The Bracken Anthology

by Matthew Bracken

  Try the path again on an overcast and moonless night. Where you must, use the minimal amount of flashlight necessary. A single-bulb LED powered by a single AA or AAA battery can be filtered and shielded to provide just enough light to avoid tripping. A humble mini-compass with a glowing North arrow can keep you on course. Try difficult terrain with and without the penlight, to understand how night movement in pitch-blackness is still possible, and also to understand its inherent limitations.

  Next, try a new route for the first time at night, under the moon. Then return during the day to examine the new path you had first explored in semi-darkness. Did you leave a trail of footprints that a blind man could follow? Finally, explore new routes on overcast moonless nights. The idea is to reach a merger point in your mental processing of various types of terrain as perceived in daylight and in varying degrees of darkness. When you achieve this breakthrough, you will be far above the mass of humanity when it comes to night fighting.

  Where it’s appropriate and inconspicuous, bring your tactical white fighting lights, and visible laser aiming devices. If you own any night vision gear or an IR laser, bring them too. Use every tool at your disposal, and learn their best uses and worst limitations. Does your red or green laser light up a quarter-mile of tree branches and other foliage, pointing in a direct line to your position? Does your 200-lumen tactical light serve as a beacon for miles around, while also killing your night vision? (Hint: one-eye-open.) Properly used, tactical lights and lasers can end a fight quickly and successfully, but they must be understood as two-edged swords.

  NEXT, BRING YOUR FRIENDS

  Now that you are becoming an expert at stealthy night movement, initiate some friends and relatives to join your nocturnal habits, and teach them what you have discovered. Their learning curves will be more rapid, because they will benefit from your prior experience on your established land-navigation routes. Teens often take to this like ducks to water. Practice using hand signals, and the least and quietest mouth-to-ear whispering possible to communicate. When you have brought a few buddies up to a certain standard, the highest level of learning can begin. Force-on-force tactical training! “Top Gun,” down on the ground, in the darkness. Man, this is so “tier-one training,” that you should send me loads of money just for giving you this idea. (Or, just buy my novels.)

  Since all of your night movement is made in ultra-stealth mode, as silently and invisibly as an Indian (and I mean that in a very admiring way), you will be able to conduct training even in urban and suburban areas. While the placid sheeple in your AO are sleeping, you and your pals shall be creeping, sometimes even right between their houses, (but more on that later).

  Okay, on to force-on-force training at night. You will need a few acres or more of mixed terrain where your occasional lights and lasers won’t cause distress. Abandoned commercial property often works well. Or your local woods and fields, or whatever available terrain that you have nearby that combines open areas and areas with limited sight lines such as buildings or woods. Designated roads, fences or streams can signify out-of-bounds.

  If you need to keep both hands occupied to “keep it real,” then tape your light or laser to a walking stick, but leave your “M-Forgery” at home. Since you might be sneaking around on land that you don’t own, you might just end the night talking to someone in authority. A light or even a laser you can explain to a corporate security guard or even to Officer Friendly, but a few “deadly high-powered assault rifles,” no way! Plus, going gun free while night training avoids the sticky area of certifying every firearm as perfectly, virginally, ammo-free. No guns, no negligent discharges by gung-ho but careless buddies. But hey, it’s your life, so you decide. Nobody knows your AO and your friends better than you do.

  NIGHTTIME FORCE-ON-FORCE TRAINING

  There are many force-on-force scenarios you can cook up or adapt depending on your AO and the number of participants, but this is a simple one to start you off. Two players begin on a time signal at opposite corners of the several-acre site. The boundaries are clearly known to both. Both are given identical marching orders.

  “This is your land. Violent prisoners have escaped from a local penitentiary after killing the guards. It’s post-SHTF, so no police are available to search for them, but one dangerous killer has set off an intrusion alarm, and is believed to be roaming on this very property. You have fifteen minutes to find him and light him up, or he will leave this area and invade the home of one of your relatives nearby, and do terrible things there. So if you don’t find him in fifteen minutes, it counts as a loss for you.” (Depending on the terrain, you might want to make this a half-hour period.)

  The reasons for the time limit and the rapid rules of engagement (ROE) are to ensure that one or both parties don’t simply go to ground, finding optimal ambush locations, while waiting all night for the other to stumble by. This results in a snooze-fest and no contact. Both players must be put on the trail of the other to ensure that fairly rapid contact is made.

  The goal of each player is to move in such a stealthy manner, cleverly using the unique and often-bizarre night terrain of light and shadow, that he will detect the other and slip into an ambush or stalking position. When one player moves into a kill position, after hearing and then seeing the other first, he lights him up at a practical range with his visible laser or white tactical light. You’ll know when you have made a “kill,” and you will know when you have been beaten. That particular game is over. Your pulse will be hammering, your adrenaline will be washing through you, and all of your senses will be supercharged. Debrief, go over lessons learned, and then set the next two players into their starting positions. Change the two adversaries each time, until a clear overall winner emerges.

  Sometimes there is an immediate “contact front” by both parties, and a crossfire of lights occurs. That’s okay, because that reflects reality. Both sides wind up with folks shot in a lot of gunfights. All the more reason to practice being even stealthier! Move like a hunter, or a specops point man on patrol deep in enemy territory. Stay in the shadows, inside the tree lines, down in the folds of the terrain, crouching low, or even low crawling when it’s necessary to take advantage of low concealment. Take a few careful steps, and then stop to listen. Slowly pan your head, with your eyes and ears and even your nostrils open as wide as possible, every onboard sensor set on “max input receive.”

  If you are always the one who hears an enemy snap a twig way out in the darkness, your early detection can lead to success, victory, and ultimately, to your survival. If you are the one cracking twigs and muttering, while ripping through bramble thickets and tripping over logs, you are probably going to wind up painted in red, green or white light, and in the real world, full of bullet holes. He who detects the other first will, in most cases, prevail. It’s as simple as that. And this is a skill you can teach yourself up to the master level.

  At that nationally known gun fighting school, they might have taught you how to change carbine and pistol magazines in nanoseconds while ducking under vehicles and around barricades, while pinging steel plates at all ranges. And that is a very good thing! But that expensive training, and that minute-of-angle fighting rifle made of pure Unobtanium, with the latest and greatest optical sight on the rail, won’t make nearly as much difference to your survival chances as simply learning to detect an enemy before an enemy detects you. And since half of your life is spent while the sun is down, don’t you think you had better become the best night fighter that you can?

  Remember, if you don’t patrol it, you don’t own it. If you don’t get out and see what’s happening in your AO after the sun goes down, you could be unaware of a midnight meth lab operating just one field or street over. Or anything else.

  Be the master of your day and of your night. Cede no terrain, cede no time, to any person or group wishing you ill. When you have learned to be a master at stealthy night movement, your skills will be so much higher than the average person’s that after dark, you
will be like a panther among sheep. Instead of fearing the night, you will relish it as your cloak and your shield.

  NIGHT TRICKS

  Now, a few tricks to employ in your AO. These will work by day or night, but they are especially useful at night.

  First, create your own secret night gates. These are your private wormholes, and will allow you to disappear and reappear like magic. With a cordless drill, some cheap hardware store hinges (let them get rusty, rusty looks old), and some cheap wood screws (ditto) you can make an invisible door out of two or three planks of a tall vertical board property fence. Put the hardware on the “back” side of the fence, optimally against some concealing shrubbery. If you have any carpentry skills at all, this is a snap. I don’t need to draw a picture, you’ll figure it out.

  A vertical strand of a chain link fence can be clipped and removed in a location that is not under much direct observation. Again, concealing shrubbery is your friend. A piece of paracord can knit the breach in the fence back together until you need to use it again. Or a micro-sized block and tackle (also using paracord) can hoist the bottom of a chain link fence high enough to slip below. Lower the fence after your passage, and no one is the wiser.

  Tough carpet remnants can be tossed over the barbed wire or razor wire atop a fence, allowing you to climb over without being cut to ribbons. The carpet will probably be stuck in place, so factor that into your plan. Trees next to the fence can both hide the carpet, and offer you an easy method to climb to the top of the fence. Or an old ladder can be installed between two trees right over the fence. There are many other ways to leave hidden passages through, under or over chain link fencing – these are just a few suggestions.

  Put your own padlock on a forgotten “permanently chained shut” vehicle gate, or access door or hatch to a utility area. Only one person knows that a key even exists for that “forgotten” lock, and that person is you. Investigate and explore your local storm drains and other infrastructure tunnels. You may have an entire catacomb beneath your feet that you can discover and map now, to use for secret movement later. (Storms drains are often big and clean, and empty except during rainstorms. Wear a bike helmet: you will hit your head.)

  Imagine waking up to a police or military “cordon and search” operation around your neighborhood. How would you slip through it? Almost everywhere today, there are lots of empty, abandoned or foreclosed homes. Install some secret gates to get access to these properties and to the home interiors via unlocked backyard windows or doors. Where two empty houses coexist back to back, you can have a permanent secret channel for moving from one street to another while avoiding the intersections where, someday, checkpoints or cameras might be installed.

  You can even practice moving across properties while the inhabitants are asleep in their beds, but exercise all due caution. Guard dogs can make your night very interesting indeed. Do motion-activated lights switch on when the wind moves the tree branches? Does anybody ever come out to check? Find out. Are the front, side and back yards quiet sod, or full of hard-to-avoid downed branches or other “loud” shrubbery? Is there an easy place to hop a fence, from either side? Shrubbery along a fence can provide a hidden corridor with complete concealment, while also hiding a secret gate that you have installed. Wire cutters can be put to good use on both wire fences, and branches of bushes that impede your movement. Once you learn safe and quiet routes between occupied or unoccupied homes, incorporate them into your mental night movement map.

  The point is to invent creative alternate routes for egress and ingress to your AO without using the normal streets and alleys. In one area, this might involve a homemade wire-rope “hillbilly bridge” across a creek between two stout trees. In another, it might be a vertical urban pathway of fire escape ladders. The point of the night training is also to train your mind to find new and sneaky ways of moving around your area without being detected. Always strive to learn new “bugout routes” and secure hiding places. Only by actively patrolling and reconning your AO, especially at night, will you discover useful concealed routes, safe areas, rendezvous points, locations for caches, and so on.

  CONCLUSION

  If you want to become an effective night fighter, and be an asset to your family and your community in the hard times that are coming, you don’t have to wait until you can attend some pricey gun fighting school. Just grab a few different lights, some like-minded buddies, and get outside after dark. A naturally sneaky teenage “ferret” with almost no money for tactical gear or training might become the most valuable player on your home team. If you know an early-rising hunter, beg him to teach you what he knows.

  Practice night land navigation, and force-on-force training. You will be well on your way to always being the one who detects the enemy before the enemy detects you.

  And that, more than any fancy gun, gadget, or professional training you can buy, is often the very margin between survival and death.

  #10

  September, 2012.

  When the music stops:

  How America's cities may explode in violence

  (Soldier of Fortune Magazine, December 2012 and January 2013 issues)

  In response to the article “Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland: A Vision of the Future,” by Colonel Kevin Benson, U.S. Army (Ret.) which appeared in the respected semi-official Small Wars Journal on 15 July, 2012, I offer my own alternative vision. Unlike Colonel Benson, I do not teach military science to field-grade officers at the University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. But I have made an extensive study of modern civil wars during the course of writing several novels about the subject.

  In his “Vision of the Future,” Colonel Benson proposed that a violent and racist evolution of the Tea Party movement in Darlington, S.C., might necessitate the intervention of the U.S. Army. I am uncertain why the colonel stepped outside of longstanding military tradition and named an actual American political movement as the designated enemy in his scenario (instead of the “Pineland Liberation Front” or something similarly innocuous,) but I doubt his reasons were untainted by political considerations.

  In my vision, instead of a small town in the South as the flash point, picture instead a score of U.S. cities in the thrall of riots greater than those experienced in Los Angeles in 1965 (Watts), 1968 (MLK assassination), and 1992 (Rodney King). New Yorkers can imagine the 1977 blackout riots or the 1991 Crown Heights disturbance. In fact, the proximate spark of the next round of major riots in America could be any from a long list cribbed from our history. We have seen them all before, and we shall see them all again as history rhymes along regardless of the century or the generation of humankind nominally in control of events.

  But the next time we are visited by widespread, large-scale urban riots, a dangerous new escalation may be triggered by a new vulnerability: It's estimated that the average American home has less than two weeks of food on hand. In poor minority areas, it may be much less. What if a cascading economic crisis, even a temporary one, leads to millions of EBT (electronic benefit transfer) cards flashing nothing but ERROR? This could also be the result of sabotage by hackers, or other technical system failings. Alternatively, the government might pump endless digits into the cards in a hopeless attempt to outrace hyperinflation. The government can order the supermarkets to honor the cards, and it can even set price controls, but history's verdict is clear: If suppliers are paid only with worthless scrip or blinking digits, the food will stop.

  STEP ONE: FLASH MOB LOOTING

  In my scenario, the initial riots begin spontaneously across affected urban areas, as SNAP (supplemental nutrition assistance program) and other government welfare recipients learn that their EBT cards no longer function. This sudden revelation will cause widespread anger, which will quickly lead to the flash-mob looting of local supermarkets and other businesses. The media will initially portray these "food riots" as at least partly justifiable. Sadly, millions of Americans have been made largely, or ev
en entirely, dependent on government wealth transfer payments to put food on their tables.

  A new social contract has been created, where bread and circuses buy a measure of peace in our minority-populated urban zones. In the era of ubiquitous big-screen cable television, the internet and smart phones, the circus part of the equation is never in doubt as long as the electricity flows. But the bread is highly problematic. Food must be delivered the old-fashioned way: physically. Any disruption in the normal functioning of the EBT system will lead to food riots with a speed that is astonishing. This will inevitably happen when our unsustainable, debt-fueled binge party finally stops, and the music is over. Now that the delivery of free or heavily subsidized food is perceived by tens of millions of Americans to be a basic human right, the cutoff of "their" food money will cause an immediate explosion of rage. When the hunger begins to bite, supermarkets, shops and restaurants will be looted, and initially the media will not condemn the looting. Unfortunately, this initial violence will only be the start of a dangerous escalation.

  The ransacked supermarkets, convenience stores, ATMs and gas stations will not be restocked during this period due to the precarious security situation. A single truck loaded with food or gasoline would be perceived to be a Fort Knox on wheels and subject to immediate attack unless heavily protected by powerfully armed security forces, but such forces will not be available during this chaotic period. Under those conditions, resupply to the urban areas cannot and will not take place. The downward spiral of social and economic dysfunction will therefore both accelerate and spread from city to city. These delays, in turn, will lead to more riots with the constant underlying demand that hungry people be fed, one way or another.