Though becoming a Spanish Linguist was not my first choice the support I did in 82nd Airborne led me to be around some of the top operators in the special forces and operations commands at Ft. Bragg. Martial arts came from soldiering. Not as some would believe coming out of some temple.

 

What I figured out very quickly was too things that forever changed my life and my training. TMA (Traditional Martial Arts) had been diluted from it original form because of what I was eventually to discover social and political agendas and pressures outside the TMA community.

 

My study at this point was already training in KOBUDO, Swords training, Ninjutsu and I was about to be introduced to a family style of KALI from a Green Beret I met at DLI. We were all working on bringing combatives back into the arts. Deconstructing technique and retro-engineering the methods to fit back into life and death scenarios.

 

This started a quest to discovery the historical arts that really worked in combat and in real defense. Military was not yet ready to understand the benefits of personal combatives in the scheme of training, the power of mental preparedness it offers, the ability to have practiced applied tactics. But we were working on it through training people around the base, officially where we could unofficially when at all possible.

 

The cross training was a hard thing to do at the time as it was NOT at all accepted and caused many to reject my participation.