Lew Hicks
He’s a Navy SEAL-turned-successful-businessman who could beat just about anyone in a fight but prefers communication to combat.
Lew Hicks epitomizes the masculine man: He knows how to fight but uses violence only as a last resort. Since leaving the Navy SEALs seven years ago, he’s built a 200-person company devoted to teaching law enforcement agencies (and a handful of private citizens) his techniques for hand-tohand self-defense. He originally developed this method for Police Corps, an innovative federal program that trains college graduates to become police officers. Hicks’ program emphasizes communication skills as much as physical prowess. His techniques--with which a 110-pound woman can pin and hold a 300-pound man--have swept America’s police agencies like wildfire and are already taught in over 30 states. Hicks is also a devoted family man who speaks openly about his religious beliefs. He talked with TAE senior editor Eli Lehrer at the Police Corps offices near Baltimore.
TAE: Tell me about your childhood. Where were you born? What were your parents like?
HICKS: I had a wonderful childhood. It was filled with adventure. I grew up near the Missouri River in South Omaha, on the wrong side of the tracks. It was a rough-and-tumble neighborhood. I started fishing with friends in the Missouri River at age six. There was a lot of independent activity in my youth. I just romped through forests and down by the rivers and adventured through molasses factories and stockyards at a very young age. I was one of 13 brothers and sisters. I’m still close to most of them. One of them was murdered in his sleep when I was in fifth grade. Through my entire childhood, I had really great guidance and, for whatever reason, I never got involved in a gang or drugs and drinking. Not so much because of adult pressure but just because I made the choice that that’s not what I was going to do. I wasn’t a bully, but I knew how to defend myself.
My father was an alcoholic and he died when I was very young. He played very little part in who I am and what I’ve become. I believe most of who I am came from my mother, who was the guiding light, the disciplinarian, and the emotional support of my life. She is still alive today and is the strongest person that I know. At 13, I moved out of the house and had my own apartment with a friend. I had a job working at Armour Packing House. I was working full-time and going to school.
TAE:What led you to move out of the house?
HICKS: My father had died, and with nine children still living at home it obviously made for a very impoverished house, and my mother, never having had a job before, had gotten one. I just decided that moving out would make things easier on my family. There were child labor laws of course. But the labor law I followed was that I needed to work. So I went to the meat-packing house.
TAE:Was being able to defend yourself a part of growing up?
HICKS: It was. I had a great many aggressive brothers and neighbors.My brothers grew up in the ’50s, I was born in 1959, and the sort of violence you see in West Side Story was real-life
activity on the streets where I grew up. There was a process of fighting and establishing yourself either as a block leader or, at least, as somebody who needs to be reckoned with. There was
a lot of fighting. For a lot of men I meet, the ability to protect themselves is a major theme in life. The things I do are sexy and attractive to most men because they are the things that are in
the front of every man’s subconscious: Can I protect myself?
TAE:What was your first fight like?
HICKS: The first time that I got into something where it was meaningful, rather than just playground pushes and shoves, was when I was five years old at a community center. There was a wrestling match that day. I weighed all of 60 pounds and there were all these eight-, nine-, and ten-year-olds around. I was asked if I wanted to wrestle. I was already a pretty tough little kid; when sports came up, I got picked first. And so, not having a clue about wrestling, I entered a match with this kid that weighed probably 40 pounds more than me. The coach kept yelling out to me “cross-face him! Crossface him!” and showed me a physical activity that he did with his arms, and so I copied that. My opponent’s face erupted. There was a lot of blood. And he quit. There was something about that, it gave me a sense of power. I can’t find the words to describe what it did to my confidence to take on someone so much bigger, and win.
TAE: Did you continue to wrestle in high school?
HICKS: I wrestled! The coach’s name was Beauford Hazler and he was probably harder on me than any other male figure in my life. He was extremely tough, very fair, and gave me something that I’ll remember for the rest of my life. He just told me, “You know, Lew Hicks, the harder you work the luckier you’ll get,” and for some reason that stuck in my head. And so, even when I was at the packing house working, pulling hides off of these carcasses and standing knee-deep in blood and guts, I looked at it as a workout. It was something that was going to make me stronger and harder.
TAE: What about your path from high school to the SEALs?
HICKS: I had my share of problems in high school. A lot of the time, I was just fighting for no reason. I had thoughts of college but didn’t feel that I was prepared for it. I had wasted so much time in high school because of academic misdirection; not knowing what my academic talents were. During a wrestling tournament, I met someone who was the assistant Olympic coach, a gentleman named Gary Sauer, who was a commander in the Navy. And he said: “If
you’re lost and you don’t have any place to go, why don’t you join the Navy?” And so that’s what I did. I came to my mother’s house one day and told her. She was surprised but accepted it. All I wanted to do was get away from the packing house and get away from South Omaha.
TAE: So how did that lead you to the SEALs?
HICKS: I was on the Navy’s own wrestling team. At a wrestling meet on Okinawa, I ran into some SEALs. They were unbelievable physical specimens and they had an air about them that I could appreciate. They were competent individuals that knew what they wanted.And the camaraderie that they shared was something that, at that point in time, I had never experienced. So it definitely was something that I sought out.
TAE: How do you go about becoming a SEAL?
HICKS: Some people I’d run into in Japan told me about BUD/S [Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL, the first course that SEALs take]. When I was stationed in San Diego I got my physical, did all the things that I was supposed to, and then I took the screening test. I was in pretty good shape, so I passed. I still didn’t have much direction, but this was something that really intrigued me. Something inside of me said, “This is what I’m supposed to do.”
TAE:What was the training like?
HICKS: There’s been lots written about BUD/S but I don’t think it can convey the character growth, moral development, and the physical strength that one gains through the training. More than anything, however, the idea of camaraderie and becoming a team is central to the training. It is an unbelievable experience. You go through extraordinary experiences that you’ll be able to draw strength from for the rest of your life. Every single day was a whole new adventure and a whole new trial. There were parts of it where all you wanted to do was get to the next ten minutes. Or get to the next day. There was very little thought of “Okay, what am I going to do this week.” It is amazing what your body can do if your mind says “Don’t stop!”
TAE: To what extent did your upbringing prepare you for the rigors of Navy SEAL training?
HICKS: It was tailor-made.When I went into the SEALs, I was surrounded by many of the individuals that were of the same mold. These were individuals with hard childhoods, who were scrappers by nature, but also had things going on upstairs. There was a very difficult intellectual component to SEAL training dealing with the physics of combat, the physiological aspects of diving medicine, dive tables, writing abilities, and communication skills. Lots of things took place intellectually that I didn’t know were part of BUD/S. But these were just the sort of things my upbringing prepared me for.
TAE:What happened after SEAL training?
HICKS: I had done the five-and-a-half-mile swim and everything else that’s required of you. And I was thinking, “I can’t wait until I get out of BUD/S, I’m never going to be in pain again. I’m never going to be cold again. This is great! I get to become one of the boys.” Well, right after that, I went to jump school at Fort Benning, where I had to go through training with a bunch of Army individuals with several of my SEAL classmates. And it was hard. Then I had to go through Prisoner of War School. I remember, my first day there, there was a Frogman, a Navy SEAL, that showed up to do our first day of physical training. He was a tall, dark-skinned guy. He looked like he’d been out in the sun all day, very gray hair, an older-looking gentleman. I thought, “What’s this? I thought I was going to be challenged!” After about 45 minutes it was all I could do to just stand up straight without my body shaking. It amazed me that this man had such vigor, vitality, and strength even though he was twice my age.
TAE:What was your SEAL work like?
HICKS: Busy! You spend countless hours preparing, training and dealing with the competitive nature of your teammates on a daily basis. It’s tough: an immense, intense masculine environment.
It is purely a man’s world--the language, the smells, the daily adventure, the toughness and the hardness that you had to prepare for every day. That’s what Special Forces is about. There are probably some women, somewhere, who could put up with the physical rigors of serving in SEALs. I don’t doubt it. But it would never work. It’s just a purely male environment and the fact that it’s all men is a big part of it. That’s all there is to it.
TAE:What else did you do in the SEALs?
HICKS: After spending nine years in one of the SEAL teams, I had the opportunity to be an instructor for BUD/S. So I did that for two years. That was probably the most difficult job I’ve ever had. The hours were hard. You had to lead from the front. Those two years as an instructor probably molded me to what I’m currently doing more than any other time in my life. It was great: Everything you did was going to have an unbelievable effect on these young men. It was a bit staggering to see the transformation. Then I got involved in some special operations for about two years. Following that, I went back to the SEAL teams for some more adventure and some more platoon life. I finalized my career at what was called Navy Special Warfare Group One: the governing body for the entire West Coast special ops. And I was involved with a huge training section there that analyzed and developed different types of training that would prepare all the platoons for combat readiness.
TAE: Why did you leave the Navy?
HICKS: I was asked by a fellow Navy SEAL to give some demonstrations of the hand-to-hand combat that I had developed through working with police officers. A lot of ex-SEALs had become cops. And police officers I knew decided that the type of hand-to-hand combat that I had developed was what they needed. I developed it working in the SEALs but it wasn’t polished. I met Adam Walinsky who was helping get the Police Corps program off the ground and, instantly, I was entranced with the idea. Remembering my childhood and the fractures that existed in society, I knew that the police could solve them. There wasn’t a question in my mind that this was what I needed to do. I was also getting married, so it became obvious that I should move on from the SEALs.
TAE: Tell me a little bit about the fighting system you’ve developed.
HICKS: The system I’ve developed is based on physics and the mechanics of the body. It’s based on what I learned in the SEALs and a lot of it I figured out myself. It doesn’t make any difference, whether you are female, male, black, white, tall, skinny. It works for anybody who has a certain level of fitness. It’s based on constants that deal with physiology that apply to everybody. It’s not based on any existing fighting system, just on science and common sense. The idea is not pain compliance. Most of the people who attack police officers are drunk or on drugs and therefore resistant to pain. There’s no point in trying to inflict pain on them. That’s likely to turn brutal, and ineffective. With my technique you can just control their bodies and get them to do what you want. Talking to people, however, is the real essence of what this is all about. Police officers spend 98 percent of their time talking with people and, if they know how to do it, they can avoid fighting. The time of beating young black men with black sticks is over. And it’s wrong! If you can talk to people and approach them with dignity and control the excitement levels and the energy levels then you control a lot of the things that are going on. The most brutal level of force is ineffective force. There does come a time when the talk ends and you need to become physical. But if you’re afraid, and your language reflects that, then you’re always playing catch-up. Police officers had better know how to talk to somebody. Can you imagine approaching a hardened kid on the streets, like myself when I was a young man, and not having the confidence of self-preservation? As soon as you opened your mouth I would know that you are afraid.
TAE: To what extent is the ability to fight with your hands still important for SEALs and for the military in general?
HICKS: Very, very important. It’s still going to take courage to push a button, and you can best develop that if you have fighting skills. And it’ll still take individuals to infiltrate the hardest and harshest areas. That takes a great amount of courage. If you put your hands on an opponent during war to take him into custody, you don’t know anything about him. He could make things very bad for you. You have to be able to preserve your life. Even if you have every smart bomb and high-tech weapon, a lot of war fighting still comes down to direct contact. For fighting people, having the ability of self-preservation can give them the confidence that they’ll excel in all other aspects of warfare.
TAE: What about for life outside of combat situations?
HICKS: I don’t care whether you’re in the military or you’re a businessman--every man wants to know that he’s going to be able to preserve his own life.And I think most wives have a sense of security by having a husband in the house. Men are hunters. Men are the protectors. And as long as the human race exists there’s going to be a need for males to fulfill that role. One of men’s greatest fears is the inability to take care of themselves. Many men have mental images of self-preservation. They believe that if anybody ever got them in an alley or accosted their wives in a parking lot, they would magically come to grips with these physical skills, of which none of them know anything. It won’t happen unless they learn how to fight. But when they actually learn those skills, it changes from a subconscious process to something real and it gives them an unbelievable amount of courage. Courage enough that they can approach communities and their lives with real dignity and strength. It is enormously important for their interactions with other men.
TAE: Should women also learn to fight?
HICKS: Without a doubt. I have a specialized course just for women. Some people may look at this as a sexist thing but I train women differently than I do men. Their physical strength lines are different. Their body mass density is different. The whole dynamics of how they use their bodies is different. The psychological aspects of life are different. But they can learn how to use their bodies just as effectively as men; they can win fights. They gain the same things that men do from learning how to fight. Although, on a mental level, simply being able to do it isn’t quite as important for women.
TAE: Have you ever gotten into a private fight as an adult?
HICKS: Yes, twice. The first time, I was with a friend in a car in a shopping mall parking lot in the middle of the day. We were approached by a guy with a gun. He obviously hadn’t bathed in days and was strung out on drugs or a street-type person. We thought he was going to hijack the car. When he reached for the gun, I took physical action. That put him out of commission.
The police showed up and took over. Soon after that, I was at a gas station and a guy who was drunk, or high, drove up in a large truck. I was in a smaller truck. He drove right up under my back bumper and locked our trucks together as I was pumping my gas. Without a word he started pumping his gas. So I said to him, “Hey, why don’t you move your vehicle?” Well, he verbally accosted me and then started to approach me. So I knocked him out. I took the gas pump from him and put it away. I drove off leaving him sleeping soundly.
TAE: Gandhi said “Peace will come not out of a clash of arms, but out of justice lived and done by unarmed nations in the face of odds.” In other words, fighting never solved anything.
HICKS: Well, philosophically that may be true. But Gandhi never walked the streets of South Omaha or East Baltimore or Chicago. Or Camden. Or East L.A.And when you’re 14 years old and it’s two o’clock in the morning and you’re leaving work and it just happened to be your time for somebody else’s entertainment, I think the solution is that you get to go home even if it means fighting. It may not solve the fractures in society. It may not solve the problems of mankind but it sure as hell is going to solve your getting home that day.
TAE: How important is religious faith in your life?
HICKS: I think religious faith is extremely important. What the name of your God is doesn’t matter to me. I think the spiritual reflection on the decisions we make, the things that give us our moral fiber, and the guidelines for our character, are ingrained in us. It allows me the period of time of reflection that I need dealing with everyday life, dealing with the issues that these Police Corps kids and these other police officers have to face every day. It just gives me the strength and the guidance that I need to provide to them the things that I believe they need; the idea of self-assuredness, character-building, problem-solving, and decision-making under stress. But still, the bottom line that guides all of these things is not a use of force continuum, it’s not a list of rules and laws, but what is morally right and the moral obligations that you have to man and to God.
