile.

A year after I got out of the Army, I was patrolling the streets of Portland, Oregon as a city cop. The intensity of the job was considerably less than in a war zone, but there were always people who were mentally ill and violent, people who had intoxicated themselves into violence, people who had worked themselves into a violent rage, and extraordinarily fat or muscular people who were both violent and resistant to the usual control techniques.

Now that I was once again training in the martial arts, teaching defensive tactics to police officers, and getting lots of hands-on experience working the street, I was able to experiment with ways to deal with people who tolerate pain. This book contains many of the techniques and concepts that I’ve found, and my friends in the martial arts have found, work most of the time. Most of the time is the operative phrase here.

As I discuss in the following pages, there are no absolutes in a physical confrontation. Just when you think you have a sure-thing technique, one that makes everyone in your class groan and writhe, you’ll run into someone who, for several reasons that are discussed in a moment, shrugs it off. So what do you do then?

Read on …