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Cry Foul and Let Slip the Dogs of War

April 30, 2024/0 Comments/in Injury/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Using UFC fouls as the basis for operational success in violence.

Contrary to popular belief, combat sports are not about injury. In fact, they go to great lengths to make the contest as “safe” as possible so that competitors can have lucrative careers that generate profits for a good chunk of time. A rotating stable of fighters makes more money than having people get functionally retired every time they lose a 10-second match. The 27 fouls in the UFC are specifically designed to make debilitating injury the least likely outcome—for our purposes, this makes the list a pretty good roadmap for what to do first in violence. It turns out that not all the fouls are useful guideposts; some are definite yesses, fewer are iffy, and two are flat-out wrong. Here they are, with commentary:

DEFINITE YESSES

2. Eye gouging of any kind.
9. Fingers outstretched toward an opponent’s face/eyes.
The eyes are one of the three targets that don’t require body weight for serious injury. A pinky nail across the cornea is all that’s needed to blind someone. And to quote Master Derrick, “Violence is the race for the eye.”

5. Hair pulling.
See 19, below.

6. Spiking an opponent to the canvas on his head or neck.
Your doctor would tell you to never, ever do this. Especially if by “canvas” you mean “parking lot”.

7. Strikes to the spine or the back of the head.
‘Nuff said.

8. Throat strikes of any kind, and/or grabbing the trachea.
The trachea is the second of three that do not require body weight for injury; grip strength gets it done.

10. Downward-pointing elbow strike (12 o’clock to 6 o’clock strike).
This is contraindicated due to “accidental” body weight transfer. Downward means gravity-assisted, which means falling body weight; using the elbow rather than the lower arm or hand means the removal of strength as a factor. This changes it from a punch to a strike (as we define it). The point of the elbow is the smallest, hardest striking surface. Add it all up and you have people “accidentally” doing an ideal strike. Line it up with a target (oh, like the spine or neck of a grounded person) and you have a guaranteed fight-ender.

11. Groin attacks of any kind.
The groin is the last of the “Anti-Wrasslin’ Trifecta”—no body weight required to cause serious injury. Get a fistful of soft tissue and haul yourself into your next target. Better phrased as “Groin attacks of every kind.”

12. Kneeing and/or kicking the head of a grounded opponent.
13. Stomping a grounded opponent.
Again, the “accidental” inclusion of body weight, driven home by leg strength and front-ended by a part of your body that’s meant for rough business (your foot). All that effort is back-ended by the planet—the body has no way of moving to dissipate the force—meaning all the work comes out inside anatomy. Could result in actual, fight-ending injury.

14. Holding opponent’s gloves or shorts.
Falls under the aegis of 5, above, and 19, below. Useless in isolation, brilliant in conjunction with a throw.

15. Holding or grabbing the fence or ropes with fingers or toes.
Typically employed when stomping or kicking a downed person. Adds leverage and improves follow-through.

16. Small joint “manipulation”.
(Quotes mine.) As long as this is really code for “breaking fingers”, I’m all for it. Personally, if I were going to use code, I’d say something like “forcible removal of all future piano concertos.”

17. Throwing an opponent out of the ring/fighting area.
Okay, bear with me on this one. I take it to mean “throwing into a not-nice place” like a fire hydrant. Or a plate glass window. Or traffic.

19. Clawing, pinching or twisting the flesh.
By itself, this doesn’t make the cut, as it’s simply painful. As an adjunct to something vicious (like a throw or joint break) it’s wonderful. To the trained operator the human body is like a jumpsuit with handles all over it. Except that the handles are all sewn into the bones…

22. Flagrant disregarding of the referee’s instructions.
Violence is the time to jettison those pesky social mores. You are free to do as you will, beholden only to the physical laws of the universe.

23. Unsportsmanlike conduct that causes injury to an opponent.
Goes without saying.

24. Attacking an opponent after the bell has sounded the end of the period of unarmed combat.
25. Attacking an opponent on or during the break.
26. Attacking an opponent who is under the care of the referee.
AKA “attacking unexpectedly”. But isn’t that the best time?

27. Interference from a mixed martial artist’s corner or seconds.
Yes, your mates are free to pitch in. Many hands make light work, and all that.

IFFY

1. Butting with the head.
Goes without saying. Can it work? Sure. Ask a Scotsman… from a distance. Is it a good idea? Hardly.

3. Biting or spitting at an opponent.
Three little words: BLOOD-BORNE PATHOGENS. Can it work? Sure. As an omega option. I bet you ten bucks you can figure out something better to do first.

4. Fish hooking.
I actually know a guy who was in a headlock and went for the eyes and missed and ended up fish-hooking the guy instead. It did make the guy let go. This is anecdotal and your mileage may vary. The danger of getting your fingers chewed should dissuade you.

18. Intentionally placing a finger into any orifice or any cut or laceration of an opponent.
Again, this is just discomfort. But if we take it to mean “rolling ‘em over with a broken arm” then I’m all for it.

20. Timidity, including, without limitation, avoiding contact with an opponent, intentionally or consistently dropping the mouthpiece or faking an injury.
This one’s iffy. I take it to mean “social manipulation to gain advantage” (see 24-26, above). But that would only really apply in antisocial situations, wouldn’t it?

FLAT-OUT NO EFFIN’ WAY

21. Using abusive language in the fighting area.
Once you break the social plane and cross over into violence, there is no communication.

AND THE ONE THAT’S NO LONGER A FOUL FOR SOME REASON

X. Throwing in the towel during “competition”.
(Quotes mine.) In violence if you quit, you die. End of story.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2006, revised 2021)

What Is Injury, Really?

April 24, 2024/0 Comments/in Injury/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

It’s the only thing that means anything in violence, or at least that’s what we’re always saying… But what is injury after all? And is there a simpler way to think of it, relate to it and thereby better relate it to others?

We’ll start with the dictionary definition of the word—The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 5th Ed. says:

Hurt or loss caused to or sustained by a person or thing; harm, detriment; damage, esp. to the body; an instance of this.

This is a good start, but it’s not quite as serious or stunning as I would like. While “harm, detriment, damage” are all good synonyms for what we’re up to, it’s still a little bit vague on the overall effect we’re gunning for. There are plenty of people out there, for example, who believe that they can sustain “damage” and keep going. And, of course, they’re right. We all can. But no one—NO ONE—can sustain injury the way we mean it and keep going. Period. So even the dictionary leaves something to be desired, a tightening-up of ambiguities.

These ambiguities flourish and grow into their own chaos-gardens in the minds of the average person—I daresay no two people’s definition of “injury” is going to be exactly the same. For some it is tearing a fingernail or stubbing a toe; others won’t declare it until blood is spilled. The difference between a lucky person unused to pain and a trauma surgeon is going to be vast. It’s a lot like saying the word “dog” out loud to a roomful of people—everyone will see a dog in their mind’s eye, but I daresay no two will be alike.

And still, for me, even with torn skin and spilled blood, we are not at a workable definition.

Our own textbook definition reads thusly:

The disruption of human tissue in a specific anatomical feature such that normal function is obviously decremented (and can only be regained through medical intervention), eliciting an involuntary spinal reflex reaction.

This is great for two reasons: it reinforces the universality of violence (as this effect can be achieved with any judicious application of kinetic energy, from fist to stick to bullet) as well as being specific enough to rule out hangnails and messy, but ultimately ineffective, minor lacerations.

The only problem is that for all its precise lawyer-ese it’s quite a mouth- and mindful. It’s not easy to remember, it doesn’t roll off the tongue, and you’re just plain not going to win over any converts with it. It’s thorough, but clunky. By seeking to be clear it loses its clarity and becomes next to worthless to you. Anything that gets in the way of your understanding needs to be retooled—like carving steps into an insurmountable cliff face.

This gets us to my current favorite way to think of injury:

Break things inside people so they don’t work anymore.

This is the way the sociopath approaches the problem, the way the Saturday night slugger thinks when he wades in to deliver a beatdown. It is the simplest way to think of injury. It paints a picture that’s easy to parse; even the ambiguities work in your favor. Does “they” refer to the people or the things inside them? Hey, either one—or both—I’m good with all of it.

This is a definition of injury you can take as your personal violence mission statement. It’s all you want to do; it’s the only measuring stick that divides success from failure. Easy to think, easy to say, easy to do.

It just goes to show that sometimes simple is better than precise.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2007)

Tactical Cruelty

November 30, 2018/2 Comments/in Mindset/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

“Violence is the race for the eye.”

— Master Derrick Farwell

When he was a young Marine, Derrick sought effective hand-to-hand combat training, going where stories of ass-kicking and dread reputation led. One night he ended up in a dingy karate studio; the instructor was a Vietnam-era Marine from Okinawa, a compact, no-nonsense man versed in the stunning language of fists and feet. That same night a much larger, and thoroughly drunk man, came in and challenged the instructor to a fight in front of his students. The instructor demurred, and tried to get the man to leave. But he would have none of it, and so the instructor took him up on his offer with a blow to the solar plexus. They folded to the ground and began rolling, rolling, until suddenly the larger man screamed, leaped to his feet and fled the school with his hands pressed to his face. Meanwhile, below the look of grim satisfaction, the instructor’s gi was spattered with the big man’s blood.

Derrick credits this moment as a turning point in his training — not because he learned some cool new “go-to” move or an inspirational Bruce Lee quote — but because of a simple truth: the one who gets it right first wins. It’s not what you think you know or how you look doing it — what happened inside that ball of chaos didn’t remotely resemble a magazine photoshoot karate technique — it was a mess, figuratively and literally. But it was a mess that made a difference.

From that moment on Derrick would only listen to instructors whose training was a physical reflection of that awful truth.

This is why we will always speak plainly about our work — training people to use violence as a survival tool — and not waste anyone’s time with the expected and socially acceptable euphemisms of self-defense, self-protection, etc., etc. (Euphemisms that impose a potentially lethal drag on the needs of action. All language surrounding a thing tells the story of where you see yourself in that thing. Ask yourself: During your attempted murder, do you want to “defend yourself” or “attack and injure”?) We seek to communicate with those who know or sense this truth, and who feel something vital is missing in their current physical application.

It’s one thing to say, “When things get serious, go for the eye,” and another to spend every mat session doing what those words actually mean. We set foot on the mats assuming we’re already at maximum “serious” — we get straight to it… and make sure the blind man gets a broken leg and a head injury for good measure. Violence isn’t a contest or a game, and we assume the loser gets set on fire.

Training like this has two effects on behavior:

1. We will do everything in our power to avoid violence if we have a choice, and

2. We will do everything in our power to finish it first if we don’t.

If violence is the race for the eye, we’re going to cheat by starting at the finish line. Anything less is betting your life that the other person is nicer than you are.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

Effective Human Incapacitation

July 20, 2018/5 Comments/in Injury/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

“Effective human incapacitation results from physiological phenomena.” †

The goal of life-or-death violence is complete and irrecoverable incapacitation — to remove, entirely, the person’s ability to think or move. (Preferably both.) We are not attempting to communicate, or reason with, or change the mind of the person we are breaking. We are not trying to “make them stop” — we are making it impossible for them to continue imposing their will on the physical world. For this we need unambiguous incapacity — an obviously nonfunctional state.

They need to be laid out on the deck, body contorted in trauma, silent and still — or convulsing and braying with agonal breathing:

If there is any doubt, continue breaking things until you would feel 100% comfortable turning your back on them and walking away.

Context is crucial here: we are talking about your attempted murder. For social considerations, capitulation is sufficient. The tension of an argument ceases to ratchet upward when someone leaves, or changes tack by simply apologizing, walking things back with words or otherwise shifting into a posture of de-escalation. In life-or-death violence stopping at the request of your would-be murderer can get you killed. This is equivalent to shooting an armed man once, and then stopping because he said he was done… the only thing preventing him from shooting you dead is his word-is-bond honesty and the trust inside your own head — mere ideas, as weightless and intangible as ghosts. Much better to trust in the concrete beneath your feet.

The gold standard for “nonfunctional” is an interruption of brain function; without a firearm this is most easily and quickly achieved via concussion. With boxer-like precision and good timing this can be had by catching the person “on the button” of the chin to snap-rotate the head — an oversized result for what looks like relatively little effort; but we are not interested in getting into a fight and waiting for an opening to deliver that single specific shot. As with everything in life-or-death violence we are interested in absolute overkill. If an arm delivering roughly head-equivalent mass-in-motion to the head at speed is sufficient to “shake the pickle jar” and result in a KO, then his entire mass falling, accelerated by your mass in motion, and terminating in the collision of his head against the ground should be more than enough to get it done. And if not, well, now he’s down and you can impart huge accelerations into his head with your boots.

Everything we do in violence — every thought, every movement, every injury — is done in service of this goal. The kick to the groin — as awful as a real, full-bodied, hard-as-humanly-possible shot can be — is only there to render him incapable of preventing, or safely landing, a sudden fall. We only need a moment of traumatic preoccupation — the body’s spinal reflex in response to injury, the executive function’s “What the fuh—?” stutter — for us to take advantage of that precious loss of function and balance and turn it into a very bad, targeted fall. It’s the dirty rotten poker-table flip in order to pull our holdout gun and shoot the man in the head… with the impossibly heavy bullet of the planet.

If everything hinges on that function-obliterating *smack*, then all action in violence is done in anticipation of it. And the sooner the better.

One critique we often hear at our “Dangerous in a Day” and Crash Course trainings is: “I really wish we could’ve worked on more ‘stand-up’ stuff — it seems like I only got to land a couple shots, then my partner was down, and all the rest was me stomping on them.”

First, isn’t that how you’d like it to go in the real world? Do you want to get into an extended brawl where the loser gets set on fire? Remember: the longer it goes on, the more likely you are to make a mistake, and the more likely the other person is to get something right. And whoever gets it right first, wins. Wouldn’t you rather break a couple things on the standing man, put him down, and then finish him on the ground? (This line of thought — the desire to do more “stand-up” work — stems from a misunderstanding of what we’re up to; it’s the conflation of “fighting” with “killing”, the social and antisocial bleeding into the asocial, like using wrestling against a firearm: which would you rather do, wrestle him or shoot him?)

Second, this is precisely how instructors work out. Every turn on the mats is about seeing how quickly — and how hard — we can put the man down. It all starts with blunt force trauma, breaking something important, with the second or third shot being the takedown or throw. This is because we know what’s at stake — and what we would do if someone failed to shut us off — and so we’re interested in getting it over with as efficiently as possible. Injury to the body makes injury to the brain easier… and more severe.

Third — and most importantly — this is how it works in the real world. The effective use of violence does not look like a fight. It looks like a beating. We don’t see gut-wrenching, abject brutality in a toe-to-toe stand-up fight — such a thing is interesting and exciting in a social (or even antisocial) context. But one person standing over another, stomping their unresponsive form? That looks like nothing else. Acts of violence that are morally shocking are entirely one-sided, entirely unidirectional: one person doing it, one person getting done. And we seek only to model reality on the mats.

So — hate the brain. Drive everything toward that traumatic plunge with the hard stop at the end. Break the body out from underneath the brain, deprive it of its tools, take and take and take and then spike Nature’s Ming vase — ancient, unique and fragile — into a thousand incoherent shards.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

† Duffy, Michael J. “Cranial Gunshot Wound Incapacitations.” 2016.

Tag Archive for: injury

Cry Foul and Let Slip the Dogs of War

What Is Injury, Really?

Tactical Cruelty

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