Posted on 08/22/2012 4:49:46 PM PDT by dynachrome
So how do you become a self-taught deadly warrior of the night? You begin in the daytime. Lay out a walking path through your neighborhood “Area of Operations,” a path with plenty of transitions across all types of urban, suburban and rural terrain. Culverts, gullies, overgrown chain link fences, woods, meadows, railroad tracks, bridges, power line right-of-ways, abandoned commercial properties and fallow fields will be your classroom.
To begin, mark your route every twenty or thirty yards. Small torn rags stuck on fences and tree branches look fairly natural, and won’t be noticed. Walk and crawl through thickets, under fences, over walls, through the doors and windows of closed factories or falling-down barns. Travel your path in daylight both ways, several times. If it’s summer where you are located, dress for bugs, thorns and mud, but stay inconspicuous.
Then come back after dark on a moonlit night. Your mind and memory will already know the route very well, but the darkness will swallow up much that was plainly visible by day, while revealing new folds and textures of light and shadow. Your rag markers will help you to stay on course. You can also blaze a temporary trail with a small bag of baking flour, leaving a white pile at intervals.
(Excerpt) Read more at westernrifleshooters.wordpress.com ...
Ya damn right, dem coonasses is second to nobody for sneaky at night.
Your point is well taken, I would say flour for short term and colored gravel for longer term. Rags or aluminum cans stuck in unlikely spots also make good “natural” markers. You have to study the trail just the one correct way to notice the markers are linked in a pattern.
Damn right, even a quarter moon is enough for night-adapted eyes. Unless it’s overcast and you move under thick cover. Then it’s pitch black.
Yes, by all means get quality NV when you can afford it, but don’t let the lack of it stop you from becoming a “natural” night fighter the old fashioned way.
Once you are, NODs, as available, will be a big help and force multiplier.
But don’t anybody make the mistake of buying a NOD and considering himself a night fighter, as in, “check that qual off my list, I have a NOD.” That would be very stupid, because night fighting has many many aspects, and amplified vision is just one.
(I am specifically NOT referring to you. As your posts make clear, you must get out and train in all terrain.)
Once heard it described as “blacker than a bat’s crotch at midnight”.
Correct on all counts. We are for all intents and purposes already ‘bugged out’. It meant a significant alteration of lifestyle and a reduction in income, but we’re making do. The one thing you can’t buy is time in community - time to get to know folks. Who you can trust, who you can’t. Who your friends are and who’s going have to be dealt with when the time comes.
Our biggest concern is water. We’re on a local community well, but there’s no plan to guard, fuel and defend the well head. Not good. And it’s getting way too late in the game.
BTTT
Yes, they can see it too.
If your opponent has night vision, well you’ve just lit up the whole area for him.
One course at Storm Mountain includes making multi-hundred-yard shots at night on targets producing light akin to a cigarette. ...no NV.
Throw in the odd moose or two and you’ve got our neighborhood. It’s all 5 and 10 acre plots, with every other section set aside as BLM land.
We advise you steer clear of the moose critters. They have a temper.
That's a rog, LT. And I have the scratches and bug-bites to prove it! $;-)
That’s where the philosophy “Three on a match is bad luck” came from.
Twice when I was in my teens, I tried to sneak up on someone during the night.
Once, I saw several cops looking at my car. I was doing nothing wrong but didn’t really want to announce my presence until I got closer to see what they were up to.
I had not gotten very far when one of them told me to come on out which I did. No problem, as they were suspicious of where the car was parked and I had a good answer.
Anyway, I grew up in the woods hunting (often at night) from the time I was about 5 and thought, wrongly it turned out, that I could slip up on anyone.
The lesson I learned it if someone is concealed in a good spot you will very likely see someone moving around in the woods before they see you.
Gotta link?
Am always interested in new perspectives and am a big fan of EFAD. Lest y’all think however that despite my guns and survivalism (this what we called it back in the 80s) I take myself too seriously, I must confess, proudly, that I and my ninja-obsessed brother perfected variations on all of these techniques, and many more, sans night-vision gear but avec tabi-boots, snorkels, Cooey .22 rifles, “110” photographic equipment and home-made compound-bow launched incendiaries, in some of the most devastatingly, radically, totally insane all night panty raids a certain girls-camp ever saw.
Day or night.
Even if they're looking for you and know you're there.
I was busting your balls about this very article.
I had a similar experience just about 40 years ago.
I was on the staff of a very large Summer Retreat. There was around 400 Summer Staffers, nearly all college students. There was a boys camp within half a mile from us. Now this boys camp hired almost nothing but college athletes as counselors. One Summer they had two guys who played on a national championship basketball team.
We also had a lot of good athletes and we had a rivalry with them which got pretty heated at times. They beat us pretty bad each time we played basketball. Not surprising since they probably could have beaten 90% of all major colleges.
In softball it was more even. The first game of the Summer we beat them, just barely. In the second game they had an umpire who was openly and blatantly cheating for them. It was so obvious that I thought they should have replaced him but instead they seemed to think it was funny. Of course we lost.
Later that night, I and another one of our players sneaked over to their camp. They had a beautiful totem pole right at the entrance. Well that was just too much for us to ignore. We sawed it down and very nearly got caught. They heard it break and next thing we knew there were cars driving around looking for us.
I might mention that we had around 300 girls on our staff and they might have had two or three working in the kitchen etc. For that reason they liked to hang around our campus and just naturally we didn’t appreciate it.
I figured.
we don’t have many caves up here - but we got those long winters - which will discourage a lot of city folk - who will head south - because they don’t know any better...thank goodness ;o)
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