Clay Martin - Concrete Jungle: A Green Berets guide to Urban Survival

Concrete Jungle

A Green Berets Guide

to Urban Survival

Clay Martin

Copyright 2020 Clay Martin Al Rights Reserved

ISBN : 9798652385965

II

For my son Raiden.

I dont know exactly what kind of world you wil inherit. But I do know you wil be prepared for it.

And to my boy Pitchfork, thanks for the edits. This was a mess

without you.

Pag

e

Not the Guns

Common Sense Planning

Building Your ODA from Scratch

With Our Powers Combined

Greenhorn to Wyatt Earp

Ninja Fighting 101

Stabby Things

Fitness, Food, and Water

Rumble in the Bronx

10 Dealing with Rioters

11 Balkanize Before They Rise

12 Weapons Opposable Thumbs for

the Win

13 Becoming a Harder Target

14 Blow the Escape Hatch

15 Try not to die

Introduction

Our nation seems divided today in a way that it hasnt since the 1860s (though they did try pretty hard in the 1960s). We are sitting on a powder keg with half of the involved parties chain smoking and the other half asking for a light. Things have the potential to get real y ugly, real y fast and after that happens is not the time to open this book. To borrow a proverb from the Chinese: the best time to learn how to survive is five years ago and the second best time is right now.

We have a unique problem in the United States and us veterans have lamented it many times as our hands were tied by clueless bureaucratic masters. We have protected our civilian population so wel since 1941 that most of them have no idea how the world actual y works. Often might does make right. Sometimes you have no good options. Most importantly, not only do bad things happen to good people, they happen to them on an alarmingly regular basis. We havent had actual dark times here since the last of the Indian Wars, which stil didnt affect anyone outside of the Frontier. It has made our population soft and weak and wil cause a cascading effect of systems failure at the first sign of real trouble.

As a retired Green Beret, I feel a certain moral obligation to help those that want to help themselves, which is what this book is about. Think of it like a return on investment for your tax dol ars. I dont have al the answers but I can at least say my opinion is tempered by real world experience both spotting unrest and surviving it to tel the tale.

Speaking col ectively for my brethren, we (the royal we) have a unique insight gifted to us by the GWOT (Global War on Terrorism) conflict. Fighting in both theaters involved shifting al iances between

multiple factions, even among the al eged government troops. Not dying in your sleep was often a matter of reading the tea leaves correctly. Running our own intel igence networks for two decades has also given us an uncanny ability to smel the fire coming long before you can see the flames. On a personal note, I have seen more than a few cities burn. Some of those times I was holding the matches, one I had nothing to do with, but they al yielded lessons.

Aside from correctly predicting when things are about to go pear shaped, we have learned some very important things about staying alive, which I am sharing with you in this volume. The concrete jungle is an unforgiving environment with its own unique problems and solutions. It is best to enter that arena as prepared as you can be. If we cal this book the diamond stone, al I need you to do is be the steel.

I would also like to add a caveat up frontI hope Im wrong.

Nobody in this world appreciates the little things more than us veterans, like air conditioning, having our garbage picked up on Tuesday and not catching random sniper fire. For those of us that have seen the horrors of war, we dont ever wish to see them here.

We also arent stupid and weve already proven we dont back down from a fightnot ever. So strap in and hold on to your ass.

Time to go for a ride.

1 Not the Guns

It is a uniquely American problem to think first that we can buy our way out of trouble. Every prepper forum or survival site in the country has a section devoted to hardware that is twice the size of its nearest competition. For many people, a survival plan begins and ends at a mountain of guns and ammo. A few then branch out to big ticket escape vehicles and elaborately stocked provisions. The truly big bal er class endlessly prattles on about bug out locations, usual y a cabin/fortress in the mountains, self-contained and off the grid. But I have bad news: your Visa card isnt going to save you. You are going to actual y need to do hard stuff, not just go on a camo clad multi-year Black Friday shopping spree.

Now maybe I made a classic mistake in grabbing an audiences attention and this book is now a permanent resident of your bottom shelf. Maybe I should have started with how to use a CARVER matrix (Criticality, Accessibility, Recuperability, Vulnerability, Effect and Recognizability) for blowing up bridges or 37 recipes for dragons breath shotgun shel s. Hel , maybe Im just mad I didnt start sel ing water filters in the 90s instead of enlisting. But if you stop and think for a second youre going to realize that Im right.

Il give you two competing examples. First is the army of Saudi Arabia, especial y the commando high speed units. They have more whiz-bang toys than you or I have ever had. From the ultra Gucci uniforms, to the finest German scopes, no expense is sparedyet they couldnt fight their way out of a wet paper bag. Example two are our own Vietnam-era MACV/SOG troops. The equipment they used is laughable by modern standards, from radios to rifles. Yet they carved a path of destruction and bodies across that green hel

battlefield completely out of proportion to their numbers. Even in their 80s now I wouldnt want to tangle with them. Im betting it hurts to get a walker shoved up your ass sideways and would prefer to skip first hand experience.

If step number one isnt a trip to the gun shop with al your money, gold coins and silverware, what is? Glad you asked. You already completed step one by recognizing trouble is brewing, which is probably why you bought this book. Even if you are only here as an apocalypse voyeur, some part of you knows mayhem is in the forecast.

Now on to step two, which is arguably the most important thing you are going to do to ensure your survival. It runs counter to the common wisdom for a variety of reasons but it is what actual y matters. You need to engage with your neighbors and start building an al iance of local help.

Whoa, hold the phone! You mean actual y talk to real life human beings? Yes, I do. You are going to need to engage in some of that old-fashioned, face-to-face conversation stuff we did back in the old days. For many of you, this is going to be the most difficult phase.

We have al been conditioned to use our smart phones for everything; it isnt uncommon to see people texting each other at the same table anymore. For you young people, it is entirely possible you dont even know how to have an in real life conversation. Other flavors of preppers are going to have a different issue with thissticking the paranoia genie back in the bottle.

For reasons I cant fathom, many in the survival movements wil have an intimate conversation with internet strangers about every detail of their plan but wil clam up like a mafia courier the second it comes to real people. It makes absolutely no sense. You have no idea who you are talking to on the internet, no matter how careful y you check. The like-minded person you are talking to about how to shoot down dem gubbmint black helicopters with a deer rifle may very wel be a federal agent recording it al in a chat log. You dont