I am often asked what to do if you live in a built-up urban center or major city and the stuff hits the fan. Getting out of the city alive will be a tall task and it will come down to a good plan, gear and tools to do it with. When I was deployed to Iraq on a mission for Operation Iraqi Freedom, I had two Rifle Companies that had Fire Bases inside the heart of the city of Kirkuk. So, having a good plan in place to get out of the city was critical and we had to ensure all troops would get out safe and alive. You may have enough supplies and a plan to wait it out, but things can get out of control very quickly once the local stores have all been looted. You will have a lot of bad characters out and about looking for easy victims and desperate citizens. Folks pushed to the edge and scared will do things they normally wouldn’t do to try and survive. It’s only a matter of time before they come to your door. I am a believer that the sooner you go, the better.The first goal is to reach the city’s edge and the plan starts at your residence, be it a house or an apartment. I am a big believer in firearms and knives being a part of the plan. Obviously, a firearm is the best defense against an assailant, but I always try to plan and foresee situations before they happen and prepare for them. So, in that case, I often have knives, mostly folders, duct taped all over the house in every room, just in case I need them to defend against an intruder. I keep them in spots where they won’t easily be found. (Remember, if you have children around, keep the knives out of their reach. Be responsible!) Obviously, if you are holding up in place for a bit, a good knife will be used to open cases of stored food, used to handle survival chores and even butter your biscuits, so it’s not just for defense, it is a critical tool in all situations.
You next must think about what you may encounter along the route. A good firearm will even the score if you run into some bad hombres, but remember, a knife will help in self-defense if you are trying to move with stealth and not be seen or heard. I like to carry several knives hidden on myself such as inside my boot or hidden on my belt so that I always have a backup. You may also want to have a good Leatherman Tool or Swiss Army Knife with you in case you need to break into someplace for supplies or safety or possibly use it to hotwire a car or fix something that breaks on you.

Having a good tool like this will come in handy if you need to cut wires or fencing along the way or open a much-needed snack of canned vegetables. If you have practiced and run your evacuation route (do dry runs ahead of time), you should already know some of the issues, but it’s hard to plan for the unexpected so it’s always better to overthink your needs in this situation. You may want a Kukri or machete in case you need to cut through some thick vegetation to avoid some bad characters along your route. A large blade is a very intimidating thing to be holding when someone may be sizing you up as a potential target.
Bottom line, a good rehearsed plan, your equipment, firearms and especially the knife, will play a huge role in survival in the wilderness and also in the urban jungle when the SHTF. If you take this type of thinking and planning and apply it to your “Get Out of Dodge” plan, it will pay off when you need it most. As I always say, you need to “Train As You Fight” with everything you do, so that you build confidence with your plan and see the challenges and issues before they arise. A good rehearsed plan always helped my units get out of sticky situations in combat and always proved to be the difference in success and it will do the same for you.

If you’ve ever witnessed a grand mal seizure, you know they can be very frightening. They are violent, uncontrolled, and confusing in terms of not knowing exactly what to do. However, despite being the type most think of when they think of seizures, these epileptic seizures aren’t the only kind.There are actually many different kinds of seizures. They are all caused by errant electrical discharge activity in various parts of the brain. These electrical discharges usually result in symptoms such as behavioral disturbances or unusual smells, tastes or sounds that aren’t really present. Also occurring are small isolated tremors, fine muscle movements or loss of consciousness with large violent convulsions and spasms of large muscle groups.

If only small parts of the brain are affected, the person may not lose consciousness, but may have confusion or impaired awareness of their surroundings. This occurs in something we call focal seizures and can result in someone staring into space or being “stuck” in repetitive movements or actions. When larger parts of the brain are involved, awareness is most always affected and many times, there is also a loss of consciousness. When these seizures stop, the involved individuals are usually confused and it takes several minutes for them to understand where they are and what has happened. Types of seizures in this category are absence (staring/unaware), tonic (stiffening), clonic (jerking) or tonic-clonic seizures (otherwise known as grand mal).

The only way to stop a seizure is to either wait it out as they are self-limited in most situations or administer intranasal, intramuscular or intravenous medications such as benzodiazepines like Ativan or Valium or antiepileptic medicines like Keppra, Dilantin, or Phenobarbital.

When someone is having a seizure, the best thing to do is be supportive. Make sure they don’t hurt themselves, make sure their airway stays open and they can breathe. If you have a long rubber or wooden bite block and you can safely insert it between their teeth, it may help prevent tongue injury. Don’t use anything they may swallow and don’t get bit. Make sure nothing falls on them and make sure they don’t fall.

You should seek immediate medical attention if the seizures last more than 5 minutes, are recurrent and won’t stop or if there are injuries caused by the seizures. Also, if breathing or consciousness doesn’t normalize within a few minutes after the seizure stops or if the person having a seizure has a high fever or is suffering from heat exhaustion call 911.

Many times, we don’t find anything significant and just don’t know what caused the seizure. However, when we do find a cause, it may be that they had a head injury, a brain tumor, a brain bleed, a stroke, metabolic problems, or heat stroke. If a seizure is one and done, the patient may never need medication. However, if the seizures are recurrent, the physician will most likely prescribe medications to prevent recurrence. If you’ve had a seizure, you should not take part in dangerous activities for at least 6 months. That means no driving, no swimming alone, no climbing on ladders, etc. If you have a seizure while you are doing any of these things, you risk severe injury and even death, and if you are driving, you will place the lives of others at risk as well.

The realm of international espionage operates under a strict training and elimination architecture. Many of the training modules are rated with the simple nomenclature “Satisfactory” or “Unsatisfactory.” If for some reasonably excusable cause an otherwise good candidate is rated as “Unsat” in a particular segment of a training module, they may be extended the opportunity to repeat the training segment and be reevaluated. But, this mercy is rarely granted and almost never granted a second time for the same person. Hence, an “Unsat” rating in a training module will be a failure and result in removal from the program.

One such Pass/Fail module has been portrayed in many spy movies. It’s the scene where the spy candidate is sent into a bar to pick up a specific woman or man. It is essentially a field exercise to test an operative’s elicitation skills. While we did do that as part of the elicitation module in training, we had a few even more challenging elicitation exercises called the Pick-up/Break-up and the EEI’s.

In my assigned Pick up/Break up evaluation, I was sent into a gay bar with the mission of “picking up” a man and getting him to go home with me while I was under direct and indirect observation. One of the trainers entered the bar before me and established an OP (observation post or position) and one of the trainers was outside in the parking lot to observe and record what happened when we came out. Picking up a person in the bar was the easier part of the field test. The harder part is what we call the Termination (no, not lethal).

The operational cycle of a HUMINT mission is the Spotting, Assessing, Development and Recruiting and Transfer/Termination (SADR/T). So, in this training scenario, the second phase of the mission is to “dump” the pick-up just outside of the bar. The test here was to see if I could abruptly terminate the relationship with minimal or no drama or outbursts.

But, for most of us, the hardest field elicitation exercise was the challenge of getting someone’s PIN, birthday, partial SSN, banking info or other highly protected information. In my training cycle, we were sent into retail establishments in malls. Our trainers would pick out a store and then instruct us on what information they wanted us to return with. Since in the real world we have time to do some casing, observation and other techniques to increase rapport, we were given great latitude and could select the individual we wanted to approach.

For example, we were sent into a music store and instructed to return with either the birthdate or PIN number from someone or the store’s security alarm code. If we could not ascertain either of those (remember, we were in a store in the mall where people were running errands and not at a cocktail party chatting away for hours) we could return with other information such as phone number, maiden name, etc. And, if all else failed, the trainers would accept an address, make and model of car, hobbies, etc.

You might be wondering how the trainers tested and confirmed the intelligence collected from the targets by the spy candidates. You also might be asking yourself how we pulled off stunts like this since American Foreign Intelligence Operations Officers are legally barred from spying or even collecting information from US Citizens.

We (officers in the Intelligence Community) have liaisons with federal law enforcement, most often FBI or Secret Service. Anyone that any candidate asks questions of receives an immediate (more like instant) visit from a badged and credentialed law enforcement officer. Depending on the status of the candidate, the officer identifies him/herself as a Federal Agent, displays their badge and credentials and informs the individual that they are not in any trouble but they need to answer a couple of quick questions for their own safety.

The next phase of the interview goes like this: The Agents will tell the interviewees that the encounter was part of an authorized US Government training program. Then they ask the interviewee to recount the entire encounter with that trainee. They ask very specific questions to determine what, if any, personal information they provided the trainee. As part of the review and assessment of the candidate’s elicitation, the Agents also ask questions like “did it feel like a normal, comfortable conversation? Did you feel like they were trying to get you to tell them things? Did they make you feel like they could be your genuine friend?”

Here’s how I was able to get the clerk’s PIN during that particular training exercise. I started off by looking over at the clerk as soon as I entered the store. I gave the clerk a casual smile and even a little hand-wave gesture. Then I just started looking around the shop for a minute or two. Next, I approached the clerk and asked for help finding a particular title. While accompanying her to look for the title, I engaged in some light, non-invasive conversation. I then let her return to her checkout stand. A few minutes later, I briefly stopped by the counter and asked some kind of innocuous question (I cannot remember what) and thanked her again for the help. Then I continued casually shopping.

When there was a moment that no one was in line and the store was pretty much empty of customers, I went to the check out. I thanked her again for her help and made some small talk and jovial remarks. When she rang up the total, I said “That’s wild!” She asked what was wild. I told her that the last four digits of the price were the exact same as my PIN. Then I said, “And the only way I can remember my PIN is that it’s my birthday.” She laughed and said “I use my birthday for my PIN, too.” To which I asked her if she was born in December of the same year I was born in. (This was a joke since she was clearly much younger than me.)

She said “No, I was born in July” and gave me the year. And then I said “No way! I have a baby sister whose birthday is (month and year she just gave me). And then I said, “don’t tell me your birthday is on the 15th!” I like using that day of the month because it’s easy for people who want to try and lightly conceal the actual day of their birth date to quickly calculate and say something like, “Nope, 10 days before that.” Yes, they actually believe they are protecting their private information that way. In this case, she just came out and said, “Nope, my birthday is on the 21st.”

So, by great luck and a little skill and training, I got both her PIN and her birthday. If there is any “trick” to this, it is that you have to be genuinely friendly, completely comfortable and confident and look at them like they are your best friend. Don’t rush the little conversation or they will instantly feel there is something sinister on the cusp. And as you get each piece of information, show no interest in it, but use it as a bridge for you to provide them with information about you. The more vulnerable you make yourself to them, the more willing they will be to expose themselves just a little. Sometimes just enough to get what you need. We call these provocative statements and questions. They are very useful in getting the information you need. Try it on your spouse, kids, co-workers, or even on a stranger. You will be shocked at how effective this approach is in gathering information, just remember not to use this for any nefarious purposes.

Recently, I have been covering the release of Project 20/20, our highly targeted approach to gold coin investing. While I am still extremely bullish on gold coins, I want to share with you some news regarding silver from a recent interview I did with one of the top experts in the country, Dr. Michael Fuljenz, who is excited for silver’s potential.

A number of mainstream investment banks and commodity market analysts also see fundamental reasons why silver ought to be higher. Three major banks have issued price projections of $18 for 2019: Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Natixis and ABN AMRO. In addition, the commodity market analysis group Capital Economics predicts $17.50 silver this year. Their reasons are fundamentally sound: Positive investor sentiment has driven higher bullion coin sales, while industrial demand has also risen and new supply has fallen slightly over the previous year.

Here are the supply and demand realities: According to the Silver Institute, global silver demand hit a three-year high in 2018, surpassing one billion ounces after falling just short of one billion ounces in 2017. At the same time, global silver mine production fell for the third straight year, falling 2% to 855 million ounces. Total new supply fell 2.7%, from 1,032.6 million ounces in 2017 to 1,004.3 million ounces in 2018, while demand grew 3.5%. That means there was a 34.2-million-ounce silver surplus in 2017 (surpluses tend to depress prices), while there was a 29.2-million-ounce shortfall in 2018. (Shortfalls tend to boost prices.)

The biggest percentage increase in 2018, by far, came in demand for silver coins and bars, rising 20.5% from 150.4 million ounces in 2017 to 181.2 million ounces in 2018. This trend is continuing in 2019. In the first six months of 2018, for instance, the U.S. Mint sold 6,822,500 1-ounce Silver American Eagles, but in the first six months of 2019, Eagle sales grew by 47% to 10,022,000 ounces!

Turning to industry, silver has many industrial uses, accounting for more than half of annual demand worldwide in each of the last five years. Basically, when the world is growing, silver demand grows. Silver has the highest conductivity of any element for electricity and heat. It is valuable for soldering or brazing alloys. It’s used for batteries, medicines, nuclear reactors, photovoltaic (solar) cells, glass coatings, etc. These are many of the reason why silver acts like “gold on steroids” during a bull market in precious metals. With its huge undercurrent of industrial demand, there is a powerful floor under the silver price these days, so investors can buy silver with the assurance that the supply/demand curve will continue in their favor over the long term. [Publisher’s Note: For questions about buying gold and silver coins you can contact Forest Hamilton directly at foresthamilton@universalcoin.com or call 800-822-4653. Please know, if you purchase any coins from Forest, we don’t receive any compensation from him. We simply know he’s one of the good guys in the business that can be trusted.]