Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse

CHAPTER 9 Shank’s Mare

In late May, following two months of boredom, Rose Trasel spotted a stranger approaching the perimeter of the retreat. It was just after dawn. At first she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her. She thought she saw movement, but then could see nothing. Rose picked up the binoculars and scanned the area where she thought she had seen the movement. Still she saw nothing.

Finally, she saw more movement. It was a single figure, well camouflaged, carrying a long gun, moving a few paces at a time, and pausing. From the LP/OP, she called in an agitated message on the TA-1:“Hasty-rear. A probable solo. Armed. Approaching slowly from the east, cross-country. Estimate four hundred and fifty meters.”

Because it was during daylight hours and most of the group members were up and about, there was time to set a hasty ambush before the stranger came into view of the house.

In low prone positions within the concealment of the wooded area north of the house, Todd, Mary, Kevin, and Dan waited for the stranger to approach. The man walked toward the waiting ambush cautiously.

The man stopped occasionally to scan his surroundings. When he saw smoke coming from the chimney of the Grays’ house, he cautiously moved inside the tree line of the wood lot. He was carrying a Springfield Armory M1A with a padded black nylon M60 sling. The rifle was slung across his chest, ready to fire quickly. He was wearing BDUs and carried a forest green Kelty backpack. As he got closer it became apparent that the stranger was also wearing camouflage face paint.

Since he had veered to enter the tree line to avoid observation from the house, the stranger passed only ten feet in front of Kevin Lendel, who lay prone, his face covered by a camouflage sniper’s veil. Just after he had passed Kevin without noticing him, approaching Mary’s position, Todd yelled, “Halt!”

Normally, Todd would have waited until a stranger was in the middle of the kill zone of the ambush, but because he had unexpectedly entered the tree line, the ambushers were in great danger of being spotted.

In a booming, no-nonsense voice, Todd warned, “There are four rifles trained on you. Just lay your rifle down, very slowly.” After a pause to look around him and confirm the number of ambushers, the stranger did as he was told. “Take three steps backward. Put your hands on top of your head. Now, drop to your knees and cross your legs.”Again, the stranger obeyed.

Todd motioned forward in a jabbing motion of his index finger to Dan Fong. From his spot at the far end of the kill zone, Dan set down his HK and rose to his feet. He quietly padded around their unexpected visitor, positioning himself on the far side of the kill zone. He then drew his .45, leveled it at the man, clicked off its safety, and said, “Okaaay, I want you to very slowly unstrap your belly band and then toss your backpack toward my friends over there.”

With a grunt, the stranger tossed the pack toward Mary. It landed only a few feet in front of her. “Okaaay. Now the same for your web gear.”With that the stranger unsnapped his belt and pulled off his LC-1 harness. It fell next to the Kelty pack. Dan thumbed up the safety of his Colt, reholstered it, and approached the intruder. He frisked him thoroughly. In the pockets of his M65 BDU field jacket he found a pair of D3A gloves and wool liners. In his shirt and pants pockets, he found a German army pocketknife, and a U.S. Army issue lensatic compass with tritium markings. Wrapped in Ziploc bags were AAA Idaho/Montana and Western States and Provinces road maps. In other pockets, he found a foil wrapped maple nut cake from an MRE, and a camouflage face paint stick. He also discovered a custom T.H. Rinaldi Sharkstooth fighting knife strapped to his left calf, under his BDU trousers. Dan commented, “Wow, a Rinaldi!You’ve got nice taste in knives… Always good to have a little backup.”

After gently tossing the Kydex-sheathed knife and the contents of the stranger’s pockets into a pile near the pack, Dan declared, “He’s clean now, Boss.” Dan walked back to his position, snapped his Bianchi holster’s retention strap closed, flopped down prone, and reshouldered his rifle.

As soon as Dan was back in position, Todd stood up. Holding his HK91 at waist level, pointing at the stranger, he proclaimed, “We’re not bandits. We are sovereign Idaho citizens. I own the land you are standing on, free and clear. We just want to ask you some questions, and then you can go.” Todd lowered the muzzle of his rifle, and then continued, “Who are you?”

“My name’s Doug Carlton.”

“Where are you headed?”

“West.”

“Where’d you come from?”

“Missoula. I went there to see if my parents were still alive. They weren’t. Half the town was burned out, including my parents’ place. I buried them in the backyard, and moved on. Not many people left there.”

“And where before Missoula?”

“Pueblo, Colorado. I’m, or was rather, a senior at the University of Southern Colorado. I was studying mechanical engineering.”

Todd clicked the push-to-talk button on his TRC-500. He spoke into the black foam-padded microphone, “Any signs of anyone else, Rose?”

From the LP/OP, Rose replied, “Nope, looks like he’s a solo rather than somebody’s point man.”

Todd replied, “Thanks. Just keep your eyes open, out.”

After adjusting the thin wire antenna of the TRC-500, Todd resumed his questioning. “You look pretty military, Doug. Are you a National Guardsman or reservist?”

“Neither. I’m an Army ROTC cadet—an MS 4—that’s a fourth-year cadet. I went to ROTC Advanced Camp last summer and Basic Camp at Fort Knox the summer before that.”

“If you’re really a cadet, then you’ll know a few things… such as:What does

‘PMS’ stand for, in the context of a ROTC department?”

“Professor of Military Science. Usually a Colonel, sometimes a Lieutenant Colonel.”

Todd nodded affirmatively, then asked, “What are the four Army staff functions?”

Carlton quickly recited, “At brigade level and lower, the S-1 shop is for personnel. S-2 is intelligence. S-3 is for training in peacetime, and operations in wartime. S-4 is logistics. The functions are the same at higher echelons, except they have G prefixes: G-1, G-2, G-3, and G4.”

“Correct. What is the maximum effective range of an excuse?”

Carlton snapped back: “Zero meters!”

Todd nodded again and grinned. “You’re a kay-dette all right. Sit down Indian-style there, and let’s talk.” Carlton sat down as ordered. Todd also sat cross-legged, fifteen feet away, the HK91 now resting crossways on his knees.

He looked the stranger in the eye, and asked, “Now where exactly were you headed?”

In a more relaxed voice, Carlton replied, “Just west into the Palouse country. Nowhere in particular. I thought I’d try to find some little town that wasn’t wiped out, and hire on as a security man. You know, sort of a Yojimbo.”

Todd cocked his head. “I’m not sure how many towns are still intact, Doug.

Besides, you’d be lucky if you were able to approach one without being shot on sight. From what I’ve heard on the CB and the shortwave, there are itchy trigger fingers all over America.” Todd paused and asked, “Why weren’t you down on the county road?”

“Roads are for people who like to get ambushed! If you’ve got to travel, you live longer traveling cross-country. I’ve learned that it’s best not to follow trails that look like they’ve been used by anything but deer.”

Todd vigorously nodded his head in agreement. He eyed the heap of Carlton’s gear on the ground. Looking back toward Doug, he pronounced, “To save us some time, give us a complete rundown on the contents of your pack, your clothing, and web gear. Be honest. We’ll check for ourselves later.”

Doug Carlton began a matter-of-fact inventory. “In the web gear I’ve got six spare magazines for the M1A: one loaded with match, one with hundred-and-fifty-grain soft nose, and the rest with ball. A Gerber multi-plier tool. Two canteens. On the outside of the pack is clipped a parachutists’ first aid kit.

Inside the pack I’ve got a cleaning kit and a few spare parts for the M1A. A Wiggy’s sleeping bag. A poncho. Several sets of socks and underwear. An extra set of BDUs. What’s left of a tube tent. Five MREs. Four cans of chili and beans. A bag of venison jerky. Some miner’s lettuce. A half dozen smoked trout.

A small fishing kit. Some snares. A gill net. A toothbrush. A hank of olive drab 550 parachute cord. A little Tupperware container of salt. Some Ziploc bags and three plastic trash bags. Signal mirror. One of those Navy signal strobe lights with a spare battery. A small sewing kit. A little over twelve dollars face value in pre-1965 silver dimes and quarters. A Case skinning knife and small sharpening stone.”

He hesitated briefly, and then went on, “Let’s see, what else? Some pieces of tanned deer hide. A pocket address book. Three bandoleers of seven-sixty-two ball. Forty-seven rounds of .308 soft-points. Some granola bars. A bar of soap. A couple of camo sticks. A cable saw. Matches in a waterproof container. About seven or eight packs of damp-proof matches out of MREs. A ‘Metal Match’ fire starter. About ten trioxane ration heating bars. In the bottom of the pack I’ve got a Survival Arms AR-7 .22 rifle, stowed in its stock. Three spare magazines, and 462 rounds of .22 long rifle—a mixture of soft nose and hollow points. I may have forgotten a few odds and ends, but that’s about it.”

“No handgun?” Todd asked.

“Negative. That was going to be my next purchase, but then the economy went ballistic.”

“Sounds like you had the survival bent well before the Crunch hit, Doug.”

“Yeah, I’m a ‘prepper.’”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Are you a member of a survival group?”

“No. Last spring semester some of the cadets in our ROTC department and I talked about forming a group, but nothing ever came of it. So you have a group retreat here?”

With a frown, Todd rebuked, “For now, let me ask the questions, Cadet Carlton. If we decide it’s appropriate, you might get some of your questions answered later. It sounds as if you have some information on what is going on outside our immediate vicinity that would be of interest to us. I also need to discuss some things with my friends. Now… what I want you to do is to get up and walk slowly toward the house. You are now our guest. Once again, you don’t have to fear for your life or property. You can collect your gear later and go in peace. We’ll just leave it exactly where it is for the time being.”

They slowly walked to the house, with Carlton leading the way, five paces ahead. When they got to the house, Todd asked Mary to wait outside and watch Carlton. She stood twenty-five feet away, with the muzzle of her CAR-15 pointed toward him. Gesturing to the gun, Carlton said, “That really isn’t necessary, ma’am.”

“Let me be the judge of that,” Mary replied, with her exhaled breath making a miniature cloud of fog.

After twenty-five chilly minutes, Todd poked his head out of the door.

“You can come inside now.”

Doug Carlton sat in an easy chair at the end of the living room near the stove, warming his hands and sipping a cup of instant coffee. After waiting a few minutes, Todd inquired, “Very well then, Doug, let’s hear your life’s story, beginning with ‘I was born…’.”

“My full name is Douglas John Carlton. My father was a telephone line-man and later a phone company office manager. Before that, he did two tours inVietnam with the 101st Airborne Division. He was awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. He got out as an E-6. My mother was a legal secretary.

They wrote letters back and forth the whole time he was overseas. I guess you could say that they fell in love via correspondence. They got married just a month after he ETSed, and I was born exactly one year from the day that they were married. Every year we celebrated my birthday and their anniversary together. I was an only child. Something about a complication from when I was born prevented my mom from ever having any more kids….”

Carlton sighed and went on. “I was born and raised in Missoula. I had a pretty typical childhood, at least by Montana standards. My dad liked hunting and fishing, so I got to do a lot of both. I’ve always been mechanically inclined.

I guess I took my Erector Set and Legos too seriously as a boy.

“When I was five or six years old I was building little forts in the backyard. By the time I was ten, I had free rein at the junkyard that was a quarter-mile away from our house. The old guy who ran the place humored me by selling me scrap box-bar stock, sprockets, pulleys, and wheels and whatnot for nickels and dimes. I built pushcarts at first, and later chain drive pedal carts. By the time I was a freshman in high school, I built my first motorized go-cart. It was powered by a five-horse Briggs and Stratton engine. It’s a wonder that I didn’t get myself killed, driving those go-carts around.

“It was only natural that I wanted to study engineering. I started out at the junior college in Missoula. I tried getting into the engineering program at the University of Montana there in Missoula, but it was ‘impacted.’ So I started applying all over the place for scholarships. I got a two-year scholarship from the University of Southern Colorado. That was more than enough to make up for the higher cost of out-of-state tuition. I only paid the out-of-state fees for the first two years. After that, I had my Colorado residency, so I paid the lower resident tuition.

“The University of Southern Colorado is in Pueblo. Everyone calls it USC, which of course leads to some confusion. When I told my friends in Montana that I was enrolled at USC, they immediately thought that I was talking about the University of Southern California. Personally, I thought that our USC was the better school. I really liked the people there. On campus everybody got along, whether you were Mexican, Indian,Anglo, or anything in between. The engineering program there at USC was excellent. We called it the University of Solid Concrete, because of all the concrete architecture.

“Pueblo is essentially a blue-collar town. So the campus and town are two different worlds. Off campus, there were already some interracial problems, so I knew it wouldn’t be a good town to stick around in, during an upheaval.

“Two years ago, one of the guys in my dorm asked me if I wanted to go with him to Army ROTC Basic Camp at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Since I had grown up hearing my dad’s stories about his Army days, I was naturally interested. My dad had talked about shooting M60 machineguns and Browning .50s, and here was my chance to get trained on all that stuff, with no ROTC contract obligation. I thought ‘wow, I’m going to get paid to go shoot up Uncle Sam’s ammo and get tactical training?’ I went to go talk to the PMS, Colonel Galt, and he signed me up. It didn’t pay much for the six-week camp, but they let us keep the two pairs of combat boots that they issued us. The weather was really hot and humid, but other than that, I had a blast and I learned a lot. When I got back, I signed up for a Guaranteed Reserve Forces Duty contract with ROTC. That pays four hundred dollars a month for an MS-4. Last summer I went to Advanced Camp. That’s another six-week camp that cadets usually take between their junior and senior years.

“I liked the idea of the GRFD contract, because I knew that I wanted to work in civilian industry, rather than spending four years in the active Army. My only active duty commitment was a five-month officer’s basic course, and then six years in the Army Reserve, with two weeks of active duty training each year. I had applied for branch assignment to the Ordnance Corps with the Engineers as my second choice. But then everything collapsed and I had to bug out before my branch assignment ever came down from the Army Personnel Headquarters.

“When the dollar took its swan dive, things in the dorms at USC got strange. More than half of the dormies had bugged out by the time I left. Some of them that didn’t have cars had family members come and pick them up. Nearly everybody who bailed out left things behind, but it was amazing seeing some of the useless stuff they took with them, like computers, and stereos, and desk lamps. They just weren’t thinking the scenario through to its logical conclusion. I probably should have bailed early on too, while there might have been gas still available. But I made the mistake of sticking around an extra day, waiting to see if things were going to get back to normal. Big mistake. I should have gone didi mau and not worried about missing any classes.

“I was able to buy some gas before the stations in Pueblo ran out. I had to wait two hours in line. They were limiting everyone to six gallons, positively no filling of cans, and strictly greenback cash. It was thirty dollars a gallon for premium and twenty-eight for regular. I always kept a few hundred dollars or so in cash on hand for contingencies, and the gas wiped out most of that. I had to try three instant teller machines before I found one that had any money left. I took out six hundred of the six-hundred-and-two dollars that I had left in checking, and I got a cash advance on my VISA card. The maximum I could take was nine hundred, so I took the max.

“It started getting weird in a hurry. At this point the power was still on, the water was running, the phones were working, and the central heating co-generation plant for the campus was still running. Most of the classes were still meeting on schedule. But each successive night it got a little stranger in the dorms. One gal on the third floor of our dorm had a gallon jar full of coins, and she used it to empty out all the candy machines. Most of the people who were left in the dorms were starting into some stage of mental breakdown.

“My roommate, Javier, packed a few things and went to stay at his girlfriend’s apartment. When he was packing up he kept chanting to himself, ‘What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do?’ There were some students from Taiwan on our floor that were crying and practically screaming: ‘We go home now! We go home now!’ What a lousy situation for them. Here they were in a foreign country, they could hardly speak the language, and suddenly things got terminal. It made me count my blessings. At least I had a clear destination with some way of getting there, a couple of practical rifles, and a pretty well-stocked bug-out bag.

“The night before I left, a few of the football players started cleaning the food out of the dorm Dining Commons and the Joe O. Center, and stockpiling it all, plus a bunch of water, up on the fourth floor. They thought they were pretty smart. They disabled the elevators and had the fire escape doors barricaded with couches and desks. Those dumb bunnies mainly had baseball bats for self-defense. Talk about having no clue about eventualities. It was just a matter of time before somebody with guns came and cleaned them out. And even if they had the necessary coercive force to hold their position, what were they going to do for heat that winter? Once the co-gen plant was down and the electricity was kaput, they’d be S-O-L.

“With all this going on, I could see the handwriting on the wall. It was going to get very ugly once people started getting hungry, and that was going to be real soon. I figured that it was definitely strength-in-numbers time, so I started going through the ROTC department phone roster, starting with the MS-4s and working my way down. The cell phone system was down, and nobody answered their land line phones. They had all bugged out. All that I got was either continuous rings or answering machines. I remember Cadet Pickering had a funny message. It just said, ‘Will the last student leaving Escalante Hall please turn out the lights?’

“Finally, I got hold of somebody, but it wasn’t a cadet. It was Ross, I guy that I knew who lived on the first floor of the dorm. Ross was in my Wednesday evening Bible study class. One time he happened to mention to me that he kept a Model 12 shotgun in his room, that he used it to shoot skeet. I made a little mental note of that. So he was the first guy I called after I went through the cadet roster. He answered on the first ring. Our deal was that I would guard him while he hauled his stuff to his car, and then he’d guard me.

“It worked out just fine. Ross had his Model 12 all right. The night before, he’d used a tubing cutter to cut the barrel off at about nineteen inches. A shame to butcher a collectible gun like that, but ‘desperate times call for desperate measures.’ Nobody messed with us. By that time there was no campus security left around, and the Pueblo police and County Sheriff’s departments had bigger fish to fry. You could hear lots of sirens, any hour of the day.

The night before I left, I heard shooting off in the distance toward old Pueblo, every half hour or so.

“Parenthetically, I should mention that I had previously carried my M1A in a guitar case whenever I took it in or out of the dorm, because they had a ‘no guns on campus’ rule at USC. It was one of those rules that didn’t make any sense and was rarely enforced. I was hardly the only one who kept a gun in my dorm room. For example, USC had an official pistol team that practiced at an on-campus indoor range, and most of those guys used their own guns rather than ones issued by the ROTC department. So they didn’t fall under the exception in the rule for school-owned guns and ROTC department guns.

The team members just didn’t bother mentioning to anyone that those guns were their own property. And they didn’t keep them in the ROTC arms room, either. They were just very low key about it. My roommate Javier wasn’t bothered by the fact that I kept my M1A and AR-7 in our dorm room. He even went out to the range with me a couple of times.

“Well, so much for obsolete legalities. Let’s see, I was telling you about packing up… The power was still on when I was packing up my ’95 Jetta and Ross was packing up his old Chevy minivan. We could hear somebody up on the fourth floor with their stereo cranked up full blast. They were playing that old REM song, ‘It’s The End of the World as We Know It, and I Feel Fine.’ I thought it was kind of apropos.

“It would’ve been much better to have our cars travel together for mutual security, but I was headed north to Montana, and Ross was headed south to his uncle’s ranch outside El Paso. So after we’d both packed up, we just said prayers for each other, shook hands, and hopped in our cars.

“I anticipated that the whole I-25 corridor up though Colorado Springs and Boulder was going to be impassable, so I immediately headed west on I-50 toward Grand Junction.

“I decided it would be best to take US 50 only as far as Salida, then US 285 north to Leadville, basically following the Arkansas River. From 50 I’d then take US 24 over to I-70 into Grand Junction. I knew there’d be less people and less social stress, along that route.

“My goal was to travel the Basin and Range route north, where there’s hardly any population. I didn’t see any traffic to speak of; just a few people who were obviously refugees, with trailers piled way up high, and a few truckers. I saw several diesel prime movers without trailers. I guess they’d abandoned their loads and were just trying to get home.

“I usually kept my car’s tank three-fourths full, and I always carried a spare five-gallon can, treated with Sta-Bil. Wouldn’t you know it, but I had a lot less than my usual average when things hit the fan. With what I had in the tank, even after buying the extra six gallons in Pueblo, I calculated I had only about a two-hundred-and-forty-mile range. If I had really planned ahead, I would have found someplace there in Pueblo to store more cans of gas.

“I checked every station that I came to on the highway, and took some exits to cruise through some of the smaller towns, but they were all out of gas. A few of them still had diesel, but there was no gas left. Man! If I’d only bought one of the later diesel Volkswagen Jettas instead of a gas model, I could have found plenty of fuel and driven all the way to Missoula. You can even run a diesel on home heating oil, since it is basically the same stuff. It’s just dyed differently so that people don’t try to cheat on the road taxes. For that matter, you can even stretch diesel with used vegetable oil if you filter it. Before the Crash you could get used vegetable oil for free at most restaurants… As it was, I had over six hundred miles to go when I ran out if gas.

“If I had to do it over again, I would have bought a car or truck that burned diesel. It stores better, it’s safer to carry in bulk, and it was available for sale a while longer than gasoline. Diesel will store for a decade or more if you put an antibacterial in it, and don’t let water seep in. I had a friend in Montana who worked for a road contractor. He had a full-size diesel pickup with a big extra tank in the bed, right behind the cab. They used it mainly to carry extra number-two diesel fuel for the graders and dozers. The tank was L-shaped so that most of it went underneath a cross-bed toolbox, so effectively it only took up ten linear inches of bed space beyond the toolbox. He said that it held ninety-eight gallons. You can go a loooong way with an extra ninety-eight gallons.

“The night my car ran out of gas, I was about twelve miles short of Grand Junction, near Orchard Mesa. When the engine started to stutter, I pushed in the clutch, took it out of gear, and coasted downhill for the last two miles. As I was coasting, I starting whistling the tune to ‘It’s The End of the World as We Know It.’ It was the end of the world as I knew it, all right. No more soft life. No more car. It was time for a long ride on ‘Shank’s Mare.’

“There wasn’t much left worth salvaging from the car that was light enough to carry. All that I took was a few road maps, a fifteen-minute road flare, some plastic bags, a space blanket, and two two-liter pop bottles full of slightly chlorinated water that I had kept in my car for emergencies. My first goal was to get off the highway so I didn’t get robbed. I left my car out on the shoulder, locked. I suppose that it’s still sitting there. It was pitch dark, and I had quite a time struggling to get my pack on, and getting moving. I had a lot of food crammed in my pack, plus those extra pop bottles, so my pack weighed nearly seventy pounds. My rifle and web gear were an extra sixteen pounds. It seemed unbearable at first, and I wasn’t able to travel very fast. After a few days, my back muscles got used to the weight, and since I was eating up some of the food, my pack gradually got lighter, but not much. Right now, for example, it’s probably still well over fifty pounds.

“I only covered a mile or so that first night. I thought that I’d follow the Gunnison River. I hiked the first quarter-mile, stumbling around in the dark, when I came up to a railroad bed. I figured that it was safer than traveling on the road, and easier than tripping over sagebrush. Since it ran north-south, it was even going in the right direction. When it started to get light, I set up cold camp a couple of hundred meters off the track, in a thick clump of brush. As I was laying there that first night, trying to get sleep, I made a mental checklist for my walkabout. I decided that since I was on my own, it was best to travel stealthily, to avoid detection. I had to treat everyone I met as a potential adversary. Traveling alone is a very vulnerable situation. I realized that it would be best to travel with no detectable actions like noticeable cooking fire smoke or any firearm discharges unless absolutely necessary, because evasion is always easier than escape or—God forbid—a firefight.

“I was awakened by the sound of a northbound Denver Rio Grande Western freight train coming, a couple of hours after sunrise. I thought to myself, ‘Great! The trains are still running. Maybe I can catch a ride.’ That train was going at least forty, so I didn’t bother chasing it, but just seeing it cheered me up quite a bit. Now I at least I had a vague plan. I slept off and on until just before full dark, ate a can of beef stew, and started out again.

“I made it all the way to Grand Junction that night. I was lucky that the ballast was packed nice and level with the ties most of the way, so aside from the weight I was carrying, it was easy walking. I stopped short of town, and got way back into some pinon pines to sleep. I was pretty tuckered out. That day two trains went by—one southbound and one northbound; and that was encouraging. All that I did that day was refill my water bottle from a creek and dose it with a purification tablet. I slept off and on. A couple of those big gray Clark’s Nutcrackers kept waking me up. I thought about shooting one with my .22 to eat, but I was too close to town and I didn’t want to attract attention. As close as they were, a wrist rocket would have worked perfectly.

“I waited until full dark, and picked my way back down to the tracks. It was strange and scary walking through Grand Junction. The tracks skirted the east side of town, so I just stayed on them. I figured that those big rails would at least offer some ballistic protection if I got into a firefight. The power was out there, but I could see candles and kerosene lamps in a lot of houses. There were no cars moving on the streets. There was a marshaling yard on the north end of town, where they put together trains. I thought that it would be a good place to catch a ride.

“Just as I got close to the marshaling yard, a freight train throttled up one of its power units and started heading north. I quick-timed it toward the train, but I couldn’t move very fast with the weight I was carrying. The train picked up speed before I could get to it, so I had to stop and just watch it go.

“I heard someone up on a knoll at the edge of the yard shouting at me, ‘Hey soldier boy! Did you miss your train?’ That scared the dickens out of me. I dropped down to one knee, swung around in that direction, and clicked off the safety on my M1A.

“The guy up on the hill stood up, laughing. He said,‘Hold your fire there, pilgrim!’ There was plenty of moonlight, so I ascertained that he was alone, and—at least from a distance—looked unarmed. He walked toward me. He was a crusty-looking old hobo, who introduced himself as ‘Petaluma Bob.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry, son. They’ll be coupling together another northbound tomorrow.’ He invited me to his camp, which was two hundred and fifty yards away, back in a stand of mesquite. He was camped out by himself.

“He carried all of his gear in an old blue Air Force duffel bag. For protection, he had an old .38 Smith and Wesson top-break revolver with most of the nickel finish worn off. The thing looked ancient, but functional. This guy Bob looked to be around sixty years old, and smelled like he hadn’t had a bath in a long time. He didn’t have any front teeth—top or bottom, so it made for a hilarious smile.

“Petaluma Bob spent half an hour describing the train schedules to me. He had a greasy old railroad map that he kept in a plastic bread bag, along with some passenger train schedules, some road maps, and some handwritten notes on freight train schedules and routes. We used his little stub candle to read the maps and schedules.

“Bob told me that he was waiting for a train headed southwest. He said that he was going to Ajo, Arizona, where he had a bunch of his things including a couple of other guns and extra ammo in a plastic olive shipping barrel that he buried as a ‘cach-ay.’ Hearing that kind of surprised me. I’d heard the term ‘cache’ used by survivalists and Special Forces NCOs before, but never by anyone else. From what he said, he knew lots of hobos that buried extra food and clothes along the routes that they frequented. He mispronounced it ‘cach-ay’ but from the way he described it, he sure knew how to dig one and camouflage it.

“We waited there that night and all the next day, sharing stories. It may have been foolhardy, but I trusted him and I slept for a while, and I shared some of my food. Bob said that he’d never had anyone point a gun at him his whole life, but that in the past three days, he’d had guns pointed at him three different times. He said,‘And you just now, Soldier Boy, was the third!’ I had to laugh at that. I pumped him for information on ‘hoboing’— like where and how to catch trains, what cars it was safe to ride on or in, and even where it was safe to ride if you couldn’t get inside a car.

“Petaluma Bob was right about the next train heading my intended direction. We could see them using a small DRGW switcher engine to hook up the cars for a couple of hours in the evening. The train was scheduled to leave at 11:10 p.m. I wanted to get down there and pick out a car early, but Bob advised me to wait until the brakeman did his rounds checking brake lines and ‘bulling’ the cars. He made his final check, carrying some kind of big lantern, around 10:30. Finally, Bob said, ‘You can go hop onboard now, Pilgrim. Pick out a boxcar marked Northern Pacific, and you won’t go wrong. Good luck.’ I wished him God’s speed. His southbound was due to leave the next morning. I prayed that he made it. He was a nice old guy.

“I found a Northern Pacific boxcar near the middle of the train with an open door. I got in as quietly as I could. All that was in the car was fifteen or twenty flattened cardboard boxes, great big ones for appliances. I positioned two of them at one end of the car and set my gear down. Then I gathered four more and draped them over the top of me, and my gear. I wanted to be as inconspicuous as possible, in case someone made another ‘bull’ run. The train pulled out right on schedule. I was absolutely thrilled. I was making progress north at a great rate. We went over the Douglas Pass around midnight. Then I fell asleep for several hours. I woke up at civil twilight, and watched the miles go by, praising God.

“The train’s route took it north though the Salt Lake City area, and that had me nervous, that being a metropolitan area. I couldn’t see any signs of trouble in the Salt Lake area aside for the power being out. There was a stop to switch out some cars in Ogden, late in the afternoon. That was a nervous time.

Luckily, my car ended up with the train that continued north. I stayed hunkered beneath my boxes the whole time we were in the yard. The train pulled out again around sunset. We had another brief stop at what I suppose would have been Logan, based on the timing. When the train was stopped there, I heard a couple of men’s voices. One guy said,‘Hey let’s try this one—this one’s empty!’ I yelled in my best command voice, ‘This car is not empty! Move along!’ One of the guys answered all meek-like:‘Okay, okay, we were just leaving! Sorry to bother you.’

“I got off when the train stopped in Pocatello, because it was going to continue west to Boise, and I, of course, needed to go north. So I was back to Shank’s Mare. After the train, it was quite a letdown. It was full daylight by the time I was all the way out of Pocatello proper. A paperboy on his rounds stopped his bike and put both of his feet flat on the ground and watched me walk by. I waved at him and said ‘Hi.’ He must have thought I was from another planet. I often wondered how many more days he was delivering papers. That might have been his last day.

“I paralleled I-15 up past Idaho Falls. It was pretty slow going, since I had a heavy load, and again, I was trying to avoid contact with anyone. I averaged around ten miles a day. I traveled mainly at night. I could hear shooting and fire engines sirens, and police sirens in even some of the smaller towns, so it was clear that the situation was deteriorating.

“I cut off to the west, following Highway 28, since it went through less population than if I’d continued on I-15. That route would have taken me through Butte. Highway 28 follows the Lemhi River and the Salmon River, up through the town of Salmon. That’s Elmer Keith’s old stomping grounds. I nearly froze up in the Lemhi National Forest, way up in the Lemhi mountain range. A storm front came through and dumped about five inches of early snow. Here it was the second week of November, and it was already starting to snow at the higher elevations, and I still had over two hundred miles to go!

“When that snow hit, I had to build a shelter quick, or freeze to death. I found a ponderosa pine that had blown over, and still had a big root ball of soil on it. I cut a bunch of limbs off of some fir trees with my cable saw, and piled them around the base of that tree, weaving them together into a wickiup with a vent at the top, snugging them down with parachute cord. I put my tube tent, a space blanket, and a couple of trash bags between the layers. I got a fire going, hunkered down, and did my best to dry out my clothes. The wickiup worked pretty well, but I don’t know what was worse, the cold or the smoke from that fire.

“The snow stopped the next day, and it took another day and a half to all melt. During that time, I got busy with my AR-7, and shot a marmot. By the way, I’m glad I have a .22 rifle. The .308 is a lot louder, and doesn’t leave much usable meat on small game. The marmot was pretty tough, but nutritious. I cooked it all in strips skewered on sticks over the open fire. I ate the whole marmot in a day and a half.

“Also during that time, I melted a bunch of snow in my canteen cup to refill my water bottles with boiled water. You have to melt an outrageous quantity of snow just to fill one two-liter bottle. Of course I could have used water from a creek, but then I would have wasted purification tablets. Besides, I had a fire going all the time, and nothing but time on my hands. Like my dad used to say,‘What’s tiiiime to a hawwwg?’”

Kevin Lendel interrupted, asking, “Pardon me, did you say hog?”

“Yeah, hog. It was one of my dad’s favorite jokes: ‘A traveling salesman is driving through Arkansas. He sees a farmer struggling under the weight of a hundred-pound pig, carrying it from tree to tree, so that it can nibble on the apples that are hanging. The salesman is dumbfounded by what he sees. Finally, he can’t stand it any longer, and he goes and asks, ‘What are you doing?’ And the farmer answers, ‘I’m just a-feedin’ my hawwwg.’ Then the salesman asks, ‘Why don’t you just knock down a bunch of apples?’ ‘I jus prefer to do it this away,’ the farmer says. Then the salesman asks, ‘Isn’t it a waste of time, doing it that way?’And the farmer asks,‘Well, what’s tiiiime to a hawwwg?’”

Kevin and the others laughed. Carlton took a sip of coffee and resumed his tale. “I slowly worked my way north. The days were getting shorter and progressively colder. It took me fifteen days to make it from Pocatello to Salmon.

“As I got farther north, water wasn’t nearly as much of a problem as it had been down in the Pocatello and Idaho Falls area. That’s dry country. A couple of times down there I had to purify water that I got out of cattle tanks.

“I foraged as I went. I shot a couple of rabbits and another marmot. I had some snares and a gill net, but I didn’t get a chance to use them, because I was never in one place long enough. I got pretty good at fire starting, even when things were damp. First you….”

The TA-1 on the C.Q. desk made its distinctive cricket-like chirp, interrupting Doug’s story. It was Rose. She inquired, “Mike was supposed to have relieved me fifteen minutes ago. Where is he?”When he was relayed the message, Mike apologized profusely for losing track of the time, and then dashed out the door.

“Where’s he headed?” Doug asked.

Dan replied casually, “LP/OP.”

Doug nodded his head. “Sounds like you have a squared-away tactical operation here. Now where was I? Oh yeah, fire starting. The trick is to always start with a tiny fire and work it bigger gradually. I always carry a little dry tinder. Dried moss works the best. And, if you have nothing but damp kindling to light, nothing beats using half a trioxane fuel bar or a full hexamine tablet. That’ll start just about anything.

“The boots that I had been wearing all this time started to fall apart at the seams. I had them all wrapped up in duct tape. They looked pretty comical, and worse than that, they leaked. I had to wear plastic bags between my inner and outer socks to keep my feet from getting soaked.

“I crossed the Bitterroots the last week of November. I’ll tell you, at seven thousand feet of elevation, it was plenty cold that time of year. I got close to Darby, which is seventy miles south of Missoula, when the winter really set in, in early December. It was frustrating being so close to home, but unable to go any farther. ‘So close and yet so far.’ The snow was really starting to pile up. I knew that I had to find some decent shelter or I was going to end up a human popsicle for some bear.

“Out of desperation, I broke into an unoccupied hunting cabin in the Bitterroot National Forest that was off the beaten track. It was a small seasonal cabin without much insulation, but it served my purposes well enough. It had a good supply of firewood under the porch. There was a Franklin stove, bedding, a big year-round spring for water, a couple of good axes, and a bucksaw. There were some canned goods there too. It took a monumental force of will, but I didn’t use anything I found there in the cabin except a bit of salt, soap, and some medical supplies to keep me regular. Those cans of soup, chili, and vegetables were practically singing to me like the sirens of lore. But I resisted the urge. It was bad enough that I was an uninvited lodger, but I wasn’t going to stoop so low as to steal another man’s food.

“Between snowstorms I gathered as much firewood as I could, and I knocked down two fat does. There was a set of gambrels, two meat saws, and several gutbuckets there at the cabin. I used a pulley and ropes to hang up the skinned-out deer-quarters way up in the fir trees near the house to keep them away from bears. Luckily I didn’t have any bear problems that winter. The meat froze so hard that I had to use an ax to cut it. I left the deer hanging outside and just took each quarter down on an as-needed basis. I used everything from those deer: the brains, the meat, the fat, the heart, and liver. I even sawed the bones open for the marrow.” He added with a snort, “It’s an acquired taste.”

“I spent most of the winter in my sleeping bag—just hibernating like a bear. It’s a real warm bag—a Wiggy’s Ultima Thule. They make ’em in Colorado. With the heavy bag, I only had to burn a low fire to take the chill off the cabin. I used bedsheets from the cabin as bag liners to protect the sleeping bag from sweat and grime. I piled up another sleeping bag and some blankets from the cabin on top for extra warmth. Tending the fire, cooking one meal a day, and reading is about all that I did for three months. Oh yeah, I also stitched together three pairs of deer hide moccasins. The first pair turned out pretty crummy, but the other two pairs fit me fairly well.

“I didn’t want to burn any of the candles or kerosene there, for two reasons. First, they didn’t belong to me. Second, burning lights might attract unwelcome attention. I didn’t hear any evidence of anyone living in the area except for a chain saw way off in the distance a few times, and a couple of shots, even further off. I wasn’t taking any chances. I adjusted my sleeping hours to match the sun cycle, so I did all of my reading and cooking during daylight. During the shortest days of the year, I must have been sleeping fourteen hours a day.

“By about when I estimated it was the middle of February, I was sick and tired of venison and had a bad case of cabin fever. I shot two more deer—both yearlings—in the late winter. I never want to spend a winter by myself like that again. Thankfully, there was a Bible there in the cabin, so I kept sanity by digging into God’s word. It was a Catholic Douay-Rheims version, so I got a chance to read the apocryphal books for the first time. I’m a Methodist and I don’t consider those apocryphal books to be the inspired word of God, but they were fascinating, nonetheless. Aside from the Bible, there was not a full winter’s worth of reading material in the cabin. There were a few hunting and fishing books, and about thirty magazines. I read them all cover to cover—some of them several times.

“The snow got three feet deep. When it got close to the spring solstice, the snow started receding, and finally it stopped sticking. Since I had burned up the two cords of wood that were stored there at the cabin, I felt it was my responsibility to replace it. I spent most of the mud season cutting down small tamaracks, cutting the wood to stove length, hauling it back to the cabin in a wheelbarrow, splitting it in halves, and stacking it. Without a chain saw it was exhausting work, but it was good to get my muscles back in shape. I wore out a pair of work gloves in the process. I piled the wood box inside right up to the ceiling, and I left more wood under the cabin than I had found originally, so I figured that I was square with whoever owned the cabin.

“Once I got the firewood in, I started spring cleaning. Before I left, I felt honor bound to clean the cabin. I started out by cleaning the chimney, which had so much creosote in it; it was a wonder that I didn’t have a chimney fire that winter. I swept and scrubbed the floors, washed all the towels and bed linens, and hauled out the buckets of ashes and creosote. All in all, the place looked much better than when I found it. Finally, I washed all my clothes, washed my sleeping bag, gave my web gear a good brushing, trimmed my beard, and gave myself a long hot bath. It was the first bath that I’d had in months. It felt reeeeally good.

“Before I left, I wrote a long and apologetic thank you letter to the cabin owner and left it on the kitchen table, along with two dollars in the old 90 percent silver coins and all the rest of my paper currency—not that it was worth much. I also left behind two of the four deer hides that I had brain tanned. I rolled them up together around a five-foot length of pine sapling. I hung it from two pieces of wire in the center of the cabin so the mice and rats wouldn’t get to the hides.

“I got an early start, not long after the snow stopped sticking. I really wanted to get home to my folks’ place. I covered the distance to Missoula in just over a week, up through Hamilton and Stevensville. Most of the towns going up the valley looked downright fortified. In most of the towns they had huge abatis roadblocks made out of big logs on all the roads leading in.

“I took a few risks in covering those last seventy miles. For example, I traveled some in daylight, which I don’t normally do, near population. I guess I was rushing a bit, but again, I couldn’t wait to get home.

“Past Stevensville, which was fortified, things were pretty well wiped out. Florence and Lolo were burned completely down. There wasn’t a soul around. From a distance, I could see that more than half of the houses and nearly all the stores in Missoula were burned down. My parents lived on the outskirts of the east side. Not knowing who controlled the town, I came into town from the east in the middle of the night. When I saw the ruins of my folks’ house, my heart just sank. All that was left standing was the chimney. The garage was still intact, so I spent the rest of the night in it. I just cried and cried. There was just one neighbor living down the block, named Mack. He was an old widower. Everyone else was either dead, moved out, or burned out.

“When I left for college last fall, Mack probably weighed two-hundred-and-forty pounds. This spring, he weighed maybe one-hundred-and-sixty pounds. I didn’t hardly recognize him at first. He was practically skin and bones. Mack told me about what’d happened. The brigands came through in a convoy of more than sixty pickups, Suburbans, Hummers, and Blazers, stripping all the food and fuel they could find. They stayed several weeks, raping, getting drunk, and burning a few more houses just to be mean. Anyone who resisted them in the least was shot or burned out.

“The evening after I buried what was left of my mom and dad’s bodies, I dug up my cache in my folks’ backyard. In the cache I had a spare pair of combat boots, four pairs of boot socks, half of my silver coins, some .22 and .308 ammo, some Duracell batteries, a few camouflage face paint sticks, two bars of soap, multivitamins, some canned food, salt, cocoa powder, trioxane fuel bars, and eleven MREs. I had it all cached in three of those tall steel ammo cans—the kind they make for the 60-mike mortar rounds. The outside of the cans had gotten pretty rusty, and that scared me when I first dug them up. I thought that they might have leaked. I suppose that I should have painted them with asphalt emulsion to make them last longer. But luckily they kept their seals and everything inside was just the way I left it.”

Looking down at the pair of sturdy Army combat boots that he was wearing, Doug declared, “Like I said before, the boots that I had been wearing the last year were falling apart at the seams. I wore my moccasins part of the time, but they were a poor substitute, particularly on rocky ground. It was kind of odd, you know. I had put these boots in the cache as sort of an afterthought, because I still had room in one of the cans. I was going to put in more canned food—my mom always bought tuna by the case—but then the idea of the extra boots popped into my head. Ironic, but a year later, of everything in the cache, it was these boots I needed the most. It must have been Divine providence. I’m sure that it was the good Lord that put that thought into my head.

“I spent another full day there, mainly just praying and thinking. I talked and prayed with Mack quite a bit. Since by that time my hair was so long that I was looking like an angora goat, he gave me a short haircut and beard trim. Then I did the same for him. I’m afraid that I wasn’t very good at it. We used some scissors and a pair of hand clippers that had belonged to his wife. I gave him some venison and canned food. He gave me a big bottle of mild laxative, which was something I needed, given the fact that my diet was mostly venison.

“I didn’t find anything of value in my parents’ garage except for a bottle of Rem-Oil. Practically everything else including all the tools, the camping gear, and even the scrap lumber had been stolen. There wasn’t much in the garage at all except my folks’ car—which was minus its battery and had no fuel in its tank—and a couple of old tire rims. It was like locusts had come through. All that I got out of their car was an Idaho/Montana map. It was identical to the one that I had been carrying all along, but it was in better shape. I had folded the first one so many times that it was coming apart into a bunch of long strips.

“Neither of my folks had any family west of the Mississippi, so I didn’t have a clear destination. I knew that there was a much less severe climate in the Clearwater River valley, just over the pass, so that seemed like a reasonable first area to look for a place to settle. I’d been across there, fishing steelhead with my dad lots of times, so I knew the Clearwater country fairly well.

“I spent the first three weeks in the canyons west of Missoula, waiting for the snow to clear in the high country. I shot a young buck, and that fed me for the whole time I was there. It took nearly a week to turn it into jerky. I found some Camas plants and a big patch of miner’s lettuce, and I pigged out. Between the venison, the bulbs, and the miner’s lettuce, I started to put some weight on.

“I transited the Lolo Pass three weeks ago. By then, the snow was shallow on the northern facing slopes and in the heavy timber, and patchy most everywhere else. Since I wasn’t in any great hurry, I traveled even more slowly than before. I only averaged about four miles a day. I like to move with some stealth, and take lots of listening halts. I gradually worked my way down the Lochsa River, and then the Clearwater. There’s no sign of any organized commerce or travel at all down there. Everybody is just hunkered down, big time. I tried approaching the town of Kamiah, but I got shot at by a guy with what looked like an SKS. I was two-hundred-and-fifty yards away, so I didn’t even have a chance to explain myself. I just got myself out of there, double-time.

“That same day, I started getting a horrible toothache. It was one of my lower molars. By two days after that, the pain was so bad that I knew the tooth was rotten and had to come out. I couldn’t bring myself to pry it out with my Gerber multi-pliers. So I managed to tie a piece of monofilament around the tooth. I tried pulling it by hand, but I chickened out. It just hurt so badly. I didn’t have anybody to help me. Finally, I ended up tying the fishing line to a big sapling that I had bent over. I sat down, pulled my lips out of the way, opened wide, and let it fly. The tooth came out all right. I screamed for a second. The void bled a couple of days. I did my best not to spit, because I’d heard that that creates suction and causes additional bleeding. It was painful, but luckily I had some Tylenol left in my first aid kit. The gum has healed fine, now.

“I did some fishing along the Clearwater before I headed up onto the Palouse. There are a lot of fish in that river. Even with just a hand line, I was able to catch a Dolly Varden and a good-sized salmon. That was enough food for three days eating, in less than an hour of fishing. It would have been nice to have one of those collapsing fishing poles, though. A few days later, I did some gill netting on some of the little tributaries going into the Clearwater. I caught a mess of trout. I cooked some, and smoked some.

“My trip up here toward the Palouse was relatively uneventful. I saw a lot of wild turkeys, several elk, and deer beyond counting. This is good country for foraging.”

Todd interrupted: “Is there anything else you wish that you’d had in your pack or cache, or things you would have done differently, in retrospect?”

“Let me think.” Doug paused to ponder. “Several things come to mind immediately. First and foremost, I should have found somebody to travel with. Going solo cross-country is a dicey proposition. You never know when you might get ambushed. If somebody gets the jump on you, you’re history. Also, there is no simple way to provide security while you’re sleeping. Just twisting an ankle badly or one bad swing with an ax could be fatal. You need a partner. Preferably two or more partners.

“And needless to say, traveling at all in anything less than an APC these days is foolhardy. There are too many chances of running into brigands; too many uncertainties. Staying put at a well-stocked and defensible ranch or farmhouse is the best approach. Traveling is only for the foolish or the desperate.

“Secondly, if I had cached some MREs and a few essentials in a few places along my route from Colorado, things would have been a lot more comfortable. I had some hungry days. For that matter, I could have cached some gas too, and just zoomed home.

“Third, I would have really benefited from a pocket-sized Bible. A few memorized verses aren’t enough. You need the Word to keep you going and to maintain your balance.

“Fourth, this may sound pretty minor, but it isn’t. I should have bought a pair of gaiters. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve had to start a fire at midday to dry out my pants from the knees down.

“Fifth, I should have taken better care of my teeth. Brushing with just salt works fine in a pinch, although a mix of three-quarters baking soda to one-quarter salt is preferred. I should have carried a toothbrush, floss, and a tin of powder. They would have added hardly any weight at all to my pack, and in the long run, they could have saved me some grief.

“Sixth, I should have invested in an expedition-quality four-season tent. Tube tents—or even three-season tents for that matter—don’t cut the mustard. Every time it rained, part of my gear would get wet and I’d spend hours drying it out.”

Kevin chimed in, “As we often say around here, ‘hindsight is twenty-twenty.’ We planned ahead for what we could foresee and bought all that we could afford, but there’s a lot of gear that we now wish that we’d bought.”

Todd declared, “Speaking of gear, Kevin… Go gather up Doug’s gear out at the wood lot, bring it back to the barn and inventory it.” Lendel nodded his head, picked up his 870 from the ready rack, and headed out the door.

Watching Kevin go, Doug said, “You certainly have a very well-organized retreat here.”

Mary chimed in. “Yes, Cadet Carlton, you stumbled into the perimeter of a real-live survival retreat. You’re looking at the culmination of about nine years of active preparation. Nobody wanted things to fall apart, but our group was part of the minority that was ready for it.”

“Nine years?” Carlton asked.

“Yeah. Nine years ago most of us were in college, and not anywhere near the same stage of preparedness as you. We just have the advantage of having been at this a lot longer, methodically getting ourselves trained and storing up all the necessities, in quantity,” she said smugly. With her last comment, Carlton’s eyebrows raised and then a smile spread across his face.

Mike Nelson made a large batch of popcorn for everyone to share. Mike was the only one at the retreat that had yet learned the knack of making popcorn on the woodstove without burning it. As they were finishing the popcorn, Kevin returned. His report was terse: “Everything was just the way he described it, although he didn’t mention that the socks and underwear were dirty. Whew! They’re very frausty.”

Todd called for another meeting late that evening. Everyone was present, with the exception of Kevin, who was by then on picket duty. Mike listened in over the TRC-500. As the conversation developed, it became apparent that there were two avenues that could be taken. The first option was that if he was interested, Doug could be nominated for consideration for a position in the group. If he accepted, it would be with the understanding that he would be treated as a full and equal member. However, he would have to give up any ideas that he might have of being a paid employee. If anything, he would owe the group redoubled efforts, as he would be using up part of their precious food supply. The second option was that Carlton could be resupplied with food and sent on his way, with the group’s best wishes.

After being given the options, Carlton replied, “I don’t think I’m likely to encounter a better survival setup anywhere in the country. Yeah, I’d certainly like to be a member of your group!”

The next morning, Doug Carlton was voted in as a member. He was temporarily housed in the hayloft of the barn. For his first two weeks he would only be assigned C.Q. duty. Thereafter, he would be allowed and expected to pull both C.Q. and LP/OP duty. He was warned that his position was probationary. Any foul-ups, and he would be banished.

After a week at the retreat, Doug already fit in and felt like an old hand. With his military background, he became a fast friend of Jeff Trasel. His interest in guns also brought him close to Dan Fong in short order.

In an orgy of generosity, Jeff gave Doug his spare blue steel Colt Commander .45, five magazines, a UM-84 holster, a cleaning kit, and more than two hundred rounds of assorted ammunition. Dan Fong gave Doug his beloved Winchester Model 1897 riot shotgun, its bayonet, and a surplus engineer’s satchel filled with Remington number-four buckshot, twelve-gauge shells, and twenty rounds of Brenneke rifled slugs. Mike Nelson donated his spare “Trick Five Hundred” and a pair of nine-volt nickel hydride batteries to power it. Todd, who was roughly Carlton’s size, gave him a set of DPM camouflage fatigues and his spare Moss Stardome II tent.

Doug commented several times that it seemed like Christmas.