School Of Winology
With
Wonderful Daily Winology Classes In –
- Safety
and Survival Skills For Women. - Advanced
Fighting Arts For Men and Women. - Avoidance
and Preventive Techniques. - Escape
and Evasion Techniques and Strategies For Children (Against Predators, Abductors,
et al.). - The
Psyche Of Survival: Crucial Mental Conditioning and Toughness. - Spontaneous
Knife Defense: Surviving a Close Quarter Edged Weapon Attack. - Practical
Ground Avoidance and Ground Escapes: The Grappling-Arts That
Can Save Your Life Now! - Home
Invasions: Domestic Counter-Terrorism Strategies and Techniques. - Tactical
Communications: The Mastery of Words That Can Assure Your Survival
In the Modern, Violent World. - Counter-Bullying
Strategies and Techniques For Children and Teens. - Mastering
The Art Of Being A Courage Coach For Your Children. - The
Fighting Arts For Seniors. - Managing
and Surviving Workplace Violence. - Managing
and Surviving School Violence For Students. - Managing
and Surviving School Violence For Teachers. - Threat
Management Techniques For Entertainment Security Staff. - Action
Fighting Arts : A Total Threat Management Training System. - Your
Own Special Class(es) By Request. - Light
The Fuse: You are Already Hard-Wired For Violence. Ignite
the Fuse, If You Dare. - Survival
Skills For Women On Today’s College Camp - And
Too Many Other Courses To Mention Here.
What do we mean by The School Of Winology, you ask? Truth is – as you may have already surmised – there is no bucolic campus spread out invitingly on the edge of some big city, and, if you try to Map Quest it, you will find it not. If you try to look up The School Of Winology, or, as I sometimes like to call it – Winology State University – on the Internet, you might only find:
Action Fighting Arts: Knife Defense, Ground Fighting, Defensive Tactics – “Professional and effective self defense and/or subject control trainings. Ideal for citizens and law enforcement officers interested in staying safe. Legally, tactically and medically acceptable Winology instructor certification trainings—–
Actually, Winology is a term I coined about 8 years ago when I was the lead trainer for the Pennsylvania Board Of Probation and Parole (PBPP). Charged with researching, developing and delivering Use of Force training for all PBPP (clerical, administration and field staff, Department of Corrections and most employees of all 67 Pennsylvania counties)I rebelled against the traditional way to train staff, which was to separate lethal (firearms) training from non-lethal (verbal, psychological and physical) tactics. Without getting too deep in this subject and risk boring you, suffice it to say Winology crystallized my philosophy of integrating all skills, strategies, principles and techniques into one symmetrical training philosophy designed to win against all types of resistance or violent attacks. I chose the term Winology because I found then and I surely find now that the terms Self Defense or Subject Control never quite said it all. Self Defense failed because the term seemed to require the officer and/or the citizen to react to an attack by a Bad Guy and Subject Control, although an improvement, never quite did it for me either. Winology, on the other hand, said it all: the goal of all my training became – not to defend and not just to control, but to do whatever it took to win in any situation. In many instances, doing whatever it took to win required the person to actually initiate the assault (ergo, in my philosophy, Become Violence in order to prevent and/or overcome the violence), or take the fight to the potential attacker rather than wiat until the Bad Guy took the first shot, which in the case of so many victims I have studies, or, in some cases, have known, has ended up in tragic, tortuous and agonizing deaths.
Maybe it would be best if I use the following four examples to better illustrate Winology in real action.
HARRY THE HAMMER, DOTTIE MAY, THE SHOOTIST AND INDIANA JONES
”Be the bullet, Hammer. Just be the bullet.”
BACK in the 80’s I made the mistake of going after a parolee named Vinegar (I have changed most of the names in my personal stories to save from embarrassment and/or humiliation those who were once on parole/probation and who were particular Bad Asses back then but who have reinvented or rehabilitated themselves) Malone. That was what I did for all of the 70’s, 80’s and some of the 90’s. I was a Pa. State Parole Agent and when one of the many felons I had On Paper violated the terms of his or her supervision, it was my job to retrieve him or her. Retrieve often meaning forcibly yanking a parolee out of his home, job, bar, street, wherever. Hooking him up and driving him back to the jail, prison or institution from whence he came.
Vinegar Malone came to me by way of a transfer from the Philadelphia District after being literally warehoused for a dime and change at a state correctional institution. Vinegar was later called “The Blade” after using a stiletto to carve the face of a State Trooper into a bloody Jigsaw Puzzle who tried to bust him for a string of strong-armed robberies in the Philadelphia area, so the Hell’s Angel was trying to walk off a long tail of over 20-years on parole. Maybe trying is too generous a term for his efforts since Vinegar had been sent back twice for violations before I got him.
Anyway, here I was about a ten-spot inside Vinegar’s apartment. He knew I was there to take him back. If he didn’t know, he was a flaming idiot since he had special conditions on his parole that he couldn’t consume alcohol, that he must not frequent establishments that served alcohol, and that there would be zero tolerance for any acts of assault and intimidation. I was ten feet inside his crib because – you probably guessed it – he punched out a bartender, inside the Double Deuce Tavern
because the bartender had the temerity to ask him if he had a designated driver because that same bartender thought he was drunk. What I call The Triple Crown of parole violations.
Vinegar Malone had even opened the door for me. I should have slammed on the cuffs right then and there, but I was so used to parolees hiding while someone else came to the door, denying any knowledge of the Bad Guy’s whereabouts, I guess I was taken by surprise. Malone looked a little bewildered too. Probably never figured any parole agent would come after him solo. No sane one, anyway. He looked at me, smiled in his own inimitable malevolent, humorless style, then looked behind me, to my right, left. Even looked in the air above me, scanned all around, like I would bring floating, airborne agents and aircraft with me. Hell, we were lucky they even gave us state cars.
“You alone, Parole Man?” he growled.
Believe me, at that instant I had wished I had half the USMC with me. But I said – “Just me, Mr. Malone. I think you know why,” in my toughest cop voice.
Vinegar said, “Let me get this straight. You come to take me back alone? Like, by yourself? You are either just plain stone stupid, or fu—ing crazy, Harry. What is it?
To which I replied: “Can I get back to you on that, you psychotic ape (This years before I understood the concept of Verbal Judo and that the term “psychotic ape” might be construed as an insult of sorts)?”
I knew everything important there was to know about Malone. Knew it from reading his voluminous case file; and knew from trailing him, watching him, listening to those close to him who were too intimidated to ever testify against him, but were willing to go off the record. He was a three percenter, called that because Malone and his ilk were those rare miscreants who were never gifted with the ability to think in atavistic terms of getting what he wanted, no matter what pain it caused those he had to hurt or kill to get it. The needs and/or feelings of others were of no concern to him and his fellow three-percenters. They were all sharks: mindless, feral, atavistic, soulless machines relentlessly stalking the bottoms for victims. These are egocentric animals to whom counseling and rehabilitation were comic, pitiful, pathetic words. Malone could only respond positively to one thing – immediate and effective action as soon as he stepped out of line. Three Percenters, like Malone were and are unrefined evil, far as I was concerned. To make matters worse at the moment at hand, Malone was large, strong, and from what I could glean was virtually undefeatable in a fight. When he was in Gratersfors, he practically ran the monolithic state penitentiary, and, from what I heard, when he strode down a corridor, everybody – and I do mean everybody – stepped aside. One inmate, a pretty tough Skinhead from Pittsburgh, spent almost a month in the SCIG Hospital Bay after not stepping aside quickly enough and actually stepping on Malone’s shoe.
HOW I BECAME THE HAMMER
I held both hands, palms out, in front of me and said, “Ok, Vinegar, maybe psychotic ape was a little harsh, but, man, if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, I’d think again. I called the police before I knocked on your door. They’re on their way,” I lied. “All you got right now is a couple measly technical violations. Don’t make things worse by going up against me. I know you’re smarter than that.”
Course, no one had ever accused the biker of being too smart for anything before now.
“This is where I fire you up, Parole Man,” he announced calmly, that same bemused, humorless smile playing on his face. Then, in a heartbeat, he backhanded me hard across my face and then tossed me across the room in what seemed to be an effortless motion. Crap. I was having trouble thinking about what to do next and it occurred to me – as I watched him stride confidently toward me and felt his huge hands grab my neck – that, unless I did something pretty quick – something pretty impressive, by the way, I might not walk away from this.
And then Malone hoistedme off the floor by my skinny neck and I was having some problem breathing, which was ironic, I guess, because it occurred to me that I had done what so many officers and civilians do (9 out of 10, as a matter of fact) when First Touched by an attacker – I had frozen and held my breath. So, I blew out a hard breath and remembered that both the monster’s hands were squeezing my neck, and it came to me that, if his hands were on what was left of my neck, at least one or two Primary Targets (groin, eyes, throat, maybe the knees, nose and ears) had to be open!
Voila. Out of the haze of my quickly fading eyesight came the vision of the perfect open and vulnerable Target – the bridge of his nose! Malone worked out assiduously, but no matter how much muscle he put on, his nose was still fragile. I had less than seconds of air, but that is the beauty of The Natural Fighting Arts (I much later came to call these the Fighting Arts), consisting of natural, instinctive skills that require the minimum in training). I may have seen a Hammer-Fist Strike at some time in my life, maybe as a Marine, maybe in Tai Kwan Do, but there was no conscious thought or recollection of any formal training when I tightened my fist and drove the ridge of my hand (next to the little finger) with a natural downward blow into the bridge of his nose.
IT was a perfect strike by the feel of it, the cracking sound of it and the spurt of blood that filled the air. His hands weakened around my neck and, this time with my feet on the floor, I delivered a second Hammer Fist – even stepping into it and rotating my hips – and he was reeling backwards, his mouth lolling open. I hit him with a flurry of follow-up punches, not wanting him to recover from his surprise and pain; and all I knew was I was hitting one target after another as they opened up with elbows, head butts, palm heels and, finally, as his head started to drop toward the ground, a rousing couple of piston-like knee strikes to his face while both my hands tightened around the back of his head, creating counter-pressure.
Fight over.
Thing is, I had no doubt that Malone was the better fighter, physically superior, more practiced. All that mattered, though, was I did what I had to do- no – what he allowed me to do to cut his wires. To destroy his targets, one after the other, until the fight was mine. I had to Become Violence In Order To Beat Violence. This, then, is the epitome of Winology. It was if he was an automobile and he had me pressed against a wall and his engine was roaring like a feral beast in anticipation. He had all the weapons, all the time in the world to think about, plan, prepare and practice killing me. I had nothing, save for my desire to survive, my hands, and, oh yeah, the brains to quickly pry open the hood of his automobile, reach in and pull out all the wires that made the beast operate.
And that is Winology. Not unlike what a woman I shall call Dottie May, a woman of about 64, who was in one of my Self Defense classes, did to survive her attack.
DOTTIE MAY: “Just Conjure Up An Image Of Someone To Fight For. Something dear to survive for.”
Dottie May by her own description was a handsome big boned gal from Southern Cal. She was almost 64 when she was attacked a second or so after unlocking her car door. The man “exploded out of nowhere,” she recalled, and quickly bear-hugged her from behind, his arms so strong that she felt she couldn’t breathe.
“Be nice, keep your mouth shut and I won’t hurt you. Understand?” he lied in her ear. That would have been fine with Dottie May and she would have said so, if only she was capable of speech. But now she was being dragged by strong hands and arms into her own car and she could feel the hot breath of her attacker on her face and she desperately tried
to remember something – anything – she had learned in her martial arts classes, but the harder she tried the blanker her mind became.
IT was then, at the very second she had decided to give in, to violate the primal law of survival – Never Go With The Attacker – that she thought of the 8 grandchildren and two daughters she would never see again and something lit inside her mind and she decided right then and there she would do whatever it took to stay alive – either here, outside her car, or, if the bastard somehow forced her inside – she would make her fight there.
AND, as she later told me after a class, almost magically, vulnerable targets appeared, body parts she knew she could hit. Hit hard and hit often. “I think my freezing actually was a good thing because I think he started to take my passivity for granted and he relaxed,” Dottie told me. “When I suddenly went from being a total victim to an enraged animal, he was off-balance, kind of weakened, and I was able to take advantage.”
Dottie May, according to her account, bucked her butt hard against him, using the car door the attacker had pushed her against for leverage. She heard him grunt, either from pain or, more likely, surprise; then she followed up with a hard foot stomp on his instep, actually jumping in the air and driving her foot onto his. After that, she backhanded the attacker in his groin with her fist, and her elbow hard into his chin as his head dropped forward.
For a second she was free, but as she tried to run, the Bad Guy grabbed her and turned her toward him by pulling her long hair. She thought of trying to pull herself free, but he was so strong she knew that would be futile, so she jumped forward inside his grasp, which not only was a nifty surprise move, it had the added benefit of taking the slack out of his cowardly hair-pull. The man seemed to hesitate for a second and she
could see something in his eyes that she swore looked like confusion (The exact same look I saw once in the eyes of my dog when I was a child. Pepper, I remember, was stranded on a rock in the middle of a corn field and somehow it had caught fire. There she was on this rock and the flames and smoke wavered all around her, blown by the wind. She saw me as I tried to get to her, her head tilted, her beautiful pink tongue lolling from her mouth, and those eyes, filled with recognition of its fate—) or maybe even fear. She conceded that for a second she thought of easing off, but, thankfully, she did not. She hit him square on the chin, driving the heel of her palm up from his stomach through that blind spot extending up from his chest to his chin area, and the she clawed at his face and eyes, driving his head back on his shoulders, then she bit his cheek hard, and just kept pounding away and clawing until finally the would-be attacker cried out then pushed her away from him and ran off into the night.
“I think it isn’t what you know that can save you,” she speculated, “because what I did had little to do with skill. I think you just conjure up something or someone to fight for, someone not to die for, and just be willing to shove fear aside and do whatever you can to save yourself. I got mad, real mad at the bastard, and I swore I wouldn’t let this creep take what I held dear away from me. Course, if I would have been smart and, like, aware, I could have prevented this whole calamity in the first place—”
THE ESSENCE OF WINOLOGY: THE SHOOTIST AND INDIANA JONES
In the second Indiana Jones episode, one of my favorite scenes was when Indiana was faced with an obviously skilled and practiced saber-wielding man. For nearly a full minute the fierce-looking Arab slashed the air with wondrous edged weapon moves accompanied by fancy and adroit footwork. Indiana stood motionless through the entire display, expressionless. When his foe finished the show and assumed his fighting posture, Jones simply smirked and strode away, deftly pulling a handgun from his holster and firing one deadly shot at the Arab, almost as an afterthought as he moved on to the next scene. End of confrontation. Which is the essence of Winology: In the School Of Winology we don’t ask you to wait until the obviously superior-skilled warrior is ready to attack; we don’t ask you to fight fair. Not ever. What we do require is for you to prevail by using whatever “weapon” gives you the best chance to walk away. If it is a gun, knife, bat, improvised weapon – fine. Long as it is appropriate to the threat to your life and/or safety. I will be going into that more in detail.
In the Shootist, a book and later a movie, John Bernard Books – played in the movie by John Wayne – was a hard, cold gunfighter who was terminally ill with cancer. At one point, the character played by Ron Howard asked Books to give him a shooting lesson. After a bit of shooting, Howard, who actually hit the target as often as Books, asked Books: “How did you get in to as many gun fights as you did and always manage to come out on top?
Books smiled and deposited his gun in its holster and replied: “Well, almost every time I fought I noticed the other guy would blink an eye, or draw a breath before he pulled the trigger. See, I never hesitated. Never. And that is the difference. One breath, one extra heartbeat—“
“You’re a hard man,” Howard’s character said.
“I’m alive,” said Books.
Which could be the logo on the banner of The School Of Winology, if we had a banner. Or a building. Or, anything. Or perhaps we could inscribe my other favorite motivational words, these from Michael Duda, a firearms instructor who had watched me struggle with a qualification course and inspired me to not only pass, but excel:
“Be the bullet, Hammer. Just be the bullet.”
- THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FAIR FIGHT WHEN YOU ARE ATTACKED. DO WHAT YOU MUST DO AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE.
- THE KEY IS TO BE AWARE. SEE OPEN AND VULNERABLE SECONDARY AND PRIMARY TARGETS AND HIT IT/THEM AS HARD AS POSSIBLE WITH WHATEVER BODY PART OR OBJECT THAT WILL WORK BEST.
WHAT ARE SECONDARY TARGETS?
Secondary Targets (ST) are locations on the attacker’s body that one should strike in order to open up key primary targets. ST’s include (opposite the ST you will find suggested strikes):
|
Secondary Target |
Strike With |
|
· Feet |
Foot/Feet. |
|
· Lower Shins |
Instep and/or Toe of Shoe. |
|
· Middle Shins |
Toe Of Foot or shoes. |
|
· Knees |
Balls of Feet. |
|
· Inside Of Thighs (Femoral Nerve MP) |
Middle of Shin/Foot. Knee. |
|
· Outside of Thighs (Common Peroneal NMP) |
Knees. Middle Of Shin |
|
· Stomach. |
Knees. Fist. Elbow. |
|
· Solar Plexus |
Elbow. Forearm. Fist. Heel Of Palm. |
|
· Chin |
Heel of Palm, Elbow, Fore- Arm, Fist |
|
· Mouth |
Fist; Heel of Palm; Elbow |
|
· Nose |
(Hammer)Fist; Heel Of Palm; temple; Back Of Head; Fist; Elbow. |
|
· Ears. |
Palm (Slap). |
|
· Back Of Head/Upper Spine. |
(Hammer) Fist/Elbow (Drop). |
|
· Side Of Necks (Brachial Plexus Origin). |
Heel Of Palm; Inside & Out- Side of forearms. |