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THE BULLETPROOF MIND

 By Loren W. Christensen

Talk about setting goals.

“I want to train every cop in the United States,” says Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, and he’s got a good jump on it, too. From his home and office in Jonesboro, Arkansas, he flies about 300 days a year training police officers and military all over the U.S., Canada and overseas. His message is powerful, as is his delivery, and his sessions often end with a boisterous standing ovation.  

Col. Grossman is a retired Army Ranger, West Point psychology professor and director of the Killology Research Group in Jonesboro where his work on the psychology of killing has made him an internationally recognized expert. He has testified before the U.S. House and Senate, and President Clinton cited his research after the Littleton school shootings.

The Colonel brings to his presentations years of scholarly work, including thousands of interviews with professional warriors – soldiers and police officers – who have looked into the jaws of death. His clearly explained scientific findings, punctuated with powerful supportive anecdotes, and a good ol’ boy Southern sense of humor, have made Col. Grossman one of the most popular and sought after speakers today.

He’s an author, too. His best-selling book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and his second book, Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence, is considered the definitive work relating violent media to school shootings. He has lent his expertise to places like Littleton and Jonesboro and he’s discussed the issue on top TV talk shows, radio and news programs.

Financial gain is not what drives Col. Grossman to want to “train every cop in the United States.” His fervor comes from his deep and profound belief in what soldiers and police officers do. He is driven to share his research and 23 years of military experience to save officers’ lives and to encourage them to be a warrior for justice.

Col. Grossman says that, around the world, law enforcement officers and our military find themselves now working the same kind of missions and confronting opponents who are similarly armed with assault rifles and explosives. Modern times necessitate that officers carry high-tech weapons and have immediate access to SWAT teams who look like, and are equipped like, a military force. 

An explosion of violent crime has caused this change for law enforcement agencies. Between 1957 and 1994, we have experienced an almost sevenfold increase in per capita aggravated assault. In recent years, there has been a slight reduction, primarily a result of aggressive policing and a fivefold increase in per capita incarceration rates since 1970, but still the serious assault rate is nearly six times greater than in 1957.

Where do we get professional police warriors, men and women willing to face the most heavily armed criminals in history, willing to rush up the steps of a burning World Trade Center, and willing to go out every day to do an extraordinarily stressful job in these most difficult times?

Col. Grossman says the answer is simple: We build them; we train them; we prepare them – and that is much of what his training sessions are all about.

Let’s take a brief look at some of the key elements in Col. Grossman’s presentation for police officers which he calls “The Bulletproof Mind.”

A New Kind of Threat

Back in 1995, when law enforcement was struggling with a massive proliferation of street gangs and wave after wave of illegal drugs, many wondered if the job could get any tougher. It did. It began when the most deadly attack ever committed by a domestic terrorist in one day ripped through the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Four years later, just as the term “mass murder” was beginning to fade from our vocabulary, two teenaged boys dressed in trench coats executed the largest teenaged mass murder in history. Prior to Columbine, an 11-year-old in Jonesboro held the record for mass murder in a school. Then, last year, the horrific terrorist attack of September 11 took more American lives in a single day than any other act on American soil since the Civil War.

Police today are learning to face a new twist on terrorism: It’s called body count. Whether the perpetrators are school killers, workplace killers, or international terrorists, they don’t want to talk to our negotiators; their goal is to kill as many people as possible.

We Are Better Prepared Now

It may have taken the horror of Columbine to shake law enforcement awake, but we are on it now, as agencies across the country develop rapid response techniques to go into schools and face young killers in the halls. Citizens, too, are no longer going to sit by as innocent men, women, and children die en masse. We saw this new thinking on Sept 11, when Americans on that fourth airplane, Flight 93 over Pennsylvania, fought back.

A Cop in Every School

The most recent statistics show 35 murders in one year in our schools and over a quarter of a million assaults. Col. Grossman says that putting an armed officer in every school could dramatically reduce the deaths and injuries. Just as today’s airports take a no-nonsense approach to security, schools need to do the same by establishing stricter rules regarding threats and weapons, by establishing rigid dress codes, and implementing randomly located metal detectors. Since school killers don’t want to take hostages and they don’t want a gunfight, an armed officer in every school acts as a deterrent. A nice side benefit is that officers also serve as a role model for future recruitment.

These Violent Times

Col. Grossman says that since modern medical science is saving more lives now than ever before, the annual murder statistic is not a true indicator of the level of violence in our schools, streets, and perpetrated against our police officers. The true indicator is the aggravated assault rate which, in many cases, is an unsuccessful murder. That statistic has increased fivefold in the last 40 plus years, making today the most violent in peacetime American history.

Enabling Killing

Although there are rare exceptions, inside the mind of most healthy members of most species is a resistance to kill their own kind. We see it in animals and we see it among humans. Many people think killing is a natural act, but Col. Grossman argues that it isn’t. He discusses how new and innovative pop up targets, video-based firearms training simulators, and Simunition®-based training are used to facilitate overcoming this innate resistance. These devices are then combined with high repetition to condition a correct response even in the face of fear.

Conditioned Responses

Sometimes, a deadly force encounter explodes without warning, or a fight can be so fast and furious that there is no time to think about which technique to use and how best to employ it. To survive, you must do what needs to be done – now. In order to react reflexively, yet responsibly, and continue to fight no matter how impaired, you must have a set of conditioned responses ingrained into your mind.

Range training must be repetitive. When a pop up target of a bad guy appears (stimulus), you shoot (response). Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, and then a pop up target of a man holding a cell phone appears, you don’t shoot. The more realistic the target is, the better.

Sleep Deprivation

“Lack of sleep is a key factor in stress casualties and in PTSD,” the Colonel says. “The sleep deprived zombie, the physical and mental equivalent of a legally drunk person, is not the kind of officer we want carrying a gun, driving, or making life and death decisions, but it happens all the time in our understaffed police agencies; it’s a situation ripe for a lawsuit.”

Surprisingly, there are still agencies which practice shift rotation, some as often as every three months. Couple that strain with sleep deprivation from forced overtime, then add to the mix a traumatic event, and the probability of an officer making an inappropriate response increases dramatically. 

Accelerated Heart Rate
and Performance 

Your ability to function begins to decline as your heart rate increases in response to a traumatic event. At about 115 beats per minute, your fine motor skills begin to falter, such as your ability to write or load bullets into a magazine. At 145 beats, your complex motor skills begin to decay and bilateral symmetry begins to set in; meaning, what you do with one hand, you are likely to do with your other. This is dangerous when you are holding a gun in one hand and grabbing a suspect with your other (which is never a good idea anyway).

Above 175 beats per minute, a catastrophic set of events begins to happen: Both your fine and complex motor skills go; tunnel vision sets in; you have difficulty seeing your gun sights; your rational thinking shuts down; your blood pressure skyrockets; your hearing is affected; and irrational flight or fight behavior sets in. Only your gross motor skills can still function (mainly your ability to run and grapple without thinking and without skill). New studies show that the heart rate of some people in combat can spike to 300 beats per minute and sustain at 200 beats.

Stress Inoculation

Realistic settings and situations, combined with live fire training using Simunition rounds will dramatically elevate your adrenaline to replicate how a real situation feels. The more you engage in this kind of training, the lower your heart rate gets as you become “inoculated” against combat, just as a vaccination will inoculate against a disease. An important element of a simunition exercise is to condition you to continue to fight after you have been hit with a bullet.

Tactical Breathing

This is a simple breathing procedure which instantly clears your mind of clutter. Do it before a stressful event to get optimum physical and mental control, during the event to give clarity to your decision-making, and after a violent encounter to calm your raging flow of adrenaline. The Colonel advocates doing it during the critical incident debriefing as a tool to help delink physiological arousal from your intense memory of the event. Here’s how it’s done.

Breathe in through the nose for a count of four, filling your lower belly. Hold it for a count of four and then exhale through your lips for a count of four. Hold for a count of four and then repeat the cycle, so it looks like this: In through the nose 2-3-4, hold 2-3-4. Out through the lips 2-3-4, hold 2-3-4.  That’s one set. Repeat for four sets.

The Reality of Taking a Life

Anecdotal evidence proves that the expression “scared speechless” is a common reaction to stress by people who have not trained properly to function in a high stress, traumatic event. Scientific evidence (the Col. draws extensively from Deadly Force Encounters, Artwohl, 1996) and volumes of anecdotes indicate that, in many shooting situations, there is a sudden clarity of vision and a slowing of time. Some officers experience momentary paralysis, intrusive thoughts, memory distortions, and loss of memory, such as the inability to recall the number of rounds fired.

Coupled with this is the tendency for some officers to shoot multiple times under stress, a fear induced response called perseveration, a phenomenon seen in other deadly situations, such as in a burning building when people try repeatedly to open a locked door instead of seeking another way out.

Proper training is the solution to perseveration, especially simunition-based training.

The Fog of Uncertainty

Everyday you live with the burden that today you might face a violent situation in which you have to kill to avoid being killed. This is called “the fog of uncertainty,” and can eat away at you if it’s not dealt with properly. We know that a traumatic event will be psychologically debilitating when an officer denies that such an event could occur. To prevent this powerful shock, you must absolutely accept that not everyone is going to be compliant and today just might be the day. 

Flight, Fight, Food, and
Human Nature

The stress hormones pouring into your body in preparation for, say, a shooting, are there for flight or fight. If there is no flight or fight required, the stress hormones need to be released and the best way is through vigorous daily exercise. Overeating is a common response to stress, making exercise even more important to reduce the psychological need for comfort food. Stress might affect your sexuality, too; sometimes dampening desire, sometimes increasing it. Whichever direction it goes, it’s important to know that it’s a natural response to facing death.

The Moral Obligation to Participate
in Debriefing

Officers reluctant to participate in a post-incident debriefing need to understand that since their (potential) post-traumatic stress disorder can also affect their family and coworkers, they need to do it for them. Debriefings should include every officer involved in the incident.

Col. Grossman says, “Any organization which sends officers into the toxic realm of interpersonal aggression, and does not subsequently conduct a critical incident debriefing, is morally, medically, and legally negligent.”

Train the Mind and Body to Win

Many scenario-based training programs pretend to kill the trainee when he errs. This teaches him to die and we don’t teach people to die; we teach them to live. Instructors should strive to never send a “loser” off the training range. It’s paramount that a trainee leaves at the end of the training feeling good that he has learned and progressed. Instructors should never speak negatively about their trainees, as there is a confidentiality standard among instructors and leaders, just as there is among priests and doctors. The instructor’s job is to build people up, not tear them down by ridicule.

On Survival

If you are alive to know you have been shot, you must do one of two things: If you don’t have help, you must continue to fight the perpetrator. If he is no longer a threat, you still must get out of the line of fire and get medical help. Know that you can take a bullet through your heart and still neutralize the threat, or hold on until help comes.

Great advances in medical technology have made it possible to survive even deadly wounds.

Preparing Your Family

Though you can prepare yourself to face a deadly threat on the job, take rounds, and even die, it’s unfathomable to think of your loved ones in harm’s way. By the nature of the job, it’s a possibility that you may have to take police action when you’re off duty with your family, so you must prepare them. For example, Col. Grossman says that, should you get wounded, your family should be instructed not to come to you until the threat is gone. You don’t want them in the “kill zone.”

After the Last Roll Call

One vital element of survival and happiness in retirement is to have a strong support group outside of work – people and organizations not associated with law enforcement. Since you have had a challenging life of serving and contributing to the community and the country, it’s vital that you find a way to continue to serve in some capacity. You can serve your community in a variety of ways or teach others in lecture or writing what took you years of sweat and toil to learn.

Warriorhood

The retired Army Ranger sprinkles the word “warrior” throughout his presentations. He uses an analogy to show that, in society, there are sheep, sheepdogs and wolves. The task of the sheepdog (the warrior) is to protect the sheep (the people) against the wolf (the predators). The average American on September 11 said, “Thank God I wasn’t on those planes.”

But, the warrior said, “Dear God, why couldn’t I have been on those planes? Maybe I could have made a difference.”

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman’s Web site, www.killology.com, lists his monthly training and speaking schedule. Check to see when he will be in your area and avail yourself of his powerful and inspiring presentation.n

About the Author: Loren W. Christensen recently retired after 29 years in law enforcement. He now works as a full-time writer and martial arts instructor. He has written 23 books, made two defensive tactics videos, written dozens of magazine articles, and is the editor of  the Rap Sheet, the Portland (Oregon) Police Association’s monthly newspaper. You can reach him on his Web site (LWC BOOKS) at www.lwcbooks.com.