My overnight trip with the wife ended up taking a few days longer than expected. In between everything involved in the trip, I had a lot of time to think about different stuff, and since I’d been reading some bushcraft stuff, and have a training trip coming up that involves a 1200 mile round trip, fieldcraft, living out of a ruck, and load-carrying over long distances, were at the forefront of my mind. The trip ended up taking enough time that getting caught up on farm chores upon our return interfered with my normal practice of getting this Monday article typed up. So, this is sort of a last-minute, flow-of-consciousness mind dump on some things I thought about last weekend. 1) Travel light, freeze at night. My observation—and experience—has been that, “preppers” tend towards two camps when it comes to packing rucks for “Get Home Bags” and “Bug Out Bags.” The first camp is full of middle-class suburbanites who’ve never spent a night outside a tent, in their entire adult lives (and many, their entire lives, period). They cannot imagine living out a pack without all the comforts of home, so they follow the mantra of “two is one, and one is none,” and pack a half-dozen of each and every comfort item, three square meals a day worth of food, and twelve or thirteen gallons of water. The other camp is composed of guys who are prior service, and spent their entire career humping a lightweight ruck with 90 pounds of team gear and ammunition. I get that. I’ve carried 120+ pound loads in combat and training. I lived to tell the tale, so carrying a 65-75 pound ruck shouldn’t be nothing. Right? But…we KNOW “mobility kills.” We also know, the less shit you’re carrying, the faster you can move, safely. The class I am teaching next week will be Clandestine Carry Pistol, so I don’t really need a ruck or LBE to teach the class. I’m carrying both because shit happens, and it’s a nearly 600 mile walk home if something catastrophic happens. That may be unlikely, but it is POSSIBLE, and the consequences of facing it unprepared are not as catastrophic for me as for some, but they’re still really fucking bad. So, I packed my “spring/summer” ruck. Then, I stepped on the scale to see what it weighed. My entire load, from skin out (FSO) was 65#. That’s cake! Hell, I’ve carried rucks alone that weighed more than that! But, as I was standing there on the scale, looking at the quantifiable, inarguable number represented, my mid-40s back and hips were going, “Man, that feels like a lot more than 65 pounds! I bet you could dump some of that shit, and be okay.” So, I listened to the voice of experience, and managed to get my ruck weight down to less than 20# (this is the base weight…not counting water). That was a lot more manageable. I did that by thinking about what I was actually carrying, versus the mission set I could foresee needing to fulfill on the long trek home, if it came down to it. I’m not going to be “camping” for days at a time, leisurely loafing away my vacation. I’m going to be moving as fast as I safely can, for as many hours a night as I can, then racking out for a couple of hours before getting up and repeating it. I’m not traveling with an ODA or a Ranger platoon. We won’t have mortars or belt-fed crew-served weapons that require me to carry spare ammunition, base plates, tripods, and etc. While I might need to be all Sneaky Pete, the Secret Squirrel a bit, if I have to walk home, that’s a lot easier to do with a smaller element, and that means a warming survival fire is not out of the question. Especially since, much like the Kentucky/Tennessee Longhunters, I can expect the “Injuns” to be holed up somewhere dry and warm if it gets cold enough to need a fire. The ability to use a warming fire means I don’t need as much snivel gear. So, there’s no reason for me to carry a stupid-heavy ruck. I can, and I can do it and still move reasonably fast, because I specifically train for it, but….at the same level of fitness and conditioning, I can also move two or three times as fast with the lighter load. When you’re packing a ruck, think about what you NEED, not what you WANT. The more you know, the less you need. 2) A friend of mine is a MARSOC veteran. He and I were talking about the potential intervention in Venezuela the other night over supper, and I mentioned that I was curious to see what changes would occur to TTP, based on the transition to a jungle/alpine rural patrolling environment, versus the desert, mountain, and urban environments we’ve been operating in for the last two decades. My entire life, I’ve read, written papers about, and discussed personally and professionally, the tendency of military forces to “prepare for the last war.” I’d always thought we had moved past that, but as I look at current articles and writings from the War Colleges and Center for Army Lessons Learned, as well as other sources, I’m not so sure. Load-bearing is one of those lessons that we discussed, since it had been on my mind anyway (others included the changes that will occur regarding the use of UAV for surveillance/target detection. I suspect that ain’t going to work nearly as well in a jungle mountain environment as it does in the desert. Also, the mega slums of Caracas will, I suspect, be dramatically different than Baghdad’s. Add in the ability for large forces to hide effectively in the jungle, and suddenly, the truck-borne infantry will have to go back to being foot-mobile patrolling forces…there’s a whole lot that will change…again…in a military intervention in Venezuela, after the bodies start piling up). I’m a big fan of chest rigs for LBE, which long-time readers and former students will be aware of. I’ve worn them in a lot of places, all with differing environments. Chest rigs also have a really long history of being useful in various environments. One of the lessons I’ve personally rediscovered in recent years though, is that a nylon chest rig, in subtropical environments is a pain in the ass. Yes, they worked awesome in Rhodesia…which was a relatively dry desert environment. They worked well in Afghanistan…which is a relatively dry desert environment. They work well along the US/Mexico border…dry desert environment. They work well in the Rockies….dry desert and/or cold environment. They work well when most of your operations are truck-based, and focused on urban CQB. But, I’ve been in the Southern Highlands again for a couple of years now. It’s cold as shit right now, but in another month, it’s going to be hotter and moister than three feet up Satan’s asshole until November or so. And, what I’ve found? A chest rig SUCKS in that environment. Maybe it didn’t suck as bad when I was in my early 20s, but nowadays, it just sucks. You can’t cool off, because the fucking nylon blocks evaporation from sweat across a huge swath of your upper torso. Cotton canvas webbing would, at least, absorb the sweat and then it could evaporate from there. My solution was to go back to a belt system. It uses PALS/MOLLE, but it’s a basic belt and suspenders system based on the exact layout we used with LC-2/ALICE gear back in the 1990s, in the Ranger Regiment. It’s comfortable enough, and it leaves most of my body free to dispose of perspiration. I KNOW the belt system will allow you to sweat, and use evaporative cooling, because…Ranger Regiment in the 1990s equaled lots of time patrolling in Georgia for most of us (except 2d Batt, of course. They were too busy chasing Alternative Music fan girls in Seattle). It’s hot and moist in Georgia most of the time). The drawback to the belt system of course, is the inability to use the waistbelt on a ruck, but…when you’re packing properly (as in #1 above), the loads tend to be light enough you don’t need the fucking waist belt anyway. And, if you really do need a heavier ruck, you can always go back to loosening the suspenders and letting the belt hang lower, or shortening them, and wearing the belt rig like a chest rig. I didn’t do either. 1) My rucks are light enough now, for everything in my local environment, that I don’t need the waist belt.) 2) If I am doing something that I feel the belt load alone doesn’t provide adequate ammunition stowage, I throw a chest rig on above it, loaded only with magazine pouches, instead of magazine pouches plus utility and sustainment pouches. 3) I’ve started making our local training group guys run all rifle drills in full LBE with assault packs/rucks on. Part of this is to help motivate them to do more PT, but it’s also an opportunity to let them see how they perform with the gear on. Should they dump more of their gear? Should they choose a smaller, lighter, tighter assault pack? Should they just do more PT? (Yes. Yes. Yes.) 3) We heat with wood. Even with a full stove in a well-warmed house, at bed time, by the time we get out of bed in the morning, it can be blistering cold in the house, and it usually takes a little while for the newly stoked morning fire to warm up the house (since the house is still not complete, there are always occasional drafts, but it’s also an extremely well-insulated house. That means, it doesn’t get cold as quickly, despite the drafts, but you can feel the drafts, and it also doesn’t heat up as quickly in the morning from passive solar heating…). Our commercial comforters on the beds weren’t enough, so last fall, I broke down and ordered several Woolrich wool blankets for each bed. Now, I’m a long time fan of wool. I check local thrift stores for wool sweaters regularly, and any time I’m on a trip to the mountains or the PNW, I make sure to check them out there too. My normal winter attire, even now, is wool flannel shirts, and wool sweaters. Despite this, the value of wool blankets had never really sunk in for me. They did this winter. Wool IS warmer than any synthetic. It stays warm, despite being damp, and it doesn’t stink once it dries back out, because it apparently has natural antimicrobial properties (that having been said, wet wool is heavy, and holy shit does it stink!) It got me thinking, and the more I thought about it, the more I decided to do something drastic. I’ve dumped all of my synthetic long underwear, and I’ve added two wool blankets to my winter ruck load, in lieu of a sleeping bag. I may not have had the nerve to do the wool blankets in lieu of sleeping bag in the northern Rockies in wintertime, but here, the current -12F overnight low wind chill is about as cold as it ever gets, and even in a tactical environment that disallows a warming fire, I can survive comfortably warm in that, if I throw on dry wool socks, and wool long johns and a stocking cap. Wool of course, in a tactical environment, has the additional value of not melting to you in the case of flash burns/explosions. It is a natural fire retardent base layer. One of the advantages often voiced about modern military surplus synthetics is that they are inexpensive, of course, but a quick look at Amazon and a local outdoor store both showed decent prices on wool long underwear, and in a couple of cases, they were less expensive than the local surplus store price on waffle pattern USGI base layer. And, anyone who has ever worn polypro can tell you, after you work up a good sweat in them once, you’ll never….ever….get the stench out of them. So, there’s my impromptu, “John needs to knock an article out for Mountain Guerrilla Monday!” article. Next week, we will return to your regularly scheduled programming, and an announcement of a cool new project coming soon. Continue reading...
