"Reality of Combat"

 

This video recently gained some attention as it demonstrated the brutal nature of close quarters combat, and how even in the modern day even a fight with a grenade and rifles can lead to an up close and intensely personal knife- and bite-fight. 

There is an incredible amount of absolute nonsense put out there in EVERY facet of the martial world: martial arts, modern combatives, classical martial traditions, you name it. The reason is people have forgotten the difference between these things and the kind of things seen on this admittedly viscerally moving video.  Some of the most verbose pontificators, and some highly regarded teachers, blathering on "the reality of combat" have never even been in a fight, let alone actual personal combat. They can't even begin to understand where they are wrong, let alone in what things they may have obtained a kernel of truth.

More interesting, the only place I really saw this shared was on combatives sites, maybe some jiujitsu pages, probably because the most significant portion of it is on the ground. It is NOT jiujitsu by any stretch, but valid discussion can be had as to whether, or what, elements of jiujitsu may have assisted either man in this death-struggle. It's even a study in the usefulness of biting in a combat situation - with points pro and con - as well. 

I specifically did not see it on classical martial arts pages - though I may have missed it. This is interesting because many classical jūjutsu methods have patterns specifically addressing this exact set of circumstances - one or both on the ground, one or both with knives - yet that seem to do nothing like it in practice. 

While some may view sharing the content of this video as obscene, I would counter that the real obscenity is acting out a scene like it while completely removing the reality, performing it as one would for a crowd of spectators, and aestheticizing the movements - including the stabs, or in some schools, the actual beheading - so that it comes across more as stage-fighting than anything else.

Certainly most of what we do in the martial disciplines, even the koryū būjutsu, has nothing to do with a battlefield and actually never did. But at their bare essentials, there is often something there that was at least contemplated as potentially useful in terms of the encounter we witness in this video - at least in the earlier schools. It may be necessary at times to take a step back and contemplate it ourselves.