Left of Bang: How the Marine Corps' Combat Hunter Program Can Save Your Life

by Patrick Van Horne

“Right of bang,” as Van Horne and Riley explain in these pages, means after the bomb has gone off, after the shots have been fired, after the damage has been done. “Left of bang” means before the bad stuff happens. That’s where you want to be—alert, ready, prepared to respond to protect yourself and your loved ones.

Gary Klein, who developed the idea of recognition-primed decision-making (RPD). RPD describes how people with expertise intuitively identify a pattern in a situation and quickly determine a course of responses, without any analysis or comparing different courses of action. These intuitive decisions are very often right—but they are “good enough” solutions, not perfect solutions.

“A good solution applied with vigor now is better than a perfect solution ten minutes later.”

“Many military problems simply cannot be solved optimally, no matter how long or hard we may think about the problem beforehand. In many cases, the best we can hope for is to devise partial, approximate solutions and refine those solutions over time, even after execution has begun.”

“What matters most is not generating the best possible plan but achieving the best possible result.”

A good heuristic decision is made by 1) knowing what to look for, 2) knowing when enough information is enough (the “threshold of decision”), and 3) knowing what decision to make.

Understanding the limbic system and its core freeze, flight, or fight responses is the first phase in detecting a threat. It’s important to remember that the enemy stalking a Marine on patrol or a seemingly helpless woman on her way home is under duress. This stress manifests itself in physical actions. If we look for these particular physical actions when our limbic system gives us the “heads up, something’s not right” signal, we’ll be able to operate effectively “left of bang.”

Identifying threats means establishing a baseline and looking for anomalies. A baseline is what is normal for an environment, situation, or individual.

An anomaly is any variation from the baseline—and what we are primarily searching for is anomalies.

In fact, even if faced with clear failure, people often follow the same behavioral patterns in the hopes they will work again.

“Everything a person does is created twice—once in the mind and once in its execution—ideas and impulses are pre-incident indicators for action.” —Gavin de Becker

The closer people choose to be, generally the more comfortable those people are with one another.

People who know each other will stand near each other. In any crowd, people who know each other will be next to each other, and those people who know each other best will be the closest to each other.

humans have an internal reluctance to kill.

there is within most men an intense resistance to killing their fellow man. A resistance so strong that, in many circumstances, soldiers on the battlefield will die before they can overcome

In hostile situations, it is much easier to back down from a decision to kill than it is to ramp up to a decision to kill.

combat profilers should begin by assessing whether the most serious decision—kill—is required first, and then moving to the next, less serious, decision—capture.

For civilians in noncombat situations we recommend “run, hide, fight.” For a civilian who encounters an attacker, the best chance for that person’s survival is to put as much distance as possible between him or herself and the threat.