Rory Miller

The serious bio:

Rory Miller is a seventeen-year veteran of a metropolitan correctional system. He spent seventeen years, including ten as a sergeant, with the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office in Portland Oregon. His assignments included Booking, Maximum Security, Disciplinary and Administrative Segregation, and Mental Health Units. He was a CERT (Corrections Emergency Response Team) member for over eleven years and Team Leader for six.

His training has included over eight hundred hours of tactical training; witness protection and close-quarters handgun training with the local US Marshals; Incident Command System; Instructor Development Courses; AELE Discipline and Internal Investigations; Hostage Negotiations and Hostage Survival; Integrated Use of Force and Confrontational Simulation Instructor; Mental Health; Defensive Tactics, including the GRAPLE instructors program; Diversity; and Supervision.

Rory has designed and taught courses including Confrontational Simulations; Uncontrolled Environments; Crisis Communications with the Mentally Ill; CERT Operations and Planning; Defensive Tactics; and Use of Force for Multnomah County and other local agencies.

In 2008 Rory Miller left his agency to spend over a year in Iraq with the Department of Justice ICITAP program as a civilian advisor to the Iraqi Corrections System.

He has a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology, a blackbelt in jujutsu and college varsities in judo and fencing. He also likes long walks on the beach.

His writings have been featured in Loren Christensen’s “Fighter’s Fact Book 2: The Street” Kane and Wilder’s “Little Black Book of Violence” and “The Way to Blackbelt.” Rory is the author of “Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training and Real World Violence” published by YMAA; “Violence: A Writer’s Guide” published by Samshwords; and the soon-to-be-released “Facing Violence” out in May 2011 from YMAA.

Less serious:

How to make a Rory:

First you take a kid and raise him without electricity or running water or television. Especially television. You get a whacked out doctor to convince his parents that he has a birth defect such that if he ever loses muscle tone his joints will spontaneously dislocate, so you encourage hyperactivity. Instill a love of reading and introduce to meditation at a young age. Teach him to hunt and track. Send him away to college at the age of seventeen painfully aware that he has almost no experience with people. Arrange for him to luck into world-class trainers in his first martial arts. Let him obsess on martial arts even at the expense of his school work. At some point he will get a need to go someplace strange, maybe Reno, and do something different, like be a bouncer. Let him, he'll come back. When he comes back, if he falls in love with the right princess ('cause every thug needs a princess) he'll start doing crazy things like joining the national guard and working in a jail. Let him. He'll discover that he has a way with violent and crazy people and might wind up doing stuff like running a tactical team and teaching officer survival skills and designing classes and teaching jujutsu. If he has an ugly year (and he will) he'll start writing. If he gets really bored he will suddenly quit and go to Baghdad. We're still waiting to see how that part turns out.