by Neil Strauss
As I was standing around the fire one evening, cooking fish that an instructor had taught us how to gut, I found myself immersed in a conversation with the marines.
A younger marine, Luke, was speaking. He had close-cropped black hair, thin lips, and small, sparkling brown eyes. “This is going out on a limb, but I think there will be a revolution in America in the next hundred years.”
“Where’s it going to come from?” I asked.
“Me,” he said without smiling. He paused, then explained. “If you ask anyone in the military, they hate the government. They have all these rules that hold us back and put our lives in danger.”
“If we followed the rules of engagement,” an enormous older marine named Dave added, “we’d be dead.”
Luke told a story about how he’d gotten in trouble with the government for breaking these rules. His battalion had captured a top-ten Iraqi fugitive, which provoked villagers in the prisoner’s hometown to rebel.
“What happened to them?” I asked.
“They ended up looking like that.” Luke pointed to the fire, where fish wrapped in smoke-blackened tinfoil were cooking on hot coals.
I could tell he was proud, that he thought it was cool, that it was a Hollywood action movie come to life with him as the star, but all I could think was that those people had futures that were now gone. One of my War Card fears was running into someone as power-drunk and desensitized as Luke, but being on the other side.
Later that afternoon, Brown taught us what he called the sacred order: shelter, water, fire, food. Wilderness survival, he explained, required taking care of each of those needs, in that order of importance.
For the remainder of the week, we were taught how to use nature to fulfill the sacred order, which was the reason I’d signed up for Tracker School in the first place.
Every now and then, usually as the sun set, Brown stepped up to the pulpit and delivered a fire-and-brimstone lecture about the imminent apocalypse. Each successive lecture grew more extreme, until he was telling us, “If the shit hits the fan and you’re being hunted by other humans for food, your chance of survival is now ninety percent because you’ve taken this class.”
I wished I could believe him, but I knew I still wasn’t a survivor. Not only would I need to intensively practice and internalize the skills he’d taught, but most of them presented a new problem my upbringing hadn’t prepared me for. They required the use of a knife.
When I turned thirteen, my aunt bought me a Swiss Army knife. But my parents immediately confiscated it and said they’d return it to me when I was eighteen. When I asked for the knife five years later, they claimed to have lost it. I think they were hoping I’d have forgotten by then.
Consequently, where other students had no problem whittling functioning traps and fireboards from branches, it took me half a day to carve lumpy, ungainly, barely functioning survival tools. If I wanted the ability to live in the woods with nothing but a knife, I’d need to know how to use one. So I added knife training to my survival to-do list.
By his last lecture, Brown had almost completely transformed from naturalist to mystic, warning that, according to the prophecies of Grandfather, the skies would soon turn red for a week and mankind would be forced to flee civilization to survive. “That’s what drives me—fear,” he concluded in a dramatic whisper. “Fear that we have run out of time.”
Apocalyptic prophecy has been around since the dawn of man—most recently manifesting in an obsession with December 21, 2012, a date on which several different predictions coincide, most notably the end of the Mayan Long Form calendar and thus, claim some of its interpreters, so too the world. Of course, what the sport is really about is not the end of the world, but the end of mankind. And our warnings about it are not examples of our madness, but of our own quest for significance. After all, what could be more meaningful than trying to save the species?
As Brown walked offstage in silence, with tears in his eyes, I looked around the lecture shelter. Almost everyone was wearing a jacket or a hooded sweatshirt. I was still wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and I wasn’t shivering or sniveling. I looked for the shirtless smoker I’d seen a few days earlier, but he was nowhere to be found. I asked the marines what had happened, and they told me he’d gone off his medication that week and was taken to a psychiatric hospital because he’d become a threat to other students.
It seemed that the toughest survivors were also the craziest human beings.
That night I slept comfortably, soundly, and warmly. In the morning, when I was called to the podium to receive this course completion certificate, I was actually sorry to leave:
As the van taking me to the airport pulled away from the Tracker School office and made its way to the Garden State Park-way, I gazed through the window at the dense green thicket that ran along the shoulder of the road and realized that, in a single week, my entire reality had changed. I used to think the pavement was my home and the trees and shrubbery off to the side of the road were no-man’s-land.
Now, I knew that it could all be my home.
His voice was cold and gruff. “Are you interested as a dilettante, or do you really want to learn how to use a knife?”
“I want to learn it as a survival skill and as a life skill.”
“Good.” He seemed strict, with little patience for error. “You’re going to thank me when you get two flat tires in the desert and you’re trying to figure out how to skewer a rabbit with only a pocket knife, two rubber bands, and some twine.”
Once again, curiosity and the power of the odds seemed to have led me to the right person. After scouring the Internet for a knife tutor—only to find cooking classes—I’d visited a store called Valley Martial Arts Supply. The owner, Rafael, had recommended getting in touch with a man in Arizona famous for making the toughest, most effective combat and survival knives in the country. The man was known as Mad Dog.
Mad Dog lived near Prescott, Arizona—the home of not just Gunsite but also the survivalist author Cody Lundin, the shooting instructor Louis Awerbuck, the combat handgun trainer Chuck Taylor, the shotgun manufacturer Hans Vang, and a fringe militia Timothy McVeigh had visited for advice. Depending on who you were, Prescott was either the safest place in the world or the most dangerous.
“It’s a good idea to bring your gun with you,” Mad Dog advised before hanging up, “because shit happens.”
While waiting for my week with Mad Dog to begin, I wrote a meticulous schedule, listing a different survival skill from Tracker School to practice each day after I received my knife training. In the meantime, I began finding ways to build my resistance and embody the motto of the Survivalist Boards: “endure—adapt—overcome.”
At night, no matter how low the temperature dropped, I never turned on the heat—unless Katie complained. In the daytime, no matter how hot it got, I never turned on the air conditioning—unless Katie complained. When it was dark in the house, I left the lights off as much as possible to develop my night vision—unless Katie complained.
Eventually, we agreed that I would spend as much time as possible in my small backyard, while she lounged in comfort indoors. “Girls just don’t like sweating,” she’d say whenever I tried to get her to join me outside. “It’s sticky and it smells.”
So while I worked in the yard, she watched movies like Saw II and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on cable TV. I wasn’t sure whether her taste in cinema was a subconscious attempt to face her fears or collect new ones.
Though she admirably tried to join me as I slept under the stars one night, her dread of mosquitoes biting her arms, spiders dropping in her mouth, and ants crawling on her skin soon drove her back inside.
I was turning into a nightmare boyfriend. But I was determined to stop sniveling, to toughen up, to become a man. And gradually, without my climate and clothing regulated for maximum comfort at all times, my tolerance began to grow and my skin seemed to thicken.
In the meantime, however, Katie started to get
depressed sitting around the house most of the day with no job, no school, and no driver’s license. So, in an attempt to get her out of the house and more involved with the obsession that was consuming my life, I invited her to take Mad Dog’s knife class with me.
To my surprise, she actually accepted. “He’s probably like a violent, mean guy,” she said. “But I’ll come and learn how to be a Neanderthal with you if you want.”
Either she didn’t get the importance of having a backup plan, or she understood it better than I did.
While booking her plane ticket, I realized it had been months since I’d heard from Maxwell in St. Kitts, whose bank account I’d perhaps gullibly filled with money. So I e-mailed him to find out if I’d been approved yet.
He replied that he was still waiting to get the title to my apartment from the land registry so he could forward it to the government as evidence that I’d bought the required real estate. So not only did I still lack a passport, but without a title, there was no proof I even owned the apartment.
Concerned that I was being scammed, I called Spencer for advice. But he was in equally bad shape. “I’m getting so frustrated with the whole St. Kitts thing,” he sighed. He still hadn’t filed for citizenship because the negotiations for the house he wanted had broken down. “You can’t get answers from anyone. They’re always on holiday. I’ve been down there so many times, it’s become the bane of my existence.”
“So what are you going to do now?” If he had a good backup option, I thought I might try to get my money back from Maxwell and join him. But his plan was way out of my league.
“I was thinking, with a bit more money, I could get an island,” he said. “If it’s at least forty-four acres, I could have it managed by a caretaker, who would basically just be a farmer. Then I’d use half the island for agriculture and meat, and have the bulk stuff ferried out once a month. I did some research, and it’s a four-year enterprise to buy it and build it. This way, I’ll always have an out.”
It must be great to be rich, I thought. When no nation will give you a passport, you can just buy your own country.
Cogito ergo armatum sum—I think, therefore I am armed.
This was Mad Dog’s philosophy.
He told us that he liked to go to airport gift shops and see what items he could turn into weapons.
He told us that his daughters wore glass epoxy composite chopsticks in their hair when they flew, so they could sharpen them into daggers if they needed to stab someone.
He told us that he usually traveled with a fighting cane in his hands, which airport security thought was a regular cane.
He told us that anyone could make a killing baton on a plane by wrapping two rolls of duct tape around a tightly rolled magazine.
Listening to Mad Dog, all the FAA regulations prohibiting box cutters and lighters and pool cues and snow globes on planes seemed like a charade, capable of discouraging only amateurs.
Katie sat in the backseat of his truck, petrified. Maybe I’d chosen the wrong survivalist to bring her to.
Mad Dog parked in front of his workshop, MD Labs. Instead of a business sign on the door, there was a notice, as severe as Mad Dog himself, reading WE ARE NOT OPEN TO THE PUBLIC … IF YOU ATTEMPT ENTRY WITHOUT AN INVITATION OR APPOINTMENT, YOU WILL BE ARRESTED FOR TRESPASSING IN A FEDERAL CONTRACTOR’S FACILITY.
On the wall inside were pictures of his daughters, all cute girls carrying deadly bladed weapons. The workshop itself was an immense warehouse, the size of an airplane hangar, full of machinery and carbon steel knives in various stages of manufacture.
He lectured us in a slow, measured voice that left no room for things like humor or questions. “A drill bit is two knives in a helix. Scissors are two knives set up in opposition to one another. A saw blade is dozens of tiny little knives. But the finest expression of mankind’s most important tool is the fixed blade knife.”
“I’m afraid I’m going to hurt myself with a knife,” Katie interrupted.
“Why?” he asked. “You have sharp edges all over yourself.”
“No, I don’t.” She was offended by the very thought of it.
“Some of the earliest tools were bones. And look at your nails. I could teach you to defend yourself with those so you could scratch someone’s eyes out.”
Katie fell silent.
I noticed that Mad Dog never used phrases like “I think” or “I believe” when expressing ideas. To him, they were facts, as clear and present as the 5.4-inch blade he was now pulling out of a slip sheath in his waistband.
It was a knife of his own making, the Bear Cat. “This is like one of my kids or my daughter,” he said, deadly serious. “It’s not expendable.”
He then walked us through the meticulous process he used to make this kid—the band saw that cuts the knife form out of the carbon bar, the milling machine that fine-tunes the band saw cut, the grinder that fine-tunes the milling machine cut.
“This is where the soul of the blade is born,” he said as he brought us to his main furnace. Next to it was a long metal box containing the quench oil that cools and hardens the blades. It was filled mostly with vegetable oil. As for the rest of the liquid, he said, every time he cut himself while working, he dripped the blood into the oil. Thus, every Mad Dog knife was hardened in his own blood.
People like Mad Dog make the best instructors. They are so obsessed with their craft—a table to Mad Dog, for example, is not a table but a hard object shaped by an edged blade—that they don’t just give you a lesson, they brainwash you.
More than Spencer, whose strength came from his bank account, Mad Dog was the kind of guy I wanted to be with WTSHTF. A life’s savings could disappear overnight, but Mad Dog’s strength, conviction, and skills came from within. In a survival economy, they were gold.
I picked up a polished blade nearby. It appeared to be close to completion. I could almost see my reflect—
“If you break that,” Mad Dog said coolly, “I’ll stick a knife in your throat.”
Then again, maybe I’d rather be with Spencer WTSHTF. I looked at Katie to see how she was holding up. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“At first, he seemed kind of crazy,” she said, “but when he talks to me, his voice gets softer and he always checks to make sure I’m comfortable. Those are, like, nice-person signals.”
We moved to a table in the center of the workshop, where Mad Dog gave us a primer on knives.
He taught us why carbon steel blades hold an edge better than stainless steel.
He taught us about cutting tools, prying tools, and whacking tools.
He taught us about flat grinds, chisel grinds, and convex grinds.
He taught us about the primary bevel, the secondary bevel, the tang, the clip, the ridge line, the ricasso, the choil, the belly, the false edge, and the grind plunge.
He taught us cuts like the chop, push, slice, whittle, tip cope, and edge cope.
He even taught us how to sterilize a knife with sodium hydroxide in order to get rid of DNA evidence.
I never knew a simple blade could be so complex. Like learning tracking with Tom Brown, a language I’d never known existed before was opening up to me. From that day forward, I would never look at a knife the same way again. It was art, science, poetry. It was an entire liberal arts curriculum, but with a practical application.
I looked at Katie’s notes. She had begun by taking meticulous dictation, but somewhere between the chisel grind and the primary bevel, her notes had turned to doodles. When Mad Dog started teaching us how to sharpen blades with Karate Kid–like repetition, she whispered to me, “Sharpening knives is boring.” Then she walked to the bathroom and emerged with an armful of Maxim back issues to scour the photos for makeup ideas. I suppose, in her own way, she was working on one of her gender’s oldest and most powerful survival skills.
Katie and I woke up early the next morning for a day in the forest learning more advanced knife handling with Mad Dog. As I slipped into my cargo pan
ts, tactical shirt, and gun belt—my entire wardrobe had changed since Gunsite and Tracker School—Katie informed me she wouldn’t be joining us.
“What’s wrong? You’re going to be bored staying in the room all day.”
“That’s okay.” She dropped resolutely onto the bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. “I’m scared of the forest.”
After thirteen minutes of pointless debate, I gave in. When Mad Dog picked me up and asked where Katie was, I told him, grumpily, that she wasn’t coming because she was scared of the forest.
“She’s a survival liability,” I sighed.
“Not necessarily. She’s an excellent source of protein.”
If I was going to be a survivalist, I suppose I’d have to start getting used to these kinds of jokes. That is, if they were jokes.
Mad Dog was wearing dark sunglasses, cargo shorts, and a sleeveless T-shirt that read TO SAVE TIME, LET’S JUST ASSUME I KNOW EVERYTHING.
“Did your family get you that shirt?” I asked.
He nodded, smiled, and began telling me about his background. A softer side of Mad Dog—the side Katie had noticed in his workshop—was starting to come out. Though he had a reputation for being harsh and irascible, especially within the knife community, he wasn’t a misanthrope like Tom Brown. He was an artist, compelled to make knives because no one else did it the right way—which was, as his shirt stated, his way.
Born Kevin McClung, Mad Dog grew up in Redwood City, south of San Francisco. “Imagine the mind of a college sophomore trapped in a skinny ten-year-old’s body in 1968,” he explained. Consequently, he was picked on and beaten up regularly. In fourth grade, when a bigger student threatened to cut him, Mad Dog brought two feet of dog lead chain to school the next day. When the bully confronted him in the schoolyard, Mad Dog ran at him and swung the chain. As he recalled, “The kid’s head popped open like a red tomato. He never fucked with me again.”