Before arming yourself with a fighting knife, arm yourself with the facts. Colonel Applegate, the world's foremost authority on close combat, wrote this book to instill in readers the skills necessary for contemporary knife fighting. Now you, too, can benefit from the same instructions that generations of military and intelligence personnel have.

Greg Walker evaluates daggers, bowies, switchblades and utility blades according to their design, performance, reliability and cost. He pays tribute to the legendary designers -- Fairbairn and Sykes, Randall, Gerber, Applegate and Al Mar -- and gives you an insider's peek at the best up-and-coming bladesmiths. He examines the pros and cons of benchmade vs. custom-made and forged vs. ground blades, as well as answering questions about steels, throwing knives, bowies, bayonets, training knives and much more.

Whether a side-street skirmish or an all-out war, fight scenes bring action to the pages of every kind of fiction. But a poorly done or unbelievable fight scene can ruin a great book in an instant. In Fight Write you'll learn practical tips, terminology, and the science behind crafting realistic fight scenes for your fiction. Broken up into "Rounds," trained fighter and writer Carla Hoch guides you through the many factors you'll need to consider when developing battles and brawls. • In Round 1, you will consider how the Who, When, Where, and Why questions affect what type of fight scene you want to craft. • Round 2 delves into the human factors of biology (think fight or flight and adrenaline) and psychology (aggression and response to injuring or killing another person). • Round 3 explores different fighting styles that are appropriate for different situations: How would a character fight from a prone position versus being attacked in the street? What is the vocabulary used to describe these styles? • Round 4 considers weaponry and will guide you to select the best weapon for your characters, including nontraditional weapons of opportunity, while also thinking about the nitty-gritty details of using them. • In Round 5, you'll learn how to accurately describe realistic injuries sustained from the fights and certain weapons, and what kind of injuries will kill a character or render them unable to fight further. By taking into account where your character is in the world, when in history the fight is happening, what the character's motivation for fighting is, and much more, you'll be able write fight scenes unique to your plot and characters, all while satisfying your reader's discerning eye.

Provides an historical analysis of the range of weapons used in hand-to-hand combat from prehistoric flint knives to eared daggers of the mid-sixteenth century, to nineteenth-century British and American naval dirks.

This is the remarkable story of how Col. Rex Applegate, William Fairbairn, Eric Sykes and Wild Bill Donovan trained and employed OSS and MID commandos during WWII. Includes the facts behind the development of point shooting, knife fighting, hand-to-hand combat and a staggering number of other fighting skills as taught by the top instructors of the era. Contains rare archival photos and the Colonel's graphic original lesson plans.

The low-tech, high-impact tomahawk has been carried in every American war, including Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Here the author traces the origins of the tomahawk and uses his dynamic drawings to show how it can be utilized singly or with the long knife in both offensive and defensive encounters. Includes fighting scenarios, throwing lessons and applications of the war club.