What It Takes To Survive

I like that you added the will to survive. Many people forget about the mental aspect of survival until they get put in a real life scenario. You might have all the gear and skills to survive but if you don't train yourself mentally to survive you might not have the capacity to survive.

 

That's right need to practice all of it

 

Unfortunately there is a 5th to this. Luck. With the other 4 points we try to minimize the luck factor but in the end if your luck runs out you are done. I bring this up because it leads to a 6th factor and that may well be as important as any of the others and that is acceptance.

We don't talk about it here but reality is that in the event of any sort of catastrophic near world ending event with death rates in the 90% area we will all have loses and the psychological damage can be as deadly as a bullet. If you don't come to terms with and accept your loses you will lose that number 4 thing and that is your will to live and continue on.

One of the few things that you can do before hand is to consider the worst case scenarios so that you will at least be aware that in real life there just is a $hi+ happens factor that you can't control. Shock is a killer!! When you lose a loved one the shock is just as devastating as a grave personal injury.

It isn't going to make it OK but a little time considering the realities in advance will help you deal. I remember an article that I read many years ago by a guy that trained police in gun handling and the mental parts of the job. One of the things he did was haul them to the hospital where they saw people coming in that had been shot and then following their recovery over the next few days. The fact is that if you can get someone to the hospital still alive most of them survive. Getting shot isn't an immediate death sentence. He did this because so many people that get shot go almost immediately into shock and every year a number of people die simply from the shock of being shot...even when the wound isn't especially dangerous.

The mental preparation that forethought will give you won't make you 7 feet tall and armor plated but it will make you tougher and harder to kill whether the would is physical or mental. Lack of fear and acceptance is what makes someone high on certain drugs so hard to stop and even kill. I think that most of us are prepared for and accepting of the fact that despite our best efforts we might not make it. A warrior can't be effective without accepting this. You need to try to prepare yourself to accept the loss of loved ones or you won't be an effective survivor.

 

We had to take our beloved daughter off life support.

I've literally finished eating while watching a man die, however when your heart is ripped from your chest, your soul loses the Light of God and you become blank. You become darkness itself. God's light goes out. You become something else. You become death. The world is without meaning. Suffering ... happiness ... whatever ...

There is no meaning. I'd like to see the world return for others, for the worthy. Life is over for me. Mayhem is just another amusement. I have no place here. If there is screaming and panic on the TV, then it's popcorn and cola time.

 

"Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom in heaven." Even Jesus understood that for some life sometimes becomes more painful than can be borne my Brother. At times like that your only solace is in the knowledge that life is but a moment in an eternity and is but the smallest part of what you are, were, and will be.

 

Good point TexDanm, many people don't take the time to think about how hard it's going to be mentally as you watch everyone die around you. Hopefully we don't have a SHTF scenario that bad in our lifetime but I'm not so sure we'll be so lucky..

 

My father's brother was infantry WWII. At one point, he was in the middle of combat amongst hedgerows -- I don't know if this was part of what was called the "War of the Hedgerows" or not (?). Anyway, he saw the absolute worst of combat (was in Battle of the Bulge; bronze star) and while fighting in these fields, he said that a man could step from body to body.

He saw bomber wreckage, sees a boot, goes over to the boot, there's a leg still in the boot.

Had dumb-butt Adolf listened to his real generals of the Wehrmacht, Germany would have won WWII.

On top of all of the catastrophes of the coming SHTF years, wars between nations will be raging. Therefore, in addition to there being shortages due to economic reasons, military needs will be siphoning off what there is of those already short supplies. Factories will only be able to pay in barter.

Barter has been used to pay for everything from food to theater.
https://www.bartertheatre.com/about/history

 

Considering how many just awful and insane decisions Hitler made it tells you just how much of an advantage they had at the start of the war. Had he not betrayed the Russians and instead "shared" Poland with them it could have changed everything. Without having do divide his resources onto so many fronts he probably could have taken Great Britain. We could not have won a war in Europe fighting it from our East Coast.

If he had allowed Rommel to move his tanks south as he wanted to D-Day would have had us landing in a trap. It is even possible that if his people hadn't been afraid to wake him that morning that Rommel still might have been able to get there. As it was though by the time he woke up and they could try to react the crazy men in the Airborn had flown and parachuted in behind the lines and blown the bridges and roads. I had family that flew in on D-Day in a towed glider full of men that were on an almost suicide mission to do that very thing. The mortality rates among some of those units was almost total!

The US was in an isolationist period and if Japan had left us alone we possibly would have waited too long to get into the war. The truth is that we were already in it just not openly or officially. My Dad's Brother was already in the war and flying long before December 7th. He was trained and flew for the Canadians and then moved over to the Army Air corp after we officially got in. We were chewing on Japan flying out of China long before December 7. The Flying Tigers might as well have had Stars and stripes on their sides. FDR was determined to get the US in one way or another.

That truly was a generation of giants!!

 

That was but one of the many mistakes he made. The fact is that Hitler had a great respect for the British and wasn't ever sure that that would have been a battle that he could win. Unlike the French you crazy Brits don't quit when it becomes obvious that you can't win and it would have been a horrific mess trying to take you on on your own grounds. The damn Scots would have fought until the last one was dead. Even the Romans couldn't totally subdue them. The history of Great Britain is an almost endless story of several clans of hard headed people roughing eachother up century after century killing the weak and making eachother harder and harder. Hitler knew this and it made him hesitant to go there.

He honestly thought that once France folded up that Britain would sue for peace. He never could understand why the British of all people would fight for the freedom of the French. Honestly I don't understand that either. Next time the Germans send a platoon to France and they surrender I hope that we will just send them a house warming present. We have gone to war for them twice and they hate us more every time. There are enough American graves there and too many debts unpaid.

 

More power to them if they can pull it together. The EU with its Euro is a crazy idea. It would be like letting all 50 states in America print money as they wanted.

 

We have a hard time in the US with the different world views of the people in different states... and we pretty much all speak the same language and come from basically similar backgrounds. I can't imagine how they thought they could get a consensus out of people with such vastly different cultures.

 

Notice that just a couple of years ago the big story was: How can the euro stay afloat?! Greece and Spain were bankrupt and unable to meet their debt payments (looking at not even being able to pay the interest on their debts). Italy's banks were bankrupt (and are bankrupt today). Then Poof! the story disappeared in the mainstream media.

The new story was mass immigration and opposition to mass immigration. So the attention of the sheeple was drawn-off. It was OK for civil strife to exist. It was NOT OK for the sheeple to question the validity of the unbacked currency they were holding.

The socialist overlords will do anything, to include the starting of wars, to prop-up the illusion that their fiat currencies have validity.