School of hard knocks

Briant Wells center turned into Combatives School

BY MICK WALSH - mwalsh@ledger-enquirer.com --

Matt Larsen, considered the founder of modern day combatives, could have bragged about the size of his new school, which, at 11,000-square feet, is twice what his old place was.

But instead, the director of the Army's Combatives School wanted to talk about the three feet that often separate the good guys from the bad in hand-to-hand combat.

"We have to be ready for the last three feet of the fight," said Larsen shortly after he, Col. Gregory Kane, 197th Brigade commander, and Command Sgt. Maj. Russell Sadler participated in Monday's grand opening of the combatives school. It used to be called the Briant Wells Fitness Center.

Larsen, who retired as a sergeant first class three years ago, authored the combatives manual, tested when he was assigned to the 75th Ranger Regiment and later at the Ranger Training Brigade.

Basically, combatives is what you must rely on when your weapons fail.

After introducing the concept to a new Stryker brigade at Fort Lewis, Wash., Larsen was surprised to see an article in a Seattle newspaper that quoted a brigade leader who said that "if it gets down to hand-to-hand combat, something has gone wrong."

But when a buck sergeant in that same brigade ran into a situation in Iraq a short time later, his combatives skills actually saved his life.

Paul McCulley was searching for a weapons cache along with three other soldiers when a suicide bomber killed himself and two of the soldiers, Larsen said during a walk-through of the newly renovated fieldhouse. McCulley was knocked unconscious and awoke with a rifle butt pounding his face. McCulley was able to grab the AK-47 and began employing knee strikes from the clinched position.

"In his after-action review, McCulley called his fight with the Iraqi a 'skilled overmatch' and credited combatives with keeping him alive," Larsen said.

When the Fort Lewis brigade returned from its deployment, it asked for more combatives training.

"Training like this has been around since 1864," said Larsen, who now leads a cadre of 12 instructors. "What's really different from the kind of training in the past is that we now have a permanent home in an outstanding facility."

The Army invested $500,000 and several months in transforming Briant Wells from a fitness center into the Combatives School.

The program is designed to train soldiers from different Army installations worldwide to become combatives instructors at their home bases.

The gym renovation included padded walls, a new classroom, improved office space, a medical screening room, a dedicated heavy bag room, a caged equipment storage room and a fully equipped gym for the instructors.