LETTER FROM SALUDA 47were in a restaurant. It filled me
with nausea and grief; why should
children be taught to kill other hu-
mans? Stutts also said that after
homeowners had incapacitated rob-
bers or looters by shooting them in
the legs, and the malefactors were
on the floor, bleeding, the vigilante
homeowners could decide for them-
selves whether to wait for the police
or just “finish the job.” He made it
clear with a big clownish wink what
he would do.
“How to Build a Medical Kit” was
presented by the Skinny Medic, a boy-
ish paramedic who had named himself
when he weighed 120 pounds follow-
ing a high dose of prednisone. Now
that he was healthy, he joked that he
should be called the Dad Bod Medic.
He listed what ought to be in a med-
ical supply kit: headlamp, box of
gloves, shears and hemostat, Betadine
or iodine, saline flush,
superglue, horse tack,
Ace wraps, Combat
Application Tourni-
quet, stretch gauze,
plastic bag to seal
chest wounds, Mylar
space blanket, generic
pain meds, and so on.
This felt deeply help-
ful; my fingers ached
from taking notes.
Thunder sounded
overhead. The skies
darkened, and a very
light rain drizzled down. Black flies
descended with the rain and began
to bite.
At my next class, “Primitive Wil-
derness Survival,” I learned how to go
“beyond prepping to recognize and
utilize the resources in nature”: how to
find water from the source and build a
debris shelter. The instructor joked
about his worst night in a shelter: “I
slept like a baby—I cried all night and
pooped my pants.” On to the Old
Grouch’s “Simple and Quick Shelters,”
where I learned how to make a differ-
ent kind of shelter out of a poncho.
My last class of the day was “Psy-
chological Warfare.” The instructor
was a super-fit black man named Ha-
kim Isler, whose movie-star charisma
made sense when I learned that he
had been on Naked and Afraid and
other survivalist television shows; he
calls himself the Black MacGyver. He,
too, was former military, from the
SERE—or Survival, Escape, Resis-
tance, and Evasion— school, a combat
veteran, and a fourth-degree black belt
in To-Shin Do, which had led him to
write a book called Ninja Survival.
Isler took us through the idea
behind psychological operations, or
psyops, which he learned when he
was in MISO, or military informa-
tion support operations. He spoke
of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the
five tenets of survival (there’s al-
ways an agenda, know what makes
you tick, psyops is a two-way street,
take notes, be flexible and open to
change), and the four strategies of
the field (fortify, align, divide, and
overcome).
I began to think that perhaps Isler
was himself here to engage in
psyops— to discover what makes
preppers tick, to track
their psychology, to
understand the needs
and weaknesses of
this community, with
the ultimate aim of
somehow using that
knowledge. Perhaps
this class was a way of
hiding in plain sight,
being so brazen about
his presence that no-
body would ever sus-
pect him of having
an agenda. I thrilled
to the idea; I felt, for the first time
since the disillusionment of the day
before, that there might be someone
in this place who wasn’t a libertari-
an. Perhaps I wasn’t as lonely in my
politics as I had felt. Or perhaps I
was losing my mind.8.The doctrine of hatred must be preached
as the counteraction of the doctrine of
love when that pules and whines.A
nother sad dinner of PB&J
and oranges, and back into
the night to hear the key-
note speaker. I needed all the resil-
ience I could muster. The speaker
was a man named Curtis Bowers,
whose films, Agenda: Grinding Amer-
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