A Good Book Review

Enforcing Home - Another Excellent Chapter in the Survivalist Series

I have wrote before about how well written and realistic A. American's Survivalist series was and the latest, book #6 called "Enforcing Home" is no exception. This latest book continues to find Morgan, his military partners improving their situation while faced with threats from armed bandits and the Department of Homeland Security.

While survivalist books by A. American, Joe Nobody, James Wesley Rawles and others are novels since the collapse hasn't happened yet,.....yet,.....you can still learn something. You can see problem sets and ask yourself how you would solve it, what decision you would make. Another way to learn are the survival tips that the authors spread among the story line.

Without giving too much up for those of you who haven't read the book yet, I had five major takeaways from a learning or reinforcement stand point:

Growing food occupied all the characters and/or their separate survival groups. The most successful people in the story line was a couple who had a collapse preexisting green hose and were adept at growing much of their own food supply. S o in a perfect world the survivalist would have a green house, possibly some cleared land for a spring-summer garden, a good supply of non-hybrid seeds, a water source and the skill to grow vegetables.

Feed chickens was the second point. In the story Morgan's group had chickens which gave them a healthy supply of eggs. A way to feed those chickens was described where a bucket with holes was hung up above the chicken coop and a dead animal carcass was put into the bucket. Flies would leave their eggs in the carcass and when they would hatch the maggots would fall out the bottom of buckets onto the ground for the chickens to eat. I never heard of that before.

Preserving eggs. Something I have heard before and reinforced in memory was the technique of coating eggs with mineral oil to preserve them. Having a supply of mineral oil on hand for other things is smart as well. Treats constipation, can be used for burning in oil lamp, even lubing weapons in a pinch.

Prepared for contact with disease ridden people. This is something I had wrote about before, about having personal protection gear and a plan on how to approach, handle or interface with people possibly infected with bad communicable diseases. In that perfect world again, a smart and well prepared survivalist would have a stockpile of antibiotics to treat some of treatable diseases, the knowledge of treatment plans, a stock of personal protective gear, and a plan on what to do with diseased infected suspected contacts or people that have been exposed within your own group.

If you are a prepper and have not yet read the Home novels from A. American (the "A" stands for Angry by the way) then you can pick up series through Amazon.

Urban Survival Skills – Wilderness Survival

I am often asked for recommendations on wilderness survival training courses and references on back country survival.

I was a Wilderness Survival Instructor for a military course where we presented two days of hands on round, robin type instruction on various desert survival related subjects including: Survival Sheltercraft; Building expedient weapons; Traps, Snares and Hunting; Water procurement and Purification; Edible Plants and Medicinal Uses; Poisonous Plants; Poisonous Dwellers (predominantly Rattlesnakes); Fire Starting; Navigation without mechanical aids; and, Recognizing and treating Dehydration and Heat Injuries. We then placed these individuals in small teams into a desert environment where they had to move 60 miles in 8 days to a pickup point for recovery. They were not given anything other than 2 one quart canteens and knife and some parachute suspension line, and, only eat or drank what they found or caught.

Anybody going through this training will have the skills and understanding to survive not only in Desert environments or also other wilderness’ as principles and techniques are essential the same even as some of the environmental concerns, animals and plant life changes.

But understand that being stranded in a wilderness and surviving until recovered is much different is living in degraded society after a collapse. To put it another way, anybody with sufficient training and skills can survive like an animal but living with any quality in an environment without packaged foods, services provided electricity and greater threats such as overtly operating gangs of criminals and lack of medical infrastructure is going to take a lot of planning, preparation and the acquisition of Survival related Gear, Equipment and Supplies.

Having said that, learning about surviving in the wilderness is something for the Urban Survivalist to consider especially if the Bug Out plan following a collapse may include transiting rural or remote areas, and possibly moving overland on foot. The Survival Bug Out Bag, which consists of essential Survival Gear and Equipment, should ensure you have the tools to survive until you get to your prepared Safe Location, but your movement may be much slower than you anticipate and you may run out of essential supplies and/or lose some of all of your kit.

So it pays to have the Wilderness Survival training and skills. Barring that the next best step is to have some decent reference material on Wilderness Survival.

For General Wilderness Survival there are three excellent books among many that we recommend: Tappan On Survival, by Mel Tappen; US Army Field Manual on Survival; and, John Wiseman’s SAS Survival handbook. These are available through the Recommended Reading link to the left and also on the bottom of this page.

For specific topics such as Edible Plants, three of the best resources we have found are; Wild Cards: Edible Wild Foods, by Linda Runyon; Edible Foods Master Class (book and DVD); and, an old time classic, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, by Euell Gibbons. Other good edible plants book are a available as well.