Emergency

by Neil Strauss

  Yet when I asked even the most dogged marksman there if he’d ever used his gun in civilian life, the answer was almost always “no” or “almost.” But as easy as it was to find flaws in their logic, ultimately these gun enthusiasts were just like me: they were survivalists. And they wanted to be prepared for every eventuality, no matter how unlikely.

  By the last day of class, I’d taken McNeese’s advice to heart. I slowed down, relaxed, and loosened the sphincter muscle. Instead of trying to remember all the details essential to accurate shooting, I simply trusted myself to do it—coolly, slowly, and methodically.

  Soon I was pressing the trigger instead of pulling it jerkily, keeping my eye on the front sight of the gun, hitting targets in clusters around the heart and eyes, and making it through entire shoot houses without killing a single innocent. In 1.5 seconds, day and night, I could draw a holstered pistol, aim at a target seven yards away, and shoot it twice in the heart.

  It wasn’t just a lesson in marksmanship. It was a lesson in life.

  “We’re in America, we’re shooting guns—it’s a good day!” Campbell proclaimed as he walked down the range, watching his students blast the hearts out of their targets. “There’s nothing better in the world.”

  In my final shoot house session, I noticed that the first gunman was wearing a bulletproof vest, so I shot him in the head. In the kitchen, I spotted another gunman outside the window and shot him in the heart. And in the last room, there was a target with a gun, but beneath it, he was holding a small child. I asked him to release the child, and when he didn’t I shot him in the head—twice.

  “I’m impressed,” McNeese said. “So you are trainable.”

  A feeling of relief washed over my body. I had succeeded in my mission. I felt like I could protect my home in St. Kitts—and in Los Angeles. At least from small bands of looters who hadn’t been trained at Gunsite.

  In the process, though, something strange had occurred. I developed a bloodlust I’d never felt before. I actually wanted an excuse to shoot a bad guy, so I could experience what the instructors had talked about.

  Guns are designed to kill, and to understand them correctly is to understand killing. Not shooting anyone was like learning to golf on a driving range but never going to an actual course. (Of course, ask anyone about golf at Gunsite and they’ll tell you it’s “a waste of a perfectly good rifle range.”)

  I began to understand how armies could so easily indoctrinate new recruits to murder. It’s as easy as stereotyping a group of people as bad, then teaching soldiers day after day how to kill them before they kill you. The better the training, the more of a waste it would be not to use it. After all, those who don’t know how to fight tend to stay out of fights.

  “Be safe,” McNeese told us during our graduation ceremony, “and be good to everyone you meet—but always have a plan to kill them.”

  He then handed us our diplomas:

  “I’ll tell you something,” Stephanie, the student with the government Beretta, told me after the ceremony. “The day I checked in here, I had fired a handgun probably twice before. This course has probably saved my life.”

  Afterward, we went to Colonel Cooper’s house to meet his widow and look through his memorabilia. I sat and talked with McNeese, who recommended some of the other courses. “Don’t go into a gunfight with a pistol,” he confided, leaning in close. “It’s a low-damage weapon. It’s what you use when you can’t get a bigger gun.”

  “So what kind of gun do you recommend then?” To me, low damage was getting hit in the head with a Ping-Pong ball, not a .45-caliber hollow-point bullet traveling 835 feet a second.

  McNeese suggested a twelve-gauge shotgun with an 18.5-inch barrel. He recommended using slugs for outdoor shooting and, for indoors, birdshot, which is less likely to penetrate a wall and hurt a family member. Apparently, I was going to need heavier artillery for my urban survival kit.

  Nearby, a group of students and instructors were making fun of Democrats, gun control laws, and anyone from California. “There’s no constitutional amendment that’s been more crippled and regulated than the Second Amendment,” a competitive shooter was saying about the right to keep and bear arms.

  After eavesdropping for a while, I began to realize that all my life I’d been a hypocrite. As a journalist I’d always supported the right to free speech, but been opposed to guns. However, by playing favorites with the amendments, it wasn’t the founding fathers’ vision of America I was fighting for—it was just my personal opinion.

  Though I’d passed the writing and shooting tests at Gunsite, which made me eligible for the permit to carry a concealed weapon, I discovered that I needed to send a set of fingerprints to the State of Arizona to receive it. And, unlike the prints I submitted to get my background check for St. Kitts, these would be kept on file permanently. So I was faced with a dilemma: which was more important, my safety or my privacy?

  After weeks of debate, I chose privacy. If the social order ever broke down, no one would be checking for concealed-weapons permits anyway.

  Spencer, meanwhile, was solving the same problem the B way. “I’ve actually been trying to find a podunk place where I can buy the police a squad car in exchange for being named an off-duty cop,” he said when I called to tell him about my brand-new pistol skills. “That way, I can carry a concealed weapon anywhere.” He hesitated for a moment. “I want to have it ready for the next fiscal crisis.”

  This wouldn’t be my last gun class. I would eventually purchase and learn to use a Remington 870 Wingmaster shotgun with a ventilated rib barrel and a model 700 rifle with a Tasco Super Sniper scope.

  Thanks to Kurt Saxon, Mel Tappan, and Bruce Clayton, I’d become a gun nut. I’d become one of the guys I would have been too scared to hang out with on the millennial New Year.

  There is a language of survival.

  WTSHTF is short for When the Shit Hits the Fan. And, as disastrous as that may sound, it’s not nearly as bad as EOTWAWKI—the End of the World as We Know It.

  Bugging out is slang for leaving your home to go somewhere safe. To do so, you’ll want a bug-out bag (or BOB) full of survival supplies for the road; a bug-out vehicle (or BOV), which will get you out of the impact zone and through traffic as quickly as possible; and a bug-out location (or BOL) stocked with enough provisions to get you through whatever crisis is occurring.

  So, in short, WTSHTF, you’re going to want a BOB to bring into your BOV to go to your BOL, where you’ll pray it isn’t the EOTWAWKI.

  I learned all this on the Survivalist Boards.

  When I returned home from Gunsite, I noticed that most of my friends grew fidgety whenever I began discussing my quest for a passport, a Swiss bank, and bigger and better firearms. Either they thought I’d gone off the deep end or they wanted to talk about something more directly related to their interests—like whether Rock Band was better than Guitar Hero.

  This was before gas prices soared, banks collapsed, and my friends began feeling the terror in their wallets. Most people tend not to care about political, economic, and ecological problems until they’re personally inconvenienced by them.

  Thankfully, there’s this thing called the Internet, where individuals who feel alone in their predilections can discover a community of people who share their interests. If Armin Meiwes, a cannibal in Germany, could use the Internet to find two hundred people volunteering to be killed, cooked, and eaten, surely I could find a community of survivalists to give me advice.

  All it took was one search for survivalist forum to find survivalistboards.com, which soon became a daily obsession. The Survivalist Boards were a treasure trove of postapocalyptic suggestions, ranging from hunting for food at the local zoo if game becomes scarce to making a gun out of galvanized plumbing pipe, a dowel, a nail, duct tape, and a small piece of cardboard.

  I read the boards for days, trying to separate the useful, practical advice from the black-helicopters-following-me paranoia. I didn’t know when—or w
hether—my St. Kitts citizenship would come through, so I wanted to train as quickly, intensely, and efficiently as possible. In addition, because I didn’t plan on living in the Caribbean full-time, I needed to be prepared for the more likely scenario that something would go wrong while I was still in Los Angeles.

  As long as I was joining hidden communities, I also signed up for a perpetual traveler mailing list called PT-Refuge. Survivalists understood handheld tools like guns, knives, archery bows, fishing poles, and can openers. But they had almost no interest in nontangible tools like passports, trusts, LLCs, and numbered accounts. Perhaps they didn’t think these things would still be around WTSHTF. Or, more likely, judging by some of the survivalists I corresponded with, they clung fiercely to their own conception of America, and a SHTF scenario was also an opportunity to form a militia and remake the country according to their own ideals.

  I called Spencer to tell him to check out the Survivalist Boards. He was in St. Kitts with his brother and his parents—who, unlike my family, supported his endeavors. They were getting citizenships too.

  “I knew you’d catch on eventually,” he told me.

  “Thanks, I think.”

  “These are the kinds of things you should be considering,” he continued as he scrolled through the posts. “The way I see it, there are only two situations we need to be prepared for.”

  Since I’d discovered the boards, I’d been thinking the same thing. “Bugging in and bugging out?”

  “If that’s what they call it, yes. First, you need to have enough supplies at home so you can survive with no help from anything or anyone in the outside world. Next, you need an escape route in case you have to leave your home. And that escape route should lead you to a safe retreat.”

  “Like St. Kitts.”

  “Once we get our passports.” He sighed. He’d been feuding over contract details with the developer of the property he wanted to buy, so he hadn’t even filed for his citizenship yet. “Our biggest challenge is going to be just getting out of the city, because traffic will be bumper-to-bumper.”

  “I’ll tell you what. Have a good time in St. Kitts. I’ll look into ways to bug out when the shit hits the fan.”

  I was already talking like a hard-core survivalist.

  After getting off the phone with Spencer, I made my first post on the Survivalist Boards—a plea for advice on how to escape the city WTSHTF.

  Most of the experts advised moving out of the city immediately. But just like the decision not to turn my fingerprints in to the government, I wasn’t ready to compromise my freedom and enjoyment of life for security. A second citizenship added options and opportunities to my life; living next door to Kurt Saxon would only remove options and narrow possibilities.

  Others responded with vivid scenarios worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster. One poster, who went by the name Dewey, advised, “The best thing, given your situation, is to: arm yourself to the teeth to fend off looters and gangs, build yourself an excellent BOB, and keep a month’s worth of rations at your residence to weather out the initial exodus of sheeple and eventual gang wars. I’d lay low, let all the gangs kill each other off first (expect that within 2–3 weeks), then prepare to hoof it. Thus, an excellent BOB is essential, as is carefully selected firearms. You’re definitely going to need a semi-automatic rifle with high magazine capacity.”

  Others gave less morbid advice that I never would have come up with myself. “Might I suggest a different path?” Lasercool wrote. “If escaping beforehand is not an option, you might want to get involved with the local disaster management organizations run by the government. Here in Miami, the police run a CERT team—Community Emergency Response Team. You can get decent training, a snazzy vest, and most of all contacts within law enforcement. You’ll be seen as one of the ‘good guys,’ and often that can make the difference between getting through a roadblock and not getting through.”

  Finally, a handful of others on the forum insisted that I purchase a motorcycle with saddlebags and study local trail maps so I could escape via isolated mountain roads instead of crowded, chaotic highways.

  The only problem was that I didn’t know how to ride a motorcycle. I’d tried once before during an interview with Tom Cruise at a motorcycle raceway. But it ended in disaster: while trying to brake on a turn, I wiped out on his expensive 955cc Triumph bike. Though he didn’t seem to mind the damage to the motorcycle, I was humiliated.

  Fortunately, the survivalists were helpful and thorough. They suggested the best place to train: the Motorcycle Safety Foundation. They suggested the best survival bikes to buy: the rugged Rokon Trail-Breaker used by U.S. Special Forces in Desert Storm, the versatile dual-sport Suzuki DR-Z400SM, and the Russian Ural, a sidecar-enhanced motorcycle built to battle the Nazis. And they suggested the biggest hazards to watch out for: a saboteur stringing piano wire across the road to decapitate me, an attacker lurking around a corner wielding a two-by-four, and a motorist shooting me in the back to get a free motorcycle.

  I was impressed by their imaginations. They reminded me of Katie and her movie-inspired fears. Maybe she’d make a good survivalist after all.

  Since the risks seemed improbable, I signed up for a course with the Motorcycle Safety Foundation and looked into the Rokon Trail-Breaker. With a two-wheel drive system, wide tractor-like tires, and hollow aluminum wheels capable of storing gas and water, the Rokon was a survival machine, able to ride through mud puddles and streams two feet deep, over mountains of rubble, and through snow-covered fields. While cars were stuck bumper-to-bumper on the freeway, I’d be able not just to weave around them, but to cruise along the median, the shoulder, the embankment, and even, if necessary, over the tops of abandoned cars.

  For the next step in my evacuation route, I did something Spencer had advised when we first met: I researched flying lessons.

  I couldn’t believe I was about to take my pursuit of offshore safety this far, but Spencer was right. If I was going to have a compound in St. Kitts, I’d need a way to get there. Though the survivalists recommended using a kit to build my own ultralight plane, my tool skills at the time prohibited anything with words like kit, build, model, or construct—unless they involved small interlocking rectangular blocks or cheap Swedish furniture.

  “The most unforgettable day of your life will be the day you take your first solo flight,” Taras, my instructor at Justice Aviation, told me when I signed up for pilot class. “The second-most unforgettable day of your life will be the day you take your first solo trip somewhere.”

  As I sat through his orientation, it occurred to me that flying lessons would be a long and costly commitment. On the positive side, spending time at the airport would enable me to make friends who flew planes and worked in control towers in case I needed them. On the negative side, a single-engine plane on a day with a good tailwind would only fly as far as Santa Fe on a tank of gas.

  I decided to take a few lessons anyway, until I came across a better option. Though a single-engine plane wouldn’t get me to St. Kitts, at least it would get me across the border.

  Before I could start flying, however, I needed to give Taras a copy of my driver’s license and proof of my U.S. citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate. Between my flight lessons, gun purchases, and suspicious Internet searches (at least the ones I’d made before taking Grandpa’s anonymity advice), I was pretty sure I’d caught the attention of the government. I’d recently read that James Moore, the coauthor of a negative book on Karl Rove called Bush’s Brain, had been added to the no-fly list. Hopefully, I wouldn’t be next.

  The tools we need to protect ourselves, I realized, are nearly identical to those that others are using to kill us. Perhaps the only difference between the good guys and the bad guys then is intent. Because by not trusting the state, I’d made myself indistinguishable from its enemies.

  Motorcycle school was just as humiliating as gun school. Not only was I inexperienced, but I was one of the few people in class who’
d never even driven stick shift before.

  Perhaps I wasn’t so much getting prepared for hard times as I was catching up to normal people. Driving stick, shooting guns, farming, and using tools are things every man should know. But my friends and I had never bothered to learn these basic skills because everything had always been handed to us. Public transportation, fast food, the Yellow Pages, and Craigslist had made them seem unnecessary.

  Just as I squeezed triggers too hard, I throttled the bike too much. When weaving around cones, I inevitably crushed them. And during a stopping exercise, I braked so suddenly that the rear wheel locked and the bike tipped over.

  It wasn’t until the last day of class that I realized what was holding me back: my sphincter. I was worrying too much—about braking, throttling, balancing and releasing the clutch at just the right times while under the scrutiny of the instructors. And the more I thought, the worse I rode.

  As I approached a row of cones, I took a deep breath and decided to trust my instincts instead of thinking so hard about trying to do everything perfectly. This time I carved around the cones gracefully, without hitting a single one. Yet when it came time to repeat my performance during the final driving exam, my sphincter shrunk back to the size of a needle’s eye and I didn’t even come close to passing. To truly learn to survive in stressful situations, I’d need to take the motto of the Survivalist Boards—“endure—adapt—overcome”—to heart and learn to relax my sphincter permanently instead of tightening it whenever confronted with a challenge.

  Or, as security consultant Gavin de Becker put it less scatologically in his book The Gift of Fear, I needed to learn to disengage my logic brain and engage my wild brain, which instinctively guards and protects.