You can’t fight natural instinct, he decided. But you can make natural instinct fight for you. So the Twins came up with a new, fear-as-a-weapon approach, and brought it with them when they returned to Britain. “The man who can use his weapon quickly and accurately from any position without using the sights is the one who will stand the best chance of not going out feet first,” the Twins announced. “It can be done and it is not so very difficult.” The trick is making your pistol an extension of your fascia. And for that, you only need to point your finger.
When you sense menace, your body craves balance. That’s why a scare puts you instinctively into the pose of a tightrope walker—knees bent, hands up—but there’s another effect: your arm can locate a threat like a compass needle finding true north. The biomechanics make sense: to avoid getting knocked over by an attacker, your body weight has to be ready to instantly shift from two points of support—your feet on the ground—to three: your feet plus the attacker you’re about to hold at arm’s length. Your hand can’t wait for a command; it needs its own defensive directional system, a fascia-based response.
Fairbairn called it “the impulse of the master-eye.” Pick a spot on the far wall, he’d instruct his recruits. Cock your thumb and finger like an imaginary pistol. Now pull—yank up your hand and quick-draw toward your target. Don’t think, don’t aim; just move. “Observe carefully now what has taken place,” Fairbairn would say. “Your forefinger, as intended, will be pointing to the mark you are facing squarely.” To convert that impulse into deadly force, Fairbairn concluded, you just need to point your gun the same way.
“We were not taught to hold the gun out at arm’s length or with two hands but to draw the gun and hold it tucked into your navel with the gun pointing straight ahead,” one of the Twins’ students, Robert Sheppard, would explain. “Wherever you looked, your gun moved round towards the target you were looking at.” SOE recruits who’d handled a gun before bristled at the point-and-shoot system. It was ugly and humiliating. They didn’t look like brave lawmen, aiming carefully with locked-out arms and two firm hands. They looked like scared punks trying to sneak off a shot without getting spotted.
But Fairbairn’s partner, Bill Sykes, knew how to deal with doubters. “I’ve seen that chap turn round with his back facing the target and hit the bull’s eye from between his legs,” Sheppard would recall. “I’ve seen him do that.”
CHAPTER 12
Now, Ah Hing, I’m going to teach you how to fight like a woman.
—GRANDMASTER IP MAN, Bruce Lee’s teacher
REX APPLEGATE got off to a bumpy start with the Twins. He was a massive guy—six foot three inches hardened into 230 pounds of muscle from a boyhood in Oregon logging towns—and so skilled with his fists and trigger finger that even as a young second lieutenant, he was handpicked by Colonel “Wild Bill” Donovan to teach stealth fighting to the espionage-and-sabotage unit that would become the Central Intelligence Agency.
Word had it that two old Brits were the best gutter fighters in the world, so Wild Bill sent Applegate to find out what the Twins were up to. “We soon sized each other up,” Applegate recalled, and he was unimpressed. Maybe Fairbairn knew a little judo and was flashy with a pistol, but in a real scrap, Applegate would smother the shrimp. Fairbairn must have sensed what he was thinking, because during a demonstration he invited Applegate to come forward. “I want you to attack me,” Fairbairn offered. “Just like you were going to kill me.”
Applegate was thirty years younger and nearly a hundred pounds heavier, but, more important, he knew how to dismantle these so called martial artists: you psych them out with some noise, then run ’em over before they have time to set up any of their little flippy moves. “The first thing to do when on the offensive is to weaken the opponent’s balance mentally and physically,” Applegate explained. “I let out a roar and went for him.” The soldiers in the front row had to scramble out of the way as Applegate came sailing back at them. “I had been in some bar room brawls and held my own,” a stunned Applegate would recall. “It got my attention.”
Whatever the Twins were teaching, it was different from anything Applegate had seen before. “We are reverting to the type of individual warfare of earlier times,” Fairbairn explained. Your strength won’t help, he told Applegate. Neither will boxing, wrestling, or most anything you might have learned in a karate dojo. Those are just games, with made-up rules and show-offy skills. You can break a board with your foot? Big deal; try it on the Twins and you’ll go home with that foot in a cast. You’re a Greco-Roman wrestling champion? Super; Fairbairn could cripple a wrestler as easily as he’d manhandled Applegate.
“Stay on your feet,” Applegate learned. “A cardinal rule of this kind of combat is never go to the ground.”
But wait—wouldn’t mixed martial artists later claim that 90 percent of all fights end up on the ground and win bouts all the time by bringing the action to the mat? Very true, Fairbairn would reply—and if you find yourself inside an octagon with a cushioned floor and a Brazilian in surf shorts, then go ahead and grapple. But in a real fight—with no rules, no ref, no tap-outs, no guarantee the other guy doesn’t have a weapon—the ground is where you go to die. If an attacker gets you down, you’d better grab his testicles, jam a thumb in his eyeball, tear his ear off with your teeth, whatever it takes to kick free and scramble back up so you can use the “Bronco Kick,” one of Fairbairn’s pet moves: jumping on the guy’s chest until his ribs are jelly. Real violence isn’t about sportsmanship, Fairbairn stressed; it’s about survival. You’re not shaking his hand and wishing him well. You’re hoping he’s still lying there when you leave.
Boxing and wrestling aren’t natural forms of combat, the Twins explained. They’re natural forms of peacocking, created by and for men to showboat two unique male attributes: bulk and upper-body strength. Otherwise they’re useless. No human in the wild would ever throw a punch if he could avoid it, not even against another human. Why risk breaking all those fragile bones and knuckle joints, or jabbing out an arm that can be trapped, twisted, and snapped?
But that’s not even the big red flag. There’s a more glaring giveaway that boxing and wrestling are just recreation: girls and old guys aren’t good at them. As a rule of thumb, performance aberration in a basic skill is a good way to evaluate whether it’s natural to a species. When you spot a giant ability gap between ages and genders, you know you’re looking at nurture, not nature. Male and female geese differ in size but not in speed; otherwise, migration would be mayhem. Same with trout: if males rocketed past the females, they’d always be first to eat, last to be eaten, and on their way to a disastrous shortage of spawning partners. Gender and age differences don’t disappear, of course, but they’re tremendously diminished.
Especially among humans. Compared with other animals, men and women are remarkably alike. We’re roughly the same size and shape, and share the same biological weaponry. Men aren’t specially equipped with horns, fangs, or giant racks of antlers, like the males of other species, and they don’t dwarf women; men are only about 15 percent bigger, not 50 percent, like male gorillas. We need to be similar because for most of our existence we shared similar jobs. Humans survived for millions of years as hunter-gatherers, ranging across the terrain together in search of edible plants, digable roots, and catchable game. We worked together, and as couples we stayed together: humans choose one mate at a time, and we do it peacefully.