by Neil Strauss
I was writing as fast as I could. I recalled the instructions for making a rudimentary pipe bomb from one of Kurt Saxon’s books—just stick a plastic baggie in a pipe, fill it with safety-match heads, add a piece of string as a fuse, and cap both ends. Even I could do that.
He said, if you’re in a shopping mall and someone sets off a dirty bomb, you have roughly thirty minutes to decontaminate.
Why was I taking notes so furiously?
He said, cover your nose and mouth immediately with anything that wasn’t exposed.
Was this ever really going to happen to me?
He said, never use a cell phone or radio within a thousand-foot radius of an explosion in case the frequency sets off a secondary device.
How many dirty bombs had even been set off in American shopping malls?
He said, if you rush toward the exits with everyone else, you risk not only being trampled but also getting injured by a secondary device planted there. Instead, head to the bathroom, find the sprinkler, bust it open, and decontaminate yourself.
And how often was I in a shopping mall? Almost never.
He said, if you have to remove contaminated clothing, don’t pull it over your head. Cut it off.
Yet I continued scribbling away, because I was haunted by the same demon everyone else in class was haunted by: Just in Case.
I was reminded of a book I’d recently read on the Inquisition. For five hundred years of Western history, the Catholic Church was much more extreme than today’s Muslim fundamentalists. Its armies killed all the heretics they could get their hands on, wiping out entire religions by torturing, slaughtering, and burning alive nearly every devotee. Like the fatwas of hard-line Muslims today, it even wrote edicts prescribing these genocidal terms. And because of these bloody measures, Christianity dominates the West today. In history, whether you look at the manifest destiny of America or the city-demolishing bombings that ended World War II, winning is killing.
He said, if you’re ever in a public area and someone starts spraying gunfire, get down on your stomach with your feet pointed toward the attacker, your face positioned away, and your hands covering your head. This way, it’s less likely that the bullets will hit your vital organs.
Scribble. Scribble. Now this seemed more likely to happen. Slightly.
He said, if you notice an absence of birds and mosquitoes, or you see people with drool, tears, and snot pouring out of their faces, it’s most likely a chemical attack. Cover your nose and mouth, head upwind, and use the rule of thumb—which means getting far enough away from a chemical incident that when you stick your thumb out and squint at it, your digit covers the entire scene.
Why hadn’t anyone told me this before? I was glad I had to wait for my second passport. Otherwise I might never have taken the time to learn about the dangers I was trying to protect myself from.
He said, if chemicals from the attack get on your skin, rinse them off for twenty minutes with cool water while cleaning with soap and bleach. Don’t use warm water because it will open your pores.
Fuck calculus. Fuck trigonometry. Fuck long division. This was cool knowledge, useful knowledge, life-saving knowledge. Even if my chances of using it were as likely as having to use the law of quadratic reciprocity in real life, at least it seemed practical—at least it slew one head of the many-headed demon Just in Case.
Afterward, with no test and little ceremony, we collected our uniforms and credentials—including this certificate, auspiciously signed by the mayor, stating that I was now qualified to serve the city in the event of a disaster. As a committed non-joiner of teams and committees, it wasn’t the kind of honor I’d ever expected to receive:
A few weeks later, I received a message that ten CERT members were needed at Fire Station 88. We were asked to bring our vest, hard hat, gloves, goggles, and a flashlight. I thought this might be a chance to put my newly learned skills to work.
Instead, it was just a media opportunity. For KTLA News cameras that night, we demonstrated how to remove a trapped victim from under a slab of concrete using cribbing. I was the safety officer. If you look at the still carefully, you’ll see me on the far left of the frame—the skinny lone wolf in his hard-earned green helmet, with his foot up on a slab of concrete and his hands protecting his crotch from some unknown threat.
As the safety officer, it was my job to make sure no one was injured. I accomplished this task by watching everyone else do all the work.
Some call it laziness. I call it a survival skill:
What do you need?
It’s great to have Louis Vuitton Cherry Blossom Papillon Murakami purses and Vacheron Constantin Patrimony watches and THX-certified mega-multiplexes with twelve different blockbusters to choose from. After all, most Americans, if given the choice between having the right to vote or the right to see whatever movies they want, would choose the latter.
I probably would. There are a lot of really good movies out there, and not a lot of really good political candidates.
But these are just wants. Happiness, friendship, education, entertainment, success, family, respect, freedom of speech—those are wants too.
Our needs are actually very few. Here is all we need:
1. Safety and health: In short, the confidence of knowing we’ll wake up each day in satisfactory working order, without a knife held to our throat or a hurricane tearing our roof off or a disease attacking our body.
2. Shelter and warmth: According to the rule of threes, though we can live without water for roughly three days and without food for some three weeks, it can take just three hours to die of exposure.
3. Food and water: No explanation necessary.
That’s it. Call it the triangle of life. When it comes down to it, every one of us would sacrifice our freedom to fulfill any one of these three needs if they were lacking. And all the aspirations people have—to become rich or famous or simply better than their neighbor—would instead be focused on obtaining a glass of water, a warm place to sleep, or an antibiotic to fight an infection.
There’s a ceiling over our heads that we’re all striving to reach. And right now, despite the political and economic problems in the country, that ceiling is very high and almost anything is possible. That’s why people like Tomas immigrate to America.
Survivalism is preparing for the day when that ceiling is lowered, almost to the floor, and success is simply a matter of not dying. And just because I was learning to ride a motorcycle and fly a plane, just because I was stockpiling supplies and preparing an escape route, just because I knew how to crib and triage, didn’t mean I’d truly know how to survive WTSHTF.
So I looked to the people who were the experts at throwing shit in the fan: the military.
There’s a program in the military that supposedly turns boys into men. It teaches downed air force pilots to survive behind enemy lines and captured soldiers to resist interrogation.
It’s called SERE, and it stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. It’s supposedly hard-core, and hard-core was what I needed if I wanted to learn to fend for myself in both America and St. Kitts.
So I called Evan, the Green Beret I’d met at Gunsite, and asked if they let civilians into SERE.
“SERE’s gay,” Evan replied instantly. “They don’t teach you how to survive. They teach you how to die slowly.”
“What do you mean?”
“They basically ask who wants to be an instructor, and whoever says yes gets to teach. You’re better off reading a book. The only part that’s kind of interesting is the interrogation.”
During his mock interrogation, Evan said he was imprisoned, tortured, and waterboarded. At night, his captors—fellow soldiers playing a role—blasted a Nazi SS march at deafening volume over and over, until he was driven nearly mad with sleep deprivation.
“They got pretty sadistic,” he continued. “But people underestimate their ability to deal with pain. What got me wasn’t the torture, but the psychological stuff. Whe
n they put my balls on a table and brought out a hammer, I just broke down.”
“So maybe it’s worth doing SERE just for the experience?” I prodded. “I mean, minus the balls thing.”
“Nah, the rest is pretty lame. The guy you really want to go see is Tom Brown.”
“Who’s that?” I’d never heard of him before.
“Tom Brown is the real deal. He teaches the guys who teach the marines how to survive, if you know what I mean. All our snipers secretly go to that course. He’s a civilian, but he’s worked for OGA”—other government agencies. “If you want to learn how to live in the wilderness with nothing but the clothes on your back and a knife in your hands, go see Tom Brown. Fuck SERE.”
Those four words—“go see Tom Brown”—were among the best advice I’d gotten in my life.
But there was a problem: Brown’s Tracker School was in a campground in the woods. And while camping may be a vacation to many people, it had always been like waterboarding to me. In Chicago, there wasn’t much nature around the apartments where I grew up. In the desiccated grassy areas that the city called parks, our main recreation as twelve-year-olds wasn’t camping or joining the Boy Scouts, but a game we called jump-the-bum. The object was to leap over sleeping and passed-out homeless men in the park—either alone, in tandem, or en masse—without waking them.
We usually won.
The only other nature experience I had was at overnight camp, but both times I went camping, it poured rain and the cheap tents leaked until we were wet, cold, and fed up. Maybe it was nature’s revenge for our jump-the-bum games.
After my camping washouts, I vowed never to set foot inside a tent again. After all, who needed tents when there were perfectly good hotel rooms nearby with movies on demand and daily maid service?
If I wanted to be a survivalist, however, I’d need to break that vow.
To find appropriate gear, I called Justin Gunn, who, besides holding Dave Navarro’s firearms for me, had been trying unsuccessfully to get me into one of his other hobbies, ultralight backpacking. The idea was to go hiking and camping with just a few pounds of equipment—most of it designed to weigh almost nothing and serve a variety of functions. Walking sticks doubled as tent poles, jackets converted into sleeping bags, backpack pads became sleeping mats.
On Justin’s advice, I bought a one-pound waterproof high-thread-count spinnaker-cloth tent, a 6.2-ounce nylon taffeta sleeping bag, a pair of lightweight SPF 40+ hiking pants with mesh-lined thigh vents, and a silicone-coated ripstop nylon backpack.
Since I’d last experienced it, camping—once a way to enjoy the outdoors and commune with nature—had turned into a market for advanced fabrics and technology, all designed to minimize any type of suffering created by interacting with the natural world.
Unfortunately, I would suffer anyway.
Even after I researched Tom Brown Jr. on the Internet and discovered that nearly every person who ran a respected survival school had once been a student of his—
Even after I read his book The Tracker, in which he describes such boyhood adventures as walking miles in a snowstorm wearing nothing but cut-off shorts, surviving weekends in the woods blindfolded, and perching two nights straight on a tree branch avoiding wild dogs—
Even after I learned he’d been shot four times while tracking criminals and found trails leading to some one hundred and sixty dead bodies—
Even after I watched the Tommy Lee Jones movie The Hunted, in part based on Brown—
Even as I flew to New Jersey to meet the man…—
I had no idea what a force of nature Tom Brown was.
To this day, those two words alone continue to fill me with admiration and intimidation.
After arriving at Brown’s Tracker School in the heart of the New Jersey Pine Barrens—the stomping grounds for most of his tales of nearly inhuman feats—I looked around the campground. Scattered throughout were various sweat lodges, wooden shelters, and a shower area consisting of several buckets and mirrors. The buckets were for hauling water from the creek nearby to wash with. The mirrors were for daily tick checks. The woods were crawling with infected deer ticks, which had a nasty habit of jumping onto passing humans, burying their heads in the flesh, gorging on blood, and, if not stopped within two days, leaving a souvenir called Lyme disease.
I found a clearing near an open-air lecture shelter and unpacked my one-pound spinnaker-cloth tent. It was the first tent I’d ever pitched by myself, and at the time, I thought I’d put it together correctly.
By eight P.M. that night, the temperature had dropped to 56 degrees. As we huddled on the benches of the lecture shelter, wrapped in sweatshirts and jackets, Brown stepped up to the podium. Seemingly impervious to the cold, he wore a faded gray tank top with wide cutouts on the sides that ran from his shoulders to his abdomen, exposing as much skin as it covered. Above him, a sign carved out of wood read NO SNIVELING.
“All right—holy shit,” Brown bellowed, projecting deep into the woods. “Welcome to Tracker School. This is the center. This is where everything took place.”
He gestured grandly to the wilderness around him.
“There’s a vast difference between theory and experience,” he continued. “If you don’t believe me, watch TV. The survivor programs make me vomit. Snivelly assholes!” His face reddened as he spoke. “Between Survivor, Man vs. Wild, and Survivorman, I’ve got a nest of snivelers. Surviving in the woods for a year? That’s not even getting your feet wet.”
In front of him, he had three Poland Spring water bottles lined up. He took a swig from one of them and crushed it dramatically in his hands. “You can walk into any store and there are five survival manuals you can buy that will kill you. Same with those edible plant books. I recover the bodies in their pathetic shelters that don’t work because they learned it badly.” His unblinking eyes bulged furiously out of their sockets. He almost spit as he spoke his last words: “So forget you have a past.”
Unlike Kurt Saxon, Bruce Clayton, and the denizens of the Survivalist Boards, Brown wasn’t of the Cold War school of survivalism. He didn’t advocate stockpiling dozens of sacks of grain and hundreds of gallons of gasoline and thousands of rounds of ammunition. He advocated taking a stroll in the woods.
“How many people can say that they’re free?” he yelled at his students—a mix of marines, hippies, businessmen, and a few psychiatric patients hoping a week of primitive living would restore their balance. “How many people can take a walk for the rest of their lives and never need a damn thing from society?”
Though Brown was fifty-eight, he looked anything but old. He had gray hair parted on the right and plastered by sweat to a face chiseled like an aging superhero’s. His flesh was an onion of tan, red, peeling skin in seemingly endless layers, testifying to countless exposures to the elements. His body was thick and powerful, and though it was beginning to atrophy, every slight sag seemed to tell a story few would ever know or experience.
“Why would you want wilderness survival?” His voice raised to a shout. “Because of the what-if question. I’m going to hand you an insurance policy against the what-if question.” Now he grew quiet. “By the time I’m done with you, you will be able to survive anyplace with nothing. I’ll teach you to build shelters, make fire, forage for food, find water—even if you’re in the Sahara.”
He was a fantastic performer. One minute he was a drill sergeant, then a preacher, then a crazy old coot. If he delivered even one-tenth of what he promised, attending Tracker School would be the best decision I’d made since deciding to learn self-sufficiency.
Equal parts fact, hyperbole, and self-mythologizing, the Tom Brown legend is on par with the stories of Paul Bunyan, Geronimo, and Mowgli from The Jungle Book.
As he tells it, he had a childhood friend named Rick. And Rick had a grandfather who was a Lipan Apache scout and shaman known as Stalking Wolf (usually referred to as Grandfather, though not to be confused with Grandpa the PT).
At age seven
, Brown met Grandfather and spent the next ten years learning about animals, the wilderness, and Native American life under the elder’s almost frustrating figure-it-out-for-yourself tutelage, known as the coyote style of teaching.
When he was twenty, Brown stripped off his clothes, stepped into the woods, and lived by his wits for a year. When he returned, he started helping the police track missing children, hikers, and criminals in the forest.
After Brown tracked a suspected robber and rapist who had eluded some two hundred cops and firemen, the New York Times ran a front-page story on this amazing “27-year-old woodsman” (though the suspect Brown discovered was reportedly acquitted of the crimes). A media frenzy ensued, and soon Brown was doing talk shows, signing a book deal, and opening his own school.
Antisocial and somewhat misanthropic, Brown used to read his students excerpts from Touch the Earth, a collection of Native American wisdom. But when he noticed he wasn’t connecting, he reinvented himself by studying televangelists and the title character from the campy action movie Billy Jack.
“Survival is an art, a philosophy, a doorway to the earth,” Brown yelled at us. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped the sweat up his forehead, along the top of his head, and around the back of his neck. “It’s the fucking garden of Eden. Anyone who says it’s a struggle lacks knowledge and skills.”
By the time the lecture ended, it was eleven P.M. and the temperature had dropped several more degrees. I walked to my tent and zipped into my ultralight sleeping bag with my clothing still on. With deer ticks around, the last thing I wanted to do was get naked.
The problem with my ultralight sleeping bag was that it was practically useless against the cold. I tried not to snivel as I pulled the nylon top over my head like a cocoon and cinched the drawstring tight. As soon as I generated a little body heat, my bladder began to squeeze urgently. So I extracted myself from my cocoon, stepped into the cold night air, and walked to the outhouse.