LIFE SKILLS
Self-aid, buddy aid, first aid.
It’s natural disaster season in Canada. This is a bad time to take stock of your individual readiness - the right time to do that was before the fires started - but better now than when you’re trying to decide between “shelter in place” and “run for your life.”
This got me thinking about life skills. Not life skills like filing taxes and retirement planning, I’m talking about skills that save lives. These are the skills you practice without your phone, off the cuff, because the moment you need them the most is the moment when it’s too late to learn.
The most important life skill is avoiding dangerous situations altogether, but as I’ve noted before, shit happens. With that maxim in mind, here is a working draft of life skills which every fighting age Canadian ought to be capable of:
Driving, even if you don’t own a car.
Performing basic operator maintenance on your daily mode of transport (car, bicycle, feet, etc.).
Fire prevention, fire starting, and fire extinguishing.
Swimming.
Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) and first aid.
How to tie these seven knots, combinations of which will solve ~98% of your fastening problems;
Speaking their second language.
Running 5 kilometers and walking 20.
Safe preparation of food and water.
Recognizing and managing panic in yourself and other people.
These days it seems like the tech and wellness industries are doing everything in their power to liberate us from the frictions of everyday life. Why should anyone bother cultivating these abilities in the age of app-based everything? The answer lies in one of my favourite army-isms: “one soldier one kit.”
Each soldier is responsible for their own clothing, water, personal equipment, and most importantly, themselves. When it’s time to pick up and go, it’s expected that you and your kit will be ready, because you’re part of the team and the team needs you. This is why we inspect everything (including each other) before every mission.
The core concept here is reliability. We rely on each other because each one of us has proven to the others that we are reliable. When we trust that everyone else has the necessary tools (physical, material, and mental) to do their job, it frees us to focus on our’s. We are useful to each other, and immediately offer support when the going gets tough. But in order for me to offer my help, I must first have some help to offer.
This is a moral imperative for self-reliance that is not conditioned by some frontier ideal of freedom from other people. This is living in Moodie-mode: we practice self-reliance so that we can help each other in times of need. Self-reliance is the start-state, not the end-state. If we genuinely care about each other and we accept the duty of mutual aid, that implies a duty to be useful. The lifeguard is useless if they start drowning and now there are two victims where before there was one.
The essence of teamwork is linking individual efforts to achieve a common goal. When soldiers gripe in the smoke pit, it’s about someone who is shirking their share of the load, hence “one soldier, one kit.” The same principle of “things common-to-all” applies to baseline skills. Every soldier should be able to shoot, move, communicate, and medicate as the situation demands. The force has specialists dedicated to doing each of those things really well - and civie side there are emergency services - but the specialists can’t be everywhere all the time. Sometimes you have to self-extract.
Years ago I did a course alongside a reservist/RCMP officer in New Brunswick. He told me that every winter he recovers bodies from cars buried in snow. People slide off the roads, neglect to ventilate their cabin while waiting for rescue, and die of suffocation, carbon monoxide, or hypothermia. These are normal people, loved and mourned, who died for want of knowing what to do when a normal day went wrong.
In Canada, extreme natural events and natural disasters1 have become normal events. The CAF is Canada’s force of last resort, so when a request for federal assistance comes in, we grab our kit and go. In the recent years however, the CAF has been stretched thin as the DOMOPS2 tempo has gone from stressful to unsustainable. Between increasing demand and decreasing capacity, it’s not inconceivable that simoultaneous natural disasters could overwhelm the system’s ability to respond with the efficacy that Canadians have come to expect.
I am neither a strategist nor a policy wonk, just a soldier with an ear to the ground. While we keep on waiting for the world to change, I humbly suggest that everyone take a Marlboro minute and do an honest assessment of where they’re at ability-wise. We should always be learning, practicing, and preparing for self-reliance so that we can rely on each other during tough times. There are vulnerable ones - the infirm, ill and injured, the young and old - who have no choice but to rely on those of us who are able and willing. So when the time comes, you better have a grip on your kit because the team will need you.
Whatever the technical definitions are, the practical difference between natural events and natural disasters is the extent to which people are affected.
Domestic Operations, military operations conducted on home soil, typically in aid to the civil power.
"I am neither a strategist nor a policy wonk, just a soldier with an ear to the ground." I do find it ironic that this is written with a sense of humility. Being a soldier with an ear to the ground is precisely why your advice neither ruins countries nor individual human lives, but saves them.
I will always obey the wisdom of a knuckle dragger over a strategist or thousand pound brain.
Great post.
I was in conversation with a wargame designer at Connections 2024 in Carlisle last week and one thing I emphasized to her was to remember the very basic training that all soldiers receive. The really important stuff about combat and warfighting seems to come after their initial training but the early training begins building up the muscle memory that makes them do the basic important stuff with little prompting.