A Knife Fight Goes Bad…
Billy Jack, stoic Indian with Green Beret Martial Arts training, was one of the first movie heroes to beat up bad guys with karate/kung fu/taekwondo/whatever.
Interestingly, I met a real Indian war hero who told me what it was really like. He was a chubby fellow from Northern California, and he had been a Navy SEAL. At least so he said.
He told me that the Navy had been looking for people who were extra sneaky and mean, and they tried him and a few other Indians.
He told me they would sneak around the bush, sneak up on the VC, and kill everybody they could.
He said that one night a couple of his friends came back from a mission laughing. They had apparently snuck into a VC barracks and sliced the throat of every other man. They thought it was going to be a great joke when the survivors woke up and found that the men on each side of them had been killed.
And, he told me of a knife fight he had had when he was a teenager.
He got into it with some other good, old boy, and they were rasslin’ and stabbin’ each other when the cops pulled them apart and arrested them.
The other guy went to the hospital, where he might not make it through the night.
My friend sat there, waiting to see if he was going to be charged with fighting or with murder. And he wiped some blood off his shirt. Talk to the cops. Wiped some more blood off. Talked the cops. Wiped some more…”Hey! I’m bleeding!”
Apparently the other fellow had managed to stick him in the gut, and the fold of skin had compressed while sitting and the blood only seeped out, which made it look like he wasn’t really injured.
So he went to the hospital, the other guy lived, and he joined the Navy to avoid charges for assault and battery, which was the way they did things back then.
Anyway, I don’t know the truth of his story, he could have been telling me a big windy, but I do know something about knife fighting.
You can stab, or you can slice. Bad idea to throw, ‘cause there’s no smarts in throwing away your weapon. How you hold the knife depends on what you want to do, unless you go in without a plan. not a good idea. Everybody should be trained, and that training should have an idea for every possible situation.
Anyway, I’ve written a complete course, with a few hours of in depth video instruction, on how to handle knives and other bladed weapons. The course is called Blinding Steel, and it is available at Monster Martial Arts.
But the thing about knives is this: it is the most common weapon you will meet in a fight. After all, knives, for the most part, are legal.
You can carry a Bowie knife, or any large knife, even a machete.
You can carry knives openly, or even concealed.
The only knives you can’t carry are things like dirks and ballistic knives and daggers and stilettos.
You can’t carry knives that look like something else, like a tube of lipstick or a pen or something like that.
But you can carry a knife, and bad guys will resort to a knife as their weapon of first choice. After all, past a gun, which is illegal for the most part, in spite of all constitutional guarantees, a knife is easy, quick, and visually frightening.
But, if you study a real martial arts course on knives, like Blinding Steel, then you won’t have much to worry about. With Blinding Steel knife course you learn how to use anything for a weapon, and you can even take a knife away from some idiot and insert it where there isn’t much chance of getting a sunburn.
That’s Blinding Steel, at MonsterMartialArts.com.