#79： On Killing & On Combat With Lt. Col. Dave Grossman
Episode Stats
Summary
Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman has spent his entire career preparing individuals for life-or-death situations in law enforcement and the military. In this episode of the Art of Manly's Podcast, Brett McKay talks to Dave about what it means to be a killer.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. So last year,
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I wrote a series of posts about becoming a sheepdog. So there's this analogy out there that there are
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three types of people in the world. There are sheep, which is most of the population,
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which are just nice, innocent people. There are wolves, which is a very small portion of the
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population. And they're the bad guys, the criminals, and they prey on the sheep. And then there are
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sheepdogs. And these are the individuals who protect the sheep, protect the herd. And they're
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a very small portion. Anyways, I got this analogy from a book that our guest wrote. His name is Lieutenant
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Colonel Dave Grossman. And if you are in law enforcement or in the military or are interested in
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self-defense, you are probably familiar with Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman's work.
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He's written two very influential books. The first one is On Killing, which is about just that. It's
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about killing, not murder. We're talking about killing individuals who in the line of duty or in
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an effort of self-defense have to take the life of another human being. And it's all about the
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physiological and psychological response that happens before, during, and after the act of killing.
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And it's something that a lot of people don't talk about. And we're going to talk about in our
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podcast today, why that is. And the second book he wrote is On Combat, which is about preparing
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your mind and your body for life or death situations for combat. Dave Grossman's work,
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his research has had a profound impact and influence in the military on what soldiers are doing now to
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prepare for combat. And we're going to talk about some of that stuff that he's done.
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And even if you're not in the military or interested in tactical stuff, I still think
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you can get something out of this podcast because it's all about, at its core, what Dave Grossman
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talks about is managing stress. And the tactics, the mindset that he teaches his students are just as
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applicable to corporate warriors as they are to actual warriors. So in any ways too, it's just
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interesting, very fascinating topic, the subject of killing, because it doesn't really get talked
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about all that much. So with that said, let's get started on killing, on combat. Here we go.
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All right, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, welcome to the show.
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All right. So you have had, I mean, just, you spent your entire career studying, you know, some very
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unpleasant things, killing and what happens to a human being in combat, as well as being an advocate
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for trying to, I guess, diminish violence in America, and as well as prepare individuals, both in law
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enforcement and in the military, and also citizens, on how they can be ready for those violent
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confrontations if they were to happen. So I'd like to, if at all possible, try to cover your
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huge breadth of work with a few questions and get people who aren't familiar with your work a little
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bit more familiar, and then people who are familiar, because I know we have a lot of listeners who are
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big fans of your books, a little bit more insight. So your first book that really caused a lot of
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waves and got a lot of attention was a book called On Killing. How long ago was that published?
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About three years before I retired from the Army. I was on active duty. I'd been a West Point psych
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professor. And the book now has got about half a million copies sold. It's translated into eight
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languages. Marine Corps Commandants required reading, recommended reading is for the Army and the Air Force.
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And what inspired you to, I mean, it's such an unpleasant idea, right? Killing.
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Well, I enlisted in the Army in 1974. The Vietnam War did it pretty much in 72. I was a young
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paratrooper. We had combat veterans all around us. And the young troops wanted to know what combat was
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going to be like. And nobody would say. It was this kind of taboo topic. And I remember at the
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time being fascinated by, you know, what's going to happen in combat? What's going to be like in
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combat? Trying to get combat veterans to talk and tell us. And then fast forward 15 years.
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And I'm in route to teach at West Point as a psychology professor. My undergraduate training is a military
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historian. I said psychology. I don't want no stinking psychology. I'm a beady-eyed killer and I'm Army
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Ranger. I'm a historian. But I would have taken a graduate degree in underwater basket weaving if
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that's what, that's the program the Army let me take. So I said, I'll study the psychology of killing.
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And the Army pounded a square peg into a round hole. My particular personality background would almost
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never become a psychologist. And somebody with the personality background of studying psychology would
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almost never have looked at this topic. So my graduate work was all on this topic. I published the book
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afterwards as a West Point psych professor, as an Army Ranger, an infantry captain. All of a sudden,
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people would talk to me and they would tell me and they would give me a depth of information that
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most people will never get. And it was really an honor and an obligation to get this body of
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information. And that pretty well became my book on killing. On killing. And it's interesting that you
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noted, or you talked about how the veterans wouldn't want to talk really about what happened
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in combat. It's like a very private thing. And on killing, you actually compare the act of killing
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very similar to the act of sex. It's a private act that most people don't talk about. I mean,
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I retired from the Army 17 years ago now, 1998. I've been on the road almost 300 days a year,
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going on 17 years. I train. I'm the only law enforcement trainer qualified to train in all
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50 states. I train every federal agency. I train all of our tier one spec ops and all branches of
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the service. I also do a lot of work in school safety. And as you said, civilian sheepdogs,
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mental preparation for the battle. And as I talk with my sheepdogs, I get a depth of information
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the average person won't get. And I ask questions others won't ask. And I found out my firefighters
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after a brutal life and death for a long fire, finally get the fire out, finally get home at the
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end of the shift. And cops say, knock down, drag out fight, cuffed him and stuffed him, finally get
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home at the end of the shift. And cops say, gunfight, bad guy's dead, I'm alive. Finally get
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home when it's all over. And they all say, the best sex I've had in months. Both partners are very
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invested in some very intense sex. I tell my cops, I say, there's nothing wrong if it doesn't happen.
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There's nothing wrong if it does happen. Is it the affirmation of life in the face of death? Is it
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a hormonal surge? We don't know. But there's not a whole lot of perks that come to this job. You find
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one, relax and enjoy it. And I always said, off duty. Wait, wait, wait, until you're off duty.
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So the reproductive drive in the face of death is very powerful. And the two both are kind of
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mixed together in a taboo realm. And our depth of ignorance and our lack of knowledge in those
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fields. I'll give you just one example, Brett. And this is made out of me. For better or worse,
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this is my concept. But you know, the necktie. You know, the necktie, it starts down at the crotch,
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it comes up to your neck, it's got a big knob on the top. It's been in style for over 100 years.
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Fashion's come and go, come and go. And the necktie's been there for over 100 years.
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It's a dick. It's not just a phallic symbol, it's a dick. A hundred years from now,
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they'll look at photographs of us with our neckties and they'll all laugh and titter and say,
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couldn't they see it? Couldn't they see it? They're all wearing a big dick. They're wearing a dick.
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All the time, everywhere, they wear the dick. And I tell my cops, you know, you knock on the front
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door and you're both in your suits, you got your dick on. The guy that answers the door doesn't hit,
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the little monkey brain goes, woo, woo, woo. And it works. It works. It's intimidating. And if everybody
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has theirs on and you don't have yours on, it doesn't work. Of course, the bow tie is the guy that
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should not play in the game. He's opted out. And more or less a quasi-effeminate type.
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I always wear a bow tie now. You know, the cowboy bow tie. The cowboy's just not playing the game.
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Here's my dick. He pulls out his gun and waves his gun at you. There's my dick. He doesn't have
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to worry about this phallic symbol or this phallus that you're carrying. But I'm telling you,
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once you look at it, you know, and women almost never wear it. Women will, any fashion a man has,
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a woman will have. With very rare exceptions, women won't wear a tie because the monkey brain
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is confused. The monkey brain sees a woman with a tie and says, oh, oh, it doesn't work. It's there.
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It's powerful. It permeates every aspect of our society. And we're completely blind to it.
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When we talk about things like killing insects, these are just topics where social taboos and social
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blind spots are just everywhere. And our inability to pierce those is pretty powerful. And the
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destructive act and procreative act are pretty interwoven. And I've pretty much dedicated my
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Yeah. And you talk about in the book how, because of taboos we have in our culture,
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things like sex and things like killing, it's more of an abstraction for people now. They don't,
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you're not really close to it anymore. You know, a hundred, 150 years ago, most people lived on farms
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where they saw, you know, the slaughtering of animals, right?
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And they saw animals reproduced, but now, you know, most people are just so distanced from that.
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I mean, what effect does that distance from killing and from sex, I mean, what does that have on a,
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what kind of effect does that have on a person when they actually engage in like having to protect
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Yeah. They're, they're far less prepared psychologically. And it's not a big deal.
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We don't want to cop a pity party, but I'm convinced from a lifetime of study, the single
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best way to prepare for combat is hunting. My little, I never, I had three boys and I never
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was able to take them hunting. I was in the army. I was just going a hundred miles an hour day after
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day after day, but I've got grandchildren now and I consider it my responsibility to take my
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grandchildren hunting and block out a week or two every year for deer camp. One in Alabama
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with relatives, one in Minnesota with relatives. So, and took my little grandson, my oldest
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grandchild is 12 now. When he was seven, we went to deer camp the first time. And he came
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back a week later. He'd gotten out of school for a week, grubby and dirty, hadn't taken a
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shower or bath in a week and just absolutely on top of the world. And his mom said, what'd you
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like the best? And he said, gotten the deer for a seven year old boy to see all that, that
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crap and stuff inside of living creatures. Fascinating. And that's a healthy response.
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That's the way it ought to be. And those early inquisitive stages, we should be confronted with
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that stuff. We should be familiar with that stuff. And then in later ages, a mark of manhood
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would be to kill your own food and to bring it home, to be intimately familiar with the smell
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of blood and crap inside living creatures. And it means food on the table. From your youngest
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days, you would wring the neck of a chicken and you would gut it. The youngest child who
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was physically able to do it would wring the chicken's neck and gut it and pluck it. And
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that smell meant food on the table. And it was an integral part of who we were as a species
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from our youngest days. And we've really grown separate from that. Meanwhile, sex is either
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pornography with a twisted, distorted, really misrepresentation of the intimacy of sex, or
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it's, it's something in private. But throughout history, sex was something noisy that happened
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in the night. Everybody slept in a common room and, and animals, of course, were reproducing
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all around us. We were in tune with this cycle of life. So we've, we've kind of opted out of those
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aspects of life. We've made sex something rather taboo and, and we either study it on in a pornographic
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realm or we, we repress it. And the same thing we're killing. We either study it on a, in a pornographic
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realm with violent movies, which don't give you remotely the, the proper understanding of what happens,
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or, uh, we, uh, we, we, we repress it and refuse to even, uh, participate or, or discuss it in any
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way. So they, these two represent really the great taboos of our era. Uh, and it's, and it's all around
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us, uh, violent symbology and, uh, and sexual symbology, like I said, the necktie and, uh, uh,
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future generations, of course, our whole problem with, uh, with media violence and violent video games
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inflicted upon children, uh, threatens the very fabric of our civilization. Mexico's our future.
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Uh, Mexico's had more loss of life than Iraq and Afghanistan put together. Mexico's been at war
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with the cartels. A generation of kids, uh, trained on video games and trained on violent movies are,
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are ripping Mexico apart at the seams and they're coming at us like a freight train.
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So visit lynda.com slash art of man. That's L Y N D A.com slash art of man. And now back to the show.
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So you get, you make the argument in your book that, um, you know, naturally as human beings,
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we have a resistance to kill other humans. Um, but you make the case that things like video games
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and violent movies is actually reduces that resistance. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, we, uh, you
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know, the, the after effect of it, post-traumatic stress disorder, I cover my book on combat, uh,
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after 10 years on the road, uh, training cops and military daily, uh, my, my repertoire had evolved
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until it was a totally different topic than on killing. I called it the bulletproof mind and the
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bulletproof mind was turned into the book on combat. We did a two hour, uh, a two day presentation
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of, uh, the bulletproof mind and we, we audio taped it and we transcribed it and that became
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the foundation for on combat, which is really the next step in this evolution of understanding PTSD
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and, and the aftermath and the physiology and how the, what happens in the heat of battle,
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how in the hell could we have had 500 years of gunpowder combat and not known that people don't
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hear their shots? I'll get an audience of 500 people. I said, how many hunters we got out
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here? Half of them will raise their hand. I said, you ever notice something? You take your
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rifle to the range, you fire one shot from your hunting rifle in the range without hearing
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protection, ears are going to ring. You go to shop, you go to drop a deer. Boom. The shot echoes
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across the valley. People a half mile away hear the shot. Hunter, what do you hear? They all say,
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nothing. I say, how many, how many of you experienced that? What we're talking about?
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Come on, raise your hand. Boom. They all raise their hands. Uh, they didn't hear a sound with
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the auditory exclusion that the shots are quiet when you're killing. And it's not about an arousal
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level. It's not about physiological arousals, but the act of killing when, uh, when the predator
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shuts down his roar. But I've got case after case of, uh, of police officers who in, in the heat
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of a gunfight stopped firing because they couldn't hear their gun and they thought something was
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wrong. Yeah. Think about it. 500 years, five centuries of gunfighter combat. And we never
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bothered to let people know ahead of time. Hey, by the way, you probably won't hear the shots at
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the moment or two. Uh, the magnitude of our ignorance, the depth of understanding, the failure
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to, to, uh, uh, analyze and assess and, and examine this topic. It's just stunning.
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Well, yeah. So what's, um, let's talk about that, the whole bulletproof mind and, you know,
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on combat, because that's, um, something we've written about on the site, like, you know,
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the idea of being a sheepdog, right? Yeah. Um, so let's talk about some of that research. What
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happens? You mentioned auditory exclusion is one thing that happens, not just in high stress
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situations, but just in the act of killing. But let's say you are in a, um, an active
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shooter situation or a home invasion. What happens to the body, um, physiologically into
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the mind, psychologically when that sort of thing happens? Well, forgive me for a minute
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while we make a little. Sure. Discursion. The term you just use active shooter. Okay. It's
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active mass murder. A shooter's an active shooter is what happens on the range and actually
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shooters. The guy got lucky during deer season, but we're in such denial that we can't have
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a use of proper term for what's happening. These are active mass murders. These are massacres.
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Uh, um, the Boston massacre, five dead in the Boston master. And one of the things set out
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the American revolution, St. Valentine, the massacre, seven dead murdered in the St. Valentine
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massacre. Uh, and it was world famous. Add them up, add up the Boston massacre. They say
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Valentine massacre, you still got more dead in Columbine. Double that number. You still
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got more dead at Virginia Tech or Sandy Hook. Yeah. These are massacres and they're mass
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murders, multiple homicides. And we can't even call them what they are. Yeah, that's
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true. And then, you know, uh, what do we call the most horrible criminals in history? The
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Columbine shooter, the Virginia Tech shooter, the Sandy Hook shooter. These are not
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shooters. The shooter's a guy at the range. The shooter's a guy, uh, the, you know, they
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got lucky during deer season. These are, these are the Sandy Hook mass murderer, killer. These
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are vicious slaughterers. And then the very fabric of our society is such, such intense
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denial that we call them shooters. And I ask my cops, is the word shooter a synonym for
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horrible mass murder? When you open the dictionary, look up the word shooter. Does it say number
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one, horrible mass murder, the most horrible criminals in human history? No. But I tell my
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cops, if you use the word shooter to refer to these horrible criminals, anytime you're
00:21:40.480
a shooter, you're condemned by your own words. We, we, we refer to these horrible
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criminals as shooters. We refer to these horrible acts as shootings. And then when the
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cops, the shooter, the media condemns you because you're the shooter. And you told them
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the shooter is a horrible mass murder. I said, cops, you will always be condemned. The
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media will eat you alive. If you take what you are a shooter, what you do shooting and make
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it a horrible match, please, please help us stop using that word shooter or active shooter
00:22:09.640
situation. It's an act of mass murder. And he could be throwing Molotov cocktails. You
00:22:14.600
know, he's throwing bombs. I'm sorry. I only turned for active shooter. I can't deal with
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this one. Or he's got knives. A kid in Pennsylvania in his high school just a couple of months ago
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slashed 19 people with knives. Well, it's an active slasher. I only turned for active shooter.
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I'm sorry. I can't deal with this one. Our very language is tied up in knots, trying
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to, trying to not talk about the reality of what's happening. That's a good,
00:22:36.540
this life and death event. That's a good, we're going to take a quick
00:22:39.000
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save 25% off your first three months. And now back to the show.
00:23:24.780
Good point. I think it's a, it's a symptom of not wanting to imbue morality into the
00:23:30.480
discussion. We want to keep it very distance, right?
00:23:33.500
Well, it was more than that. It's a, it is a moral statement. If we, if we say cops are
00:23:41.080
shooters and shooters is, is a, is an ugly word that will immediately condemn the cops.
00:23:46.440
It's not just an attempt to distance ourself. It's a, it's an attempt to not even talk about
00:23:51.420
it. An attempt to, instead of saying mass murder or even active killer, we talk about the most
00:23:59.700
innocuous aspect of what happens shooter. And so, uh, it's a little bit different than,
00:24:04.900
than that. But in the moment of truth, when a human being is trying to steal your life away and,
00:24:09.740
and you have to steal their life, you have to take their life, uh, and in defense of your own life,
00:24:15.740
a variety of things are going to happen. First and foremost, with the vast majority,
00:24:19.040
the greatest proportion, they don't hear the shots. Now, if you're hunkered down and hiding,
00:24:24.360
the shots can be boom, boom, boom, overwhelming. But as soon as you turn your predator neurons on,
00:24:30.160
as soon as you start shooting, the shots get quiet, almost without fail. Now, then, uh, then we have
00:24:36.220
tunnel vision, the next most common thing, around 80% tunnel vision. Some people talk about tunnel
00:24:41.920
vision, like looking through a toilet paper tube. Other people call it a soda straw, very, very intense.
00:24:48.000
And you'll get, uh, you'll get, uh, uh, uh, uh, slow motion time. And the slow motion time runs around
00:24:55.420
maybe six out of 10 or so we'll experience that. And it's very powerful. And I'm convinced that it's
00:25:01.260
real. I've had thousands, no exaggeration. I'm, uh, I'm on the road 300 days a year for 17 years,
00:25:08.840
plus all the research before I retired. Every day I talk to people who've been in killing situations
00:25:13.440
and life and death situations. Every day I get to interview people who come up and talk with me
00:25:18.480
in exchange of information. And I've had thousands that tell me they could track the bullets in
00:25:23.020
combat. Not like the matrix where the bullet crawls past. It's kind of like paintball where the bullet's
00:25:27.880
slow enough, you can track it with your eyes. And in two different cases, people tell me they
00:25:32.720
tracked the bullet to where it hit in one case of wooden fence, in one case of brick wall. And
00:25:37.580
afterwards they were able to, uh, walk up to that spot and point to where the bullet hit.
00:25:43.440
Just a tiny hole in a, in a wooden fence or a little smear in a brick wall. And there's no
00:25:48.840
way they could have done that if they weren't tracking them with their eyes, like they said
00:25:51.440
they were. So this, uh, this business of, uh, of the slow motion time is wild and it can mess
00:25:59.380
people up. And then, then about half of all trained seasoned cops have memory gaps, blackouts.
00:26:05.520
Uh, data is just coming in so fast and so furious that all kinds of things seem to get stacked
00:26:11.580
up and they aren't processed. And after a couple of nights sleep, some of that stuff comes back.
00:26:16.800
Guy named, uh, Bill Lewinsky, Dr. Bill Lewinsky has started something called the Force Science
00:26:20.780
Institute. Just one of the great geniuses of our time, one of the great initiatives of our time.
00:26:26.020
And they've got scientific research to establish a foundation for police policy.
00:26:31.740
And what they say, and this has become national best practices,
00:26:34.580
after a deadly force incident, you did not get a statement from the police officer immediately
00:26:40.320
after the gunfight. You're going to get garbage in military. We've always known the first report
00:26:45.580
of combat is always wrong. Uh, and if you talk to somebody right after the shooting, you have
00:26:50.200
auditory exclusion, slow motion time, you have memory gaps and memory distortions upwards to one in five.
00:26:56.740
We'll just flat remember things that didn't happen. Sometimes tiny things, sometimes big things.
00:27:00.460
So the best practices, uh, national standards is you wait for 48 hours before you get a full
00:27:08.180
statement. Otherwise you get garbage and you have to live with that garbage in court. And you take
00:27:12.860
this officer to the scene and you have them walk through the scene and tell everything that happens
00:27:18.360
with the memory cues and the actual scene that they're at. And then you'll get a far more detailed
00:27:23.040
thing to have this memory gap. And then, uh, like I said, you get the memory distortions. It was,
00:27:27.840
it was one of our tier one spec ops medics. Uh, um, he said, why did the wounded hallucinate so much?
00:27:38.880
And then that's a good word for it. You know, remember things that didn't happen. It's
00:27:42.480
hallucinations. And he said, why did they always hallucinate bad things? You know, I'm paralyzed,
00:27:49.120
I'm blind. I let everybody down. I'm going to die. I'll never have babies. Uh, uh, uh, you know,
00:27:54.100
just, uh, just once he said, uh, in the heat of battle, I don't like to see some wounded
00:28:00.560
guy hallucinate something good. Well, under stress, we envision possibilities under extreme
00:28:06.200
stress. What we envision possibility in our mind can become reality. And when we've been
00:28:11.960
wounded, we very seldom envision good things. And so these hallucinations and this auditory
00:28:19.100
exclusion and this, uh, this slow motion time, uh, uh, set aside the fact that somebody's
00:28:24.800
trying to kill you, just set aside the facts. I'm trying to kill. If you sat there right
00:28:28.920
now, boom, uh, auditory exclusion, slow motion time, uh, uh, uh, tunnel vision, uh, uh, autopilot,
00:28:37.640
your body's doing things without conscious thought, blackouts, gaps in their memory,
00:28:41.800
hallucinations, just those things by themselves will scare the daylights out of you. The fact
00:28:46.960
that somebody is trying to kill you is bad enough without being forewarned for and about
00:28:51.300
the things that happen in combat. So, so we warn people about what happens in combat and
00:28:56.340
then we warn them about what's going to happen after combat. And that's a critical, critical
00:29:01.500
piece of the equation. You kind of expect crazy things in combat when weird and wild things
00:29:06.800
happen after the event, they can really mess you up unless you've been warned.
00:29:11.560
What are some of those things that can happen after combat? Is it the memory blackouts or?
00:29:15.380
No, no. Well, what happens is you re-experience the event. Now, you know, if, if, if you're a kid,
00:29:23.880
you touch a hot stove, you'll never touch this stove again. A powerful network of neurons,
00:29:30.040
a neural pathway has been established. Whenever there's fear and pain associated with learning,
00:29:35.620
a, a instantly, a powerful, strong pathway of neurons is established. I got, I got a German
00:29:41.960
shepherd. When the dog was a puppy, she walked across the threshold and caught her, just caught
00:29:46.340
a, a, a, a claw on, on the threshold and yelped in and something bitter when she crossed that
00:29:52.820
threshold. And I'm telling you for the next six months, I couldn't get that puppy to cross that
00:29:57.000
threshold without dragging her. A powerful neural network. There's something there that'll bite me.
00:30:01.160
I can't go there. I got to avoid that. Well, under the stress of a combat situation,
00:30:08.220
the neural pathways are vastly greater than touching a hot stove or having your claw caught
00:30:12.800
in a threshold. Uh, deep and powerful neural pathways are established, but you don't even
00:30:18.280
know that they're, uh, a week later, a random gunshot goes up and you don't expect it. Like a cop. And
00:30:24.360
he told me, he said, um, I'm a week after my gunfight, I'm sitting up in the bleachers with my wife,
00:30:30.100
watching my daughter at a swim meet. A starter's gun goes off and I didn't expect it. Boom.
00:30:36.520
It is as though the event was happening again. Your heart is pounding. You're, you're, you're, uh, you,
00:30:42.820
you, you, you re-experience the event. And this act of re-experience of the event is normal
00:30:48.680
by itself. It is not PTSD, PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder happens. When you try to not
00:30:56.620
think about it, you will literally drive yourself crazy. You cannot not think about something.
00:31:02.780
You will drive yourself crazy trying to not think about it. You got to make peace with the memory.
00:31:08.460
You got to delink the memory from the emotions. And the easiest and most effective way to do that
00:31:13.520
is to talk about the event without the emotions come along for the ride. And the breathing exercise
00:31:20.120
is one of the tools we use and, and the shortcut to get people to read. And here's just a little
00:31:24.440
nugget. You know, when I tell my cops, you're going to take one little nugget of the manly art
00:31:28.700
and put it at the top of your list of, uh, in your little toolbox, your little toolbox of response tools.
00:31:35.140
Whenever you're dealing with somebody who's angry, upset, anxious, frightened, including yourself,
00:31:40.240
make them stop and take a drink of water. I don't do counseling. I do don't do therapy,
00:31:47.340
not qualified, but I have had the honor to debrief an awful lot of people about very traumatic events.
00:31:53.540
And the one tool I use, I set a bottle of water in front of them. And every time they become emotional,
00:31:59.080
stop, take a drink, regain control. If you talk about the event and become emotional,
00:32:04.540
then you're reinforcing the link between the memory and the emotions. If you talk about the event and
00:32:11.400
remain calm, then you're separating that link between the memory and emotions. And that's the
00:32:16.980
path of healing. And one of the, one of the tools we have is, uh, every time you come emotional, I tell
00:32:22.280
my cops, you know, you've got a citizen who's a victim of a crime, a very traumatic event has happened
00:32:26.900
to them. You get a witness statement from them. If they become emotional, a, you're not getting the,
00:32:32.220
the quality, calm information you need, but B you're spinning that person down the path of mental
00:32:39.240
illness. But if they talk about the event and every time they become emotional, you make them take a
00:32:44.080
drink, they regain control. You'll be amazed at how well it works. This, this fundamental tool is taken
00:32:49.960
off across the therapeutic world, like a grass fire. We used to do the breathing and now we realize
00:32:54.940
it's a shortcut to get people breathing. It works for two reasons. This, this business is taken on
00:33:01.000
drinking water. Works for two reasons. A deer is being chased by a wolf. A deer is being chased by a
00:33:05.680
wolf. Does he tell him to get a drink? Ah, I can't get a drink. I'm being chased by a wolf. He's really
00:33:10.860
thirsty, but he ain't got to get a drink. The very fact that you stopped and took a drink, sends a
00:33:17.160
message to the midbrain. Hey, we're safe. We got time for a drink. It literally puts in the clutch and
00:33:23.520
puts that midbrain in a different gear. But it's also a natural way to get people to breathe.
00:33:29.140
Study what you do when you take a drink. You breathe in, you hold your breath, you let it out.
00:33:35.080
You cannot take a drink without taking a breath. So the path to healing is to de-link the memory from
00:33:42.300
the emotions. And the way to do that is to talk about it. And every time you talk about it, if you
00:33:48.200
become emotional, stop and take a drink. That's why talking over beer. Cops call it choir practice.
00:33:53.300
You know, they get together after they shift and they talk over a beer and, and they, you know,
00:33:58.760
they start to become emotional. They stop, they take a drink, they regain control and they keep
00:34:02.420
going. Just the act of talking over beer. It's the act of, of taking a drink that allows you to
00:34:09.620
remain calm and de-link the memory from the emotions. And you've taken the critical necessary
00:34:14.740
first step on the path to healing. When you can talk about the event, Hey, what happened in that
00:34:20.020
con fight with you guys? Tell us about it. What happened? Well, you know, here's what happened.
00:34:23.640
Take a drink, take a breath, talk about it. Begin to lose control. Stop, take a drink, regain control,
00:34:30.680
talk the way through it. Pilots, you know, did a debriefing, uh, uh, on a beer in the mess after every
00:34:37.020
mission. Uh, and we always talked around the, uh, around the campfire, but then starting in World
00:34:43.980
War I, we no longer had the luxury of taking the nights off and talking around the campfire.
00:34:48.600
Uh, we had day and night combat for months on end and we lost something we've always had,
00:34:53.360
which is the ability to debrief around the campfire every night about the battle.
00:34:58.040
And, and so understanding what will happen after combat, understanding how to leash that in and the
00:35:05.080
age old process of talking around the campfire or the, the pilot at the mess, you know, with the beer
00:35:09.820
in hand and his hands weaving around and showing what was happening. And then every time he begins
00:35:15.100
to lose control, take a drink, regain control. It's as old as alcohol in the campfire. It's as old
00:35:20.520
as warfare to talk over the event, to de-link the memory from the emotions, regain control. Uh, and
00:35:26.420
we've lost it. And what we've done now is, is recreated it. Uh, and, and it's powerful. And we do it now
00:35:33.360
with the depth of understanding and, and it's been my life's work to, uh, to communicate these things and
00:35:38.220
to let people know what's going to happen to them before the life and death event, stress
00:35:43.540
diarrhea, very common LAPD SWAT. Uh, they're in combat every day. They told me, you know,
00:35:49.720
it was always 17 years ago. I first started working and they said, you know what? We're
00:35:53.260
LAPD SWAT. We're in life and death events every day. We, uh, we try to have people give
00:35:58.660
us a 20 minute warning. We're standing by and all right, negotiation is broken down. You're
00:36:02.800
going in, here's your 20 minute warning. What does LAPD SWAT do with that 20 minute warning?
00:36:06.860
They call it the battle crap. It's a battle crap. Your body will help. It's called stress
00:36:11.380
diarrhea. Do it now. Later on, it may be what's called explosive stress diarrhea. Your body
00:36:16.400
wants to dump the toxic waste inside every human body. There's a toxic waste site and the
00:36:21.940
lower abdomen, some of those toxic stuff on the planet. If the wound happens and that
00:36:26.860
stuff leaks out, it'll infect the wound. And prior to penicillin, it was a guaranteed death
00:36:31.400
sentence. So be warned about what happens before the event here. Your body might want to dump
00:36:36.040
that toxic waste. Uh, be, be warned about what happens during the event and be warned
00:36:42.440
about what happens after the event. And at every stage before, during and after the tool
00:36:48.040
that we're using to leash in is the breathing exercise. And of course, the shortcut to get
00:36:54.140
people to breathe is, is to take a drink, take the drink. So that's kind of the whole dynamic
00:36:58.660
in a nutshell of, of the ride and where we've been and what we've done and how we've recreated
00:37:03.280
it across time and laid the foundation for our warriors to be far more capable of performing in the
00:37:10.480
heat of battle and in life and death events, whatever that may be. That's really, really
00:37:14.240
fascinating. Um, I thought it was interesting in your book and you kind of mentioned there a little
00:37:17.700
bit about possibly kind of make the argument that possibly one of the reasons why there's been an
00:37:22.700
increase in PTSD is that for most of modern warfare, we didn't have that debriefing period,
00:37:28.840
right? After the battles, like you went to battle and then you were back in your bunk and the next day
00:37:34.460
you're in battle. And then when the war was over, you know, anciently you had to like march home and
00:37:39.760
it took maybe a month to get home. So you had that time to talk with your comrades about what happened.
00:37:45.540
Um, and you'd go take part in some like ritualistic activities to sort of cleanse yourself of,
00:37:51.360
of war and then you can integrate back into normal society in a healthy matter. But you make the
00:37:56.760
argument that because of the rise of rapid transport, like you could be in Fallujah one day and the next
00:38:01.440
year you'll be back in Baltimore and you don't have that time to, to cool off. You know, uh, the
00:38:07.080
Canadian army has kind of set a standard for this, Brent. And when the war first began, uh, it was
00:38:12.520
Canada's first shooting war in 50 years. Korea was the last time Canada was in a shooting war
00:38:17.540
and, uh, they wanted to try to do it right. When they sent the first regiment off to Afghanistan,
00:38:23.120
they did everything they could think of, including having me come and present to the troops.
00:38:28.300
When that first regiment came home, they said, okay, what worked? They said, Grossman. Grossman
00:38:32.840
told us what it was going to be like. He told us what to expect. He told us how to deal with it
00:38:36.540
head and shoulders far and away. The most valuable thing we had was to have Grossman warn us.
00:38:41.660
And one of the things they did with all of this was all the Canadian units coming back from
00:38:46.280
Afghanistan. Now stop for a week in Cyprus, Cyprus. I mean, this is, this is one of the most
00:38:52.820
beautiful places on the planet filled with beautiful women and booze and beaches and
00:38:59.240
the Mediterranean Cyprus. I mean, this is, this is so cool. And they stop, they're headed home,
00:39:06.200
but you know, you don't want to, and they do their processing and they do the debriefing and they
00:39:10.660
blow off steam and they get an opportunity to, to go out and, and, uh, and, and partake of alcohol
00:39:16.660
and talk and women and, and all the things they couldn't have in the war zone. And then they bring
00:39:20.860
them home. It is so brilliant. Uh, the, the, you know, and it's something that we could learn from
00:39:27.280
that, uh, we we've lost a lot of that dynamic of, of marching home together and talking at night
00:39:34.800
over the campfire. So, uh, uh, we're learning and, uh, the Canadians had done a great example
00:39:41.100
about how to, how to get it right. Uh, barring the, uh, the fact that it's not done with our
00:39:47.140
military, we should try to do it ourselves with the returning warriors. Take off a week, take a young
00:39:52.120
warrior someplace, cool and fun and, and, and spend a little time depressurizing and, and partying and,
00:39:58.660
and, uh, and talking and, uh, and help them be there at that moment. I give them that, that
00:40:04.700
depressurization time if we can. Okay. So let's talk a bit about, um, your new, your new project.
00:40:10.860
Uh, it's Grossman Academy. Yeah. Um, what, who's it for in? Commandants required reading. And when we
00:40:17.540
take the book, uh, on combat and it is the textbook and I teach the class and there's tests, uh, there's
00:40:24.500
no paper required, but there's tests and you get a three semester credit hour class. Uh, in a lot of
00:40:30.720
states, it serves as in-service training for health providers, for law enforcement, for firefighters. So
00:40:36.620
a lot of states you can get required in-service training credit for it. And in most college
00:40:41.500
programs, you can get three semester credit hours elective, uh, uh, credit for the class. And we've got
00:40:47.580
on combat out. It's taken off. It's enormously, or the, the, the on combat class and the Grossman
00:40:54.460
Academy, grossmanacademy.com. Just, just go to grossmanacademy.com and there's the on combat
00:40:59.640
class. And within six months, we hope to have the on killing class out. And, uh, these are
00:41:04.860
the two books on combat and on killing. Uh, and then there are other astounding leaders
00:41:10.960
in the community who I want to have do their own semester credit hour class using their books
00:41:17.440
as textbooks. And I'll introduce them and I'll, I'll understand, I'll explain why their books
00:41:22.620
are so important and, and then have them teach their class. And, and the student, and in this
00:41:28.080
case, the student gets an electronic copy of bond combat as, as, as part of the class. Uh, very,
00:41:34.200
very many, many of our people have already read the book and are able to blow right through the class
00:41:37.720
and, uh, you deserve it. You deserve three semester credit hours for, for having read this book and
00:41:42.660
having this depth of understanding in this field. So we're both in psych electives and, uh,
00:41:47.480
criminal justice electives and, uh, military history electives. Uh, and, and just, just any
00:41:53.940
general ed where you've got a general elective, you can tag, uh, this course fits in and the,
00:41:58.940
and the follow on courses are going to be a big deal. It's kind of funny to think about,
00:42:03.700
you know, I, I may be dead and gone. Uh, I'll be 58 tomorrow. Uh, uh, you know, uh, my dad only
00:42:12.020
lived until he was about 60. I hope I'm in real good health. I plan to fight the good fight for
00:42:17.180
another 20 years. But if I, uh, if I cashed in my chips and, uh, went home tomorrow, um,
00:42:25.620
this would be a legacy where people could attend my class and learn straight from my mind,
00:42:33.000
straight from my mind. Uh, not just reading the book, but actually taking that class.
00:42:38.120
And there's something interesting here, Brett, you might get a kick out of it. Sure. And in the
00:42:42.480
year 2000, they did a study of all of the institutions in Europe that were there on the
00:42:51.300
year 1000 and the year 2000. Isn't that interesting? No nation was city set aside cities now cities
00:42:58.180
set that aside, but no nation existed with the same name and the same structure in the year 1000
00:43:05.480
is the year 2000. No corporation, no entity. The only thing was the Catholic church and several
00:43:13.080
hundred universities. That's all the universities, uh, uh, the institutes of higher learning,
00:43:20.160
uh, the classes that we can record on modern material and, and be teaching the class potentially
00:43:27.000
hundreds of years from now. It's, it's fun to have a book published and think that a hundred years
00:43:31.520
from now, somebody might still be reading that a legacy, a kind of immortality, but it, it, it's
00:43:36.720
even more so kind of look at this class and think that it might be available to people down the road.
00:43:41.540
It's kind of exciting stuff. And, uh, I think I'll be able to find some of the great leaders in
00:43:45.820
various fields to be able to, to do courses and I'll be part of the Grossman Academy and, uh, and, uh,
00:43:51.540
to, you know, Shaolin Temple, uh, uh, a focal point of what I call the warriors to this warrior
00:43:57.360
renaissance. We're in a renaissance. We've learned more about the reality of combat in the last 50
00:44:05.500
years than the previous 5,000 years put together. And this warrior renaissance is this explosion of
00:44:11.500
knowledge. Uh, maybe we can capture it. And certainly we're done with the first, uh, the first
00:44:16.140
course. And I encourage any of your readers to, to go to grossmanacademy.com and, and take a look at
00:44:21.440
that first course, uh, just for the joy of learning or, or, uh, to pick up three semester credit hours
00:44:27.080
and or in-service credit training in your profession. So it is open to civilians as well,
00:44:31.780
not just law enforcement. Absolutely. Open to all. Fantastic. Well, Lieutenant Dave Grossman,
00:44:36.900
thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure. Brett, I'm a big fan of what you're
00:44:41.000
doing. You're part of the warrior renaissance. You're part of that explosion of knowledge and
00:44:46.380
depth of understanding that what it means to be human, what it means to be a male, uh, in our
00:44:51.580
species and in our times. And it's an honor to work with you. Well, thank you that I'm honored and
00:44:56.080
humbled by your words. Our guest today was Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman. He is the
00:44:59.560
author of on killing and on combat. You can find both those books on amazon.com, uh, really
00:45:05.220
two very interesting reads. Then you can also check out his website, killology.com for more
00:45:10.380
information about his work. And then also check out grossmanacademy.com where you can sign up
00:45:15.440
for his class on combat, which is about getting ready for those combat life or death situations
00:45:21.720
and preparing yourself physically and mentally for it. Grossmanacademy.com.
00:45:27.260
Well, that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice,
00:45:32.320
make sure to check out the art of manliness website at art of manliness.com. And if you enjoy our
00:45:36.960
podcast and you get something out of it, I'd really appreciate it. If you go to iTunes or Stitcher or
00:45:42.540
whatever it is you use to listen to the podcast and give us a rating or review that will help us out a lot.
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And until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.