Fight!

This is coolbert:

From this article in the LA Times, the long form as seen in the  Chicago Tribune yesterday:

"Marines do about-face on injuries"

"Corps hires athletic trainers to help boot camp recruits"

The U.S. Marine Corps hiring sports trainers, persons knowledgeable in sports medicine, hoping to prevent and ameliorate injury to recruits during basic training. Marine basic training very intense and physically demanding in the extreme.

Damage in the majority of the cases, perhaps predominantly so, to the legs and feet. Running with combat boots on - - those not accustomed to do so suffering inordinate harm to the lower extremities:

"fractures of lower leg bones, mostly from running, marching and jumping . . . . shin splints, ankle sprains, stress fractures of the tibia and fibula"

In particular too, the Marines continuing with close-quarters combat training, a variety of fighting forms:

 "The Marines do bayonet, knife fighting and martial arts training, Pugil-stick training is seen as particularly essential. 'A lot of these young men arrive in boot camp without ever having been in a fight, without ever balling up their fists and hitting another person,' 'Pugil-stick training develops the aggression, the blood lust that we want' 'They stop being afraid of hitting someone and of being hit.'" Sgt. Chris Woidt - - USMC drill instructor.

The merit of boxing, fencing, bayonet training having particular value with regard to military physical training as recognized almost one hundred years ago now by the Canadian Major Percy Erskine Nobbs.

And the difficulty this type of training represents for young men today the same as it was for young men of one hundred years ago!

"Major Percy E. Nobbs, of the Canadian Forces, says in the Infantry Journal for August":

"I have seen youngsters in khaki turn pale lilac with orange blotches on being told to put on the gloves, and give up cheerily at the end of the first round, notwithstanding the fact that they were daily going over the jumps and hitting the bags about; and I have seen the same boys six weeks later, in the strength of their youth and fitness, come up against skilled boxers in the regimental boxing finals, get a fourth round ordered and come up with a grin for a certain knock-out."

This Major Nobbs a Canadian solider of the most protean talents, exceedingly so. An architect of repute in civilian life, mobilized during that period of the Great War [WW1], a boxer, a fencer, a cross-country runner, a man in charge of physical training and teaching combative skills!

"Major Nobbs has had a great deal of experience as an athlete, boxed in the semifinals at his university, was a good cross-country runner and a champion swordsman [won a Silver medal at the 1908 Olympics as a fencer]. When the war broke out [in 1914] he was professor of architecture at McGill University and went to England to join the Imperial Army. His work was of such high order that he was sent out to the Canadian Forces to take charge of bayonet fighting and physical training. He is a worker and a fighter."

Read further of the skills, abilities, and talents of Major Nobbs: "6 A MAN OF MANY TALENTS".

Please recall that the fighting form Russian All-Around Fighting [RAF] begins with the novitiate at the most basic level first learning to fight with the bayonet on rifle, all other disciplines building upon the concepts as taught from combat with the "cold steel"!

coolbert.