A Member of the Special Forces Gave Me This Advice on Bar Fights

I was sitting in a bar in northern Virginia with a friend of mine, Mark, then a member of the Special Forces. A bouncer had asked two belligerent, intoxicated men to leave. They turned on him, looking for a fight, and the bouncer backed up, apparently unsure what to do. It was about to get ugly when Mark stepped in. He grabbed one of the drunks with a wristlock and threw him into the other. Both drunks went down, and Mark was instantly kneeling on one’s spine and holding the other’s wrist behind his back. Then Mark hoisted them up and walked them out the door.

He came back, sat down, sipped his beer. To my look of wide-eyed surprise, he said in a calm tone, “You can do just about anything as long as you do it with confidence, poise, and control.”

I was nearly speechless, but he explained: “I was taught that smooth is fast and fast is smooth. I was first taught that as a lesson in gun handling. We’d draw our pistols, bring them up, get the sight picture, and dry fire  again and again until the exercise was so tedious our brains got out of the way—a total Zen thing. We wouldn’t try to go fast. After a long while you just get fast without any mistakes. That’s how you outdraw someone. That’s how you kill your target before they kill you.”

“But you just took out two guys that even a bouncer was afraid of.”

He shrugged. “Bar fights are ridiculous. I didn’t hurt either of them, not really. They’re drunk. Maybe they’re good guys. I don’t know. Maybe they learned something from being taken down. Doubt it though.”

The bouncer stopped by, with a big smile on his face. “Thanks. That happened fast.”

Mark nodded. “The smaller one wanted to fight. It was all over his body language.”

“But that move you used,” said the bouncer. “Jiu jitsu?”

“Yeah.”

“I gotta learn me some of that.”

Mark shook his head. “The trick is to just watch them. Figure out what they’re going to do. Run the scenarios through your head. Think about what you need to do. And then do it first, before they even get started.”

Mark was done talking about it, but after a while, after the bouncer left, I asked, “What do you mean about fast is smooth and smooth is fast?”

“I’ve trained to do that physical stuff of course,” he said, “but you know, it doesn’t take a lot of training in martial arts. It takes staying calm and having poise. You can stay that way because you’ve already decided what you have to do. Getting there simply takes some forward thinking and preparation. That goes for a lot more than fights. You also have to be prepared for what someone might say, for the tone they’ll bring. That’s how a man gets himself ready to open a door for a lady or to respond in the right way in a boardroom meeting. You’re simply calmer and more ready when you’ve visualized what can happen and have practiced what you’ll do until it becomes natural to you. Most panic, even fear, simply comes from not being mentally prepared.”