Dave Taylor / Davey Herold Question

[MaddieM]

(02-17-2014 06:06 PM)L Verge Wrote:  I am only guessing here, but Powell was trained in hand-to-hand combat and going for the jugular, which has virtually no protective skeleton around it, makes for a quick kill. The neck is also usually semi-exposed at least, whereas, in Seward's case, clothing and bed coverings add extra layers to cut through -- as well as having to make sure the blade hits between the ribs so that it gets to the heart.

I suppose he didn't think to rip the bed clothes off the guy. Which further goes to show he did what he did in a state of panic, rather than the cool collective actions of a trained assassin. He clearly had the knife on him as a back up...but when push came to shove, he messed it up good time. Was he actually trained in knife fighting? Or was he purely used to the hit and run on horseback that seems to be mostly written about his time with Mosby? It's one thing to shoot someone from horseback, and quite another to kill them with a knife. Would he have received this kind of training in the army?