"On Combat" by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman

• If you are in a war, you are a warrior.
• There are only two kinds of people once the bullets start to fly: warriors and victims, those who fight and those who are unprepared, unable or unwilling to defend themselves.
• One commonly accepted truism is that democratically elected governments do not go to war with other democracies.
• One phobia that pushes almost everyone's button is interpersonal human aggression. That is the Universal Human Phobia.
• When it is another human being who causes our fear, pain and suffering, it shatters, destroys and devastates us.
• The stress of combat debilitates far more warriors than are killed in direct, hostile action.
• Research shows that if you have a “load” in your lower intestines during a highly stressful situation, it’s going to go.
• Fighting all day and all night for months on end is a twentieth century phenomenon.
• It was not until the twentieth century, beginning with World War I, that battles went day and night, for weeks and months without end. This resulted in a huge increase in psychiatric casualties and it got vastly worse when soldiers were unable to rotate out of the battle.
• Have you ever sat on the edge of your bed at night with your mind spinning, your heart pounding and your body raring to go? That is what residual adrenaline does to you. To burn it off you need to conduct calisthenics, go for a long run or lift weights.
• In the immediate days after a combat situation, a warrior can be at his most vulnerable.
• In order to prevent warriors from becoming vulnerable after they have secured an objective, they should be trained to automatically begin a series of tasks to keep them occupied.
• Throughout early history, man almost always got enough sleep, because when the sun went down there was nothing else to do.
• Everything about sleep is a mystery, but one thing is certain: our body needs four things to survive: air, water, food, and sleep.
• Stress is a major destroyer and dis-abler of a warrior.
• One of the best ways to heal and recover from psychological stress is to sleep.
• Sleep deprivation is the best way to physically predispose yourself to become a stress casualty.
• Your body builds up a sleep debt, and just as you can catch-up on dehydration and malnutrition, you can catch-up on sleep.
• A person deprived of sleep for 24 hours is virtually the physiological and psychological equivalent of being legally drunk.
• Insufficient sleep and physical exhaustion is a key factor in predisposing you to be a stress casualty.
• If caffeine does not bother your sleep, that is proof that you have already built up a powerful tolerance, and it will be ineffective when you need it.
• There is a zone that exists, generally between 115 and 145 beats per minute (bpm), where you are at your optimal survival and combat performance level. Your complex motor skills, visual reaction time and cognitive reaction time are all at their peak, but you begin to pay a price. Starting at about 115 bpm, your fine motor skills begin to deteriorate.
• Autopilot responses developed through repetitive practice, and stress inoculation through realistic, stressful training are two powerful and effective tools to push the envelope and stay in the zone.
• Whatever skill you require under stress must be rehearsed ahead of time.
• If you find yourself in a desperate life-and-death, point-blank confrontation, and you have a clear shot, trust your instincts, point and fire.
• Under stress, the body tends to tune out all senses but one to avoid sensory overload and confusion.
• Whatever is drilled in during training comes out the other end in combat.
• If we expect our warriors to be capable of using the weapons they have been issued they must practice on realistic simulators the replicate what they are going to face.
• In the military and in law enforcement communities, people qualify at the firing range every six months. More is better, but every six months appears to be the minimum since conditioned reflexes have a kind of “half-life” and begin to decay after just a few months.
• There are four levels of mastery:
• unconscious incompetence
• conscious incompetence
• conscious competence
• unconscious competence
• Speech is a fine-motor skill, and the voice is one of the first places that you can observe stress in most people.
• Whatever you drill for ahead of time will be there for you in combat. No more, no less.
• The reality is that only a handful of individuals actually participate fully and wholeheartedly in combat--rare individuals who are true warriors.
• When a training scenario does not go the way you wanted it to, then do it again, but do not ever think you are dead in an exercise.
• Never, ever give up after being shot or stabbed. Do not train yourself to die and do not train other warriors to die.
• The fundamental rule of warrior leadership is to punish in private and praise in public. Report all failures and problems up the chain of command, but report success to everyone.
• If you are shot, step one is, do not panic. The fact you are alive to know you are shot is a good sign. Okay, you have been hit, so now your immediate goal is to prevent getting hit with another bullet.
• You are the weapon, everything else is just a tool.
• The most effective way to stop someone is to fire a bullet into his central nervous system.
• When you do it right, as you have been trained, the threat may die, a possibility you must accept as a warrior.
• If you choose to take a life when you should not, or if you fail to take a human life when you should, a world of hurt will come down on you.
• You must resolve now, in your heart and mind, that you can kill.
• That is the great paradox of combat: If you are truly prepared to kill someone, you are less likely to have to do it.
• One of your primary goals as a warrior is to train and mentally condition yourself to keep going when you have been shot.
• Right now you have to develop the will and the resolve to live. Know that if you keep going until medical help arrives, you probably will survive, if you stop your attacker from shooting you again,
• You need three things to survive in armed combat: the weapon, the skill, and the will to kill.
• One law enforcement trainer told me that he has rehearsed two signals with his wife: “Go” and “Stay.” “Go” means to get out of there. “Stay” means she must put her hand on the back of his belt and use him for cover.
• There are two types of aggression on the battlefield: defensive and predatory.
• Fortunately the true predator, the sociopath who feeds without remorse on his own kind, is rare. Still, you should never assume that he is not out there. Usually, the predator does not give any verbal clues; he stands calmly and then attacks violently, forcing you to react to his action.
• Warriors have been given the gift of aggression. They yearn for the opportunity to use their gift to help others.
• If you are a warrior who is legally authorized to carry a weapon and you step outside without that weapon, then you become a sheep, pretending that the bad man will not come today.
• The sheepdog is cursed and blessed with the capacity for violence and a profound love for the flock. That is when makes the warrior different from the wolf.
• In the end, it is not about the hardware, it is about the “software.” Amateurs talk about hardware (equipment), professionals talk about software (training and mental readiness).
• The first response of most people upon seeing sudden, violent death is relief; they are relieved that it did not happen to them.
• In the stress of a violent situation, the tendency to accept responsibility for what happened can be a powerful one.
• Every day when you leave your loved ones to go to work, or when you go on a trip (whether to a combat zone or on business), never forget to kiss that special person in your life, and say, “I love you,” even if you have been fighting.
• A “suck it up and drive on” ethos has great survival value in the heat of battle, but it has also kept us from seeking helpful treatment after the battle.
• How to conduct a critical incident debriefing:
• We must not force individuals to participate. There are two key pieces of information that need to be communicate: (1) Stress is a key disabler and destroyer of warriors and, (2) although some may not need the debriefing, it is a tool that can help them save their buddies’ lives in the years to come.
• It is important that soldiers are not required to conduct their debriefings after returning home. It is extremely demoralizing for a soldier to be forced to stop and debrief when his wife and children are waiting for him right outside the gate.
• If at all possible, outsiders should not conduct the debriefing.
• One key tool to prevent PTSD is the critical incident debriefing.
• The most important objective of a debriefing is to sever, separate and pull apart the memory from the emotions, delinking the memory of the event from the sympathetic nervous system arousal.
• Tactical breathing: Begin by breathing in through your nose to a slow count of four, which expands your belly like a balloon. Hold for a count of four, and then slowly exhale through your lips for a count of four, as your belly collapses like a balloon with its air released. Hold empty for a count of four and then repeat the process.
• The best advice I was ever given for testifying in court was simply to “Take...your...time.”
• The truth every combat veteran knows, regardless of conflict, is that war is about combat, combat is about fighting, fighting is about killing and killing is a traumatic personal experience for those who fight. Killing another person, even in combat, is difficult as it is fundamentally against our nature and the innate guiding moral compass within most human beings.
• More than anything else, the greatest gift you can personally give a returning veteran is a sincere handshake and words from you that “they did the right thing, they did what we asked them to do and that you are proud of them.”
• Whether you are a soldier or marine in close combat, a peacekeeper in a distant land, or a police officer working in the mean streets of America, you are held to a far higher standard than that of the average person.
• When someone gives his life to save your life, you must not waste it.
• Erasmus’ twenty-two principles on how to be strong while remaining virtuous in a dangerous world:
• Increase your faith. Even if the entire world appears mad.
• Act upon your faith. Even if you must undergo the loss of everything.
• Analyze your fears. You will find that things are not as bad as they appear.
• Make virtue the only goal of your life. Dedicate all your enthusiasm, all your effort, your leisure as well as your business.
• Turn away from material things. If you are greatly concerned with money you will be weak of spirit.
• Train your mind to distinguish good and evil. Let your rule of government be determined by the common good.
• Never let any setback stop you in your quest. We are not perfect -- this only means we should try harder.
• If you have frequent temptations, do not worry. Begin to worry when you do not have temptation, because that is a sure sign that you cannot distinguish good from evil.
• Always be prepared for an attack. Careful generals set guards even in times of peace.
• Spit, as it were, in the face of danger. Keep a stirring quotation with you for encouragement.
• There are two dangers: one is giving up, the other is pride. After you have performed some worthy task, give all the credit to someone else.
• Turn your weakness into virtue. If you are inclined to be selfish, make a deliberate effort to be giving.
• Treat each battle as though it were your last. And you will finish, in the end, victorious.
• Don’t assume that doing good allows you to keep a few vices. The enemy you ignore the most is the one who conquers you.
• Weigh your alternative carefully. The wrong way will often seem easier than the right way.
• Never admit defeat even if you have been wounded. The good soldier’s painful wounds spur him to gather his strength.
• Always have a plan of action. So when the time comes for battle, you will know what to do.
• Calm your passions by seeing how little there is to gain. We often worry and scheme about trifling matters of n real importance.
• Speak with yourself this way. If i do what I am considering, would I want my family to know about it?
• Virtue has its own reward. Once a person has it, they would not exchange it for anything.
• Life can be sad, difficult, and quick: Make it count for something. Since we do not know when death will come, act honorably everyday.
• Repent your wrongs. Those who do not admit their faults have the most to fear.