A Pipe Hitter's Guide to Crushing the Coming Societal Breakdown

Table of contents :
Introduction
Chapter 1 Understanding the Threat to the Food Supply
Chapter 2 Time for Guns
Chapter 3 Team Tactics
Chapter 4 Blow Out Kits and Trauma Medicine
Chapter 5 Tribes
Chapter 6 Fortifications and Fire Bases
Chapter 7 The Dutch Lifeboat by Nicholas Orr
Chapter 8 Swallowing the Red Pill
About the Author
Other Books by Nicholas Orr :

Citation preview

A Pipe Hitter’s Guide to Crushing the Coming Societal Breakdown by Nicholas Orr

A Pipe Hitter’s Guide to Crushing the Coming Societal Breakdown by

Nicholas Orr Copyright 2020 All Rights Reserved

No part of this text may be reproduced without the express written permission of the author and publisher.

Foreword by the author, Nicholas Orr The topic of survival, both in the short-term as well as the long, seems to be cyclical. A quick review of human history will turn up periods where the masses feared that the end of the world was near. Some of the motivation for those feelings may have been superstition. When ancient man experienced a solar eclipse, they thought the world was coming to an end. Other apocalyptic predictions came from natural events; severe droughts, massive storms, and floods they bring, abnormally long winters, and of course the Earth being angry as represented by the eruption of a volcano now and again. God or “the gods” was/were angry. Of course the actions of man are the most common harbinger of the societal collapse or doom for a country or society. One can only imagine the fear inspired as the Huns ran roughshod and unchecked across Asia. Europeans had much to fear as the Muslim hoards stood on the edge of the continent, threatening slavery and subjigation for every man, woman, and child. Charles “the Hammer” Martel can be thanked for halting one of first major thrusts into Europe by the Muslim invaders. During nearly the entire history of mankind, when apocalyptic threats were on the horizon, the citizenry or the peasantry if you will, depending on the time and place, had little choice but to submit to their fate. The ancient pagans might have tossed a virgin or two into a volcano. Some men sacrificed lambs on the highest rock. Still others begged and pleaded for their King or Emperor to save them from impending doom. One lesson from history that should not be lost on the citizenry is that in nearly every case of impending doom, whether natural or manmade, the Kings and Emperors took care of their people, the ruling class, first while the welfare of the peasant class came a distant second. Serious famine affected the peasants first and the

King and his army last. It only stood to reason, if you possess the sword, you control the food. The foundation of the United States of America represented a hard turn about from the worldwide history of the Ruling Class versus the Peasant Class. From the outset of the new nation, the idea that some men were born to be rulers and others were born to be ruled was cast aside. The greatest evidence of this was the codification in the Constitution that the sword was meant for the people, not the crown. Forbidding the peasant to possess the sword, a physical means of dissent and rebellion, has been standard operating procedure for every government and empire since the dawn of man. When the men who founded the United States of America put the sword in the hands of the people, they forever changed the idea that, during times of crisis, emergency, and impending doom, the citizens had to beg their King for protection. The citizens could now employ the sword against the onslaught of marauders, huns, and barbarians who threatened to steal their crops, burn their homes, and enslave their women and children. For this text I have enlisted the aid of my good friend and compatriot, Thomas Thrasher, and interviewed him at great length. A combat decorated United States Marine during the late unpleasantness, Tommy moved on to work as a military contractor. Thomas Thrasher is the epitome of the term pipe hitter. As for the explanation of “pipe hitter”, there are various definitions floating about, however for our purpose here, a Pipe Hitter is some one or a group of people who are willing to go to the extreme in order to get things accomplished. This descriptor most commonly refers to Special Operation Forces, but it is not limited to that. Throughout the remaining text, unless otherwise noted, Mr. Thrasher will address, in his own words, the coming societal breakdown and apocalyptic threats. He will also give you, the reader, a how-to guide for dealing with the end of the world as we know it in your community and neighborhood.

Nicholas Orr September, 2020

Chapters Introduction 1

Understanding the Threat to the Food Supply

2

Time for Guns

3

Team Tactics

4

Blow Out Kits and Trauma Medicine

5

Tribes

6

Fortifications and Fire Bases

7

The Dutch Liferaft

8

Swallowing the Red Pill

Introduction A big thank you to Mr. Nicholas Orr for reaching out to me and giving me the opportunity to put my thoughts on paper. I can only hope someday to be the wordsmith that Mr. Orr has proven himself to be. Through numerous phone calls, emails, and a few personal meetings, Nick coached me and then went through the material I submitted so that it did not come across as the incoherent scribblings of a barbarian. This is a deadly serious topic and I approached it as such. Throughout my career as a Marine, military contractor, and professional pipe hitter, I have witnessed the fatal results of men who failed to prepare and their communities and countries have suffered. This is not a game we are playing where you can just accept the loss and try again tomorrow. If you fail here, you die and those about whom you care or love will suffer irreparable harm for your failure. If you are not prepared to deal with the harsh realities of a life or death struggle, I would suggest that you put this book down now. Either that, or pass it along to someone who does possess the mental fortitude to deal with the harsh realities that come with living on planet Earth. I will approach this work as my Drill Instructors on Parris Island and then my Infantry School Instructors at Camp Lejeune did. Those men were not there to be my buddy or my pal. They understood that I and my fellow Marines would, sooner or later, have to face down the Reaper. They broke me down and built me back up and for that I will be eternally grateful. Those men prepared me to deal with the life and death conflicts that came thereafter. If you are hoping that I will sugarcoat the dangers that we face in our modern world and what it will take to crush those dangers, I hate to tell you, but I am all out of sugar. There is a lot of suck in our world today and there is even more suck coming. However, the good news is that you don’t have to just take it. My hope is to provide you with

the information, education, and mental tools you need to crush the coming societal breakdown. Thomas Thrasher, from somewhere in Free America, October 2020

Chapter 1 Understanding the Threat to the Food Supply For this manuscript, we will address the threats to the United States of America, not Europe or Asia. The inhabitants of those continents long ago sealed their nations’ fates by surrendering their individual sovereignty to the will of the collective. In our modern world, Poland and the Czech Republic seem to be on the right path, but it is going to be a long hard walk for them. Conventional Europe; Germany, France, the UK, etc. have devolved to socialist slave states and without a complete 180, they will fall to the invading Muslim hoards in the next generation. The USA provides the last opportunity for humans to possess individual liberty and freedom, not collectivism and tax-slavery, on planet Earth. Therefore, our prime focus will be defending the United States from enemies foreign and domestic. Thanks to a deliberate effort to demoralize the populace of the United States during the last two generations, we now bear witness to citizens with little to no understanding of national and world history. They have become the ultimate Lotus eaters. These men and women are convinced that their desires and inbred feelings of entitlement will keep them fat and happy and distracted, regardless. The only threat they perceive is a threat that might force them to confront harsh reality. (Okay, now that half of you have Googled “lotus eater”, we can continue.) Food Supply Aside from the apathy of the people, one of the greatest threats to the survival of the United States is the move from purposeful and productive living to notional or virtual living. During World War II, the federal and state governments encouraged the people to plant “Victory Gardens”. The leaders at the time were under no illusion that the citizens would grow so much food that traditional farms would be eliminated. The purpose of the Victory Garden movement was to get people used to

the idea of providing, at least some, food for themselves. This also gave them a feeling of purpose. The people were not just sitting around hoping that some faceless farmer somewhere would grow food for them. No, instead the people who grew Victory Gardens during WWII were participating in their own survival, however small of a factor that might have been. At very least, growing their garden gave them a very real sense of the genuine labor that it took to produce edible food. A successful garden also produced a very real sense of accomplishment and pride in their labor. In the United States today, only a small percentage of the people ever plant a garden or participate in the critical aspect of feeding themselves. The millions of people dwelling in major metropolitan areas are completely dependent on a fragile supply system to keep their stores stocked with food. In the average big city, there is a 3day supply of food in all of the grocery stores for the total population. Delivery trucks from strategically placed supply depots run constantly, in order to keep these stores resupplied. Unlike decades past, where every grocery store was equipped with a warehouse or the meat and dairy came from local suppliers, today the barcode system is used to place orders and resupply on demand. As we have witnessed during numerous hurricanes and floods, when the trucks can no longer reach the cities, the food supply dries up fast. More recently, we have seen that the closure of just one meat processing plant can drive up the cost and drastically limit the supply of meat to entire regions of the country, not just one city. The systematic centralization of the food supply chain has created a dangerous situation, one where hundreds of thousands of people can be without food or be drastically rationed almost overnight. Rock and Stone World Despite the marvels on the internet and the wonders of smartphones, all it takes to send us right back to the 1800’s is to turn off the power. All the gadgets and distractions of modern life are meaningless if the power grid is interrupted or completely shut down. Are you going to

eat your iPhone X? How are you going to order Doordash or UberEats without power? City-dwelling Americans have become so accustomed to 24 hour stores and on-demand food delivery that most have completely lost touch with the reality of where genuine food comes from and how much effort it takes to produce it. We all know the young Millennial couple who eats out almost daily or who has their meals delivered via mobile phone app. What are they going to do when that option is completely off the table? The generally accepted calorie count for human survival is 2000 calories per person per day. How many calories worth of real food, not cookies and chips, do you have in your home right now? I am reminded of the recent Communist insurrection within the city limits of Seattle. The mongoloids in Seattle started running out of food almost immediately. They resorted to begging and then stealing food within days. Their childish effort to grow food overnight by sticking vegetable plants in the grass of a city park would be laughable if not so ridiculously stupid. That was only a small scale, but it is a good example of the completely out of touch behaviour of spoiled urban parasites. Everyone has to eat. There is no getting around that fact. For the entire history of man, those who have controlled the food have controlled the people. If you do not have food on hand and the ability to produce it, you will be a slave to whomever it is that is controlling it. Mohammed Farah Aidid and the other warlords of Somalia understood this lesson perfectly. During the 1990’s, UN and other humanitarian food shipments to famine struck Somalia were seized by the warlords at gunpoint. The warlords and their men ate first and the remaining food was used as a weapon to control the peasants. This was not the first time that men with guns seized humanitarian food shipments from the United States and Europe. In Africa, that

practice is the rule rather than the exception. Corrupt governments and regional warlords consistently seize the food for themselves while the peasants continue to starve. When the traditional production and supply system breaks down, food becomes a weapon. Don’t believe me? Ask the survivors of Joseph Stalin’s mass starvation of the Ukraine. Between 6 and 7 million Ukrainians died of starvation thanks to Uncle Joe. Chairman Mao’s communist utopia led to the starvation of over 30 million Chinese peasants in only four years. The bottom line is this, the systemic centralization of food production and distribution has put every major American city in a precarious position. What is worse is the fact that the majority of the populace seems to be blissfully unaware of this situation. Sitting at home watching Netflix and munching on lotus, they cannot fathom the idea that food will not just appear on demand with a touch of a button on their iPhone.

Crushing Food Prep Unless you are trapped in an urban hell like New York City, most all of the readers of this book can implement the following suggestions. Our mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers all knew that everyone in the family was going to have to eat, every day. They did not order food with an app or go to the grocery store every other day. Our grandmothers stored food in the home. The food supply and preparation plan I am about to lay out for you has four tiers, implement them as you see fit. Tier 1 Canned Food By canned food, we mean commercially canned food from the grocery store. The benefit of canned food is that it is all essentially ready to eat. You can warm it up or eat it cold if you have to. Canned food will last a couple of years, depending on the specific type, from the date it was processed. Old canned food is not necessarily rotten,

but it loses nutritional value slowly as it ages. Exposure to oxygen and heat is what degrades fruit and vegetables the fastest. The downside to canned food, besides needing a can opener to access most of it, is that it is heavy. If you are not planning on moving or leaving during the collapse of society, then that is no big deal. However, if you need to relocate, 20,000 calories of canned food is a lot of weight to transport. Tier 2 Bulk Food Bulk food, such as rice, wheat, corn, flour, sugar, salt, etc. can be purchased for much less than prepared food. That is the good news. You can store a hundred pounds of rice and a hundred pounds of grain or flour for relatively low cost compared to other food sources. Like commercially canned food, bulk food is going to be heavy to move. Considerations for bulk food are primarily storage. You need to keep out oxygen, moisture, and bugs. Also, if you buy whole grain, you will need a grain mill to grind it up and make usable flour. The good news about wheat grain is that it lasts nearly forever if you keep the bugs and water out of it. Another important aspect of bulk food is the actual ability to cook and prepare food from scratch. Don’t laugh. How many of you either fall into or know people that only purchase and eat prepared/ready-tocook dinners? Having a hundred pounds of wheat grain on hand is rather pointless if you do not have the skill and know-how to turn it into bread. And yes, you need more than just flour and water to make edible bread. Tier 3 Specialty Food In the specialty food tier we will put both MRE’s (Meal Ready-to Eat) and the numerous brands of dehydrated long term storage or camping food. The US Military MRE’s are valuable because they do not require cooking, they last for years and years on a shelf. In a deep freezer, MRE’s will last for decades and still remain edible.

Also, one MRE has all the nutritional value you need; protein, fat, carbohydrates, vitamins, sodium, etc. MRE’s are made to provide ample calories for men living in the field during combat. The average calorie value of one MRE is 1250. Practically translated, unless you are engaged in hard physical labor or surviving in cold temperatures, two MRE’s would be enough for one person, per day. In a survival situation, two people could share one MRE and get enough calories to stay alive and function. The only real drawback to genuine military MRE’s is the cost. Expect to pay $7 to $8 per meal. That price tag will add up quickly. *Personal note: People who would refuse to eat an MRE have never been genuinely hungry. I have heard rear-area pogues and chairwarming fucks carp about how they would never be hungry enough to eat an MRE. Folks, that is straight up bullshit at its finest. Those people would be begging you for a vegetarian MRE two days into the collapse. As for dehydrated food, it is not as pricey as MRE’s but it is not cheap either. Dehydrated food has come a long way since NASA figured out how to send ice cream to space for the astronauts. There are several makers; Mountain Home and Wise Foods are the primary names you will encounter when shopping. I have eaten both brands and both companies make edible food. The natural attraction to dehydrated food is the fact that it is super light and numerous meals can be stored in a relatively small container. This type of food will keep on the shelf for years as well. The downside to this type of food is that you need to have a fair amount of water and the ability to boil it. I suppose you could put room temperature water in a dehydrated Mountain House meal and eventually it would be edible, but that is not the preferred method.

Tier 4 Grow and Can Your Own Food Growing your own vegetables and fruit is naturally a great plan for the breakdown of society, it is also the most time consuming and labor intensive. What should be obvious is that as soon as you can you should start growing food to supplement your available food supply. While the plants are growing, you eat what you have stored up. Ideally you have heirloom seeds that were not genetically designed to deteriorate rapidly. Also, you need to actually understand what it takes to turn those tiny little seeds into edible food. Going back to the Victory Garden discussion, how many people in today’s society actually have the skill and knowledge to produce enough food for themselves or their family? Hell, how many could grow enough vegetables for one large salad? The other component to growing food is the ability to store it. Oxygen and moisture will degrade you fresh vegetables relatively quickly. You need to have the skill, ability, and the hardware you need to can food in your kitchen. Both gardening skills and canning skills are not things that suddenly come to you when the crisis hits. Your first garden is going to be an exercise in trial and error. Your first canning adventure will not likely be perfect. Start learning and practicing now. If you have the skill and knowledge in both areas, start teaching your friends and relatives. The more prepared people you have the fewer will be begging for your food. Many of you have already thought; what about eggs and milk and meat? Raising animals for food and milk is a subject that is a bit more in depth than we have space for here. Chickens are not that difficult to raise once you know how. Some breeds of ducks will lay massive protein-laden eggs for you. Ducks also tend to be more resilient. A dairy goat will provide enough milk for a small family’s daily needs. Goats are easier to raise and keep than cows. Even peasants in third world countries have goats and chickens.

Understand this, without a well-thought-out food preparation plan, during a major catastrophe or crisis, you will be a slave to anyone who has food. If your plan is to sit around and wait for FEMA to drop food in your lap, good luck. Eventually you will become a refugee living like a slave in a government FEMA camp. I don’t know about you, but I say, fuck that. Trust me, I have seen these kinds of Refugee/FEMA camps, you do not want your family living with the people who flock to them.

Chapter 2 Time for Guns All of you guys who watched the Road Warrior, and got a hard-on thinking about it, have been waiting for me to talk about guns. The firearm is the most valuable self-protection tool during a societal breakdown. I’ve read a bunch of bullshit fantasies from suburban weaklings who think they are going to drive off hoards of looters with bright lights, lasers, and bear spray. Let me tell you something brother, if that gang of looters does not have guns of their own, and they likely will, they will have other deadly weapons such as baseball bats, machetes, axes, etc. If you plan to stop twenty thugs carrying baseball bats with your 2000 lumen flashlight and a can of bear spray, you are going to die with a stupid look on your face. A firearm is a critical tool for survival. However, I see far too many people who think that buying a gun somehow guarantees their safety. That’s like buying seeds and assuming you will be able to grow a garden if it ever gets that bad. If you have never had genuine firearms training, from a skilled instructor, you are kidding yourself. Yes, you might get lucky and pop off a few shots at a crackhead or lone rapist. Irregardless, when the organized mob descends on your quiet little neighborhood to steal all of the food you have stored up, you are going to need more than luck. Step one, if you own a gun but have no training, quit making excuses and get training, now. You say you cannot travel now or you don’t have training available where you live? Okay, bullshit, but okay. Hopefully you have a combat experienced veteran in your neighborhood or at your church. Very politely ask them if they will spin you up on your gun handling skills and be ready to show them thanks. Have your wife make a big plate of cookies or a couple of pies. Most of the pipe hitters I know would love some fresh, homemade goodies, that and good whiskey. Note, I said good whiskey, not some plastic bottle Canadian garbage.

Many of you are already spun up to various degrees with your gun handling skills. Good, you are ahead of 95 percent of the population. Don’t get me wrong, an urban mongoloid with a stolen Hi-Point can get lucky and kill you, but we aren’t focusing on luck here. Also, we are not going to just sit around and wait for said mongoloid to walk up to our porch. Speaking of veterans, brothers now is the time to reacquaint yourselves with your fellow servicemen. Yes, I know that many combat vets returned home with the idea that they did their duty and now they can live out the rest of their lives in peace. That is a nice idea and in a better world it would be possible. Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers kicked the shit out of the Japanese and Germans (and Italians, don’t forget them). They came home, married their sweethearts, got a civilian job and raised a family. I wish I could tell you that all of the enemies of the United States have been vanquished, but that would be a lie. A huge percentage of the enemies of the USA now reside within our borders. Ignoring that fact or pretending it is not the case won’t change the reality that our nation is under attack from within. Before we get too deep into team tactics, let’s get back to firearms. Hopefully you already have the guns that you will need. If not, you better make friends with people who have guns and ammunition to sell or trade.

Fighting Rifle Your primary arm should be some variation of the AR-15. The Stonerbased AR design is the, hands down, most prevalent rifle in the United States of America. I don’t give two shits about how great you think your SCAR Heavy happens to be. There are more magazines, parts, accessories, and ammunition for the 5.56mm AR in the USA than all other personal weapons, deal with it. You want recommendations? Okay, here goes; Colt, BCM (Bravo Company), Daniel Defense, Armalite, LMT, LWRC, SIG, and FN.

Yes, there are many more, but the aforementioned have a good track record for quality and reliability, as well as government contracts. After the AR, some type of 7.62x39mm AK is the next most logical choice for a fighting rifle. Every other rifle is secondary to the previous two. Yes, it is better to have any rifle than none, obviously, but given a choice for an individual fighting gun, the AR is first and the AK is second, at least in the USA. If you are on a Ramen noodles budget and don’t have a long gun, I guess a 9mm Hi-Point carbine is going to be the gun for you. The good news is that as ugly as they might seem, Hi-Point carbines run.

Fighting Pistol During a major crisis or societal breakdown, a handgun is a secondary tool to the rifle. Nonetheless, we carry handguns because they are always on us, allowing the use of both hands. I’ll make this one simple; buy a Glock 19 or 17. The reasoning is the exact same as the AR. There are more Glocks in the USA for fighting than any other handgun, that means more mags, holsters, accessories and parts. There is more 9x19mm ammunition in armories, storage lockers, and gun safes in the USA than any other fighting pistol cartridge. If you cannot find or afford a Glock for some reason, the S&W M&P is a solid choice, but let’s face it, if you cannot find a Glock for sale you won’t likely find an M&P. The SIG 320 might seem attractive, but they are nowhere near as prevalent. Surplus Beretta M9’s or 92’s are big, but they work. The Canik line of pistols are well-made, rugged and reliable, they are also priced about $200 less than Glocks and SIGs. Not as many mags or holsters are available, but a Canik will get the job done.

Fighting Shotguns I know a lot of you preppers have been screaming “Shotguns!” for the last couple of pages. Calm down, bitches. I will address shotguns now. When it comes to a universal fighting tool, the shotgun is second to the rifle, but far ahead on any handgun. The 12 gauge shotgun is a powerful, close range tool, but it is still a special purpose tool. Ounce to ounce and pound for pound, you can carry a lot more 5.56mm ammunition for the same weight as 12 gauge. The standard Foster-type slug for the 12 gauge is 1.25 ounces, 16 gauge is an ounce, and 20 gauge is ¾ ounce. I am not going to waste ink on the .410, we are not discussing rabbit and squirrel hunting. If you just weigh the projectiles and not the case and powder, 20 rounds of 12 gauge slugs will add up to 25 ounces or 1.56 pounds.

By comparison, 20 rounds of 77 grain BTHP will be 3.4 ounces. Yes, that is just the projectile weight, but you get the point. It is most certainly true that the average gangbanger or urban thug is not going to shake off a 12 gauge slug or nine 00 buck pellets to the chest. By the same token they are not going to shake off a 77 grain Mk262 round to the chest either. The problem that most neophytes have with shotguns is that they become schizophrenic mongoloids when it comes to ammunition. They view the 12 gauge as the ultimate answer to all situations and start playing the salt and pepper loading game. I actually heard a man, in person, say that he loads rubber buckshot, birdshot, lead buckshot, and slugs all at the same time in his pump action shotgun. “Bailiff, whack his pee-pee!” Yes, a positive aspect of the 12 gauge pump-gun is that it is versatile due to the numerous loads being available for it. However, this situation often leads to mass confusion as to which load to use and when. For fighting against human predators, there are only two choices; slugs or buckshot. Go have the home defense birdshot conversation with your buddies on the “Tactical Masturbation” forum. If you are serious about using slugs in a shotgun, that gun needs to have real sights, front and rear, not just a brass bead. You can get away with a brass bead for buckshot. Of course, if you are really froggy and have a picatinny rail on your shotgun receiver, you can dial in a red dot at fifty yards or so for your slugs. Despite popular mythology, the fighting shotgun is not a beginner’s or an amateur's gun. Running a 12 gauge pump gun skillfully during a life or death struggle requires dedicated training and practice. The bottom line is that the 12 gauge fighting shotgun does have a place on the battlefield, but it still comes second to a self-loading rifle. Regardless of the firearms you have on hand, the most important consideration for any of them is for the user to be thoroughly skilled in their use. If all you have is a .30-30 Marlin lever-action, so be it. You

should be able to work that lever in your sleep and stuff the magazine tube with your eyes closed. Regardless of the popular mythology, firearms are not some magic talisman that provide a cone of protection around your home or your body. You would not expect a new wooden deck to build itself just because you went to Home Depot and bought a $50 hammer and a bucket of nails, would you? It does not matter how expensive the tools were, if you have no skill, your new deck will end up looking like a retarded monkey banged it together. As I mentioned earlier, if you have guns but do not have training, get some. Make it your priority. This is not one of those “well, eventually I will do it, some day” situations. You cannot crush the coming societal breakdown without skill. Just do it.

Chapter 3

Team Tactics

There is a reason why all of the military organizations in the world teach their men team tactics. Even the vaunted US Army, 1st Special Forces, Operational Detachment Delta works in teams. The lone wolves like John Rambo, Col. James Braddock, and even Paul Kearsey, are Hollywood fantasy. You are just one man or woman, you will need to eat, sleep, and shit. If you do not have team support, who is going to keep watch while you do the aforementioned human necessities? For all of you recent or more seasoned veterans, now is the time to start getting your suburban neighbors organized and working together. Hopefully, if you are a combat vet, there are others with similar skill sets living in your general area. It is time to break out your field manuals and notebooks and reacquaint yourself with basic squad or team tactics. Unfortunately, many urban or suburban gun guys think that because they have a group of friends who are “gun guys” that they have a ready-made team. Unless you have trained with those gun guys and actually participated in team exercises, what you have is a bunch of individuals who happen to like guns. That is not a team. Vets, you are going to have to assume the role of leader for your community. Unless you live in some liberal-infested shithole like San Francisco or Austin, Texas, there will likely be enough local gun guys who want to do something positive and proactive. Your task is going to be helping them figure out what to do and how to transform them from a bunch of random people into a unit that, at very least, will not shoot each other during the first engagement with the enemy. Let’s say that your community has no late veterans to step up and be the leader. You might not have any recent GWOT vets around you, but what about Vietnam? If you have an old timer in your neighborhood who survived the Battle of Khe Sanh or Hue City, you need to shut up and listen to what that guy has to say. That old dude

might not be able to get around quickly, but he should be able to give you guidance and tell you what to expect during mortal combat. Still no veterans? Okay, who among you has been to actual firearms training. I am not talking about an 8 hour CCW class, I am talking about a course where you actually sweated and fired hundreds of rounds under the watchful eye of trained instructors. If you have the most training experience of your peers, then you are the guy. Congratulations, the fate of the cul-de-sac is now in your hands. Workup Team Tactics If you have an Army or Marine Corps combat vet, I will leave the team tactics and training to them. A SEAL veteran is probably spending all his time marketing a perfect push up machine or some brand of protein shake. Either that or he’s working on his career as an Instagram model. (I kid because I care) Without a combat veteran to guide you, I have some recommendations for a crawl, walk, run approach to team tactics. Vets, you might find something in the pages that follow to inspire you or spark a memory. You do want to crush your enemies and see them driven before you, don’t you? Alright, then.

Step One: Gun Handling This is the really real world we are living in, not some cold range, lorded over by a guy with a red RSO hat and a micro-penis. Everyone on your team has to be comfortable and competent carrying and handling loaded guns around other humans. As a leader you need to instill Col. Jeff Cooper’s four Universal Gun Safety Rules into the minds of your people and help them understand that they are “Universal Rules”, not “Range Rules”. The following are the rules Col. Jeff Cooper brought down from Granite Mountain. Universal Firearms Safety Rules #1 Keep your Finger Off of the Trigger until your Sights are on the Target and you have made the decision to Fire the gun. (Triggers are not finger rests, they are designed to make the gun go ‘bang’) #2 Treat All Guns as if they are Always Loaded (Most Negligent shootings occur because someone ‘thought’ the gun was not loaded) #3 Never Allow the Muzzle to Cover anything you are not Willing to Destroy (Before you point a gun and anything/anyone, ask yourself if you would be willing to put a bullet in it/them) #4

Know Your Target, what is around it and what is beyond it.

(Bullets do not always strike the center or stop in the target, consider what is around the target before you fire) Notice that the Universal Firearms Safety Rules do not include the words “range’” or “mechanical safety”, or “chamber flag”. The Universal Rules are, well, universal, that means they apply everywhere; your car, your bedroom, out in public, on the range, and even during a gunfight. I just heard you. You said, “But Clint Smith says ‘If you ain’t cheatin, you ain’t trying.’ or ‘If you find yourself in a

fair fight, your tactics suck.” Yes, so what? That has nothing to do with Universal Safety Rules. Allow me to introduce you to a word; fratricide. Fratricide goes way back and the old, original definition means to kill one’s brother. In our context, fratricide means when one good guy, through error or negligence kills another good guy. Your gun has no mind of its own. Your gun has one job; launch bullets. You are the operating system for that firearm and if you pull the trigger through error or negligence because you failed to follow the four rules, that’s on you. Even in a gunfight there are as many things that should not be shot as should be shot. If you get shot in the back of the head because your team mate is an incompetent asshat, you are still just as dead as if a looter shot you in your face. So, the moral of the story is that the Universal Safety Rules always apply, even during a gunfight. Question: How do you get a bunch of gun guys used to actually carrying loaded rifles around other people? Answer: You have them all carry loaded guns around other people. Don’t think you can just carry around empty guns and then; “When it is real, we’ll load our guns”. That is a load of horseshit. If the gun is empty, people know it is empty and they will treat it like a prop in a play, not like a deadly force tool. When the gun is hot and deadly, people will treat it with respect. Think of a chainsaw. If the chainsaw is turned off and the chain is covered, no one gives it a second thought. When the chain is uncovered and that bitch is running you absolutely treat it with the respect it deserves. A dormant chainsaw is not of much use. Only when the chainsaw is fired up and dangerous is it useful. The exact same goes for your rifle. If your rifle is empty it is essentially useless, it is not useful unless it is topped off and dangerous. Also, the “chamber empty, magazine inserted” situation is “Institutionalized Stupidity”. Either load your firearm completely so that it is dangerous or lock it up in a safe so no one can steal it from you. If you have people who want to be a part of the team, but refuse

to load their guns completely and carry them, they are not serious. They will either get you killed by negligently shooting you or you will need them to shoot a bad guy but their fucking gun will be unloaded and then you get killed that way. There are a lot of ways to get killed, try not to die from the incompetence of others. Mechanics and Marksmanship If you have never worked or trained with your friends and neighbors, you need to know that they can safely operate a firearm without injuring themselves or, most importantly, you. This is where fundamental marksmanship and mechanics come in. During this range time we will utilize more traditional or standard firearms training. Everyone gets a target and we run through the basics: loading, engaging a target, operating the safety lever, reloading, clearing stoppages, etc. Think of this as the “crawl” part of the equation. You can do these drills with rifles or handguns, but keep in mind, we need people to be proficient with rifles first as they are the best man stopping tools we have. Review the Universal Safety rules, designate the location of the trauma kit and who the primary caregivers will be in the event of a medical emergency. Instruct every student that if they hear the command “Ceasefire!” that they immediately take their finger off of the trigger, point the muzzle in a safe direction (not people) and hold in place for further instructions. Ceasefire does not mean go back to the holster or fuck with your rifle, it means finger off trigger, safety on, stop moving. Please note, we are not focused on competitions or looking cool. These are not speed drills. Leave your shot timer at home. To quote James Yeager of Tactical Response, “The only ‘splits’ you should be working on is splitting your opponent’s skull.” Do not worry about long distance shooting, this is not a sniper course. Get people used to engaging targets from close up, say 3

yards, out to about 25 to 30 yards. Think of your fighting rifle as a powertool, it is a sledgehammer that you will use to smash the looters and thugs who want kill you, steal your food, and rape your wives and daughters. As we mentioned earlier, if you are the guy who has actually gone to realistic firearms training, now is a great time to liberally borrow or just steal the drills that your instructors used to get you spun up. Believe me, John Farnam, Clint Smith, and James Yeager will all forgive you if you borrow their range drills to get your neighbors ready to defend the community during the coming societal collapse. In a perfect world, you and your friends would all take training together from the aforementioned. But we are not dealing with a perfect world situation here. Team Tactics Pt 1 - Range Drills *Note: The instructor and a partner must demonstrate all of the drills cold (no shooting) and then do a live-fire demonstration. Look everyone of your people in the eyes and be sure they understand what is expected of them. Encourage questions. Do not put a confused shooter on the line. Review the Rules, Emergency Medical Procedures, and Ceasefire command. None of these drills are “speed drills” or on the clock. These drills are used to instill confidence in one another and to get people used to moving around friendly personnel with loaded guns in their hands. This is the “walk” portion of the program. Drill 1 - The Straight Line Have all of your teammates join you at the range. Have everyone load their rifles. Next, have the students form a straight line facing a single target. Target distance should be ten to fifteen yards. Everyone in line has their muzzles down pointing at the ground, not the guy’s legs in front of them.

The first guy fires three or four rounds into the target, puts the rifle back on safe, goes muzzle up, turns around and walks to the back of the line, then goes muzzle down. Next guy in line takes a big step forward, shoots the target and does the same thing. Then the next guy, and so on and so on, continue until everyone has run through the drill at least three times. Drill 2 - Back to Back Break your men into teams of two. Set up however many targets you need, ten yards away is fine. Space the team out about ten yards from each other in a normal shooting line. Instruct shooters that they will be “Moving to the Left.” Now have them raise their left hands over their heads. I’m not kidding. The first man is facing the targets. The second man is facing 180 degrees away from them, low ready. Hence the title of the drill “Back to Back”. Give a command; “Fire!” “Kill!” “Rumplestiltskin!”, whatever. The first group of shooters from a muzzle-down ready engage their target with three or four shots. When the shooters have engaged, they safe their rifles, muzzle up and announce “Moving!” loudly. Their teammate, the one behind them responds with, “Move!” At that time the first shooter pivots left away from the target and the other man pivots left to now face the target. Now they have switched places. It is important that the two man team does not switch positions until the rear man has indicated that he is ready by giving the “Move!” command. The instructor now gives the fire command again. The exercise continues until every two man team has gone through it three or four times. If people are bumping into each other or having trouble with the concept, feel free to repeat the drill. Drill 3 - The Stack Now is when you find out who has been paying attention. The Stack is relatively simple, but if you screw it up, it can be ugly.

Have all shooters get in line as they did with the first “Straight Line” drill. The instructor’s first command will be “Move!” The first man in line takes one big step forward and kneels down, taking aim at the target. The next man in line will go muzzle up, take one or two big steps up to the man who is kneeling and press his leg into the off-side/non-gun side shoulder/back of his partner. Physical contact is important, just don’t slam into the guy who is kneeling. The standing man will bring the muzzle down. For the first time through this drill, the instructor will give the “Fire!” command. Both men fire three or four shots into the target. When both men have stopped firing, the kneeling man will yell, “Moving!”. The standing man will say, “Move!” Standing man goes muzzle UP and pivots to the left. Kneeling man goes muzzle DOWN and gets up and pivots to the right. Both men return to the rear of the line. If you have an even number of shooters, have them switch places. If you have an odd number, they can just get back in line as they were and work with a different partner. For “The Stack Drill”, after every shooter has successfully run though at least once, the instructor will no longer need to give commands. When the first team has fired and moved out, the second team will automatically take their place. When the standing man has made contact and indexed on target he will fire without command from the instructor. The kneeling man will open fire as soon as the standing man fires. When they are done firing, the move/moving commands will be given. When your men are truly switched on and operating like a team, you might inject the ‘Totem Pole of Death’ drill. The Totem Pole of Death is a 3-man drill like the stack, except the first man goes prone, the second man kneels next him and the third man stands. After they have mastered The Stack or Totem Pole of Death, have them do it while utilizing cover. There is a method to the madness. It should be obvious that the team tactics shooting drills will require everyone on the range to be locked

on and paying attention to the direction in which their muzzle is indexed. Your people will also get used to both giving and receiving commands, not just standing around waiting for someone else to tell them what to do. Far too often, shooting schools and training courses do little more than turn the students into robots who cannot and will not move without first being given a command. If you have any hope of turning a bunch of gun guys into a useful team of men, they must learn how to give commands as well as receive them. They need to learn how to work closely with others and they cannot be afraid when another good guy is shooting, even if they are right next to them. I know that some of you in my audience have dug in your proverbial heels and said; “You are wrong, you never go muzzle up” or the opposite, “You never go muzzle down”. To that I will respond, did you pay attention to The Stack Drill? If the standing man goes muzzle down he risks pointing a hot rifle at his partner. If the kneeling man goes muzzle up, he will certainly risk blowing his partner’s head off. Who is right and who is wrong? The fact is that there are times for both muzzle up and muzzle down. If you are moving from place to place around other people, muzzle up is almost always the best answer. If you are going low, kneeling or prone, and good guys are standing nearby, muzzle down is safer. The purpose of these drills is to get shooters used to THINKING with a gun in their hands and making the correct choice as to muzzle up or muzzle down. Team Tactics Part 2 - Field Exercises Remember when I said we were going to build our team up with a “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach? Well, now it is time to run, both figuratively and literally. You as the team leader must decide if everyone on you team is ready to run, some of them may not be. That’s okay. Spend more time on the previous drills.

Regarding those who are just not catching on, there may come a time when you need to have a serious ‘Come to Jesus’ discussion with one or more guys. If they are so out of shape that they cannot make it to lunch without a nap or they are behaving in an unsafe manner and endangering others, you need to find them another job. As we mentioned before, there are enough ways to get killed in this world. Getting killed because someone else was careless or negligent is bullshit. The Universal Firearms Safety Rules are not rocket surgery. We have not yet touched on the body armor, plates and plate carriers, and helmets that so many suburban American commandos have purchased during the last few years. Veterans understand the suck involved in wearing a helmet and armor everyday. Combat veterans also know the comfort afforded by said items when the bullets start to fly and shit is exploding all around you. I’d say that it is a safe bet that if your neighbors consider themselves gun guys and preppers, that most of them have purchased the armor combo we just mentioned or at very least load bearing vests, war belts, etc. I would also put money down betting that 95 percent of these same guys have only worn said gear the day they bought it when they played dress up in the mirror. Having protective gear is good, but that gear is also heavy. Your gear is not going to carry itself. One 10”x12” AR 500 armor plate weighs 8 pounds, double that and you have 16 pounds, and we have not added the carrier, magazine pouches and loaded magazines. All told, a loaded rifle, plus magazines, trauma gear, plate carrier, helmet, a knife of some sort and miscellaneous items will be 30 to 35 pounds or so. The average male CCW guy might be carrying 3 or 4 pounds of gear between their pistol, ammo, flashlight and pocket knife. Hopefully you will have access to some type of open field, woods, farm land, etc. If one of your team members has a farm or a close relative or friend with a farm that you can use, that’s a Yahtzee!

Get all of your cul-de-sac team members together and schedule a full day of training in the field. Instruct them to tell their wives they will be gone all day and not on their phones. The wives will probably be grateful. Also, tell your people to bring all the tactical Gucci gear that they have been squirreling away “just in case”; helmets, armor, load bearing gear etc. Every one of them needs to bring their rifle and at least four fully loaded magazines. Don’t forget water; canteens, Camelbak’s, bottles, whatever. Water is critical in the field and it is also heavy. Dress for the weather. Also, remind them to wear good boots. *Instructors need to put in a solid recon of the property so you have a good feel for the lay of the land. Before the team arrives, map out a route that is approximately one mile from where everyone will staged at the beginning of the day. Secure a map of the area before you bring your team out. Have all team members meet at the designated training field early, say 0700 hours. When all personnel are accounted for have them gear up. Tell them to put on all of their war gear. Veterans, try not to have a stroke at how they wear their gear. Just let them do what they think they are supposed to do. Everyone needs to carry everything that they will need for the entire day. No going back to the cars or trucks. Do not allow people to lollygag around. Encourage a sense of urgency in your people. The enemy is not going to take a timeout while you leisurely dress yourself in your war gear. Divide your people into two columns and step off. The instructor will lead from the front. Start out at a normal walking pace. The average adult can cover one mile in about 15 minutes on level terrain. After about ten minutes, pick up the pace to a rapid walk; long strides. After another five minutes or so, walk over to one of your people, tell them their ankle is broken and have them fall to the ground. Now your team has a casualty. Explain to the team that the casualty cannot walk on their own and you are in a dangerous area. The team

must evacuate them to a safe zone. Instructor, step back and allow the team to figure out how they are going to evacuate the wounded man. You should be less than a quarter mile from your destination. Continue to lead them to the end point, which is one mile from the staging area. When you have reached your first goal, miraculously heal the casualty. Now it is time for some real world learning. For an infantry veteran, a brisk walk in combat gear for one mile is child’s play. For the average suburban commando, this will very likely be the longest that they have ever walked with a loaded rifle, much less all the MultiCam® Gucci gear they have bought. Now is the time to have everyone consider how their gear carried on their bodies. Was their gear too loose? Did it move and shift on their bodies? Was it too tight and cut off their circulation? Plate carriers and load bearing vests need to be secured up high on the chest and be tight enough so they don’t bounce with every step. They should also not be so tight that they cut the circulation off in your arms. Helmet straps need to be adjusted so that the helmet does not bounce or shift constantly. Most new people will not secure their helmet’s chin strap in a snug fashion. Backpacks need to ride up on the shoulders, not dangle down to the lower back. The instructor needs to lead the conversation and have the team break down their response to the casualty. What worked? What did not work? Through what trial and error process did they go? What could they have done better? Carrying a fully grown man, and all of their gear, is not an easy task. Within the first hour of this training exercise, a great deal of learning should have already taken place and you are just getting started. Patrolling There are three basic types of patrols that infantrymen will conduct; Security, Combat, and Reconnaissance (Recon).

Security Patrol: A designated patrol route within an area of operation to keep the enemy from entering or infiltrating. This is the most simple. You will patrol around your area of responsibility to keep the bad guys out and the people inside safe. You may or may not encounter hostiles, but you need to be ready if you do. Security patrols are the most overt type. Combat Patrol: This patrol is deliberately directed toward an area where enemy presence has been reported and is expected. The purpose of the patrol is to locate, close with and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver. In short, you go out looking for a fight and are ready to deliver it. The patrol is covert up to the moment of attack. Recon Patrol: A reconnaissance patrol is one that is conducted to gather information about the enemy. Recon patrols are the most covert. Even when the enemy is located, the mission is to document and report, not engage. Men on recon patrols travel light with only the minimum amount of gear as their mission is to be swift and silent. For our purposes, the Security Patrol is the one on which we will be focusing the most. Looters and thugs are generally cowards and they will go after what they perceive is the easiest target. The smart ones will recon your neighborhood before they attack you. If your cul-desac looks like a hard target, one where they might be killed, they will most often fuck off and look for a weaker target. If they decide not to fuck off, you need to be prepared to ballistically encourage them to do so. For our field exercise, the instructor/leader will break out a map of the area, orient it with a compass, and have everyone school circle around you. Point out where you are, where you want to go, and how you are going to get there. Security patrols generally make large circles around the area to be protected. The Marine Corps infantry utilizes a number of formations for patrolling. I recommend you pick up a copy of the Marine Corp Rifle Squad Manual. To keep it simple, we will focus on the diamond, the

staggered column and the column. Fire teams are four men, squads are thirteen. The four man team is the easiest to control. Diamond: just as it sounds, you walk in the shape of a diamond. One man up front, two men to the sides, one man to the rear. The man up front is point and leads the team, the man to the rear is rear security to keep you from being ambushed. The man to the left has left side security, the man to the right has right side security. Again, it’s not rocket surgery.

Diamond Formation

Staggered Column: One man front right, he is the point man, one man to the left about three yards behind the front (left security), one man right behind the point man about three yards behind number 2 (right security), and finally one man left rear, three yards behind man number 3. The rear left is rear security.

Staggered Column Straight Column: A straight column is only used when the terrain becomes thick and uneven, such as walking on the slope of a hill or

ridge. When the team reaches difficult terrain, they collapse down to a straight column. When the terrain opens up, they return to a diamond or a staggered column. All of this should seem relatively simple and straightforward on paper. The trick is to get four people who have been functioning as individuals to work as a unit, as a team. You remember when I admonished that a bunch of guys who all own guns are not a team? This is when we stop being a bunch of individuals and learn to work together. For your initial practice, find an open field. Break you men up into groups of four as best you can. If you have odd numbers, you can add a man to the end of the diamond or back of the column. After everyone is working together in the open field, move them to the woods, uneven terrain, etc. Contact Drills The security patrol can be a deterrent, as we mentioned earlier. The sight of several armed and obviously disciplined men will often give the average thug reason to pause. Nevertheless, we must be mentally and tactically prepared for the eventuality that you will encounter a hostile enemy during the security patrols around your neighborhood. This is particularly true a night when vermin are most likely to attempt to infiltrate your area. Contact drills or immediate action drills must be rehearsed by everyone on the team to both ensure a tactical edge over the enemy and to reduce the risk of fratricide. Regardless of the patrol type, your team should be moving noiselessly and using hand and arm signals to communicate. In the dark, where your team will be closer together for better control, you can use whispers or touch. If you are moving as quietly as possible, you may very likely spot the enemy before they see you, in that case you can use hand and arm signals to halt the patrol and alert your team. This is naturally the best scenario as you will have a tactical advantage and the element of surprise. If you have the drop on the enemy, you have options. You can engage if you have the tactical advantage, you can quietly

withdraw if you are greatly outnumbered, you can steathfully observe and report and call for assistance if the situation merits. When you have the element of surprise, the team will generally halt and take a knee if cover or concealment is not available. If cover is within one or two steps, move to it, otherwise just drop down. If you have one member of the team running twenty yards for cover, the formation is broken. The other scenarios are spotting the enemy as they spot you or, much worse, not spotting them until after they have spotted you. Both situations require immediate action on your part unless you want to be overwhelmed. If any member of the team realizes that their location/presence has been compromised, they need to shout out as loudly as possible; “Contact front!” or whichever direction they are responsible for monitoring. “Contact rear!” is a hair-raiser because it means the enemy has somehow come up on your six o’clock. In the situation where you have been busted and the enemy knows where you are, you can either take one or two steps to cover or drop to prone. If the enemy has seen you and you decide to run twentyfive yards to some rocks, you will be dead before you get there. If cover and concealment are thick, you might be able to get away with dropping to a low kneeling position. Remember, you need to be able to return fire. Diamond formation Contact Front: point man, right and left security address the threat. The rear security faces about 180 degrees to prevent the team from being overrun from the backside. Contact Right: point man, right, and rear security address the threat, left security faces 180 degrees away to protect what is now the rear flank.

Contact Left: point man, left, and rear security address the threat, right security faces 180 degrees to protect the rear flank Contact Rear: rear man, left and right address the threat, point man faces 180 degrees or simply in the direction the team was just moving to protect that flank. Once more, on paper these drills seem self-explanatory and simple. However, in order for the team’s movement to be immediate, contact drills must be practiced until they are second nature. It should also be readily apparent that every member of the team must have complete confidence in each other. If one man fucks up during immediate action he can get himself or everyone else killed. You must have absolute faith that the men to your left and right have your back. Staggered Column Contact Front: point man, left security and right security address threat, rear most man face about and protect the rear flank. The man directly behind the point shifts hard right for a clear field of fire. Contact Right: point man, right security and the rear man address the threat, left security faces 180 or the left flank to protect the team. Contact Left: point man, left security and the rear man address the threat, right security faces 180 or the right, to protect the team. Contact Rear: rear man, right and left security address the threat, point man covers what is now the rear flank. Left security will shift hard right to get a clear field of fire. Straight Column If your team is moving in a straight column due to the terrain and you are surprised by the enemy, your immediate action is to shift into a tight diamond and address the threat like you would in that formation. You cannot just stay in a straight column because the number two and three man will not be able to safely fire without hitting the point man. The same goes for contact rear. For contact right or left,

someone needs to protect the flank or you could be overrun, particularly if the enemy is spread out over a large area.

Realistic Scenario For those who might think that these exercises are overkill, allow me to offer a realistic scenario based upon what is going on in the United States right now. The downtown area of your city is burning and all of the law enforcement assets in your city and county are dealing with the rioting. You can call 9-1-1, but no one is going to come. Your neighborhood is five miles from where the main problem is occurring. You and your neighbors grab your guns and decide that you need to stay outside and provide security. You don’t have a specific plan but you all walk around in the same general area. Seeing you should make the other neighbors feel better. After a few hours of rioting and looting downtown, a group of thugs decide to hit the suburbs. Unbeknownst to you, about twenty of them pile into cars and head for your community. They have already smashed a car through the front of a pawn shop and stolen all of the guns they could carry. Your neighbor, Bob, is at the end of the cul-de-sac near the main intersection, you can see him but he’s probably 50 yards or so from the others in your group who are milling around front yards and talking to the various neighbors who are on their porches. Bob sees a few cars coming, he’s carrying his rifle so he feels confident to step into the street and raise his hand for them to stop. The first car slows as do the three others behind it. Now the rest of your armed neighbors start walking in Bob’s direction. Bob moves toward the driver’s side of the lead car and when he is within ten feet of it a hand comes out of the window with a pistol. The driver fires a half-dozen rounds at him. You see Bob collapse to the ground. You raise your rifle to fire at the first car and it accelerates past Bob. As you are taking aim at the lead car your armed neighbor, Steve, runs between you and the car. You hold your fire to keep from hitting him.

Across the street you see Jim, another armed neighbor. Jim is running as fast as he can towards his house at the end of the street. Hands with guns appear from all of the car windows and the occupants begin firing wildly in all directions. The women and kids who were outside are screaming and running for cover. You get back on target and shoot the driver of the lead car. You are pretty sure you hit him. All four cars stop and the thugs inside bail out in all directions. You fire at one of them who looks like he has a shotgun. He goes down, but his friends are moving in all directions. You spot Steve. He is on one knee in the middle of the street taking aim with his rifle at a thug carrying a pistol. Steve gets off a shot, but two other thugs are hiding behind their car and they fire at him. Steve goes down with a round though his right leg. If you run to help him you will be exposed. Bob is deathly still on the ground and Jim is nowhere to be seen. In this scenario you have four armed men walking around their neighborhood to keep it safe. They all have rifles and feel confident that any bad guys will see them and change their minds. The moment the first shots are fired, everything falls apart. The four gun guys have never actually trained together except for going to the range at the same time. Everyone is acting as an individual with no group plan. They had no plan for what to do if bad people actually showed up and were ready and willing to fight. If you and your team are diligent, dedicated and practice in a serious manner your odds of coming out on top of a fight will increase dramatically. Take all of this training advice to heart, buy and carry good gear and when you do encounter looters, thugs, and shitbags you and you team will eat their fuckin’ lunch.

Chapter 4 Blow Out Kits and Trauma Medicine One of the biggest benefits to the American citizen that has come out of the Global War on Terror is the advancement of traumatic medicine and the gear to go along with it. In 2001 the US Military was largely dependent on Medics and Corpsmen to care for the wounded troopers on the ground. Infantrymen were given basic first aid and CPR training, but the big stuff was left for the professionals. Aside from Desert Storm, which was won rapidly, the US Military had not been involved in serious ground combat since Vietnam. The focus during the Cold War was nuclear missiles, submarines, and bombers. Very little attention was given to the individual warfighter. That all changed after 9-11-2001. Ground combat in Afghanistan and then Iraq demonstrated the immediate need for a better traumatic medical program for the ground troops. Units could not field enough medics and medics could not be everywhere at once. We needed to teach infantrymen the concept of self-aid, buddy-aid, professional aid. It took a few years of trial and error to get all of the troops who were deploying to combat zones trained up to deal with life-threatening injuries, but we did it. I took the training and then, later on, I became an instructor and taught Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC) to younger troops who were training for deployment. BIG 3 Life-Threatening Injuries The Big 3 life-threatening injuries that are sustained from trauma, that you can effectively do something about, are as follows: Major Hemorrhage (bleeding from a limb) All humans have major arteries in their arms and legs. If one of these arteries is compromised, without immediate aid, the patient will bleed to death in minutes. By minutes we mean four to five, not ten to twenty. If a femoral artery is partially or completely severed, the death clock immediately begins to tick. If the patient loses 15 to 20

percent of their total blood volume (specific volume is different for every person), they will go into hypovolemic shock, this is absolutely life-threatening. If a person loses 40 percent of their total blood volume, the organs will begin to die and they will reach what is called “irreversible shock”. You don’t come back from irreversible shock, your organs die and you die. End of story. Loss of Airway Bleeding or not, the loss of an airway will kill the patient. God gave us a primary (the nose) and a back up (the mouth). Conscious patients that are screaming in pain have an airway, that’s the good news. Unconscious patients are the highest risk of death from a blocked airway. The basic rule is that every unconscious patient gets airway treatment. Tension Pneumothorax (TPX) A TPX occurs when a lung has been compromised and air begins to fill up in the pleural space. Think of your chest as a closed space with two balloons inside (lungs). If one of the balloons has a hole and leaks, the air gets into the chest space, but it has nowhere to go. If too much air gets into that space, pressure builds up and pushes on the heart which is in the center. The heart does not like that. Too much pressure on the heart and it will say, “fuck it, I’m done”. Ladies and gentlemen, you need your heart to work properly if you want to stay alive. The pressure from the compromised lung will also bleed over to the uncompromised lung, making breathing more and more difficult until it becomes impossible. A tension pneumothorax can occur due to an external puncture wound; bullet or stabbing or fragmentation that has come from the outside and put a hole in the lung. A TPX can also occur from a broken rib that punctures the lung. In that case, the external chest is intact but the internal is compromised. The good news about a TPX is that it builds up slowly. The bad news is that, if undiagnosed and untreated, the patient’s heart will quit or

their good lung will stop working. Both are deadly. Detailed and extensive battlefield casualty studies showed that if we can teach the men on the ground to recognize and deal with the big three traumatic injuries, we can save more lives. I cannot teach you traumatic medicine in a book. However, I can give the information you need to get the training. The good news is that any person who is intelligent and skilled enough to get a driver’s license or a CCW permit should be able to learn how to save a life during a traumatic injury. The goal of the TCCC program was not to turn our troopers into corpsmen or medics, it was to give them the skills needed to keep themselves and their buddies alive during the time it takes for professional medical providers to get to them and get them to a trauma center. Training has changed a lot over the last ten years. During the early part of GWOT (Global War on Terror), TCCC type training for citizens was largely unheard of and hard to come by. Now that situation has changed. Thanks to men like James Yeager at Tactical Response and Paul Markel at Student of the Gun, traumatic medical training for citizens is more prevalent than ever before. Remember, we are talking about serious issues here and a major crisis and societal breakdown. We cannot just rely on calling 9-1-1 and hope for the best. You carry a gun because you understand 9-11 is not the ultimate solution. You need to get basic trauma training and carry the gear for that same reason. GET TRAINING NOW You and your teammates need to make the commitment to getting traumatic medical training. If you are fortunate, you might have a military trained medic (Army) or a combat corpsman (Navy). Do some research and get the training. The life you save may be your own or that of someone you love.

If you have had trauma training, you are ahead of most of your peers. Now is the time to be honest, is it time for a refresher? If you are one hundred percent spun up, it is your task to kick your friends in their asses and convince them to get the training. Note: CPR Kills! “Whoa! Stop it right there. You cannot tell me that CPR kills. CPR saves lives.” Yes, if you have a drowning patient, a heart attack patient, etc. Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation can absolutely help to keep someone alive until they get professional help. HOWEVER, we do not do CPR on bleeding victims. If the patient is leaking, CPR will make them leak FASTER and they will die. Many, many years ago, my first TCCC instructor said to us, “We don’t do CPR on the battlefield.” The problem with people who learn CPR is that too often that is the only thing that they learn. During any emergency, people will default to the level of training that they have mastered. There have been many gunshot victims on whom the first responder did CPR and they died. CPR pushes the blood out of the victim faster. Once more, get training. Blow Out Kit (Traumatic Medical Gear) As mentioned earlier, I cannot give you training from a book, you need a competent instructor or instructors. Nonetheless, I can tell you what gear you need to have in your “blow out kit” or traumatic emergency personal medical kit. Tourniquets: I have been trained with TQ’s since early on in GWOT. Much has changed in the years that have passed. The first thing we were taught was how to make an improvised tourniquet from the olive drab caveat in our old school med kits. Combat experience has shown that improvised tourniquets rarely worked well on the battlefield. The success rate of improvised TQ’s has been pretty pathetic. The failure of the improvised TQ was due to a number of

factors; operator experience/skill and available material being the primary considerations. One of the first commercially made TQ’s issued to the military was the SOF-T, these worked much better than a rag and a stick, but they proved somewhat difficult to use under combat stress. Big Army adopted the CAT after the SOF-T. The first CAT’s worked, but improvements still needed to be made on later models. Other tourniquets found in theatre have been the TK-4, the RATS, and the Recon Medical. All of the aforementioned work when used properly by trained people. My two personal favorites are the RATS and the Recon version. RATS are easy to use, fast to apply, and compact enough to store and carry all over your kit. The Recon TQ is essentially a better made version of the CAT. When it comes to a tourniquet, think of it like you do a firearm. When there is little to no chance of a fight, we carry a handgun. When we expect a fight, we carry a rifle. When there is little chance of a fight we carry one TQ. When we expect a fight we carry at least two TQ’s on our person. Pressure Dressings: Again, the more training and experience you have, the better able you will be to make good gear choices. There are numerous companies making ready-made pressure dressings. The common components in all of them are a blood soaking pad and elastic band material. The old OD green Vietnam-era bandages had good blood soakers, but no elastic. Contrary to popular belief, the Israeli battle dressing is not the “end all be all” of pressure dressings. They work, but there are better options. Commercial pressure dressings come in many sizes from a couple inches wide up to an extra large version to wrap around the chest or abdomen. A good instructor can teach you how to make an improvised pressure dressing using a roll of medical gauze and an Ace bandage. Rolls of Coban or Vet Wrap are tremendously useful in a field trauma kit.

Coban is the professional medical wrap and Vet wrap, well, is for veterinarians. Here’s a little secret; Coban and Vet Wrap are the same thing, but Vet Wrap costs about half of the price of Coban. If your team is on a tight budget, buy a shitload of medical gauze rolls (about $1 a piece), Ace bandages and Vet Wrap. With the right training, you will be a pressure bandaging wizard. Nasopharyngeal Airway: All of you CPR graduates know the head tilt method for keeping an airway open on an unconscious patient. That method has evolved over years from neck raise/head tilt, to jaw thrust, now you just place your palm on their forehead and gently push back. The problem with the head tilt is that you have to sit there and do it continuously and you cannot do anything else. You are now the designated head tilt guy. But, what about everyone and everything else? EMTs and Paramedics have a battery of Oropharyngeal Airways. They have them sized for toddlers up to 300 pound, extra large men and everyone in between. Our issue is that we cannot expect to carry a bag full of oral airways or spend all the time it takes to learn how to use them. When the Big Army doctors realised that the loss of an airway was killing unconscious wounded troops they had to come up with a solution that they could teach to the average infantryman and a tool that was ready made for the situation. What they decided on was the Nasopharyngeal Airway or NPA or “nose hose”. NPAs come in a variety of sizes, but the primary patients on the battlefield were physically fit, relatively young men and women. The 28 gauge NPA is now the most commonly issued and used size of nose hose in blow out kits. Inserting an NPA is not that big of a deal and you can be trained to do it in a morning or afternoon. While conscious people cry and bitch about getting an NPA, the fact is that in the real world, the only patients getting them are unconscious, so they don’t bitch about it.

Chest Seals: As with the tourniquets, we learned a lot during the first few years of GWOT. At the beginning of the war we were teaching guys to make chest seals with tape and any plastic material they could find. Bandage packages were normally the go to. Over the counter medical tape is generally worthless on patients who are either covered in sweat or blood or both. We learned that good old, gray duct tape worked better on sweaty/bloody patients than most all medical tape. All US Military trauma kits contain a small roll of duct tape. Commercially made, adhesive chest seals with specially designed one-way valves came about in the mid-2000’s. They seemed like a perfect solution. However, during combat field use, it was discovered that coagulating blood rapidly clogged the valves making the valves useless unless they were regularly flushed with water. Big Army trauma surgeons realized that the one-way valves were not all that important and the next generation of adhesive chest seals were made sans valves. That is great news for you. The one-way valves made the seals super expensive, up to $50 a piece. Today you can get a 2 pack of chest seals from North American Rescue for about $12 maybe a bit more. Several companies make adhesive chest seals; HALO seals are good and HyFin seals from NA Rescue are good. I have used both. Decompression Needle: Besides the tourniquet, ignorant people shit their pants more over the idea of using a chest decompression needle than most anything else. A stainless steel chest decompression needle, that is 14 gauge and about 3.5 inches long, partners with the chest seal to deal with Tension Pneumothorax. If a TPX seems to be occurring and the patient has a chest seal over a puncture wound, step one is to vent the seal to try and give them relief. This sometimes works and sometimes does not. If the TPX is internal with no external chest cavity compromise, the only way to relieve the pressure in the field is to use a decompression needle. Obviously, this is a skill that must be taught by a competent

instructor. However, once you have learned how to do it, it is not that big of a deal. I’ve had civilians and EMT’s balk at the idea that a citizen would have a decomp needle in their trauma kit. I have had more than one person say, “That is too much liability.” I asked one of these guys if he carried a gun for self-defense. He said “Yes, of course, it’s my right.” I continued and asked if he would ever shoot a person threatening him. “If my life’s in danger, yes, I would shoot them.” To that I responded, “So, you aren’t worried about the liability involved in killing someone, but you won’t carry a needle in your kit because you are afraid to get sued?” Yeah, some people just don’t fucking think before they open their mouths. When it comes to traumatic wound care, there are some things that can be improvised from available material. There are two items that cannot be improvised from shit laying around on the ground; an NPA and a decomp needle. You either have them or you do not. That brings me to a good point. There are a lot of snake oil sellers, carpetbagging fucks, trying to make a buck on the Internet selling “trauma kits”. If their kit does not include (or offer as an upgrade) a no-shit, genuine tourniquet, an NPA, and a chest decomp needle, they are amateurs. I have seen a lot of so-called trauma kits filled with band-aids, alcohol wipes, and miscellaneous boo-boo stuff. That’s nice, but it won’t save your life during a traumatic injury.

Blow Out / Individual First Aid Kit (closed)

Various contents of the Blow Out Kit

Sterility and Infections Many new or ignorant people will get all bunged up about sterility in the field. They think that a roll of gauze or pressure dressing that touches the ground is “no longer sterile.” I’ll tell you what an 18D (Special Forces Medic) told me, “The battlefield is not sterile. It doesn’t matter whether or not the bandage touches the ground.” We don’t go out of our way to infect a wound, but we also don’t allow the lack of sterility in the field to stop up from doing what needs to be done. How about gloves? Should you stop to put them on or not? All EMTs and Paramedics in the audience just screamed “Yes!” in unison. I will give you some more advice from my mentors. “Who are you working on, a family member or a stranger?” If you need to put a tourniquet on your wife or child are you going to tell them to just relax while you find your gloves or are you going to jump in and put direct pressure on the wound while you pull out the TQ? “But your hands are not sterile.” Go back one paragraph, the world is not a sterile place. If you are working on a neighbor, acquaintance or a stranger that you have decided to help, sure take the extra time to get your gloves out and put them on. This is a good time to consider where you keep nitrile gloves in your kit. How long will it actually take for you to find them and put them on? Regarding the cleansing of wounds, hospital protocol is to put on gloves and use clean water and soap to cleanse the wound before applying a fresh clean dressing. That is absolutely the best thing to do if you are in a clean hospital emergency room. How many of you expect to be operating in a hospital ER? My point exactly. If you are in the field, away from clean water and soap, you still should attempt to cleanse the wound, before applying a bandage to it. You could pour your canteen water on the wound, but that doesn’t take care of the scrubbing with soap portion. Some advice that I received from a trauma doctor who was also a SWAT team medic was to keep a 200ml bottle of grain alcohol in your field trauma bag.

The medical standard for using alcohol to kill germs is 120 proof or 60 percent. The Everclear brand of booze makes both 120 and 190 proof varieties. The 190 proof will work, but it is going to cost more than the 120 and the 120 will kill the germs. If you can locate a plastic 200ml bottle (glass will break for sure in your pack) you have an inexpensive, compact solution to sterilizing a wound. Keep in mind that we need to clean ALL wounds, not just trauma. If someone on your team gets any kind of cut or scrape and bleeds, regardless of how small it is, you need to cleanse the wound. No, it is not being a pussy, it is being smart. President Calvin Coolidge’s 16 year old son died from an open blister on his toe. The small wound was enough to allow Staphylococcus aureus, a relatively common bacterium to enter his blood stream. President Garfield died, not from the bullet lodged in his body, but from the infection he received from unsanitary attempts to remove it. Hopefully your community tribe will include a doctor or nurse or paramedic who is familiar with and able to prescribe antibiotics to those who need them. Antibiotics notwithstanding, ALL wounds should be cleaned to the best of your ability. There are also antibiotic resistant bacteria. The best plan is to cleanse the wound as soon as you can safely do so. Other Considerations Other items that are good to have in any first aid kit are; nitrile gloves (XL), medical shears, gauze pads to wipe off wounds, tweezers, and a bottle of saline eye wash to name a few. Don’t get me wrong, band-aids and boo-boo gear are important, but often people rely on those and forget the big stuff. What about intravenous medicine and fluids (IVs), sutures and staples, splints, etc? Crawl first, then walk, then run. The bottom line is not that complicated. The more medical training you have, the better prepared you will be to crush any injury or illness that comes your way. Get CPR training and take a Red Cross Family First Aid course, and engage in Trauma Training. If you are still motivated after

all that, sign up for an EMT course or study nursing at the local community college.

Chapter 5

Tribes

Whether the breakdown of society lasts one week, one month, or one year, you and your neighbors are going to need to get seriously tribal, seriously fast, if you plan to survive. The ideal situation is that you are familiar and friendly with your neighbors long before the crisis or national emergency. We mentioned food earlier and we would hope that all the responsible people in your community have been storing food and preparing essentials for a while now. Before the emergency hits, you might consider identifying the people in your community who may be living hand to mouth. How are you going to help them without jeopardizing the welfare of those in the community who did prepare their families? You also need to have a hard CTJ with neighbors and consider who the trouble makers and internal threats to your community happen to be. It is easy to ignore the loudmouth alcoholic who is prone to beating his wife and kids when all is normal. You can just call the police to deal with his outbursts. But what happens when the police are not coming? Who gets to deal with the violent alcoholic? You cannot just ignore him. Well, you can try, but sooner or later he’ll need to be dealt with. The Best of People What I have witnessed in my time milling around planet Earth is that a crisis or prolonged emergency will bring out both the absolute best and absolute worst in society, simultaneously. During the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina I bore witness to this fact. I was a young, fresh out of the Corps military contractor and I deployed to New Orleans with the Blackwater organization. Blackwater and other military contract companies were called upon to aid the beleaguered law enforcement agencies of New Orleans proper and the various surrounding parishes. An unpopular fact is that a huge percentage of cops in and around New Orleans simply left

when the storm hit. Those who remained were tremendously outnumbered by the numerous drug gangs operating in that part of Louisiana. The moment that the gangs and thugs realized most of the cops were gone, it was game on. For the first 72 hours or so, even before the levees broke, anyone out in public or on the highway was fair game for the gangbangers. The first emergency response crews from the utility companies were stopped on the roads and streets and robbed. Yep, that’s what you want to do, jack the guys coming to turn the power back on. After the first few incidents, utility crews refused to return to N.O. without armed escorts. Blackwater provided armed pipe hitters for that task among others. When word of the out of control violence got out, men with rifles were dispatched to the Greater New Orleans area from all points in the compass. After about a week or so we put a lid on the day time thug activity and brazen looting, but they still kept up nocturnal escapades. While in New Orleans, my team spent some time in the Garden District. That area has nice to very nice to extremely nice homes, it also did not flood. We encountered many residents there who did not evacuate. While on patrol in the area one resident walked out to greet us with a Mossberg 590 shotgun slung over his shoulder. We inquired as to his situation. He replied, “We’re fine. I have a gas grill, my generator, and this in case anyone comes back to try anything.” When he said “and this” he patted the shotgun. That man had banded together with his neighbors, they pooled resources and took turns guarding their homes. Following the cops, pipe hitters, and Federal agents, tens of thousands of volunteer medical personnel flooded into the area. Doctors, nurses, paramedics, and EMTs paid their own way, cashed in vacations day, and traveled to where help was needed. The Red Cross, Salvation Army, Catholic Relief Service and many other volunteer organizations arrived with portable kitchens, medical tents,

and trucks loaded with food and water. That was the very best of people coming out. The Worst of People By comparison, allow me to relate the very worst, because this is what you can expect from the coming societal breakdown. Keep in mind, New Orleans went from normal to a third world anarchy in less than three days. In addition to the standard urban chaos that goes on everyday in major cities across America, what we witnessed in New Orleans was lawlessness of an epic scale. The first places to be looted and robbed were any business that sold alcohol, drugs (pharmaceutical) and guns. Pawns shops, liquor stores and corner drug stores were all looted almost immediately when the thugs realised the police were not coming. Grocery store looting was primarily left to the women and kids and men not associated with the drug gangs. But the gangs went after drugs and guns first. Think about it, with guns, the gangbangers could take all the food they wanted. After the previously mentioned businesses were cleaned out, they were burned. No fire department was coming to put out the flames. During my time in New Orleans, post-Katrina, I could not find one single drug store that was not a burned out shell. After the drug stores were cleaned out, the gangs targeted any medical clinic or doctor’s office they could find. Then they hit the hospitals. Hospital staff members were held at gunpoint while the pharmacies inside were looted. Now fully armed, with no police to interfere, the rival gangs went after each other. I was able to befriend a couple of NOPD officers who had stayed behind to try and help maintain order. When the water around the New Orleans Superdome finally receded, I saw cars riddled with bullet holes. I asked my NOPD friends about that, “Was it

you guys against them?” To which they responded, “No, it was them against them.” One of the officers clarified the situation. “You see, we have four ongoing turf wars between the various drug gangs. When they realised that no one would get in their way, they decided it was time to start taking out the competition.” I bet you did not get that story from the CBS nightly news. Rape, murder, assault, and theft were rampant and out of control until literally thousands of men with black rifles arrived. When the thugs realized that these new guys in khakis would shoot back, it was not quite so fun any more. Brazen daylight attacks slowed and the criminals favored the night. Negotiating with Predators If you live a relatively comfortable life in your condo in a major metropolitan area, the minute the police are gone or too busy to respond, you and your neighbors will be the targets for the thugs and gangbangers with whom you do not normally trouble yourself. The naive thought that these urban monsters will suddenly find Jesus when the power goes out is laughable. What most comfortable suburbanites fail to understand is that they will be dealing with a culture of humans who have been raised, essentially since birth, to be predators. No government pamphlet, billboard, or tax-payer funded social program is going to alter that fact. People thinking they can bargain or reason with human predators in American cities reminds me of the fucktardation that we tried to pull off in Afghanistan. The Army trained officers to go into villages to try to convince the local chiefs and warlords that if they supported America, we would bring them “infrastructure”. Yes, these officers, through interpreters, would talk about building highways and hospitals and schools and utilities. They were talking to people who shit in holes in the ground and had likely never seen the inside of a hospital. Promising them infrastructure was like promising them a fucking spaceship, it was retarded, but we tried that.

What the chiefs and warlords understood was power. They understood the value of controlling the water and food supply. They understood the value of horses, and trucks, and guns. They also understood that they should be wary of strength and they despised signs of weakness. When we negotiated from a position of strength and demonstrated through our actions that we were a force to be reckoned with, they respected us. What they did not respect was a lot of talk and empty promises. Tribes: Good and Bad As discussed at the outset of this chapter, your community will need to band together in a tribal configuration if you hope to survive the coming societal collapse. There is no nice way to put that. People who think they can just stick it out on their own will eventually be overwhelmed. Some tribes are peaceful and productive, while other tribes are hostile and predatory. Consider the history of the native American tribes before the arrival of Europeans. We like to craft an image of peaceful people, harvesting maize, frolicking by the rivers, and weaving feathers and beads. That’s all bullshit and an honest person would know it. American Indian tribes were constantly at war with each other. They fought over resources and territory. If the winter was particularly harsh or their crops poor, they would raid the weaker tribe across the valley. The plains Indians were killing and torturing each other long before white men ever crossed the Mississippi River. The rock and stone reality was that a tribe without warriors did not survive very long. As late as 1866, the Shoshone went to war with the Crow nation over hunting lands. The Crow had been encroaching on historical Shoshone hunting land. The Shoshone Chief, Washakie, in an effort to end the conflict without war, sent an emissary to the Crow. The Crow were not impressed by the gesture and killed the messenger.

Washakie, enraged that his emissary was murdered, promised that he would cut out the heart of the Crow Chief, Big Robber. The two engaged in single combat and true to his word, Washakie cut out the rival chief's heart, mounted it on his lance, returned to his people and danced on what is now called Crowheart Butte. The Crow retreated and left. There is a plaque commemorating this battle today in Wyoming on the Wind River Reservation. I relate all of the previous to remind you that despite iPhones and the Internet, we are not all that far removed from thousands of years of tribal behavior. When our comfortable society is turned upside down by forces out of our control, it is the tribe that will save the lives of our children. The second moral to the story is that, when faced with unrepentant aggression, even a man who desires peace must take up arms and do what must be done, however horrific it might seem to others. As you have this book in your hands I will assume that you plan to be a part of a productive, self-sufficient, prepared tribe. That is admirable. However, that does not alter the fact there will be tribes out there who care nothing for morality and fair play. They have no stored up food and resources, their plan is to take what they need by force from whomever they perceive to be weak. That is the rock and stone reality. Fear not my friends, if you heed my words, we will have something to say about that. Remember, we not talking about mere survival, we are going to fucking crush the coming crisis.

Chapter 6 Fortifications and Fire Bases At some point you are going to have to limit and restrict access to your community and neighborhood. The larger the city in which you reside, the more difficult this will be to accomplish. Conversely, the more rural your community and remote, the easier it will be to control access. If you are living in a metropolitan area with hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, your life will be interesting indeed. Remember, the fragile food supply chain? Add to the food problem the organized drug gangs in your city whose numbers are likely in the hundreds, if not thousands. * Author’s Note I contacted my good friend, Paul Markel, and asked him if I could quote from his book, “Patriot Fire Team Equipment Guide” for this section. Mr. Markel graciously agreed. The following information was provided with permission. Paul’s material is italicized.

Fortifying your Neighborhood Vehicles as Barriers The fastest way to block off a street (the entrance to a neighborhood) is to pull a vehicle or vehicles across the roadway. The advantage to this method is that it can be done quickly with essentially no physical labor. The downside is that these vehicles become “sacrificial lambs” as they will be subject to being rammed by looter vehicles or shot up by armed thugs. If you are relying on your pickup truck to transport supplies for your family, you don’t want to sacrifice it to a riot demolition derby or allow it to become a bullet sponge for thugs armed with all the guns they stole from a pawn shop. If you have old, junk vehicles that can be put in place, use them. Don’t sacrifice useful, utility vehicles. Road Spikes

Spike Board: An easy to make and easy to deploy road spike barrier can be made by taking a standard 1x6 piece of lumber and driving 60 penny (6 inch) or 70 p (7 inch) carpentry nails through the board and staggering them. The average 1x6 board is 8 feet long. Drill a hole on each end of the board and loop a rope through each hole so that it can be put in place or pulled out of the way by friendly forces quickly. Depending on the width of the road, you may choose to use one, two, or three of these Spike Boards. (Skill Level: Beginner) Caltrops / Jack Rocks: Using the previously discussed 60p or 70p nails, you can produce individual road spikes that can be deployed en mass on roadways just beyond barriers or signs forbidding people to enter the road. When spread widely over a likely avenue of approach, caltrops have the added advantage of greatly slowing the advance of mobs of looters. The loots will not be able to run at or rush defenders, that is unless they want to impale their feet on the spikes. These will not stop them, but will definitely slow their roll. To make individual road spikes, take 2 large nails and cut off the head to create an angled point. Bend the nails approximately 45 degrees and weld the two nails together at the bends so that no matter how they land, one point will be up. Think of a child’s toy jacks, only much larger. (Skill Level: Intermediate to Advanced ) There are a few online outlets that sell premade caltrops. One store sells them in ten packs for $50. You will likely need dozens or even hundreds, at $5 piece that price tag adds up quickly. It might be a good idea to purchase some and then replicate more later. PS: “Jack Rocks” is the term that union men use for road spikes that they litter around the gates during labor disputes. The Japanese call these devices tetsubishi and they date back to the feudal era. One form of caltrop, that looked more like a large toy jack, was widely used during the American Civil War to impede cavalry troops.

Signs and Barriers Sawhorses: The typical sawhorse made of 2x4 lumber can be quickly assembled and used to mount traffic control signs at checkpoints. During a crisis, if you don’t have a Stop sign for your roadblock you can surely find one at an intersection somewhere. A sturdy sawhorse can be drug in and out of the road quickly. A large sign affixed to a sawhorse that states “Looters Will Be Shot” might seem a bit dramatic, however, the middle of a riot is not the time to be sensitive. “Looters Will Be Shot” is a warning that cannot be misconstrued even by the most sub-moronic thug. Hedgehog: A hedgehog looks like a giant caltrop or tetsubishi. During WWI and WWII hedgehogs were constructed of steel “I” beam material to impede tanks on roads and landing craft on beaches. For our purposes, we can make hedgehogs out of 4x4 lumber. You will need 3 - 4 foot pieces of 4x4, heavy duty bolts and/or 90º corner braces/brackets (heavy duty) and wood screws that are at least 3 inches long. Lay two pieces of 4x4 centered atop one another in a “+” sign configuration. Secure them together with a heavy duty bolt. Now take the third piece of 4x4 and center it on the other two, making a threedimensional cross or “t”. When it is complete you have your sixpointed wooden hedgehog. If you require larger hedgehogs just alter the length of your 4x4. (Skill Level: Beginner) After you have made several wooden hedgehogs you can spread them out and run barbed wire between them to create a barrier that can be quickly deployed across a road. While it is true that a hedgehog will not stop a car or truck, any person that drives over one, particularly when wrapped in barbed wire, is not going to be happy.

Hedgehogs from common lumber 55 Gallon Drums: If you need to create barriers that with stop or slow down vehicles, 55 gallon drums are an easy solution. A 55 gallon drum filled with water will weigh around 450 pounds. If you set them up in a triangle formation that gives you 1300 plus pounds of barrier. Conversely, if you can get your hands on steel 55 gallon drums and fill them with sand, each one will weigh over 800 pounds. Put the sand filled drums in a triangle formation and you have over one full ton of weight. That will slow down any standard passenger car or light truck. Steel drums filled with sand will naturally provide cover from small arms fire as well. Sandbags: Sandbags are easy to come by and not that expensive. You can purchase the industrial variety that will be white, orange or some other color. The surplus market also is a good place to find

military OD green sandbags. Naturally, plain white sandbags are the least expensive. Expect to pay $30 to $40 for 100 white sandbags. Sandbags have been used to build cover for armies for a hundred years or more. They are versatile but they are also labor intensive to fill. Filling sandbags is definitely a team project. Note: In the event of an ongoing crisis, you must remember to maintain security during the construction process. Double thick walls of sandbags should stop any conventional small arms you might be facing (.50 BMG is a different story). When reinforcing guard posts normal configuration will be a opening facing the secure area. to the sternum of the average Level: Beginner)

or checkpoints with sandbags, the “U” or three-sided square with the The sandbag wall should be built up man; think 4 to 4.5 feet tall. (Skill

If at any time you might think this preparation is excessive or paranoid, consider the option of having your neighborhood overrun by fifty to a hundred armed thugs. Think about watching your family run crying from your burning house. Imagine your wife and daughter being repeatedly raped while your dead body grows cold twenty feet away. Now, get back to work preparing your team. Razor Wire and Barbed Wire: Barbed wire is available at any home or farm supply store. For instance, when this was written, an 80 Rod (440 yards) spool of barbed wire was $50 at Tractor Supply. The down side to barbed wire is that it is not self supporting. You will need engineer stakes, wooden posts, or something like the hedgehog we discussed previously. The upside is the cost effectiveness and versatility. Razor wire comes in rolls and is self-supporting. You can stretch out a roll of razor wire and it stands up. The diameter of the rolls of razor wire will vary from 12 inches all the way up to 36 inches. On the commercial market, 18 inch rolls of razor wire seem to be the most common. Like the barbed wire, you can order and pick up razor wire at home and farm stores. You can even get it from

Walmart or Amazon. Remember to purchase a few pairs of thick “Wire Handling Gloves”. Your hands will thank you. (Skill Level: Intermediate) Barbed and razor wire are primarily used to deny/restrict access to people on foot. Yes, a car or truck could drive over/through wire, but the tires won’t last very long. Imagine the rushing mob scenario. How do you slow down fifty armed looters with only a few men? Even in a deadly force situation, you will find it difficult at best to address forty or fifty threats, all at once. Regardless of how motivated, cracked up, or angry a mob might be, they are not going to be happy campers when they run into triple thick rows of razor wire. Even if they attempt to breach the razor wire with ladders, discarded house doors, or lumber, that will take time and it also creates a funnel point on which the defenders can focus. Razor wire can be cut with heavy duty tools, something thugs are not likely to have. Cutting through barbed or razor wire is again a time consuming affair, giving the defenders time to react to the threat. Thanks to Nick and his pal, Paul Markel, for giving me a break from writing. I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Markel’s advice about constructing barricade material from commonly available components. I understand the idea of fortifying your neighborhood is going to be distasteful to many, but you need to suck it up and deal with reality. Waiting for the monsters to show up on your doorstep is the worst of all plans. You need to keep the fight away from your home and your family. You must keep in mind that all cover or barricades are a temporary solution. Given enough time the enemy will always find a way to defeat your cover or get around it. You cannot just build sandbag walls, stretch out razor wire and then wander off hoping the enemy will be dissuaded. Check points must be manned by armed men. Also, routine and frequent security patrols must be conducted. If you

want to keep the monsters and vermin away from your wives and children, this is part of the price you will need to pay. In addition to road blocks, check points, and security patrols, another weapon in your arsenal needs to be some form of overwatch. In short, you need to find the highest position in your area of operation, or a few, and put men with magnified optics and rifles in them. The men in the overwatch position act as lookouts and communicate to the men on the ground giving them warning of approaching threats. These men will naturally have rifles with high power, optical sights to engage deadly threats to the community. This is one of those jobs where the leader will need to be absolutely sure that the most qualified people are manning these posts. You cannot be on the ground worried and wondering if the guys on overwatch are sleeping. Also, you must have one hundred percent confidence in the marksmanship skills of said men. These jobs will generally go to trained combat veterans first, police sharpshooter next, and, if you have no vets or SWAT guys, put some skilled and experienced hunters up there. Don’t forget, the bad guys will employ snipers too. During the first few days after the collapse of New Orleans, post-Katrina, bad guys frequently climbed up on roofs and parking garages to take pot shots at targets of opportunity. The enemy might decide to take out your check point guards with a sniper of their own. How are you going to deal with that? If your area of operation has little to offer in the way of elevated platforms, a skilled engineer with the right materials (telephone poles) can build you a watch tower. My advice is that if you build one watchtower that you build at least two. If there is only one tower, the enemy knows where to focus. If you have more than one, you can alternate watches or even set up decoy positions. Considering that your manpower might be stretched thin, it is not a bad idea to build more sandbag bunkers than you have men to fill and put dummies with BB guns or airsoft rifles in them. Of course, you

need to mix it up. Switch out the decoys will live shooters frequently to keep the enemy spies on their toes. Keep in mind, if you have done a good job securing your neighborhood, the enemy will conduct recon on you before they just come charging in. Think this is paranoid fantasy? There are cities and suburban neighborhoods in America being terrorized right now as these words are typed. The residents are cowering like pathetic sheep behind locked doors praying that they don’t get murdered or burned out with fire bombs.

Fire Bases Fire support bases or simply “fire bases” are forward areas occupied and secured by friendly personnel in a hostile environment. The fire base became popularized during Vietnam and the concept was rejuvenated during our recent involvement in Afghanistan. In addition to providing support fire from mortars and artillery, fire bases also can launch reactionary forces to support other fire bases, patrols and offensive operations. While I don’t anticipate that your cul-de-sac will possess 81mm mortars or 155 howitzers (artillery is a beautiful thing) you can support other communities and neighborhoods in your area if mutual aid agreements are made between them. This is where solid community leadership comes into play. Long before the balloon goes up or the lights go out, take your pick of metaphors, good people in neighboring communities need to have open lines of communication with one another. Ask your local Sheriff about mutual aid agreements. I would be willing to bet that your county Sheriff has a mutual aid agreement with all of the other counties that border yours. It is not all that complex, they simply agree, before a crisis or emergency, that they will come to each other’s aid if and when they are called upon to do so. There is no reason why your community, particularly if you live in a rural area where towns and villages are separated by miles of open

country, cannot engage in a mutual aid compact with others. If your towns and villages are spread out and separated by farm and ranch land, I would suspect that your small village police department already has a mutual aid agreement with the police department in the next town over and the sheriff’s office.

Chapter 7

The Dutch Lifeboat

by Nicholas Orr Allow me to relate a story to you. Many years ago in the Dutch village of Zomspeet lived a 13 year old boy named Bram De Jong. Bram’s father, Luuk De Jong, was a hardworking carpenter and Bram hoped to be as skilled as his father some day. On his twelfth birthday, Bram began to apprentice with his father. Bram looked up to his father, but thought perhaps that his father worked a bit too hard and too long. Bram’s friends who were his age were also apprenticing with their fathers. However, from the window of his father’s workshop, Bram would see his friends Lucas and Ruben running around and playing in the sunshine of a warm summer afternoon. Meanwhile, Bram would still be helping his father until the sun was almost set. The De Jong family did not have a lot of money. Nonetheless, Bram’s mother and father were always sure to put aside a bit of extra food in preparation for long winters. Bram noticed that while other men in the village were often found sitting at tables outside of the town tavern, Bram’s father would be working on yet another project. “I will have time for beer and leisure later.” Luuk told his son. One day the village elders called a meeting and Luuk along with all of Bram’s friends’ fathers were in attendance. When Luuk returned he told his family that Milan, the oldest farmer in the province had issued a dire warning, this year they could see terrible flooding. Milan was 81 years old and, as a farmer, he had kept track of the seasons and the weather since he was a young man. According to Milan, the weather patterns of the current year were the same as those from forty-five years before when the entire village was flooded and water reached the roof tops. According to Milan, the Waal River had broken the dikes and the flooding had lasted for days. He advised all of the villagers to build wooden lifeboats for their families and to fill them with food and

water. Luuk related to his wife and son that, after Milan had left, most of the village elders and men in attendance had mocked him as crazy. Everyone at the village hall was either not yet born or had been so young at the time that they had no recollection of the flood of which the old man spoke. The opinion of the elders was that while there might have been a flood forty-five years previous, it was certainly not as bad as the old man remembered. It was true that the old people of the village used to talk about a great flood, but that was a long time ago. No one spoke of that anymore. Others felt that most everyone would be safe on the second floor of their houses if a flood did come. They advised those with a single story house to go to a neighbor’s home if flood waters ever came. Bram asked his father what he planned to do? “I am a carpenter, am I not? I will build a boat big enough for our whole family.” In addition to his father and mother, Bram had a 5 year old brother, Levi. Luuk’s younger brother, Finn, and his recent bride, Mila, would join the family if a crisis occurred. Bram liked his Uncle Finn. Finn always seemed to have a new joke to tell when he came for a visit. Over the next few weeks, Luuk and Bram worked on the family’s lifeboat when they were not working on other carpentry projects. Bram’s mother filled a wooden box with dried meats and fruit. She filled ceramic jugs with fresh, clean water and set them aside. Luuk taught Bram how to make oars from hardwood and to put a finish on them so they repelled water. By the end of summer, Bram and his father had completed the lifeboat. A sturdy rope for a bow line was placed inside as were the hardwood oars and Luuk covered it all with a large canvas tarp. The food box and water jugs were staged in the family’s kitchen and life went on. Bram would work on his schooling until his noon meal and then apprentice with his father in the afternoon. A few of Bram’s friends’ fathers had come by during the summer seeking advice from Luuk

about how to build their own lifeboats. Nonetheless, by the time of the fall harvest festival, most of the village seemed to have forgotten about the warning of the old man. Bram loved the harvest festival, the air was filled with wonderful smells as the women of the village prepared a variety of food. There were games in day time for the children and music and dancing for the adults at night. The De Jong family, even Luuk, all took a break from their labors and enjoyed the festivities. On the morning of the last day of the weeklong festival, Bram was excited to meet his friends at the square. As he hurried to the heart of the village, the Dutch boy was surprised to feel a chill on the wind. The previous days had all been pleasant. Today the wind was coming from the north and Bram paused to consider going back for his coat. By afternoon the street vendors were doing all they could to keep their canopies from blowing away. All day long the wind strength grew and the midday skies grew dark. By supper time the dark clouds opened and rain began to fall. The mayor announced the day’s activities cancelled as it had been a good festival up to that point. He told everyone they should just return home. As Bram lay in his bed that night he could hear the rain beating against the roof of their home. The sound of steady rain helped him drift off into a deep sleep. When he awoke the next morning, Bram was surprised that he could still hear the sound of rain. “Had it rained all night long?” he wondered to himself. After breakfast, Bram ran from the house to his father’s workshop trying to dodge the downpour from the sky. He could see the low lying areas around the house had filled with water. When he entered the workshop, Bram found his father at the bench planing a piece of wood. “Good, you are up.” Luuk said to his son, “I have a job for you. Go to your Uncle Finn’s house and tell him to bring Aunt Mila with him here, as soon as he can.”

By the time Bram made his way home with Finn and Mila, they had to wade through small streams that had formed in every low lying part of their village. The standing water was building up everywhere. In his thirteen years, Bram had never known the rain to fall so hard for so long. The youth saw men with a horse cart filled with sand bags heading north toward the dike that held back the Waal River. When Bram, Finn and Mila entered the house they were soaked to the bone. Luuk and his wife were in the kitchen with Levi. “It looks as though the old man might have been correct.” Luuk said. “Yes, that seems to be the case.” Finn replied. Luuk continued, “If the Waal dike breaks, we will have little time. Sophie, will you and Mila put the food and water in the boat?” Bram’s father fed the fire in the stove and the wet trio gathered around it to get warm and dry. “We’ll all sleep under one roof tonight and see what tomorrow might bring.” Mr. De Jong stated to the extended family. When he woke the next morning, Bram could hear the rain. He found his father sitting by the black iron stove in his rocking chair. The young man realised his father had been up all night long. Soon thereafter, Finn emerged. It had now been raining for nearly two days straight. Luuk had Finn and Bram follow him to the workshop. Once inside and out the hearing of the women, Luuk spoke gravely. “There are not enough boats to save the village.” “How can that be?” Finn asked. Luuk frowned, “Most of the men in the village thought the old man had lost his mind and they ignored him. Very few of them have lifeboats for their families.” Mr. De Jong paused and looked his brother and son in the eyes individually, “I pray it is not as bad as old Milan said, but if it is, many in the village will not survive.” Just then the sound of the church bell began to ring. This was not a call to worship, this was the alarm. The continued ringing of the bell meant one thing, the dike had broken, the waters of the Waal River were rushing toward the village. Bram’s father said not one word as he ran to the house. Everyone knew what to do. They lifted the edge of the canvas tarp high enough

for everyone to climb in. Luuk and Finn being the heaviest sat at opposite ends. The women, Bram and his little brother sat in the middle. Luuk had made the tarp large enough to act as a shelter from the rain. The family huddled in the wooden boat and waited. Bram could not say how long they sat in the boat before they heard the roar of the approaching water. When it reached them and their lifeboat the force shook the craft. Mila let out a brief scream. “Hold on everyone, we will be fine.” Luuk assured his family. Bram felt the boat shift as the rising flood waters carried it. When they lifted the tarp to look outside, Bram was shocked to see that the boat was higher than the kitchen window of their home, by his estimation they were more than a hundred yards from the house and moving away. The house seemed to be moving farther away and sinking at the same time. Bram was amazed that the flood waters were rising so rapidly. Bram’s family held the tarp over their heads and surveyed the scene. They saw the Jansen family in their boat not too far away, perhaps a hundred yards or more. Karl Jansen had been one of the men who sought Luuk’s advice to make a lifeboat. Karl Jansen had a wife and three children. There were people in the water. They were yelling and screaming for help. Many were swimming toward the Jansen family boat. The De Jong family watched in horror as the Jansen family boat was overwhelmed by the people in the water. Unable to hold the weight, the Jansen lifeboat tipped and then sank below the flood waters. Karl Jansen and his wife desperately tried to save their children but the panicked villagers flailed and screamed and pushed the Jansens down drowning the entire family. A dozen or so remaining villagers spotted the De Jong lifeboat and began to swim for it. Luuk yelled to Finn and Bram, “Grab the oars, don’t let them get to the boat they will drown us all!” As the panicked swimmers approached the lifeboat, Luuk yelled a warning. “Stay

back, leave us be.” The villagers in the water ignored the command and kept coming. They screamed for Luuk to save them. “Stop!” Bram’s father yelled as a man reached out to grab the family’s boat. A fraction of a moment later, Luuk smashed the head of that man with the heavy, hardwood oar. At the bow, Finn defended the lifeboat as another man in the water lunged for the front. Finn stuck that man with all his might, splitting his head open. Sophie and Mila huddled in the center of the boat, little Levi between them. Mila screamed once more as a woman put her hands on the edge of the boat and started to pull herself up. Bram recognized her, she was Mrs. Bakker, the mayor’s wife. Finn and Luuk were busy defending the fore and aft. “No, stop, get out!” Bram yelled. But Mrs. Bakker, a crazed look in her eyes, ignored him. At that moment the yelling and screaming became muffled in Bram’s ears. The sight of the Jansen family being drowned by the panicked mob flashed in his mind. It seemed that the world was moving in slow motion. Bram De Jong was now operating on survival instinct. If he did not act, his family would suffer the same fate as the others. The youth was a bit surprised when the oar he was holding crashed down onto the mayor’s wife who was pulling herself into their boat. Bram saw her eyes roll back into her head and he watched her slip below the flood waters. Epilogue Like one of Aesop’s fables, not all stories have a happy ending but they do have a moral and many have lessons. I would expect the moral of this story would be self-evident, but we will dissect the tale regardless. First, we have the warning from the old man. The villagers think that the old man is paranoid or prone to exaggeration. They are assured that things could never get that bad. It is a common form of arrogance in man to behave as if history began on the day that they were born. Far too often, humans, whether by default or design, will

act as though nothing that happened before they arrived on this planet matters. In this story we see that the villagers had no direct memory of the previous catastrophic flood, so they acted as though the historical relevance made no difference to them. Luuk, Bram’s father, is a skilled carpenter with the talent and ability to build a sturdy liferaft for his family. Despite the fact that Luuk was available to give advice in such matters, only a few of the villagers decided to take him up on the subject. The villagers had all summer and into the fall to prepare, but most chose not to do so. When the flood came they were not prepared. It was not that they hadn’t been given warning, they had. They also had ample time to prepare, but they chose not to. When the unprepared and panicked villagers swam for the Jansen boat, Mr. Jansen was ill prepared to stop them from sinking it. He had done the right thing by making a lifeboat, but he and his family perished anyway. On the other hand, Luuk had arranged for his adult brother to join his family in the event of an emergency. He had built the boat so that it was big enough for the extended family. The De Jong family did not drown because there were two adult men and a teenage boy on the boat to defend it. That does not make Luuk De Jong cruel or a selfish monster. He did what was right while other men lounged at the tavern. At the end of the story, the De Jong men had to use the oars to bash the heads of those whose panicked behavior would have sunk and killed them all. The people in the water were not foreign invaders, they were their neighbors. Bram recognized Mrs. Bakker, the mayor’s wife, but none of that mattered. The people in the water were going to drown, the only difference would be whether or not they took the De Jong family with them. When the societal collapse comes, whether it lasts a few weeks, a few months, or 299 days as one author suggested, there will be people who completely failed to prepare. In a panic, they will cry out for those who did prepare to save them. They will attempt to

overwhelm the prepared people and, if they are successful, both the prepared and unprepared will all die because there will not be enough for all. You cannot make your neighbors and family build their own lifeboat. However, unless you want to be in a position where you are smashing heads with an oar, you need to encourage them to become selfreliant, now.

Chapter 8 Swallowing the Red Pill If you are unaware of it, in the movie “The Matrix” the hero, Neo, is given a choice to take either a red pill or a blue pill. The red pill will open his eyes and allow him to see the reality of the world in which he lives. The blue pill would allow him to go back to living a life of blissful ignorance. Spoiler, Neo takes the red pill. Those who watched and enjoyed the film understood that reality was not going to change regardless of the pill Neo chose. The horrors of the actual dystopian world were not going to go away just because Neo chose the blue pill. Red or blue, the harsh reality remained the same, the only choice was whether or not to have the courage to face it. That is very much the choice that millions of Americans are making today, whether by deliberation or mindless default. It does not take much effort to pay attention to the world around us and understand that evil men are growing more bold by the day. And why should they not? The thugs, looters, and criminal vermin are burning homes and businesses, stealing, assaulting and even murdering innocent citizens. To date very little punishment has taken place. Our police have been deliberately hamstrung by politicians and the media. Even when called, they come late or not at all. We witness entire city blocks set to the torch while police are ordered to stage a half-mile away by their criminal masters. People who have absolutely nothing to do with the so-called grievances of the criminal mobs are targets for beatings and worse. State governors are so intent on controlling the citizens that they criminalize free commerce and threaten to arrest the law-abiding for violating these unconstitutional mandates. Meanwhile, the same politicians turn a blind eye to mass criminal behavior and even go so far as to make excuses for it. Millions of Americans have been put into debt and many of them bankrupted through no fault of their own by politicians drunk on their

illicit power. Food production, processing, and distribution have all been damaged and the free market supply endangered. I told you at the outset of the book that I was going to give you information and education that would help you to crush the coming societal breakdown. Many of you might have expected gardening how-to’s and food canning advice. Those things you can get from any number of sources. What I have attempted to deliver on these pages is hard, in your face, information and instructions that many either do not understand or are afraid to relate. While it is definitely important to have “stuff” it is just as important to have others who understand what needs to be done and how to do it. The last most critical aspect of crushing the coming societal collapse is WILL. You must have the will, the intestinal fortitude, the courage to make hard choices and do what needs to be done to ensure that your family and community survives and thrives during the trouble to come.

About the Author Nicolas Orr is the nom de plume for a civilized barbarian, a savage gentleman, with thirty plus years of operational and combat experience in the United States and overseas. The author has carried a gun during innumerable assignments worldwide as a member of the United States Military, as a Military Contractor, and Executive Protection Agent. Thomas Thrasher is one of the author’s favorite characters and the conduit for hardcore, in your face, information delivery and entertainment. The adventures of Thomas Thrasher are chronicled in The Operator Series of books by Nicholas Orr. Other Books by Nicholas Orr: The Operator Sin City: The Operator Book 2