Guest Blog: Courage and Commitment by Chris LeBlanc

I was recently afforded an opportunity to talk to a collected group of specialists about my experiences adapting classical martial principles, training, and even technique to modern policing applications. The audience included a few others who have a foot in both classical training and modern policing, and I am very thankful to Ellis Amdur, my koryu instructor, and to Mr. Liam Keeley for that opportunity.

 Ellis’ teacher demanded that budo be applicable not simply in everyday life, but in “moving the world” in ways of consequence, and Ellis feels the same. As do I. Picture the tiger in the wild, not in a cage, and certainly not stuffed and displayed as a museum piece. This approach may be regarded as somewhat outside the norm in the larger koryu community. Some might ask how archaic martial arts, with whatever small bits any particular tradition may preserve of an actual combative curricula, could apply in any practical sense in today’s world, particularly when many practitioners themselves don’t see things that way.

 One word: Uvalde.

 I brought up Robb Elementary several times in our talk. The abject failure of courage, commitment, and leadership on the part of the officers haunts me, as tactical decision making, active threat response, and hostage rescue have been my “wheelhouse” for most of my police career. I try to wrap my head around how what happened at Uvalde even could have happened. There were a lot of men there. A lot of “cool guy” gear in that hallway: rifles, body armor, helmets, shields, halligans, rams, diversionary devices (“flashbangs”), and the collective experience and “heart” of scores of officers at the scene, a few score in the hallway alone. We are told many had received “active shooter” training within the last six months, and still they did not go forward or try to breach that door. How could that happen?

• Absolute and utter lack of fudoshin.
• Lack of zanshin
• Lack of foundational training and preparation that challenged them to look into themselves, and to face the fear of injury and death.
• Lack of seriously considering the consequences of armed confrontation: of understanding what “active shooter training” is actually all about, in the same way too many budoka fail to really consider what it would be like to cut someone down with a weapon, or to be cut down in turn.
• Lack of i (will).
• Lack of an understanding of sen…… you get the picture.

 Training, both modern and classical, is sanitized of these things, often seeming to be about looking a part rather than acting it (what the International Hoplology Society called “display over effect.”)  This is as rampant in the police and tactical community today as in some of the koryu world. We see lots of posturing in the equivalent of “samurai cosplay” even from legitimate instructors, where zanshin has become a performative pose struck upon finishing a kata rather than the oscillating psychological state that we must recognize and manifest. Similarly, in the modern world, we see what I call the “tactagram models:” bearded, tattooed men in skinny jeans flexing shiny forearms all decked out with the latest guns and gear (always out-of-the-box clean) and writing about being “savages” and “hard men” while selling themselves and their product lines.

Looking back at my own writing over the years, I’ve no doubt I have talked a little too seriously about this stuff for some people. Serious because I consider training to be preparation for something like Uvalde. I’ve been in that situation: going through a house while getting shot at through the walls, shot at through a door, shot at with a gun in my face from ten feet away—I could almost reach out and touch it—and shot at again through another door I was trying to force my way in to rescue a hostage, until I was actually shot through the chest. According to the intelligence we had, I was trying to save a “developmentally disabled young man who was being tortured.” Turns out he was a drug addict assisting the shooter in ambushing us. 

That doesn’t change anything; I would do the same thing today knowing what I knew then. I had a willingness to go forward and do my duty—despite the consequences—because it was my job to place myself at risk to rescue others. It was the expectation of the men around me that I would do so, and it was what the founders of the earliest ryuha did when offering their service. And just as it was for them, anything else would have meant eternal personal and professional shame, letting all down by succumbing to a moment of cowardice.

However, I had an advantage beyond that of some of the officers that went in with me, despite being the least experienced there. I was training well beyond the standard few hours in-service officers receive every year, beyond the “active shooter updates” that occur once a year, if that. I had undergone intense modern close combat and CQB courses, because I knew what I was getting on the job was sub-standard. And I had been inculcated in a ryuha that believed it was still living, still relevant in the real world, and the psychological experience in the moment, and resonance afterwards, was something I had found in koryu bujutsu.

In point of fact, I had stopped practice in koryu, some years before this incident, thinking that it wasn’t valuable for the kinds of things I faced, and instead focused on shooting and grappling. On that day, the first time I faced the prospect of my own death spitting out of the end of gun a few feet away from me, I knew I had been trained in ways I hadn’t even realized. Of course, I haven’t stopped practicing shooting, grappling, and CQB, but I’ve returned to koryu bujutsu; there is a tincture of Araki-ryu in every aspect of my training.

With my career winding down, as I talk about these things to the young recruits who come through the training facility where I teach, it saddens me to see what has happened to the law enforcement profession in recent years. Bookends of George Floyd and Uvalde only serve to confirm for some the bankruptcy of our policing system, and have called it into question for the many others who previously would have fully supported their police without question. All the while, the toll of citizens and officers wounded and killed in the explosion of violence since only continues to rise. Unfortunately I think things will get worse before they get better. How has it come to this? This is a question we are asking within law enforcement circles as well as without.

By no means am I saying that modern police should be studying koryu to achieve a proper mindset. I am saying that it unquestionably helped me, the very first time I was tested. Beyond that, the lessons within them could be, should be, maybe even must be taught, in some manner, in order to get past the place we are in now. For my part, I am integrating these lessons, intact, true to the ryuha I practice, in modern arrest tactics and officer survival training, sometimes in terms of physical techniques, but more often in terms of mindset. Rather than a “physical antique,” or that “stuffed tiger,” it is something alive today and badly needed by the new generation of officers.

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