Setting Priorities

Without a clear understanding of your priorities in a survival situation, you might end up running around doing things that are less important, while ignoring the things that would keep you alive. I've posted a short video clip on my website www.richjohnsonsurvival.com that will help you figure out how to establish priorities in a survival situation. Click on the link.

Escape & Evasion — Part 2

The essence of Escape & Evasion is to:

1. Avoid capture in the first place. Prevention is better than cure, in this case. If you know you're being hunted, do everything in your power to elude the hunters. If you can't elude them, eliminate them (read that any way you want to). 
2. Get away from your captors, if you have been taken hostage. This involves watching for opportunities to be out of the direct control of your captors. That means getting out of their immediate visual and physical contact. Then take advantage of avenues of escape that allow you to put more distance and barriers between you and them. 
3. Avoid re-capture after you have successfully escaped. Once the bad guys realize you're gone, they might decide to abandon the whole enterprise (unless you're an especially valuable target), or they might go nuts in a frenzy of trying to capture you again. If they do, life is going to get more challenging for you, so that should motivate you to avoid re-capture at all cost.

Let's take a look at those concepts one at a time.

Avoiding capture falls under the category of Evasion. So, technically, the whole concept of E&E should be E&E&E — Evasion, Escape, and Evasion.

If you know, or suspect, that you're a target, the first priority is to evade your captors by avoiding close proximity to them. In simple terms, that means you stay away from wherever the bad guys are. If you suspect they might take you from your home or place of business, avoid those places. This is where "knowing thy enemy" comes in handy. The more you know about your potential abductors, the more you understand what they know about you — where you work, live, worship, play, etc. Then you avoid those places.

In a combat situation, you avoid the routes (roads, trails, paths) that you expect the enemy to expect you to use. In jungle warfare (or just out in the woods), take the most difficult route rather than the easy trail, because the enemy 1) won't know which way to go to find you, and 2) is lazy and will stick to obvious trails to attempt an ambush.

Avoiding capture might involve laying your own ambush and eliminating the enemy altogether. If there's more than one bad guy involved, this can become complicated. It helps if you cut off the head of the snake — go after the leader and make a "shock and awe" example of him.

Okay, now on to #2 — Escape. If you're in the custody of the enemy, there may or may not be viable opportunities for escape. It depends on how the bad guys are holding you. The tighter the quarters, and the tighter the security, the more difficult it is. But never give up. Look for every opportunity to be in a less restricted and less secure situation — a trip to the bathroom — during transport from one place to another, etc.

If you're being held in a place that is familiar to you, such as your home or office, you have an advantage of knowing where the possible escape hatches are. If you're in a totally unfamiliar place, you must be especially observant and analytical of your surroundings. Look for the vulnerable spots in the building, and analyze where those spots would put you on the outside if you were able to make your escape. It does no good to go through a window on the 3rd floor, if there's nothing but certain death awaiting you from a fall outside.

Escape opportunities arise from conflict among the bad guys. If you can manage to turn one or more of the hostage takers against the others, that increases your chances. It never hurts to try planting subtle suggestions that might lead to a schism among the bad guys. Use ego, greed, suspicion, promise of reward, etc. to plant these suggestions. If the conflict rises to the level of a battle among the hostage takers, that might give you a chance to make your escape.

Now for #3 — Evasion to Avoid Re-capture. Once you're on the outside, use the jungle evasion trick of taking unpredictable escape routes. Don't run down the driveway, or follow the road seeking help. If you're in a neighborhood, don't go to the first house with lights on — the bad guys will expect you to do that and head for that house to ambush you. Pick a house a couple blocks away, one that shows some sign of life. Sneak up on the house and observe it from concealment, watching for any indication that the bad guys have beat you to this location, before revealing yourself. Ask if you can use the phone, and call police.

If you are forced to hide out while the enemy is beating the bushes looking for you, be aware that they might use a tactic I call "recon by fire." In a war, the enemy might shoot randomly into the bushes, hoping to scare you out of your hiding place. In non-combat situations, the enemy might shoot verbal bullets — yelling that if you come out, they'll let you go, or something to that effect. All that means is that they don't really have a clue where you are and they're trying to convince you to give yourself up. There is NOTHING TO GAIN by falling for that ruse.

While you're hiding, be silent. Remove anything that is brightly colored, cause noise, or flash a reflection. If you miraculously have a cell phone, turn off the ringer. Use the cell phone only when you are certain that you won't be heard, and the light of the phone won't give away your position.

Move only when you are positive there is no chance you will be seen. Otherwise, be still as a rock. Movement causes both audible and visual signals of your location. When you do move, do it slowly and deliberately, testing each footstep before committing your weight to it, to make sure you won't snap a twig or kick a rock loose. Move like a cat sneaking up on a mouse. Watch where you're going, so you don't stumble or cause the vegetation to move noisily. Try to avoid scaring up wildlife, or alarming dogs, etc. If it takes all night to move hundred yards to safety, that's better than alerting the bad guys to your hiding place and suffering re-capture.

While you're in captivity, pay attention to details about your captors so you can describe them accurately to the police. This may also come in handy during your escape if, for example, you notice that your captor walks with a limp, or is obese, etc. That might allow you to use those conditions to your benefit by escaping on routes with barriers that would be especially difficult for him to overcome.

So there you have it — some thoughts on the subject of E&E. I hope you never have to use them, but it's wise to include these things in the arsenal of your survival tactics anyway.

Another Tragic Story That Didn't Have to Happen

A young father and his two sons died after getting lost while hiking a mountain trail in Missouri. And it didn't have to happen.

The victims were 36-year-old David Decareaux and his sons who were 8 and 10 years old respectively. The guys were out for what was intended to be only a day hike, while Decareaux's wife and three other children were staying at a nearby lodge.

With their family dog along for the hike, Decareaux and his boys headed off along a stretch of hiking trail that crossed a sparsely populated region of southeast Missouri. According to reports, Decareaux knew the trail, but apparently took a wrong turn and ended up getting lost while trying to find their way back to the lodge.

A rain storm overtook them, and temperatures dropped from the 60s to the 20s as the day wore on. None of them were dressed for that kind of weather, and when heavy rain started to fall, there were no caves, overhangs or other natural places to seek shelter.

At 7 p.m. that evening, lodge officials called the sheriff's department, because Decareaux and his sons had failed to return as planned. A search was started, with more than 50 volunteers on foot, horseback and in vehicles. Just after midnight, flash flooding in the creeks forced searchers to abandon the mission until daylight.

The next morning, the bodies of Decareaux and his sons were found. The loyal family dog was still beside them … the sole survivor of the ordeal.

It's always a tragedy when something like this happens. And what makes it worse is that it could so easily have been avoided by following one simple principle of outdoor survival. Always be prepared to stay out there longer than you planned.

• Survival situations never announce themselves in advance. 
• They sneak up on you unexpected. 
• The only way to make sure you're not caught unawares is to be prepared to stay outdoors as long as long as it takes for the situation to sort itself out. 
• If it's bad weather, you must be able to survive it until the storm subsides. 
• If it's an injury, you must be able to survive until you are well enough to hike out. 

Day Hike Syndrome is a killer — it's when you think you're going on just a short little hike and will be back before dark. When that doesn't work out as planned, you end up with tragic stories like this one.

Escape and Evasion — Part 1

In the military, we called it E&E — Escape and Evasion. It was how we were trained to deal with a situation in which we became separated from our team behind enemy lines. But how can that possibly relate to a survival situation in civilian life?

Almost every day, somewhere around the country, innocent people are taken hostage. It happens during home invasions. It happens when banks are robbed. It happens to women who are snatched in the store parking lot. It happens to carjack victims. It happens to children who are kidnapped off the street or out of their yard.

In every case, there is a certain amount of overlap between the military E&E situation and the civilian counterpart. In every case, the victim is separated from friendlies, ends up behind "enemy" lines, and needs to employ escape and evasion techniques.

Make no mistake, it a hostage or kidnap situation, the bad guys are the enemy — every bit as much as in a theater of war. The enemy means to harm or kill you. Or he means to use you as bait to extract ransom from your loved ones. So he not only means to harm you, but your loved ones as well. That makes him an enemy. And once you end up under his control, you are behind enemy lines.

So let's analyze what to do to get out of this predicament. Your goal is to escape from your captors and return to "friendly lines." That sounds easier than it really is. But you either need to take action to free yourself or end up a captive until the enemy decides he's done with you.

In a military operation, the enemy probably has a lot of guys in the area that you need to deal with (avoid, outrun, or kill). A soldier separated from his team behind enemy lines might have to hide out, negotiate rough terrain in bad weather, and cover hundreds of miles to return to friendly forces, all the while surviving off the land.

In a civilian situation, the opposing forces are not nearly so numerous. But that doesn't mean they aren't dangerous…or even deadly. Urban enemies are often lunatics who do unpredictable things. I'd rather face a disciplined enemy soldier whose motives I can understand than a whacked-out urban nut job any day.

In a civilian hostage taking, the enemy is usually interested in something other than body count. It's probably cash, jewelry, or other stuff that can be stolen and peddled to feed his drug habit. In rare cases involving wealthy or otherwise important victims, the enemy is interested in taking you as a hostage to be ransomed.

Here's the deal — if the enemy allows you to see his face, he probably intends to kill you after he gets what he came for. Keep that in mind, because it will help decide your E&E actions. If, on the other hand, he keeps his identity concealed, he might intend to turn you loose when the gig is over.

So, if the bad guys don't take precautions to hide their identity, you might decide that you have little to lose by attempting to escape. If you don't escape, you're probably dead anyway. If you get hurt or killed in your escape attempt, you haven't lost much. Sounds harsh, but it's the truth.

Strategically, the best time to escape is at the very moment of capture. There's a lot of chaos going on right then, and the enemy hasn't had a chance to get organized and herd you into a secure location. That's the moment when you have a decision to make. Do you let yourself be taken? Do you run, hide, or fight?

A lot of this decision depends on who's there with you at the instant you're taken. If you're alone, at least you can figure nobody else you care about is going to get injured if you resist. But if you're in a room full of family members, it's a different story. The enemy will use leverage to gain your cooperation, threatening your loved ones to get you to do what they want.

In Part 2, we'll take up the subject of how to escape and how to evade your enemy. Come on back.

Self-Defense With a Tactical Flashlight

It used to be that a flashlight was just a portable means of lighting up the night, but not anymore.

Today's tactical flashlights still vaporize the darkness, but in skilled hands they also serve as effective close-quarters defensive weapons.

Take the SureFire E2D for example. This is a compact, dual-output flashlight with self-defense enhancements. It features a virtually indestructible power-regulated LED emitter and a Total Internal Reflection (TIR) lens. The E2D LED's pushbutton tailcap click switch lets you activate the flashlight and select output level: press or click for a 200-lumen high beam (ten times the light of a big two-D-cell flashlight), more than enough to overwhelm an aggressor's night-adapted vision; release or click off and press or click again for a 5-lumen ultra long-runtime low beam that's suitable for navigating around a dark room or parking lot. The Defender's crenellated Strike Bezel® and scalloped tailcap provide further defensive options should the need arise.

To use it in a defensive situation, grip the barrel of the light in your preferred fist, with your thumb positioned over the tailcap switch. Raise your arm and aim the light beam at your attacker's eyes, then hit the switch with your thumb. The bad guy will be momentarily blinded by the brilliant light.

The next step is your choice. You can either take that opportunity to escape, or you can proceed to impact the assailant's face (concentrate on eyes and nose) with the sharply scalloped bezel and/or tailcap. You can do a lot of damage in a hurry, if you think of your fist as a hammer, with the flashlight serving as the hammer head.

This is, unmistakably, close quarters combat — a hand-to-hand situation that requires steady nerves and a focussed approach to the situation. When you're this close to an attacker, you must seize the moment to overwhelm him with unexpected explosive violence. If you do it right, you'll have the element of surprise on your side. And don't stop to examine your work until the enemy is down and out — I mean REALLY out. There's nothing worse than stopping before the job is done, then facing the wrath of an injured enemy.

Financial Survival — Let's Talk Money

Yes, this is a survival site that deals primarily with Wilderness, Urban, and Disaster survival. But some might argue that the most universal and critical form of survival right now is financial. So, let's talk money.

We spend our lives, literally, in pursuit of this stuff, as if money actually has intrinsic value that is worth the exchange of our time, talent, energy, and everything else we give in trade for it. The question is why. What good is it?

In pure survival terms, there is almost nothing as worthless as money (unless you're using it to buy your way out of a tight situation). You can't eat it. You can't drink it. You can't wear it. It won't keep you warm and dry unless you burn it.

Money's only function is to serve as a convenient medium of exchange for something else that you want more than the money itself. During normal market situations, you can use money to trade for food or clothing or fuel or whatever else you want. But in a survival situation, when the market is not in normal operation mode, or is entirely unavailable (like in the wilderness), the value of this green paper can approach zero.

Lately, there's been a lot of talk about the "fiscal cliff" facing the U.S. economy. It's tempting for me to launch into a rant about who caused the country's financial mess and why the politicians and bureaucrats now expect you and me to pay for their criminal financial incompetence, but I'll try to put lid on it and deal with a more personal approach to finances.

Let's pretend that the national economy goes into total meltdown, and examine how that might affect us on a personal level. There are a couple ways this can happen. The Fed can keep printing money until runaway inflation makes the currency worthless. That's the old "It'll take a wheelbarrow full of cash to buy a loaf of bread" story. Might sound crazy, but it has happened in other countries, and it could happen here.

Or, the uncertainty of taxes and regulations coming out of D.C. punishes wage-earners, kills business, and unemployment skyrockets. With no jobs, there's no money in your pocket. I know, sounds crazy, but it has happened before and it can happen again. Just look back at our own history to the "hobo" days when unemployment was so bad that able-bodied men rode the rails all over the country trying to find work. Families were torn apart, children were given away or sold to those who could afford to raise them.

Honestly, it doesn't matter what causes the collapse, the outcome is always the same. People go hungry and homeless because they can't afford to buy what they need. Either the money is so worthless that it takes a ton of it to buy stuff, or the stuff to buy is so scarce that it just can't be found.

But let's step back and take a look at what role money actually plays in your survival. I'll say it right up front — money is worthless. You can't eat it, you can't drink it, you can't wear it, blah-blah-blah. I already went through all that. So my question is, why are we so intent on gathering up what's worthless, instead of preparing ourselves with the commodities that we will need when the fertilizer hits the fan?

I don't care if the wealth is green and foldable, or gold and silver, or diamonds and rubies — doesn't matter. If you can't eat it, or wear it, or use in in some functional fashion that will help keep you alive, it's worthless.

What do you normally do with money? The answer — you trade it for something you want or need. That's its only function. Having a pile of it stashed away won't do you a bit of good when the hurricane hits and there's not a sheet of plywood to be found anywhere. Or when the ice storm tears down all the power lines and leaves you freezing in a dark apartment. Or when an earthquake shatters the roads and food delivery trucks can't get through, and grocery stores are stripped to the bone by those who get there first.

What good is your money then?

In an emergency, you don't need money. You need food. You need warm, dry clothing that is appropriate for the conditions. You need drinking water. You need shelter. You might need a supply of prescription medications or first aid equipment. You need a way to protect yourself against human predators. You sure don't need money.

That's when you go over the real fiscal cliff — when you realize that you don't have what you need, no matter how much money you have in your wallet, bank, safe, or stuffed under the mattress.

So, let's get real and get prepared. Stop hoarding money, and start laying away a supply of whatever you need to keep yourself alive. The basic list includes easy-to-prepare foods, drinking water (and filters so you can create more), good walking shoes, adequate outdoor clothing, alternative methods of transportation (fat-tire bicycle), fire-starting equipment, illumination that doesn't need batteries, alternative cooking methods, hygiene supplies, etc.

Develop a plan of action that includes sheltering in place, as well as evacuation if that becomes necessary. Identify like-minded people you could team up with for mutual benefit, and start talking with them about "what if" scenarios.

As a society, we've lived in la-la land way too long. We've become accustomed to being able to run out and buy whatever we want, whenever we want it. We've believed that money was the answer to all our problems — with enough cash, you can buy your way to happiness.

But I predict that the time will come when those with hoards of money will be willing to trade it all for a warm coat and a loaf of bread. And those with the bread and the coat will turn away the wealthy man and tell him to go eat his money.

The wise will prepare themselves. The foolish will go without.

One Survived — One Didn't

Paula Lane and her boyfriend Roderick Clifton decided to go on an off-roading trip through the Sierra Nevada Mountains — then they got stuck in the snow.

This is how so many survival stories begin. It all starts with an innocent venture into the backcountry, with total intention to make just a short trip of it and get back before nightfall.

Unfortunately, it doesn't always work out that way. This is one of those cases. 

The trip started on November 29th, but didn't end for Paula until  7 days later when she was discovered, still alive, by her own brother as she wandered near a highway.

During her recovery from frostbite and hypothermia, she was able to tell her story. After the vehicle became stuck in the snow, Roderick Clifton decided to hike out of the area to look for help. When he never returned, Paula Lane wrapped herself in blankets to stay warm, then headed out on foot to try to reach a road. During her 7-day ordeal, the report says she slept in hollowed-out trees and ate snow and tomatoes (which she must have carried with her from the vehicle) to stay alive. 

 The official search and rescue effort was called off by authorities after they found no trace of the couple. But her family refused to give up the search. Her brother took off into the wilderness, looking for the lost pair, and eventually found Paula wandering alongside the highway. He took her to a medical facility where she was treated for frostbite and severe hypothermia. 

So, what can we learn from all this? 

• To help searchers find you quickly when you become stranded, always file a trip plan with friends and family members, saying where you're going and when to expect you back. Then stick to the plan. If you don't show up on time, at least the search can be conducted in the right place. 
• Be prepared to stay longer than expected. Take shelter and sleeping bags, even if you don't plan on staying overnight. Have redundant methods of starting a fire, and carry enough food and water to keep you going for a week or more. 
• Take communication devices such as cell phones, or 2-way radio. The ultimate way to call for help when you're in a life-threatening situation is to use a personal locator beacon (PLB) or a SPOT Satellite Messenger (www.findmespot.com).
• Rather than wander away from the vehicle, risking becoming lost, and having to face the elements without shelter, stick with the vehicle and get to work on signal techniques that might attract someone's attention. A smoky fire by day, a bright blaze by night. Use every strategy to make yourself seen and heard. 
• The reason to stay with the vehicle is because it offers shelter from the elements, and it's easier for searchers to spot from the air or from a distance. Finding a single person wandering in the forest is a long-shot.