Grant needed some ammo. At first, he bought ammunition in fifty-round boxes. Now, he bought ammo by the case. Capitol City gave him a “volume discount” on cases and basically sold them to him for their wholesale cost. He would use roughly half a case at a time on training.
Grant would take the other half case and stockpile it. He put the ammo in .50 ammo cans like the ones he had in the storage shed and now out at his cabin. At this point, he had about two dozen ammo cans, each holding several hundred rounds, depending on the size of the cartridge. About a dozen ammo cans were at his house. He couldn’t believe his wife didn’t wonder what was in all those Army green square cans with little blue painter’s tape labels on them marked “5.56” “7.62” “12” “38” and “380.” Now ammo cans with “40” on them would be appearing.
Grant used reloads for training. These were cartridges that had been fired once (or more) and then a new bullet, primer, and powder were put on. Some guys, like Pow, reloaded their own ammunition. Grant wanted to reload his ammo, but he didn’t have the time to do it and didn’t shoot enough to justify the cost of the reloading equipment. Reloads were about half as much as new ammunition. They weren’t as accurate, but they were still plenty accurate for clanging a steel plate. They would certainly work for defensive purposes, too.
“I’ll take a case of .40 reloads,” Grant told Chip. He had plenty of cash in the envelope. “Oh, hell, two cases” Grant said.
There was nothing more comforting to Grant than buying cases of ammo. A case of ammunition is a very comforting thing for someone who thinks the country is spiraling toward a collapse. Ammo would never be cheaper than it was then, he would use it and have fun, and it was literally a precious metal that was an investment. Most importantly, a case of ammo could save his life and many others’. There was no downside. It was better than spending the money on something like golf clubs.
When Grant was a kid, getting a new pair of shoes before school started was a really big deal. It was his only pair for the year. It meant going to Grossman’s, the “department” store in Forks that was really just a store with a few different things. Grossmans would give him a plastic Easter egg with candy in it when he bought a new pair of shoes. That candy was an event for poor people. And with new shoes, it was easy to forget he was poor.
Grossman’s would give Grant the chance to wear his new shoes out of the store after his mother paid for them. Grant would always say yes. It was such a great feeling to walk out of the store in those new shoes. The thrill of getting something new was magnified by using it right away.
The same was true of guns. Grant took the new Glock to the range immediately. It shot just like the one Pow had loaned him. It was so smooth. And accurate. The holster worked flawlessly; he was getting very fast at drawing that thing. He fired the Glock 22 as fast as he could to see if it jammed. Never. Not once. In the thousands of rounds he put through that gun, it never jammed once.
Grant was ready for the next Sunday afternoon with the Team.
Chip would come by the range every couple Sundays. Chip was pretty good with a carbine and pistol.
The guest instructor on some Sunday afternoons was Special Forces Ted. He would teach the guys basic small arms skills. How to move. How to shoot. How to move and shoot. And communicate. Nothing fancy. No complicated gear or advanced tactics. Ted realized that the Team members were civilians who did this every other weekend.
Special Forces Ted loved it. These young guys worshipped him. Teaching these basic small arms tactics was exactly what Ted had done in the Army. The primary mission of Green Berets was to train allied indigenous fighters behind enemy lines to be guerillas and harass whatever enemy army the U.S. was fighting. Special Forces spend most of their time training raw indigenous recruits in very basic skills. That’s what Ted was doing with these guys. And he had some very good students.
Training with the Team was going great. Grant was getting better with every session. He became so comfortable with an AR and a Glock that they started to seem like pieces of clothing. Comfortable clothing he loved to wear.
Grant was bonding with these guys. They started working on shooting together as two-man and larger teams. They all started watching the Magpul Dynamics training DVDs in between their time out on the range. These DVDs had several hours of expert training on handguns and carbines (a term for short tactical rifles like an AR). They were invaluable. Another fabulous, and free, resource was the availability of hundreds of YouTube videos on shooting, guns, and tactical gear. A particularly good YouTube channel was the one by a guy who went by “Nutnfancy.”
The Team did one thing differently than lots of guys who watched the Magpul DVDs and Nutnfancy videos: they practiced. Instead of sitting in a warm, dry house on a couch and watching people doing tactical things on a TV or computer screen, the Team took what they saw on those screens and went out and practiced. Every other Sunday afternoon they went to the range and coached each other. The DVDs and YouTube videos were a basis for it, but the practice, with live rounds, was how they got good. Really good.
The most valuable training came from Special Forces Ted. Realizing that these guys were civilians and only had ARs and pistols — instead of grenades, machine guns, and air cover — Special Forces
Ted kept the training at what he called the “law enforcement level,” which was short ranges like point blank to about fifty yards, maybe 100 for some situations. With a potential urban battlefield in mind, Ted trained the Team on picking cover, changing out magazines, switching from rifle to pistol, moving, communicating, and shooting, shooting, shooting.
On the range, the Team worked on their communications.
They had standard terms they would yell to each other. “Check” meant they were reloading a magazine or had a jam (very infrequent), so they were temporarily out of commission. They didn’t use the term “Reloading” or “Jam” because, at these short urban warfare distances, an enemy may hear that and know one of the Team was temporarily out of action.
If a member of the Team heard one say “Check,” that meant that the other guy would cover the first member while he fixed the problem. The other guy would yell “OK” to signal that he heard the “Check.” If a member’s rifle ran dry and needed a new magazine, he would usually transition to his pistol, get to a place like behind cover where he could put a fresh magazine in his rifle, holster his pistol, and keep going with his rifle. If a Team member needed to move to another position, he would yell “Moving” so the other guy knew he was moving and could keep track of where he was and wouldn’t shoot him by mistake. The other member would yell “Move” to let the moving member know that he heard him (it was hard to hear when guns are going off). The moving member would go behind the member who yelled “Move” and tap him on the shoulder so he knew the moving member had cleared him, and then take the next position. They were always assessing the scene to find the next piece of cover.
There was a lot of thought that went into gun fighting. The shooting part, the marksmanship to hit a target, was just a small piece of it. Thinking about transitioning between weapons, realizing when one magazine was getting low, changing out empty magazines, communicating, and moving so that they didn’t shoot each other took lots and lots of practice, but it was worth it. And it was the most fun they could have with their pants on.
The Team started incorporating movement into their drills. Moving around while people are shooting live ammunition is something that must be done with great care. Trust was very important among teammates. No one even came close to doing anything — ever — that was dangerous. They always knew exactly where their teammates were and never fired in a dangerous direction. They practiced the movements dozens of times without firing to get a rhythm down.
On those Sunday afternoons, the Team practiced leap-frogging so at least one guy was firing on a target as the others were moving. They practiced sustained fire, which was firing a round every so often to keep the bad guys’ heads down while a teammate reloaded, advanced, or retreated. Communicating all the while. Finding cover and constantly moving, if possible.
After one particularly good training session, Pow seemed a little choked up. He said, “I’d go into a fight with any of you guys.” It was weird and totally understandable at the same time. It was weird because they were civilians and it was peacetime, so there was no logical reason to think there would be a gunfight anytime soon. But it was also understandable because all of the guys knew they were training for something. Some, like Grant, knew exactly what they were training for. Grant knew he wouldn’t tell the Team he was a “survivalist” until later. He didn’t want to seem like a weirdo and have the guys shy away from him.
Scotty had a feeling things would be going downhill in the country soon and that they had better learn how to take care of business if there were no cops around.
Others, like Bobby and Pow, had an inkling of what looting and gang warfare could look like, but they were training primarily because it was fun.
Wes was hard to read. There was something complex going on in that guy’s head. Grant decided to find out. If Wes were crazy, Grant needed to know so they could kick him off the Team. Crazy people can’t be trusted to be around live fire exercises.
“So what’s the life story of Wes Marlin?” Grant asked one day when they were cleaning their guns and were the only ones left on the range. There was something about cleaning guns that leads guys to have deep conversations.
“Not much,” Wes said in that southern accent. He paused.
“I grew up in North Carolina mostly,” he continued. “My dad is in the Army and we went all over, but he spent a lot of time at Bragg and Benning,” two Army bases for special operations forces.
“What does he do in the Army?” Grant asked.
“He’s a Ranger,” Wes said. “Just about to retire. He’s out at Ft. Lewis now. That’s how I got out here to Washington State.” Wes was kind of quiet.
“Do you like it out here?” Grant asked.
“Yeah, it’s OK,” he said with a shrug. “It’s a little cold up here and the people are a little weird. There are too many leftist, bleeding heart stickers on Subarus up here, y’know?” They talked about all the liberal whack jobs in Washington State for a while.
“So what do you do at the equipment rental store?” Grant asked.
“Just about everything,” Wes said. “I fix all the machinery and maintain it. I show customers how to use all the machines.” Wow, Grant thought. This guy knows how to fix machinery. What an asset when equipment breaks and there’s no one to call. Wes was still holding something back. Grant thought there was a disconnect between Wes coming out to Washington State and spending the past few years working at the rental place.
“What’s your dad like?” Grant asked.
Wes straightened his posture, looked Grant in the eye, and said, “He’s an asshole.”
That’s what Wes was holding back.
“He’s a gung ho Ranger and always pushed me to join the Army,” Wes said. “I wouldn’t mind being in the Army, but he said I needed to be a Ranger or something equivalent or I would embarrass him. He actually said that. He was constantly deployed when I was a kid and when he was home he would ride me pretty hard. I just didn’t want to deal with his shit anymore so I graduated from high school and went to work out here. I see him on occasion, but we’re not really close. He can’t understand why I didn’t join the Army.”
Grant and Wes had something in common: asshole dads. “Is your mom out here?” Grant asked.
“Nope,” he said. “Divorced a long time ago.” Wes looked off. “Not sure where she is now.”
“What kind of equipment do you work on?” Grant asked, to both change the subject from asshole dads and to get an inventory of Wes’s skills. He described how he worked on power tools; small gas- powered things like chainsaws, trucks and trailers, and things all the way up to small bulldozers. Like so many others Grant was coming into contact with, Wes didn’t really have a family. He would need a family when a collapse hit, and Grant would provide it.
The conversation wound its way to guns and women, as conversations between men cleaning guns often do. Then they went home; Wes to his apartment alone and Grant to his family who had no idea about the guns, the Team, the stored food, or his thoughts on the coming collapse. In a sense, Grant was as alone as Wes was.
Chapter 28
Spiders in the Shed
Coming home from the range after a session with the Team was always a weird experience. Grant went from being one hundred percent himself with the guys, with an AR slung over his shoulder and a sidearm, to being a typical suburban father and husband. That twenty-minute car ride from the range to home was a forced transformation process. He had to go from gunfighter to suburban conformist.
It was bullshit. Why did he have to keep hiding what he was doing? He wasn’t hurting anyone. In fact, he was doing things that could very easily save all their lives. Most of his friends from work had habits and hobbies that were a lot worse; drinking and overeating, trips to Vegas where who knows what happened, a new car every few years, and spending money on totally useless things like golf. A year’s worth of prepping cost about as much as a trip to Vegas or playing golf, and a lot less than new cars every couple of years. At least with prepping, he actually had tangible things to show that were slightly more useful, like food to feed his family and weapons to defend himself and the ones he loved most.
Yet, Grant was the weirdo for being a “survivalist.” It wasn’t weird to waste money on Vegas or clothes or cars. Nope, that was normal in suburban America, where people didn’t worry about how they would survive and protect their family if an unexpected event changed their lives.
The outside thought had been telling Grant for a few years that it wasn’t normal for people to just consume things and live in comfort and peace. Maybe it was normal for these suburban people, but Grant had lived the way most other people in the world had to: poor and scared. He knew that this current affluence in America was not “normal.” It would end soon. It had to.