About LtCol Ridenhour USMC (Ret.)
7th Degree GC and Senior Master Instructor

Al Ridenhour is a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the Marine Corps with 28 years of active and reserve military service with multiple combat tours to Iraq and Afghanistan. He is the Co-Author of "Attack Proof: The Ultimate Guide to Personal Protection, 2nd Addition", (Human Kinetics, 2009) and the Co-Author of "Fight for Your Life", (June 2010).

Although he was an instructor in unarmed combat for his unit, Al Ridenhour knew he had found the right self-defense system when people half his size from John Perkins' school could strike him at will with "penetrating force," yet remain elusive to his own strikes. Even though he'd traveled the globe with the U.S. Marines and trained with a variety of U.S. military and Asian martial arts instructors, Al's first thought was "if this works for them, it'll work for me." He resolved then and there to become a student of Perkins' unusual, free-flowing and highly adaptive art.

Lt Colonel Ridenhour has been with John Perkins since 1992 and risen to the rank of 7th degree Master and Senior Master Instructor. As a veteran of the Persian Gulf War and Iraq and Afghanistan, Al has put his Guided Chaos training to use everyday to stay alive--and where possible has passed that training on to his troops.

A tremendously compelling and articulate spokesman for the art, he has become extremely sought after for seminars and personal instruction and appeared on numerous radio and television programs. 
• Instructor in unarmed combat for his unit and for the battalion's Scout Sniper platoon
• Served as Platoon Commander, Sniper Platoon Commander, Company Commander, Intelligence Officer, Security Manager, Assistant Operations Officer, and the Anti-Terrorism Force Protection Officer for the II Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq, Liaison Officer to RC South Afghanistan and the Joint IED Defeat Organization
• Worked with U.S. Customs Service and U.S. Border Patrol for the JTF-6 counter drug mission
• Has trained current and former members of US Marines, US Army Special Forces, NYPD, US Air Force OSI and US Air Marshal Service
• Training in martial arts since 1985
• Seventh-degree Black Belt Guided Chaos Combatives
• He has lectured at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and has been featured The Forensic Examiner, several times in Black Belt Magazine, Blitz Magazine has appeared on NBC TV New York with Chuck Scarborough for in-flight anti-terrorist defensive techniques with bare hands and common objects as well as Channel 12 News Long Island.  Al Ridenhour is a member of the International Combat Martial Arts Federation (ICMAF)