into the breech

INTO THE BREECH


Clark, I got your care package in the mail today. Very hearty thanks and hi ho. Folks, I wish for you to take a moment of your time, bow your head, and curse the very gods that you are not as worthy as I. Clark sent me a hand made knife with wood handle that is simply stunning. Not only is it big enough to board ships with or attack supine villagers from longboats, it is beautiful indeed. I imagine Clark will make a successful knifesmith ( Wayne Goddard's $50 Knife Shop, Revised ) after the collapse, catering to those wishing a marriage of function and fashion.

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I read the Kunstler book “The Witch Of Hebron” ( The Witch of Hebron: A World Made by Hand Novel  ) this weekend. It was a very well written novel- I didn’t want to put it down. That said, it was a bit overpriced and had almost nothing to do with a post-collapse life outside of the characters backgrounds he had already detailed in “World Made By Hand”. ( World Made by Hand,A Novel, 2008 publication )

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I also read an old book that a loyal minion had mailed me, bless his heart. “The Face Of Battle” by John Keegan ( The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme ) was an attempt to look at battles from the individual soldiers perspective rather than from the commanding generals. I liked the book as it was well written rather than dry and dull like it could have been from an English professor type. I especially liked his long drawn out sentences, in some cases close to half a page long, as I thought I was the only idiot that delighted in such shenanigans, liberally sprinkling commas around like flies on horse offal as if they were the only means of stringing random thoughts together, which if you think about for just a few seconds is in fact the case since they work just as well as anything else even if it does aggravate the hemorrhoids of the Grammar Police who are a rather stuffy bunch and probably never get laid and so must be prodded as much as possible by those of us who write without any formal education but have massacred numerous keyboards in an on-the-job training and delight in abusing the Queens English ( The Queen's English: And How to Use It ) since it is just a mongrel cur of a language anyway and deserves no respect until you get to know it a bit better and then it can be a bit cute and loveable but should never be taken too seriously as if it were a purebred being readied for a show.

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The book covers three battles. Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme. He thus covers the iron weapons, black powder and automatics and armor, focusing on western Europeans of similar culture in his quest for how the common soldier feels in battle. This isn’t about how the soldier lives. There are no tales of camp life ( Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making ) or of equipment. Rather, what motivates different generations to risk their lives. Which got me thinking about the collapse combatants and their motivation. Come the end of Oil Age, medicine is going to take a huge leap backwards ( this was covered rather well in “With Of Hebron” come to think of it, so I suppose there is that in favor of the book even if it was only a few pages out of three hundred ). Getting wounded in combat is going to be something of a death sentence. No, not all wounds will kill. But in the period between the oil economy dying and the rebirth of a sustainable agricultural economy, there will be little to no medical care. If your immune system came heal you, you’ll live through minor injuries. Chances are no medic will help you out. Even the best supplied survivalist group can only care for intermediate wounds for so long before their modern materials run out. And attending EMT school ( assuming we are all blessed with that kind of motivation and free time ) will only marginally help your doctoring skills without modern equipment and medicine. *

Since medical care has to wait until the cropland is fought over and conquered, until life stabilizes and a food surplus can pay for herbal doctors, combat will not be the modern equivalent. Now, baring major injury, the finest transportation and medical network man has ever known will repair you more often than not ( no, I’m not saying some of them will want to continue living in their new condition, but it must be nice to have a choice ). As soon as that network fails, you are going into battle and can expect three things to happen. You are not hit. You die. Or you receive a minor injury. Given how much your new odds are, what will motivate you to fight? Despite being glossed over, ignored, or made over complicated, it is pretty simple. Combat beats the alternative. Which, in the new kind of brutal world we’re headed to, includes malnutrition, starvation and famine. Slavery, torture and banditry ( Masked Raiders: Irish Banditry in Southern Africa, 1880-1899 ). Combat assures no one steals your crops, or gets you someone else’s crops so you don’t starve. Combat with even odds of death are better than slavery with death assured. Looting might be the only way to strike it rich in a world of serfs or controlled/monopolized trade.

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If life expectancy drops back down again to the thirties or forties, the prospect of gambling in combat for a better future isn’t so strange a thing. So you die at 25 instead of thirty. If you don’t die you are better off. If you do die you face an unpleasant time. Old school, there were just as many step-mothers/fathers/siblings as today. The difference was remarriage was from the partner dying of disease or violence. Since the family unit was the social safety net, it had to preserver. If combat either protects your family or betters it, that is a powerful motivator. If you die, the wife gets remarried. She won’t starve in the street ( unless she is REALLY ugly with no chest and her kids are incorrigible ). No one wants to relearn life’s basic expectation, especially if it is for the worse. But death will need to be relearned, from something you put off as long as possible to a daily fact of life. Dying in combat will become normal. As will living with your injuries if you survive. Our present system for all its faults is great cushioning us from reality ( which usually sucks ). But it is falling apart. Get ready for it.

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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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