I’ll start with a little about myself. I am a 21 year old disabled Iraqi campaign vet. I spent four years in the U.S. Army. I joined when I was 17 and started my terminal leave a couple of months before I was 21. I was stationed at Fort Hood in Texas. I was there during the November 5, 2009 shootings. I couldn’t believe the absolute chaos that caused and how unprepared we were for a situation like that, and that was just on a small scale that really only affected Fort Hood. As a whole if that had been a nationwide incident I can only imagine the absolute chaos and anarchy that would have caused. That incident is really what got me interested in being prepared as possible for any situation because as a young Soldier I believed that just a gun would be able to protect you and provide for you in any situation and oh was I so wrong.
After I got out of the Army I started prepping and storing up a food, silver, and a much more extensive ammo supply. I had originally bought my food supply based off the getting started list that Mr. Rawles has on the survivalblog web site. Buying oats, wheat’s and other food staples, I started out first just buying stuff online which was costing me quite a bit of money because I wasn’t shopping around or doing my research causing me to probably spend a couple hundred extra dollars that I could have saved if I would have simply looked around more. After a little bit of research online I was able to find a local store that geared more towards prepping, and I was blown away at how much money I save by signing up for their sales list and only buying certain products when they went on sale, and buying renewable products such as the non hybrid seeds. My prepping supplies quadrupled in quantity in less than a month because I was shopping smarter and not just buying spur of the moment. One afternoon when I was inventorying everything I had bought, my mom had come over to my house to visit and what she said really got me thinking. She brought up the point of why am I storing a bunch of food supplies that I know nothing about and I don’t know how to use, and to be honest she was right, besides knowing how long they would store for I knew nothing about what I was actually storing. There are a lot of things I store that I know plenty about. My firearms for instance I know how to shoot everyone of them, tear them apart, clean and maintain them, but that’s not enough a gun will not do everything in a survival situation. As an individual you have to have well rounded skills in order to survive. Your knowledge could be the difference between life and death. Knowing how to shoot a gun and clear a building will only get you so far if you can’t eat the food you stocked up.
It really got me thinking, so I started doing research finding recipes, writing them down and then I actually tried them out. After absolutely ruining a couple batches of each recipe, I was starting to get frustrated, and to be honest a little discouraged that I wouldn’t be able to figure it out and that I had wasted a lot of money. I wouldn’t let myself give up though. I started with one thing at a time, for me where I started was the dehydrator trying to make beef jerky. My first batch got left on too long, it was completely dried out and so salty it would have been hard to stomach if you could even get yourself to swallow it. I think it took me about three or four batches to finally figure out how to get the right flavoring and the right amount of time to make a good jerky. Now once I actually got a good batch of jerky I got excited and wanted to learn how to use all of my supplies that I store. So I tried making bread, doing everything from grinding the whole wheat down into flour, making the dough, and then trying to turn it into bread. I was very surprised at how long it actually took to grind the wheat into flour. Now I know why in Mr. Rawles book “Patriots” they hooked up a bicycle to their wheat grinder, I can only imagine how much of difference that would make.
After I ground enough wheat to attempt to make one loaf of bread, my arms were exhausted from turning the grinder. It was now time to try to make my own dough for bread and wow, looking back I can I say my first attempt at it was a complete disaster as well. My “dough” turned into a watery mess that had no hope in ever becoming bread. So then it was back to the proverbial “grinding stone” making more flour. It took me a couple attempts to get useable dough for bread. At first I was using the regular oven in my house to bake the bread, after getting the hang of making the dough, then baking and getting good bread from it I wanted to try going solar. I made my own solar oven that was originally way to deep it never heated up past 150 degrees. I modified my design rebuilt my solar oven and made it much shallower and the next day I was looking at temperatures of 350 degrees or more. More than enough for baking bread, I was thoroughly impressed with how quick it heated up and once it heated up how fast the bread baked inside of it. After making multiple loafs of a certain type of bread I branched off from their and started making different kinds of breads, white bread wheat bread, and before I knew it was up to my eyes in bread. I ended up taking whole loafs to co workers so it wouldn’t go to waste.
Now if I had been in an actual survival situation and I was trying to learn how to use these products then I would have been in deep trouble. We as a society especially the younger generation like myself are so dependent on technology that I would have been lost without it. At the time I had no recipes written down and I had zero knowledge on products I stored. I was relying solely on the Internet to help me learn. Now luckily for me I wasn’t in a survival situation and now I am slowly but oh so surely learning how to use everything I stock up on, and once I do learn how to use it I write everything down in a note book that I also keep in a dry storage container. The main thing I had learned from everything was that I need to diversify my supply more. There are something’s I don’t think I could run out of for years and years, and other stuff I wouldn’t have enough to last two days in a TEOTWAWKI situation.
The best advice I can give anyone especially young preppers like myself is to use what you are storing and if you don’t know how to use it then find out how to, even if it is through trial and error like mine was. It is way better to waste a small amount of your supplies now while it can be replaced then to be in a situation where it can’t be replaced and you end up throwing half of your supply away. I can’t believe the wealth of knowledge I have got in recent weeks. It really blew me away at how truly un-prepared I was for a TEOTWAWKI situation. The knowledge I have gained and will continue to gain by simply experimenting and continuing to learn as much as I can, may very well save my life and one of my family member’s lives. I am trying to become less and less dependent on the everyday technology and more and more dependent on my own resources.
The best knowledge source we have right now is probably the Internet since you can look up almost anything and find information on it, but one day if we are in TEOTWAWKI and all that technology is gone your best knowledge source is going to be yourself, and if you’re don’t have the knowledge you need well you can kiss goodbye your supplies and everything you’ve “prepped”. I can’t wait till the day that I am completely or at least as much as possible only dependent on what I can grow or make with my own two hands. The more I let go of the technology that has such a firm grip on so many of us the better prepared I will be both mentally and physically if something happens because I will be ready to put my knowledge and experience from pre TEOTWAWKI experiences to good use.