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Back to the dojo…
We spent the next three days working our unarmed knife defense. By the end of those first four days, all of my fingers were bruised and swollen and at least one was fractured. Nothing a little athletic tape couldn’t fix. We also had spent every spare minute whittling our training knives or sharpening our carving knives. Our right forearms (both of us are right handed) were completely worn out from the effort of carving and sharpening.
By this time, we were a little frustrated that we had not spent anytime on knife offense. We came to the dojo on our last day and confronted Kevin about the lack of offense instruction. He smiled a knowing smile and then made us feel like we were in a Karate Kid movie.
He pulled out a cardboard sheet with a series of numbered circles and lines on it. He put it on the wall and told us to stand close to the wall. He put lipstick on our now finished wooden training knife and told us to quickly slash the lines and thrust into the circles upon his calling off numbers. The quicker he called the numbers and the tighter our movements became, I was amazed at my ability to put the knife exactly where I wanted it to go. The knife seemed to be an extension of my arm. It suddenly clicked: carving that wooden knife taught me blade control. He clarified my realization:
A knife is just a tool and is useless without an artist. Work with your tools until they become a natural extension of your body, only then can you create works of art.
Then he ordered me to step back and put the knife in my left hand. He grabbed the end of it and easily twisted it out of my left hand. He then told me to switch hands and use my right hand instead. Once again he grabbed and twisted the wooden blade. This time I was able to resist and counter his force. Once again, it became obvious that all those hours of carving and sharpening by hand served more than one purpose. All of that work had strengthened my grip incredibly. He once again eloquently distilled the lesson:
Your knife or gun is only useful if it is in your hand; hand strength is critical.
Then he told me to square off with him with my wooden knife in my hand. He told me to attack him and instantly my mind seemed to go blank. In those few seconds I was standing there the aching of my fingers crept into my mind. I remembered a thrust feint into a low snapping slash that he had hit me with snapping my fingers time and again yesterday. I had seen him do it to me at least 20 times over the last two days. I remembered that I always moved my hand up when he came with that attack.
So I decided to throw that, yet aim 6 inches high with my slash. I leapt forward and threw the feint and transitioned into the slash throwing it high. As I did this, his hand was already moving upward and my blade racked him on the knuckles. I saw a grin spread across his scarred face. I was expecting congratulations, but none came. Instead I followed his eyes down to my groin where he had a second wooden blade pressed against my inner thigh under which my femoral artery and certain death lay.
My final lesson was the most important and the same as my first:
You will get cut in a knife fight.
Stay tuned for Part 4…
Cover via Amazon
I want to specify here that knife fighting is extremely dangerous and complicated. I am just introducing concepts here. This is not a definitive guide to knife fighting or defense. If you are interested in learning more, find a local expert and start training. What you will learn here are some solid tenets that you can use to build your knowledge base. Another “tool for the tool box” as I like to say.
When I last left you, my fingers felt broken and I was off to my room to figure out how to whittle a wooden combat knife. I spent the better part of the night figuring out a key lesson:
Never cut towards yourself.
This seems obvious, but you have to remember that we were just a couple of young midshipmen that grew up in the city. Only by the grace of God did we not end up in the emergency room getting stitches. That is not to say that we didn’t have a new cut or two on our fingers in the morning.
When we showed up for class, we proudly presented the beginnings of our wooden knives. Kevin immediately brushed them aside and asked to see the Gerber knives we had used to carve the wood. We pulled them out and he checked their blades. He turned to us and asked us why they were dull. Our confused looks resulted in an immediate lesson:
A dull knife is a dangerous knife.
This is a critical point. If your knife is dull, you have to use more force to get it to cut. That extra force results in having to over commit and often causes you to over travel. When you are cutting a cord in your garage, over travel can cost you some stitches. When you are defending yourself with a knife, over travel can cost you your position and therefore your life, so we immediately went into a review of stance and movement.
Then we learned the two types of attacks that can be used with a knife: Thrusts and Slashes.
Thrusts use the tip of the blade to puncture and generally travel in a line from the attacker towards the defender.
Thrusts can come from any direction: straight ahead from the waistline forward, from down low, up or in the traditional serial killer way – from above downward.
Most thrusts have a starting point and an ending point. Picture a movie serial killer coming at you with the knife held out the bottom of their fist thrusting downward like he was hammering a nail.
The key to thrust defense is to stay away from the tip of the blade. This can be done through increasing the distance between you and the attacker or by deflecting the attack through hitting the attacker’s hand from the side.
Slashes use the edge of the blade to cut and generally travel in arcs.
Slashed are very dangerous and very difficult to defend against, because they utilize the larger cutting surface of the blade and can be linked together. A skilled knife fighter can cut an opponent in multiple places in less than a second. Slashes travel in arcs; these arcs can move in any direction.
The key to slash defense is to stay outside the arc of the blade. It is difficult to increase the arc of a slash mid-slash. It is best to attack the attacker’s knife hand at the end of an arc because that is where the knife has to change direction. As we learned earlier, over travel kills, big sweeping arcs give you opportunity.
If your opponent is keeping his knife in tight, quickly linking slashes and thrusts, never pausing or over committing while simultaneously decreasing the distance between you, there is only one sure defense:
THE INDIANA DEFENSE
What is the Indiana Defense? Think back to the scene in Indian Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy is up against the beast with the two swords. What does he do? He smiles, then he pulls his pistol out and shoots the beast. This leads to our most important lesson:
Never bring a knife to a gunfight.
Thanks for reading – Larry Yatch
Stay tuned for Part 3 on Thursday, February 10th!
Image by mr.smashy via Flickr
Part 1 of 4
I spent the last three days with the Emerson family of Emerson Knives.We were able to tour their production facility and get an inside view of what makes their knives the premier tactical folding knife on the market today (see our pictures on Sealed Mindset’s Facebook page). Spending this time around knives has reminded me how much I rely on knives for defense, thus the next series of posts will concentrate on knives.
AS HUMANS, WE ARE LIMITED.
If you take a close look at a human being, it becomes pretty evident that we are not the most robust species out there. We do not boast sharp claws, fangs, or even a tough hide for defense.
There are two reasons that we are at the top of the food chain: opposable thumbs and an incredible intellect. Having opposable thumbs gives us the unique ability to make and hold tools. Our intellect gives us not only the ability to learn, but also more impressively the ability to invent; the ability to bring into existence something that never was.
Ernest Emerson and the family of Emerson Knives have put their opposable thumbs and creative intellect into excellent use by creating the best tactical folding knives available in the market today.
Anne and I have had the pleasure of being good friends of the Emerson family for a number of years now. That is not something a Navy SEAL takes lightly. Emerson knives hold a special place in the battle-hardened hearts of most special operators. I still remember fondly the first time I held an Emerson blade in my hand. There I was standing in my room at the United States Naval Academy . . .
Before I made it into SEAL training I prepared myself both mentally and physically by relentlessly pushing myself. That self imposed torture came in many forms: refusing to run in anything but a T-shirt and shorts no matter what the weather (nasty Pittsburgh weather be damned) or reading every word published on Navy SEALs.
It was in Richard Marcinko’s Rogue Warrior series in which I was introduced to the lethal efficiency of Emerson steel. In his books, “Demo Dick” Marcinko clearly stated that the Emerson CQC-6 was the epitome of combat folders.
My mind was made up: if the CQC-6 was THE knife of choice for Navy SEALs, I had to have one and I had to know how to use it. Getting one would be much more difficult as at the time there was a 5 year waiting list. I figured the best course of action would be to start saving my money and begin learning the art of knife fighting.
Spring break was coming up during my 2nd Class (junior) year at the Naval Academy; therefore common sense held that it was time to go somewhere warm with beautiful women.
Not being one to follow the herd, and not understanding how chasing women in Jamaica helped me become a better warrior, I hatched a different plan. I found a close friend, classmate and eventual co-founder of Sealed Mindset and proposed that we go to the back alleys of Pittsburgh to train with an infamous martial artist, Kevin Pegnato, instead of going to a beach.
We asked Kevin to put together a weeklong offensive and defensive knife-fighting course, and he asked us if we liked unbroken fingers. Undeterred, we packed up the car and drove through the night to Pittsburgh. He also made the strange request that we each bring a 12” x 2” x 1” piece of hardwood.
We spent the night before class awake with scenes of silently dispatching the enemies of our country with fixed blade fighting knives playing though our minds. When we arrived at the dojo early in the morning, blocks of wood in our hands, our reality was nothing like our dreams.
The first lesson we learned was the most important:
You will get cut in a knife fight.
You readers should feel lucky to have received this most crucial lesson so easily. Our Instructor was more inclined to provide physical lessons, usually accompanied with pain. He stood in one corner of the dojo with a beautifully carved wooden knife in his hand. He asked me to pick a distance away from him where I thought I wouldn’t get cut, when I looked quizzically to his wooden knife he pointed to my block of wood on the floor by my lunch.
I picked up my wood block and stood about 12’ away from him. He laid the ground rules that he would make one attack and if I was able to parry or move away from his attack the test was over. I nodded my head in understanding. Before I could register his movement he made one giant step forward, but I could instantly tell that there was no way he would be close enough to touch my body with his knife. I responded by stepping back quickly to increase my distance.
At the last instant, his wrist snapped out and the last two inches of his knife struck the index and ring fingers of my knife hand. The wooden block instantly dropped from my hand. Then came my favorite lesson concerning knife fighting:
“Not many people want to continue a knife fight when their fingers are laying on the ground in front of them.”
Now I understood his question about my attachment to my fingers. I also had a whole new understanding of 10 wonderful additional targets. He explained that the hands were usually the furthest point away from the body and also were critical in our ability to mount an effective offense or defense.
After proving these points, he told us what we could expect for the next 5 days. This would become our third lesson:
“Anyone with a knife can cut another, it takes a truly skilled warrior not to get cut.”
Unarmed defense against a knife is one of the most difficult skills to learn, and that is what he said we would spend the majority of our time on. We started with learning how to assume a fighting stance and how to move quickly with balance. The techniques and lessons I learned in that dojo in 1997 became the foundation of my shooting and fighting career.
As we were leaving that first day, we received our homework assignment. The instructor told us that he expected our blocks of wood to have the start of a handle by the next morning. He added that he would not be happy if he saw any signs of power tools on our blocks. He pointed to the simple Gerber pocket knives that we both had in our pockets and added, “Have fun and don’t put any rings on tonight, your fingers are going to swell.”
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more! Larry Yatch
Part 2 to “Learning to Knife Fight with a Navy SEAL” arrives on Tuesday!
