I’ve been teaching people how to gun fight for many years now and learned over a decade ago that you need to check yourself after a fight. During the fight, you will get so pumped on adrenaline and other drugs that your mind dumps into your body, you may not even know what just happened. That is why you may see police officers high five and hug each other after a gun battle. Those drugs your mind dumps into your body make you feel like you just won the super bowl, hit the grand slam at the end of the world series to win it, and just had the best day of your life. The police officers are just sharing that feeling with the others around them. After a fight, you need to make sure you aren’t hurt.
One of the things I taught my Marines and teach in my advance courses is that you need to check yourself for injuries, and it’s not a bad idea to have someone else check you for injuries, also. I had my Marines run their own hands over their body, feeling for tender spots, and would also have another Marine look them over and feel for tender spots. It sounds kind of funny until you find something wrong.
I learned this from a police instructor. He had a story of how someone on his shift survived a gun battle. After they took the bad guy to jail, everyone was standing around, cleaning up the scene and the survivor was there, talking to other officers. This instructor went up and started looking over his fellow officer. He noticed that the officer’s radio had taken a round. The survivor said it was no big deal, the radio took the bullet. But when he stuck his hand behind the radio and onto the guy’s body, the survivor yelled in pain. When he pulled his hand out, he found a good amount of blood. The survivor was transported to the hospital where they had to pull bits and pieces of the radio and bullet out of his side and do a bunch of stitching to patch him up. Eventually, the officer would have found the injury, but how much worse might it have been?
This can backfire on you, too, and this is why you need a second person to verify the injury. In 2003, I was in Iraq and we had a small gun battle just outside Tikrit. Two bad guys dead, one captured, no big deal. These three “geniuses” thought they would attack 200 plus Marines and survive. During the fight, a sandbag in front of me took something, shrapnel from the explosion or a round, I don’t know. I was asleep when the fight started and had my feet up on the sand bags. I started checking myself when it was over and found a tender spot between my legs. I felt a little more and it was wet. I couldn’t tell what the liquid was because it was the middle of the night and pitch black out. It was so dark, our NVG’s (Night Vision Goggles) were having a hard time seeing. Even if they were working, you can’t see color in NVG’s, so it wasn’t helping me. I had to go to our doctor and ask him to use a white light and look at my crotch to make sure I wasn’t hit. I think it was the most embarrassing and scary thing I’ve ever done. To my relief, it was water, my CamelBak had leaked during the fight, and I was just sore from the month of fighting we had been through. I think my Corpsman was a little embarrassed to be looking for blood there, too.
So, if you are ever involved in a self defense incident, check yourself after everything is safe and ask for medical attention. You don’t know if you are hurt or not. It would be better to have a medic discover that you are bleeding than for you to discover it later, when there is no one else around.
Stay Safe,
Ben
Deep stuff. Nothing but respect