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How to Receive a Good Beating



If you walk into a crowded bar with a lady, to have a quiet drink together after the opera, and an unknown man approaches you, grabs you, accuses you of being a member of the military, and he obviously is a serving member of the military, this presents one of life’s more unusual and complex self-defence situations. Firstly, everyone with skills or practical training in self defence knows that crowded bars are about the worst possible place for a fight to break out. You can’t use any of the techniques you may have learned about (for example running away - the most effective self defence technique in unarmed combat), because there are too many people around. Anyway in this instance the first punch came straight out of the blue; there was but a second or so to appreciate the danger and that I was dealing with an extremely violent and dangerous man that most other customers were afraid of. Moreover if you’re in Ukraine it takes the Police a long time to arrive to an incident of this kind. Remove the lady to the rear of the bar, so that her safety is maximised. Make sure you’re on the CCTV. And then just prepare to get punched.


There’s not much point fighting back. The more you fight back, the more it is likely that when the Police do eventually arrive the incident may be assessed as a drunken brawl rather than as an unprovoked violent assault. Moreover the assailant, being military, is expecting you to fight back and he will be taken by surprise when you don’t If he has a look of determined mania in his eyes, he is probably high on amphetamine or using steroids, which can cause unnatural aggression. He is likely to be much more physically fit than you. Try to place other people between him and you. But if he is particularly aggressive, he may start attacking them. So you need to take care not to place others’ welfare in danger. In all cases remain calm and do not run away or step outside because then he will follow you and beat you in the street, and this will be much worse because he will try to place you in a prone position and then start kicking you. It is imperative to stay on the CCTV cameras.


You have to rapidly assess what measures are available to you for defence. A tall bar stool might be used to keep him at bay, but if the bar is crowded there are probably people sitting on them. If the man and an accomplice try to grab you and pull you out of the bar, you have a serious problem because if they succeed you will be off-camera and they will render you prone and give you a good kicking. This can be very damaging to your physical welfare. In my case I used my weight: I simply clung onto something (a door corner in fact) and they could not pull me outside because I am just too heavy even for two strong men of a military physique.


Eventually of course you will have to go outside - you can’t stay in the bar forever. You might be taking the lady home in a taxi, and want to walk her to the taxi. And then the man will be waiting for you, because unfortunately some of the foreign members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are undisciplined criminals in Ukraine for all the wrong reasons. You will likely be struck once again, these strikes being in the face. The pain from someone punching you in the face is tolerable and you should again simply accept it because it’s not what the individual will be expecting. Wait for the assailant’s accomplice to separate the two of you, and put the lady in the taxi.


And then the most important part of this exercise is to go back into precisely the same bar, knowing that the man will strike you again, because at that point everyone will realise that he is the psychopath and you are the innocent man. Eventually the entirety of the rest of the bar will overcome him and throw him out, especially if he starts striking female members of the bar staff and lashing out at anyone and everyone. He will of course be barred for life, and then you can enjoy your drinking quietly until the Police eventually arrive. You have a short conversation with them, but the real point is that you have the man’s call sign which is “Reaper” because his accomplice talked to him using it. And therefore you can make it a matter for the military police. The man is on his R&R break from the front line and no doubt is extremely disturbed, if he is beating people up in crowded bars. He will very promptly be sent back to the front line where he will face death and, thank God, you will not.


Under no circumstances escalate the situation, for example by using a weapon (if you have one), because if you do have a weapon and you draw it then you must use it immediately or you are at risk of his snatching it off you. (This is surprisingly easy.) And then you are on a murder charge, which you certainly don’t want.


Then you go home, in my case with an on-foot Police escort (in my case three officers with body armour and assault rifles), and assess your injuries. If you just have bruises, black eyes and mysterious sore areas, you have survived. Congratulations. Take some anti-inflammatories to deal with the pain; a sleeping pill to calm the high adrenaline levels in your body, and go to bed. You will wake in the morning feeling sore and looking slightly ugly, but it will heal in a few days. If you feel severe pain you probably have a broken bone or two and you have to seek medical attention, In my case that did not seem to be the case. So all in all it was a reasonably successful transaction. The most important thing - and this requires the wisdom of experience and age - is to appreciate that the paramount concern is not your ego, or revenge for the person hurting you, but your own personal welfare and that of those around you. If you stay calm, use your wits, and keep this overriding objective in mind, you can probably survive an unprovoked good beating in a bar without too many pernicious consequences. And you can go back to that bar - where such a thing has never happened before - and he cannot.


The opera was excellent, incidentally; one of the best ballets I have seen at the Lviv Opera House. And nobody there gives you a good beating. The pirouettes were some of the most exceptional I have ever seen. It’s all just another day in the silent persistent horrors of this ghastly war.


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Post scriptum: I learned the next day that several other people had been injured in the struggle to remove this extremely violent man from a peaceful bar, including female bar staff as his victims; the assailant had punched and attacked them all. God bless all those people who do not deserve this.







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