Choosing With Sense and Honor

by

Michael Partie

It was my freshman year at the University of South Florida and I was in my dorm room, uncharacteristically diligent, outlining a chapter for my statistics class. A huge crash from the hallway shook the walls of my room, immediately followed by sounds of a scuffle, raucous laughter, and a string of curses. I threw my textbook and Chi Square notes aside and bolted to my door to see what was happening. Five guys from our floor had gone to my neighbor Dave’s room, grabbed him, and hauled him thrashing down the hall to the exterior door, down the stairs out to the pool, and dumped him unceremoniously into the water. It was Dave’s birthday and this looked like what promised to be a recurring alcohol and testosterone-driven celebratory ritual.

At seventeen, I had a modest ability to read a calendar and project consequences. My birthday was approaching. I had no interest in breaking an arm or splitting my head open on the stairs or pool deck so when the guys returned I said, as sincerely as I could, “Don’t do that to me. I won’t have a sense of humor about it. I won’t be a good sport. I’ll treat it as an assault and someone is going to get seriously messed up.” I had a bit of a reputation as the “karate guy” and I guess there were at least a couple of math majors in the bunch who did the necessary calculations, because they never tried to give me a birthday bath.

Later, after supper, I started thinking, what would I do if they really did come for me? This was a sobering question, because I wasn’t really a karate guy, I was a Chung Do Kwan guy. Chung Do Kwan, at least as we practiced it in those days, was a stripped down, military-style Tae Kwon Do. Our Sabumnim had been chief instructor for the Korean Army’s Tiger Divisions, who fought alongside American Special Forces in Vietnam. To give you a sense of how fierce the Tiger Divisions were, in February 1967, “Time” magazine reported that a North Vietnamese regiment of 1500 men attacked 254 ROK Tigers. The battle raged through the night, much of it close quarters, with knives and bare hands. The North Vietnamese retreated in the hours just before dawn, leaving 253 of their comrades dead, many of them “eviscerated or brained” by knives, feet and hands. Only fifteen Tigers had been killed and thirty wounded. Anyone who says traditional martial arts are not practical in a real fight, frankly, doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

We weren’t taught joint or skeletal locks, nor any takedowns or immobilizations. Our self-defense tools were the edge of the hand, the elbow, and the heel of the foot. Our targets were the spinal vertebrae, the temple, the heart, and the throat. Perhaps the most benign counterattack we practiced was breaking the clavicle. I was well prepared for destroying a violent criminal but not for safely managing the reckless horseplay of a friend. This was a disturbing realization. Until that moment I hadn’t ever really contemplated the nature of what I was learning, nor considered the real life consequences of its use. I decided I needed to round out my repertoire.

There were few opportunities for formal training so I tried to learn what I could from books on Aikido and Hwarangdo (which, depending on the source, is either a two thousand year old indigenous Korean martial art secretly kept alive for centuries in Buddhist temples, or yet another derivative of Hapkido, tracing its origin back to the early 1950s). In time, I found Tang Soo Do, which I found to be a thoughtful balance of traditional and progressive, as well as hard and soft techniques, and later, Hapkido, upon which much of Tang Soo Do’s hosinsul curriculum is based.

We often practice self-defense as if the assailant is always a violent criminal or belligerent stranger for whom we have no particular obligation or social connection, but life can be stressful and strange. We may be more likely to come into conflict with, and be in the position to physically manage, an out-of-control relative, friend, or neighbor than to fight off a criminal, so the ability to control an emotionally or behaviorally dysregulated person without injuring him, is an important skill set to develop. Likewise, if a young student responds to being pushed by a bully in the schoolyard by breaking the bully’s arm or knocking him unconscious, the student may face life-altering legal consequences. Again, there is a need for acquiring a range of skills that can be applied appropriately, depending on the context.

Because of my profession, I’ve spent many years exploring options for preventing and safely intervening in violence without escalating it. I’ve taught these methods in psychiatric, forensic, and general hospitals, schools, human service agencies, and martial arts classes. I’ve also spent some decades exploring and practicing very violent and destructive responses to physical attack, and consequently have also developed a framework for approaching self-protection from criminal assault on the street.

Since developing this model I have discovered other self-defense instructors using the same 3D trope, but with different meanings and applications. This represents independent co-arising and not plagiarism in any direction. It is the result of an obvious device being employed by multiple monkeys banging on the same coconut. The three Ds of this model stand for DERAIL, DETER, and DISABLE, and they represent the three stages of – and responses to – an aggressive encounter.

1. DERAIL. This is primary prevention of violence. By maintaining awareness of our surroundings and by respecting our intuition about potential threats in the environment, we can avoid violent encounters entirely. At this stage, we become aware of a criminal or predator observing us from a distance and planning his assault. Self-defense guru Peyton Quinn calls the assessment an attacker makes of us “the interview.” This sort of interview from a distance is considered a “cold interview.” The outcome of the interview is what determines whether the attacker proceeds with his plans. Quinn says our task is to “fail the interview.” Our awareness allows us to alter our path or to leave the area before ever engaging the person, thus DERAILING the attack before it even gets organized. Derailing makes the attacker LOGISTICALLY unable to proceed because he cannot gain access to you.

2. DETER. This is secondary prevention of violence in which the attacker comes into communication distance. Deterrence may involve defusing or de-escalating a hyper-aroused, emotionally dysregulated person, by placating, clearing up misunderstandings, using humor, apologizing for a real or imagined offense, etc. Or it may mean putting forth our own display of intent so that he thinks better of assaulting us because of potential consequences to himself. Quinn calls the belligerent verbal harangue preceding a physical attack the “hot interview.” The person is assessing whether we are safe to attack. If the potential attacker isn’t emotionally or behaviorally dysregulated, but is a criminal trying to gain access to us to rob us, abduct us, or injure us, we adjust the distance and draw verbal, spatial, and gestural boundaries and refuse him access. In any case, we DETER the attack at the level of verbal communication by making him PSYCHOLOGICALLY unable to proceed because he has re-evaluated us as a target or because we have altered his motivation by helping him to calm down or to see other options.

3. DISABLE. This is counterassault. Once the attack is in motion, we act decisively to physically shut the attacker down. Our goal is no longer to convince him to leave us alone or to help him calm. The assault has begun and our intention must be to DISABLE the attacker. We can disable him in three ways:

1. By applying a joint or skeletal lock to restrain or immobilize him
2. By inflicting enough structural damage to his body that further attack is impossible
3. By knocking him unconscious

We DISABLE the attack by DISABLING the attacker – making it PHYSICALLY unable to proceed because his body can no longer carry out any aggression. Sometimes, by marshalling our spirit and focusing our skill to disable, the attacker may discontinue his assault and even flee. In trying to disable, we deter, and so we still manage to effectively self-defend.

Again, this 3D Self Defense model applies to situations in which we are in grave danger of injury or death due to an assault. Not every confrontation is life threatening. We have to develop the ability to perceive and assess emerging situations in order to respond appropriately, not just effectively. The fifth code of Tang Soo Do enjoins us to “choose with sense and honor” in fighting. To do so requires a strong moral sense, wisdom, and an effective and flexible repertoire of skills. If the only tool you have is a hammer, then the whole world becomes a nail.