Trained to kill

The man I met on my one-to-one meeting today was trained to kill.

Pit bull dogs have been selectively bred and trained to kill another dogs in a battle. We hear of them once in awhile when a baby’s head gets bitten or a child gets attacked in the middle of a playing field, and once the Governments get too angry and decide to forbid the dogs within the country. So then, as the protective measure, we kill them all, destroying the creation of our-own sick fantasies, because it became too dangerous for our own species.

Throughout human history, humans were selectively bred and trained to kill other humans in a battle. Governments, armies, police, special forces, secret forces, all our KGBs and CIAs, spend a lot of money to ensure that their faithful men were not disturbed by the order to kill.

Physical and verbal abuse is a commonly used in the training: push-ups, running with heavy loads, shaved heads, complete luck of privacy, abuse and discrimination, crazy officers, all well defined methods with the same aim, so that the men would lose their individuality, their sense of right and wrong, their existing mores and norms, and so that they will accept a new set of values that include hatred, violence, and killing as a way of life.

Another method commonly used is stimulus-response, stimulus-response conditioning. When people are frightened they will do what they have been conditioned to do. The military has made killing a conditioned response. Soldiers and police learn to fire at man-like silhouettes. They train to fire within a second and they are rewarded if the targets are hit properly – shot in the head or heart. So their conditioned response becomes to shoot the target as quickly as possible, to shoot reflexively, to shoot to kill.

And, of course, they are always carefully brained wash so that they believe in the cause of the killing, so that they are fighting against the necessary evil, so that they are hero-s, the chosen ones, the special forces, with no empathy or remorse for the deaths of their fellow human beings or guilt for the murders they have just committed.

Today, I have met one of them.

I am not a part of the US Special Forces any more, he says, once the cold war was over, they didn’t know what to do with us, we were too many, so they started sending us to the front line of the war zones. Once I lost half of my men I decided to quit. There was no sense in staying, it became too dangerous, in fact, it became quite suicidal.

We were sitting at a corner table of a very beautiful Italian restaurant, high ceilings, middle age atmosphere, large windows that cover the whole wall of the place, candles, flowers, all the lot. Through the windows we could see a martial art club practitioners in the middle of their training throwing their legs high.

As a part of special forces did you practice martial arts? I asked.

Martial Arts, he smiled, we mastered a Martial Art called Wang Tsun or Wing Chun.

In the 16th Century in China, he said, there was a set of Buddhist Temples called Shaolin, that were at the time Chinese martial arts training academies. Within the Temples, the monks developed a new, high level martial art, gathering all the experience of the previous systems. The elders shared the most advanced knowledge of the human body, of human psychology, and fighting, and they created a completely new style called Wing Chun.

Wing Chun was designed for a single purpose - hand to hand combat. He said. The monks' goal was to train ordinary people, even women, to fight very effectively in the shortest possible time. Their goal was to create a martial arts system based on simplicity, and efficiency. Every movement of the hands and feet had to be coordinated, precise and powerful and it had to directly apply within a fight. This new art was conducted and passed from monk to monk under secrecy. The legend says that after the Shaolin Temple was burnt among the survivors of the massacres was a Buddhist nun who passed her knowledge onto her chosen disciple, a young girl named Wing Chun. This is why the Art is called Wing Chun.

Wing Chun is like a dance, he said, it is very precise and clear. You do not need all the kicks that you usually find in other Martial Arts, you don’t need all the strength, it is design to be effective. Wing Chun does not have fancy stuff around it, no high kicks, the movements are very refined.

When you stand firm you concentrate all the power in your fist and punch. And he punched the air. Look at the candle, he said, and the strength of the air his punch moved, extinguished the flame in front of me.

Wing Chun is very good in street fighting. It is a close combat fighting. You don’t go for the scull, the scull is not easy to break, you go for knee caps, for the throat and for kidneys. You disable them in a couple of minutes and you disable them for life. They don’t even feel the pain, the pain comes later, if they are alive to feel anything.

There are only three hand forms, you would think it is easy to learn, he said. In fact, it is very easy to learn the combinations, but to do them well you need to practice for years. I practiced for more than 10 years.

It is all about the feeling, if you know how to dance you would know how to do Wing Chun. It is about the sensitivity, relaxation, flexibility, and coordination of arms and hands. He would be looking at my hands and my feet would have already broken his knee caps – it is very fast, very effective. You have to have the knowledge of how to use the force of the opponent against him and how to position your arms, limbs, and body in such a way so that the force becomes explosive. The fights do not last long, they are over in a couple of minutes.

You do not see much of Wing Chun practiced, you see it around high level politicians, their body guards know the skill, otherwise it is rare, because it is so effective and so dangerous.
Choosing a weapon, for example, there is a misconception that a weapon should be a knife, he said, picking up a knife from the table in front of him. A knife is short and you are not controlling the distance. When the weapon is very long you will have an advantage. This vase, for example, is a perfect weapon, I can reach your head, in no time, I just need to develop sufficient strength in the wrist.

You also need to develop calmness and stillness and to wait for the right moment when the distance is just right and if you have trained your elbow and finger strikes you can go for the points of the body that are most effective, most sensitive and most unprotected. I used it in real fights; and I developed a reaction, if you are close to me, or you are touching a particular point of my body, I would immediately react, my reaction would be fight, very quickly I would go into the right position and fight.

The footwork of Wing Chun never advances in a straight line. For example, extend your both hands from your body, your arms creating a triangle surrounding your body. I’ve done what he told me. Advancing straight would bring me directly into the tip of the triangle you have created, to the point of its greatest strength. My body automatically kept the triangle strong. And the triangle is the strongest force in nature, he said, that is why pyramids are triangular in shape and they stayed standing for 1,000s of years. That is why the footwork of the Wing Chun closes on you at an angle giving me control over my own timing and your balance. It is a dance, just like a dance.

A dance that kills I thought, moving my hands slightly backwards so that he can not touch me any more.

The head is hard and once you are choosing the target you need to go for the sensitive parts - the eyes, nose, and teeth, they are fragile. A strike to the eyes will disable the opponent, he won’t be able to see let alone fight. Attacking the upper gate keeps the opponent occupied. He cannot ignore the fact that an attack is aimed at his face. So than you go for his knees, when he does not expect it, you disable his legs breaking his knee caps.

After this, I changed the subject, we talked about art, business, food, movies, concerts, but his description of Wing Chun stayed with me all through the evening.

To the monks, in China, 400 years back, martial arts were methods to cultivate their bodies, hearts and nourish their Buddha nature. They were carefully passed from monk to monk so that the art is not abused or misused. When Wing Chun left the Temples, the students who were thought the discipline were not beginners, they had already gone through the years of previous martial arts and Buddhist training. The monks combined the art with the philosophy keeping the teaching secret and sacred for hundreds of years.

Today, I was sitting with a man whose left hand was broken in many, many places in the close combat. His heart was also broken and I felt sorry for him.

I went home ending our never to start little romance and went to the bed shivering every time I thought of his left hand.

I cried because of all the karma he has accumulated following his path in the quest to be the best one, the best within the army, the best within the special forces, one of the heroes of some people’s children’s stories, the one who saves and fights and kills so that some will have ‘better lives’.

I cried because I knew that we have created him, with our myths and legends that still tolerate and approve killings, and still believe in heroes. I cried because I could hear the cries of all the mothers that hated him because he killed their sons, I cried because of the endlessness of the circle we live in, the circle of hunters and victims and victims that become hunters just because they believe in the motives of their actions.

And I prayed, with all the might of my prayer, I prayed for the humanity to realise that there is no motive strong enough to justify killings, there is no excuse pure enough to allow murders. Do Not Kill is the First Law and the Main Law that we have abused and exchanged with many other rules and regulations giving ourselves the right to take the Sacred Gift of Life away from other Sentient Beings.