Step with the foot opposite the throwing hand.
Rotate your hips, then your shoulders.
And whip, by popping the joints in the arm, wrist, and hand.
We weren’t always equipped with such howitzers, Roach adds. About two million years ago, our ancestors developed a few key structural changes that changed us from climbers and scavengers into living catapults: our waists got a little wider, our shoulders a little lower, our wrists more flexible, and our upper arms a bit more rotated. Once we got the hang of our wobble power and learned to put a point on a stick, we became not only the deadliest creature on the planet, but the smartest. The better we threw, the more intelligent we became.
“This ability to produce powerful throws was crucial to the intensification of hunting,” Roach explains. “Success at hunting allowed our ancestors to become part-time carnivores, eating more calorie-rich meat and fat and dramatically improving the quality of their diet. This dietary change led to seismic shifts in our ancestors’ biology, allowing them to grow larger bodies, larger brains, and to have more children.”
Bigger brains led to a revolutionary new skill, one that would become the foundation of all human achievement: we learned to aim not only where food was, but where food wasn’t. Kudus and rabbits dart off in mad zigzags, meaning a hunter has to mentally process the timing and distance of three different bodies moving through space—his own, his prey’s, and his weapon’s—to calculate the exact point where spear meets quarry. Or where Allied gunshot meets German paratrooper, on Crete.
“That kind of sequential thought requires intellect of a higher order,” says William H. Calvin, Ph.D., a professor of neurobiology at the University of Washington and a specialist in the evolution of the human brain. Specifically, he’s talking about imagination: the ability to project into the future, visualize possibilities, think in the abstract. That’s why Calvin believes language, literature, medicine, and even love are all connected to our ancient ability to hit a hare at twenty paces. “Throwing is about finding order in chaos,” he says. “The more you’re able to think in sequence, the more ideas you’re able to string together. You can add more words to your vocabulary, you can combine unrelated concepts, you can plan for the future, and you can keep track of social relationships.”
But wait: aren’t sequence thinking and idea combining the kind of tinkering there’s no time for in a race for survival? Exactly; and that’s why, when it came to throwing tomahawks, I was better off with a blindfold. With primal functions, education and execution don’t mix. Your brain processes the movement, but your body carries it out. So once you’ve grooved a move into your fascia, get out of its way. It reacts—and remembers.
CHAPTER 11
Things you do,
Come back to you,
As though they knew the way.
—RODGERS AND HART, “Where or When”
TOMAHAWKS AND SPEARS weren’t the weapons of choice for the Firm, but luckily, wobble power works just as well with a finger. When the Heavenly Twins began training Churchill’s first class of dirty tricksters, Bill Fairbairn showed them how it’s done.
Fairbairn yanked his pistol and clenched it like … well, like an idiot. He didn’t even aim the thing. Everyone knows you have to lock out your arms and steady the pistol with both hands as you peer down the sights. But Fairbairn just stood there, his knees bent as though they were about to buckle. He clutched the pistol as if he were trying to crush it in his fist and barely raised it to his waist. He looked nothing like an expert marksman or a seasoned cop. He looked more like a confused old man who suddenly found a pistol in his pocket and had no idea how it got there.
Now this, he said, is how you win a gunfight. You’re crazy if you think you won’t be terrified when you face a man who’s trying to kill you, Fairbairn explained, but that’s okay; humans are terrific at turning terror into a weapon. You just need to tap into your natural ability to aim by instinct. Fairbairn believed “instinctive aim” is what made Wild West gunslingers so deadly, and one of his protégés actually went west to find out. Rex Applegate was a U.S. Army lieutenant with unusual credentials; as a boy in Yoncalla, Oregon, he’d chucked bricks in the air as targets for his uncle, a professional trick-shot artist. “These people did not use the sights for many of their acts,” Apple-gate noted—yet when he joined the Army, he found that old-timers like his uncle were better shots than his instructors. Frontiersmen like Wild Bill Hickok had heavier weapons and no formal training, but their quick-draw skills were astonishing.
“Wild Bill was an authentic Western gunman who actually killed a lot of men in combat,” Applegate learned. “I was still searching for that essential fact: how did they do it?” The Army assigned Applegate to study close-combat techniques, and one of his first stops was Wild Bill’s final stomping grounds, in Deadwood, South Dakota. In the county courthouse, Applegate found a packet of Wild Bill’s papers. “One was a letter from an admirer asking in effect, ‘How did you kill these men? What was your method or technique?’” Applegate relates. “That was exactly what I was looking for.” Luckily, Hickok had never mailed his response. In Hickok’s own handwriting, Applegate read: “I raised my hand to eye level, like pointing a finger, and fired.”
Like pointing a finger … “This was very intriguing,” Applegate would recall, “but it wasn’t made clear to me until I started my training in combat handgun techniques under a couple of gentlemen named William E. Fairbairn and Eric A. Sykes.” The Twins, it turned out, had come up with the same technique after a lucky accident. One night, fifteen of their Shanghai policemen had raided a crime gang’s headquarters. When Fairbairn inspected the building the next morning, he found it ringed with head-high booby-trap wires. His officers had passed right under without seeing them. In a flash of insight, Fairbairn understood why: whenever they tensed, they instinctively dropped into a crouch. It must be the same reason, Fairbairn realized, they also clutched their pistols in a death grip.
“You will be keyed up to the highest pitch and will be grasping your pistol with almost convulsive force. If you have to fire, your instinct will be to do it as quickly as possible, and you will probably do it with a bent arm, possibly even from the level of the hip. The whole affair may take place in a bad light or none at all,” Fairbairn predicted. “It may be that a bullet whizzes past you and that you will experience momentary stupefaction, which is due to the shock of the explosion at very short range of the shot just fired by your opponent.”
What Fairbairn was observing would be identified years later as the Sympathetic Nervous System response, more commonly known as the fight-or-flight reflex. Your knees bend, your heart pounds, your hands clench and jerk up in front of you, your vision tunnels toward one threat, and your body squares to face it. This is your lower brain—your animal self—coiling you like a spring to either strike or sprint for cover. Before Fairbairn arrived in Shanghai, police guidelines dictated you should ignore your animal self and get composed before shooting. But while you’re composing, the other guy is firing. “If you take much longer than a third of a second to fire your first shot,” Fairbairn warned, “you will not be the one to tell the newspaper about it.” No wonder nine Shanghai patrolmen were killed in a single year. “There is not time,” Fairbairn realized, “to put yourself into some special stance or to align the sights of the pistol, and any attempt to do so places you at the mercy of a quicker opponent.”