Staying Safe

By Ed Ricciuti

(June 28, 2025) — Trust your gut to stay safe if, while traveling to places new and strange, things don’t seem right. It paid off for me early in the fall of 1991, when I tried to cash an American Express traveler’s check at a hotel where I was overnighting after interviewing the president and prime minister of Montenegro at a meeting of parliament while on a magazine assignment.

Morning would bring a flight to Belgrade and then home. But when the desk clerk did not have sufficient funds to cash my check, alarm bells sounded. I figured the hotel had either run out of cash or, more likely, was hoarding it for troubled times ahead. I felt change in the wind.

The former Yugoslavia was violently disintegrating. Earlier, I had signed a war zone waiver with the airline.  On my way to the meeting I watched a convoy of Montenegrin troops headed to join allied Serbian forces as the siege of the historic Croatian city of Dubrovnik began.

I put two and two together and decided not to take chances with my flight. I told the desk clerk to have a cab waiting at 5:00 a.m., even though my flight was not until mid-morning. When I arrived at the airport, not even the agent was at the check-in counter. I was first in line and after about two hours, the agent arrived and assigned me a seat.

Within a half hour, the airport was chaotic, full of people pushing and shoving at the counter.  Obviously, more people wanted out than seats were available.  It was first-come, first serve and I had been first.

The airport at Belgrade, normal two weeks before, was tumultuous. Soldiers with automatic rifles were everywhere. Two of them took into custody a woman, extremely well dressed with two children, whom I had seen frantically boarding my flight. She was crying.

By afternoon, I was on my way home. My instinct, honed by overseas assignments, had told me that the inability to cash an American Express check, plus the troop movements I had observed, probably saved me from being stranded. Freelancers, unlike staff journalists, usually have no news organizations for support, so I was on my own and it might have been more than an inconvenience. Not long after my arrival in Montenegro, a government functionary had hustled me away when locals began to eye me aggressively.

Observing an unusual situation and acting accordingly results from training in situational awareness, a self-defense practice that keeps one aware of trouble before it starts. Simply put, situational awareness is being tuned in to your surroundings and what is happening around you. Even if not conscious of it, good drivers practice situational awareness behind the wheel. The trick is to carry it into other activities, especially in unfamiliar surroundings.

At Green Hill Martial Arts we teach students from age four years to senior citizens how to use and cultivate situational awareness. One exercise is easy to do and, no matter what their age, students say they enjoy it. The youngest students, in fact, regularly ask instructors to initiate it.

Taking cue from the Sesame Street song “One of These Things is Not Like the Others,” the instructor asks students to walk around the studio, or other space, and carefully observe its condition, including the position and arrangement of all objects. They then return to their starting point and close their eyes. The instructor changes something in the room. It may be the placement of training equipment or changing their arms from folded to hanging alongside their body. Students then circle the room, observing, and when they finish, they are tested to see if they have noticed the change. After repeating the exercise several times, the instructor may change nothing and see if students picked it up.

In the real world, utilizing situational awareness best relies on what is called “splatter vision,” looking ahead while utilizing peripheral vision as well. Used by trackers, it looks ahead but spreads out as well, instead of focusing on one object only. This is a technique where you let your vision “spread out.” You look toward the horizon while expanding your peripheral vision.

Ed Ricciuti is president of Green Hill Martial Arts in Killingworth. This is one in a series of his articles on personal safety.