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!