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In training.

But it wasn’t until he grabbed the defiant Iraqi prisoner of war and locked him into a chokehold that he saw just how intimidating — and effective — Army combatives can be.

Hill, who teaches combatives at Fort Benning, Ga., was on temporary assignment as a platoon sergeant for C Company, 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) when he got his first chance to practice his specialty for real.

It was an early April morning when his platoon was conducting a blocking position in Najaf, Iraq, while other soldiers searched houses for enemy soldiers and weapons.

Hill’s platoon took prisoner two Iraqi men who had attempted to slip away between the rows of houses. Soldiers held them at gunpoint and disarmed them. One had a pistol. The other had a knife.

The trouble started when one man refused to let soldiers bind his hands with flex cuffs. Hill repeatedly motioned for the Iraqi to get on his knees, but the man refused.

Not wanting to shoot the unarmed prisoner, Hill sprang forward and locked the man in a rear-naked chokehold. The sleeper-style hold from behind — in which the soldier locks one arm around the enemy’s neck — is designed to constrict blood flow to the brain and render the opponent unconscious.

“He went to his knees,” Hill said, describing how the man tried to resist but quickly lost consciousness. “He put his hands on me, but by that time, it was too late.”

After that, Hill’s platoon had no trouble from the other prisoners standing nearby.

“Once I did it to this guy, the others started understanding English real quick,” he said.

Hill’s tale is just one of many filtering out of Iraq and Afghanistan about soldiers who have used combatives on an enemy.

The Army began teaching the fighting system in its leadership schools in 2000, after the 75th Ranger Regiment put the program together in the mid-1990s.

Combatives blends techniques from proven martial-arts disciplines such as Brazilian jujitsu, wrestling, judo and boxing into a system of integrated moves.

For a variety of reasons, shooting the bad guy is not always an option. More and more soldiers are using combatives to restrain troublemakers during peacekeeping and stability missions and as a last resort for self-defense on the battlefield.

“What you want to be able to do is give soldiers tools they need,” said Sgt. 1st Class Matt Larsen, NCO in charge of the Army’s Modern Combatives Program at Benning.

Staff Sgt. Jeff Rembold, a squad leader in the 3rd Ranger Battalion, put combatives to the real-world test in Afghanistan in September 2002.

Rembold, who would not say where the incident occurred, said he went hand to hand when trouble erupted as his squad was helping secure an area near a village during the operation.

“I had a SAW gunner facing out, pulling security on a wall,” he said, recalling the event in an interview with Army Times.

“Locals began to gather. We were trying to keep everybody back,” he said. One young man approached. He looked well-fed, healthy — military in appearance, Rembold said.

“He tried to walk between myself and my SAW gunner. I stepped in his way, and he still tried to get in between us. I held out my M4. When I did that he grabbed the barrel,” Rembold said.

“I took this as an act of aggression, so I decided to take him down.”

Rembold’s weapon was attached to his body with a close-quarter battle sling, so he delivered a quick jab to the man’s face with the butt of the carbine.

The Afghan was on his stomach, trying to roll over. Rembold tried to grab his arm to pull it up in between them — a move known as an arm-bar.

“I tried to break his arm,” Rembold said. “That was not working the way I wanted it to work. When you are in a real-life situation, it might not go exactly the way you want it to.”

Still trying to bring the Afghan under control, Rembold made sure to keep him on his stomach.

“I am trying to de-escalate this situation, so I try a rear-naked chokehold,” he said. But Rembold’s body armor and his chest-mounted magazine pouches kept getting in the way.

“You need to be able to sink him into your body. It wasn’t working,” he said.

Rembold knew he had to put an end to this altercation, quickly. Members of his squad held their security positions, but the gathering locals worried him.

The soldier quickly went back to lying with his chest pressed against the man’s back and kneed the side of the Afghan’s head several times. “It de-escalated the situation to where we could put flex cuffs on him,” Rembold said.

The struggle lasted nearly a minute, Rembold said, noting that having a number of techniques to draw on helped him stay focused.

“I was calm the whole time,” he said. “There was never a time that I thought it was out of my control.”

At Benning, Larsen has been collecting after-action reports from soldiers who have used combatives in a combat zone. He shared with Army Times some of the written accounts:

A prisoner attacks

Spc. Jason Ladd is a National Guard soldier serving as a door gunner on a CH-47 Chinook helicopter transporting Iraqi enemy prisoners of war.

Suddenly, one of the prisoners, who was wearing only wrist cuffs, attacked the crew chief. The prisoner had managed to take down the soldier and was choking him with his legs.

“I proceeded to pull the EPW off the crew chief and put him in a rear-naked chokehold,” Ladd wrote. “A prisoner to my left rear bit me on the buttocks while I had the EPW in the choke. I held the rear-naked choke for approximately 30 seconds.”

The hold on the prisoner enabled the crew chief to break free.

“When the crew chief became free, I elbowed the EPW to the right side of the head with a downward elbow strike,” wrote Ladd, who had received combatives training when he served on active duty with the 101st. After that, Ladd said, the prisoners “ceased all hostile actions.”

Overcoming resistance

Pfc. Peter Blickhahn used combatives twice while handling prioners in Iraq.

Blickhahn did not give his unit or the locations where he operated in Iraq in the written after-action report.

The first incident occurred in mid-April when he and another soldier were in a small room preparing prisoners for interrogation.

“We were repositioning the prisoners from sitting to standing, when one of the prisoners became irate and swung at me,” Blickhahn wrote, describing the prisoner whose hands were bound with flex cuffs and head was covered with a sandbag.

“I ducked the swing and kneed him in the ribs as I wrapped my left arm over his head and around his neck placing him in a guillotine choke. I lifted him off the ground using his own weight to assist the choke until he stopped trying to elbow my body,” Blickhahn wrote.

“I placed him back on the ground and when he [regained consciousness], we had the interpreter explain that his resistance was useless, and that was the last time we had a problem with him,” Blickhahn wrote.

On another occasion, Blickhahn and two other soldiers were escorting two prisoners from a holding area to an interrogation area.

“One prisoner was trying to remove the sandbag that covered his head. One of the other guards saw him and slapped his hands away. That’s when the prisoner tried to strike the guard. I caught his hands and threw him against the wall where I used an [arm-bar hold] until he screamed and sat down on the ground in submission,” Blickhahn wrote.