Mosby From The Library

Discussion in '3 Percent' started by survivalmonkey, Apr 5, 2019.


  1. survivalmonkey

    survivalmonkey Monkey+++

    After re-reading the Chesty Puller biography, I’ve gone on a kick of reading WW2 Pacific Theatre memoirs, including Robert Leckie’s Helmet for My Pillow, and Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed, both of which were used as the basis for the HBO Mini-Series The Pacific. I first read both of those when I was in grade school, in the old mass-market Ballentine Books printing. Even at the age of 9 or 10, I remember them being awe-inspiring, at the feats those guys put up with. Re-reading them as an adult, with my own combat experiences behind me, I can say, unequivocably, those guys were legitimately bad ass. At the end of the day, shooting bad guys is shooting bad guys, but the in-between times are different, and sometimes dramatically so. I suspect that studying these old memoirs will be of far more value, in the event of a post-grid catastrophe requiring armed security, than most of the memoirs coming out of the current and recent conflicts, just because of the differences in the in-between times.

    The Permaculture Handbook by Peter Bane

    I’ve mentioned it before, when discussing Gaia’s Garden, by the late Toby Hemenway, but most of the current crop of permaculture books are about as useless as tits on a boar for me. Either they are all about the theory, with little or no practical applications, or they are focused on tropical and subtropical foreign environments, or they are written for suburban neighborhood yards.

    This one, like Hemenway’s book, is a nice, useful cross between theory and application, with the projects being such that they are practical not only on the suburban backyard scale, but also on the smallholding farm scale, which is what we need. Unlike a lot of the current crop of books, which tend to downplay the importance of livestock to the permaculture equation, this one does talk about incorporating small livestock, like rabbits, chickens, goats, and pigs, into the equation, to develop the most benefit from them.

    Jungle SNAFUs by Cresson Kearney, PhD

    After a reader recommended this, I looked into it, and ordered a copy. My copy hasn’t arrived yet, but I did find a website for the book, with a large amount excerpted from the book, in the meantime. This review then, is based only on what I was able to read in the excerpts…

    I liked it. I’ve got some experience in the jungle, both in LATAM and the SWP. I’ve got a lot more experience living in sub-tropical jungle and sub-tropical mountains. Most of what the doc had to say I agree with, spot-on, 100%, even accounting for differences in the applications of technology that was available then versus what is available now. This is one of those books that, while it’s not completely relevant, should still be required reading for small-unit combat leaders in the Army and Marine Corps, still today (of course, I would say the same about the WW2 memoirs above…).

    I have spent most of the last two decades in alpine environments. The last couple of years however, I’ve been back in a sub-tropical jungle/mountain environment. Whereas in Idaho, we could expect snow and below-freezing temperatures most of the year, here it is reversed. We got a total of about 2 inches of snow this year, and temperatures are already hovering into the mid-70s. By the end of April, we’ll be dealing with 90+ degree weather, and humidity levels in the 90s as well. The brush is a lot thicker and, about 60% of the vegetation has some sort of tooth or claw. We have a wide variety of venomous snakes, including a couple varieties of rattlesnake, copperheads, and water moccasins (versus the zero venomous snakes where I lived in Idaho).

    Simply put, the environment, other than being steep as fuck, is dramatically different than what I dealt with living in the mountains. That means a lot of the TTPs I used for fieldcraft do not work the same here (in another week or two, you won’t catch me sleeping outside without a hammock, for example).

    This is one of those things that I suspect many of us with real-world experience suffer from, and it can result in a huge disservice to students and readers, if we try to insist that the TTPs we know, from our experience in one theater, will work, regardless of your local environmental considerations. Worse possibly, is when a reader decides to try and force my experiences into his environment, because he doesn’t even have the frame-of-reference to try and modify them to fit the local environment.

    As one example, my “patrolling” training load-out has changed dramatically, from what I carried in Idaho—which was pretty similar to what I carried in Afghanistan. For nine months out of the year, here, I can get by with a basic LBE, and a small assault pack, because I just don’t need the same snivel gear that I would in Idaho. Reading this book did a good job of reminding me of the importance of recognizing and accounting for those differences.

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