Facts of the Battlefield 

Do you think that the Special Forces can't handle themselves without a weapon? You better think again ... real fast.

In the back of a helicopter flying at 9,000 feet over a dark, remote area of Afghanistan is probably the last place you would expect to see hand-to-hand combat. But that's exactly what happened one night in early 2002, and everyone lived to tell about it because of the actions of one well-trained soldier.

During an early phase of the war in Afghanistan, while the wreckage of the World Trade Center in New York was still smoldering, a Special Forces team placed 15 Taliban prisoners in the back of a CH-47 Chinook helicopter for transportation to American-controlled territory. The Chinook is a large dual-rotor, heavy-lift helicopter, the kind often seen on the news carrying U.S. troops. For this short trip, the prisoners' hands were bound in front of them and at the time it was determined that only one guard would be needed to watch over them.

But a few minutes into the nighttime flight, with the prisoners seemingly docile and with thousands of feet of elevation making escape unlikely, the guard, who was watching the prisoners through night-vision goggles-which offer a very restricted peripheral field of view-inadvertently turned his back on one of the prisoners seated near him.

In the moment it took for the guard to lose sight of him, the prisoner grabbed him with his legs in a triangle-like choke and began to squeeze. The combination of the helicopter's deafening noise and the guard's constricted movement made it impossible for him to signal for help. But an alert door gunner turned and saw the commotion through his own night-vision goggles and moved to help.


Fall of Death

The gunner, who had been trained in basic hand-to-hand fighting skills as part of the Modern Army Combatives Program, was tethered to the aircraft with a harness designed to catch him if he fell out, but he applied the rear naked choke from his position behind the prisoner, pulling the attacker and his victim back from the open ramp and the certain death of a fall.

As he was choking the prisoner, the gunner backed into a second Taliban who dug his teeth into the gunner's backside in an attempt to assist his compatriot. Enduring the pain from the second prisoner's tooth-hold, the door gunner continued to apply pressure on the choke until the first prisoner released the guard. He then struck him in the face with downward elbows, driving him to the floor of the helicopter, where the guard was able to control him long enough to more securely bind him.

No shot was ever fired, and there was no fiery crash, because of the actions of that aviation crewmember, who reacted with his wits, using fundamental maneuvers he learned at the Army's Combatives School.

A Way of Life

These stories may never make the news back in the United States, but as many soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq can attest, hand-to-hand combat is a fact of life in this war and scenes like the one in the Chinook repeat themselves every day.

For U.S. troops, the modern battlefield is rife with technological advantages, up-armored vehicles (HUMMVs with added armor), high-speed personal protection gear and all sorts of lethal weapons. But hand-to-hand fighting, in which a soldier must be close with the enemy, is still one of the most fundamental aspects of warfare and has become a regular occurrence in Iraq and Afghanistan, even in the most unexpected places.

The Army Combatives School is taking an aggressive approach toward preparing our soldiers, pushing them to their limits of pain and endurance, and instilling the warrior spirit needed to overcome the fear of closing with the enemy.

This is the first of many columns in which we will share some of these life-and-death stories and the lessons we have learned from them.

The Authors

Matt Larsen is the commandant of the U.S. Army Combatives School at Ft. Benning, Georgia, and director of hand-to-hand combat training for the entire Army. He is also the author of "FM 3-25.150 Combatives" and can be reached at or visit www.moderncombatives.org.

John Simons III (Modern Army Combatives Level-4 certified instructor) is the founder/writer of "Youth Spotlight" and the "Modern Army Combatives" departments. He can be contacted at or visit www.odysseymartialarts.com.
 

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