“How to survive in the wild, in any climate, on land or at
sea”, so it says. This book’s in the genre of pocket-sized guides written by
earnest ex-military gents who start a majority of sentences with “well, in a survival situation”…
For a while I had this book confused with its series-mate SAS Self-Defence. I loved that book's enthusiastic, completely impractical advice (eg: make a handy cosh out of your sock
and some coins! I’m still kind of hoping for an opportunity to use this one,
but have yet to be under attack from anyone patient enough to wait for me to
take my shoe and sock off before hitting back. It also seems you’d need rather
a lot of coins to make a cosh – perhaps you could ask the patient aggressor for
change while you’re fiddling with footwear).
Anyway, the SAS
Survival Guide doesn’t cover improvised monetary coshes. It does have a
good definition of survival skills: “a pyramid, built on the foundation of the
will to survive. The next layer of the pyramid is knowledge. It breeds
confidence and dispels fears. The third layer is training…To cap the pyramid,
add your kit” (p.13).
I learned that – in a survival situation – you can suck
water from the eyeballs of a fish. There’s also a water reservoir along the
spine of larger fish. Water can be squeezed from desert frogs (p.35). I hope
not to use this knowledge.
I like this book for its compactness, but there’s too much
jungle-Arctic-SAS stuff I don’t think is LT-relevant. The medical section’s
good, though. Instead, I’m going to take the annoyingly heavy Outdoor Medical Emergency
Handbook:
No comments:
Post a Comment