who was being an insane psycho idiot and she decided to get physical (as in hitting people, me included). She did this knowing in her heart of hearts that she was invincible, untouchable, shielded by her feminine nature.
She knew this solely because nobody would hit a 'female person' in retaliation, no matter how much provocation she offered them. (The stupidity was exacerbated by alcohol, which shouldn't come as any big shock.)
Apparently she had a couple of brothers who while they were growing up, which were forbidden to smack her around for any reason under pain of pain, and so she bullied them, a lot. Later information suggested that she had even gotten away with breaking one of her brother's arms, without any consequences to herself.
I was sitting in the day-room of the barracks, reading, before going on duty, and the brouhaha spilled out of one of the barracks rooms into the hall. Being rankest in that barracks, I got up and went to see what was going on, so I would know what I was going to 'not have seen' later if necessary. (I have found that selective amnesia for anything not truly serious is a good trait; what was from the sound of it a very bad 'lover's spat' didn't seem to be all that serious to me.)
So I poked my head into the hall to see what was going down, and she spotted me. (Remember now, I'm in uniform at the time, and had two stripes more than anyone else in the building. This -was- the military after all. It matters.) Up she popped, yelling her head off about nothing being my business, and how she was going to beat me blue for interfering and yada yada yada yada. I hadn't said so much as "Boo!" yet, by the way. Just looked.
And she slapped me in the face. Landed one right on me, since I was NOT expecting it at ALL. Put some English on it, too, it was a righteous good slap. Hurt like all get-out.
In front of a dozen witnesses. She was a low-ranking enlisted individual, too, just to be clear about all this. Not a civilian. This was really unexpected, I knew she was an idiot but I -didn't- think she was quite that stupid.
Shook my head to clear a couple of cobwebs, looked at her boyfriend, and quietly asked if he thought I should take care of this formally, or informally. Everything and everyone there (excepting the bubble-head) was dead quiet, just looking at me, and at her as she was still ranting and yelling.
He kind of swallowed, turned a little green, "Uh, Sarge, can we do this, you know, kind of 'in house?'" (We had sparred before, and I was teaching him and several of the other kids in the barracks some martial arts basics. He was NOT going to push this if he could manage to keep it quiet. And HE knew what "Assault on a superior Non-Commissioned Officer" meant when it got to the Colonel's desk, even if she did not.)
So be it. Ye have appealed unto Caesar, and unto Caesar shall ye go.
Shrug. OK. So I walked up to her, tapped her on the shoulder, and when she turned around I just decked her. Out in one hit. Got her on the button, a jawbone shot which incidentally hurts your hand like bloody HELL, her head whipped around to the other stop, and she signed out of this existence for a little while.
Poured a splash of water on her face, and she sputtered and sat up, fuming. When she got her focus back, she tried to come up off the floor, to hit me again. Some people are slow learners. I waited for it, and when she swung at me I hit her again, and she blacked out again. Went down like a sack of taters.
Next time she came to, her boyfriend and a friend of his were holding her down when the whole glass of water hit her. Biggest glass we had in the dayroom, my 1-liter iced tea glass. Icewater, too, from the pitcher in the fridge this time. Sputter sputter struggle STAY DOWN, you idiot.
So, pasties, G-string, thongs? As armour? Not so much.
Depends on whether the person with whom you're fighting is bothered by the whole "can't hit a guuurl!" business. Having been HIT by a lot of girls, and having had a really WHACK Korean female martial arts instructor had gotten THAT silliness out of my head, years before this.
That instructor was a woman named 'Lily' Lee, and she was as crazy as a bedbug, as deadly as a cobra, cute as a button, and the nicest person you'd ever want to meet, all at once. She had married a Staff Sergeant who was at the language school with me in California. She took several of us on as students, to keep in training herself, and I am not ashamed to say that I was her worst student. She only kept one in five of the whole bunch that started, so even the worst of that lot was at least half-decent. Or maybe I simply proved some comic relief? I -was- the worst of the class.
Whatever, I stayed with it the whole nine months we were there, minus some deployment time, and learned an awful lot from her. One thing I learned really well was that male or female didn't matter a BIT in a fight. She used to toss me around like a rag doll, I would hit the wall, flat on my back, a meter off the floor, head down... Yeah, it hurt. A lot. (She usually reserved THAT little bit of humiliation for when I had been more clumsy than usual.)
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