Who Would You Bug Out With?

by | Jan 18, 2012 | Bug Out, Preparedness | 9 comments

A ques­tion on one of the boards I am on popped up, and I respond­ed, which I rarely do these days.  I’ve been kind of burned out of writ­ing and been focus­ing on build­ing more preps, los­ing some of my flab and get­ting into bet­ter shape, etc.…  How­ev­er, I thought this was in inter­est­ing ques­tion.  Here is is:

“What are your indi­vid­ual cri­te­ria for whom you would bug out with oth­er than fam­i­ly. I’m assum­ing that you would not leave your fam­i­ly behind. If you would, that would be inter­est­ing to hear the rea­son­ing as well. Would it be one or more of these: (a) Co-work­ers (b) Neigh­bors, © Close friends (d) Those shar­ing your beliefs, (e) Best pre­pared regard­less of beliefs, or (f) make the best of whom you find your­self with?”

I respond­ed with this:

I have been build­ing a rela­tion­ship with three or four oth­er prep­pers. Three of which I trust, and the fourth, I am not sure about. Let me rephrase, I trust him, but I know his alle­giances are to his imme­di­ate fam­i­ly, peri­od. He has his own plans, OPSEC, etc. he will adhere to. I know this going in. And I trust he thinks the same of myself. How­ev­er, in a tight sit­u­a­tion we would go it togeth­er, I have no doubt. Not sure it would be a per­ma­nent thing. I think we would part ways at some junc­ture.

That said, I’ll keep the list to my imme­di­ate geog­ra­phy. There are peo­ple out­side my imme­di­ate reach I would def­i­nite­ly bug out with, but they do not live near me, so the point is sort of mute.

A few sim­ple items. They would have to be eth­i­cal and of good char­ac­ter. There has to be a spo­ken or unspo­ken bond that as prep­pers we under­stand that we will have to band togeth­er for a short or long peri­od of time. They would have to have their own core resources. While I do not mind shar­ing resources, you expo­nen­tial­ly deplete yours when you share them, and that can short­en my life. There is a moral con­ver­sa­tion in there regard­ing women, chil­dren, fam­i­lies, in need, but that is a con­ver­sa­tion left for anoth­er time. The person(s) I would bug out with would have to have the same or sim­i­lar vision as I, would have to have sim­i­lar goals, and under­stand that there are bound­aries.

Do they have to lay down their life for me in my defense? Good ques­tion, I think no. I think they have to defend them­selves, and if we have to defend our­selves to stay alive as a team then so be it. But I do not expect some­one to just defend me in an emer­gency or sur­vival sit­u­a­tion in close quar­ters just because they are with me.

I am not sure any of this is mak­ing sense. I have not real­ly thought about the cri­te­ria, as I have plans to bug out alone, and make a stop over for sup­plies, here or there…

How would you respond to this ques­tion?  Have you thought about who you would trust to bug out with?  Do you already have plans to bug out with a team of fam­i­lies etc?

Let us know by leav­ing a com­ment…

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9 Comments

  1. Jack Karpan
    Jack Karpan on January 18, 2012 at 8:27 am

    My cri­te­ria above all oth­ers is “core belief sys­tem”. Because no mat­ter how long the rela­tion­ship last even­tu­al­ly it will come down to what each of us believes in his or her heart. I’m a Chris­t­ian — any one i would con­sid­er group­ing with in either a “stay-put sit­u­a­tion” or a bug would have to be a Chris­t­ian also. Sor­ry, that’s just my belief.

    Reply
    • Miss Kitty
      Miss Kitty on January 18, 2012 at 8:51 am

      I agree. I also think the per­son should be well prepped(Or at least as pre­pared as I am) and have some skill to bring to the table. I’m cur­rent­ly read­ing “Lights Out” by David Craw­ford and it has made me think, in par­tic­u­lar, about skills and sup­plies to use them.

      Reply
      • suburban
        suburban on January 18, 2012 at 7:55 pm

        I have been read­ing Lights Out on and off when I trav­el for works. Such a great “train­ing nov­el” around almost every aspect of prep­ping, skill sets, team mem­bers, etc… Fan­tas­tic book.

        Reply
  2. Padre
    Padre on January 18, 2012 at 11:57 pm

    I see peo­ple as assets, and while there are lim­its on the num­ber of peo­ple that are sus­tain­able in a place post SHTF, giv­en enough land, in most places sev­er­al hun­dred peo­ple could sus­tain them­selves. In fact, hav­ing too few peo­ple might be more dan­ger­ous than hav­ing too many.

    Any­way, in order of pri­or­i­ty: 1) fam­i­ly, 2) friends with skills, 3) friends with need­ed sup­plies, 4) able bod­ied friends, 5) trust wor­thy strangers who come along. I fig­ure with my set up I need about 36 per­sons for a top notch secu­ri­ty oper­a­tion, about the same for farm­ing and food relat­ed work, and about a dozen for spe­cial­ized duties main­te­nance, med­ical, auto work, etc. I am assum­ing that every able body except for medics are rifle­men in case of emer­gency of course. I think my bug out loca­tion could accom­mo­da­tion up to 100 per­sons but at present I have enough hous­ing for only about 30–40 in tight quar­ters. My long term plans includes two more build­ings on the prop­er­ty, includ­ing a sim­ple bunk house for sin­gle men and those on guard duty rota­tions.

    Reply
  3. MasterPo
    MasterPo on January 19, 2012 at 12:04 am

    The prob­lem is you real­ly need to know ALL about a per­son (or peo­ple) before you can say you want them around in an emer­gency. Core val­ues and com­mon beliefs are fine but:

    Do they drink? Have they been drinkers (or drug users)?
    What are their mental/emotional quirks?
    How do they han­dle stress?
    How well orga­nized and planned are they in every­day life?

    Just to men­tion a few.

    And that takes a lot of time around them to learn.

    Reply
  4. millenniumfly
    millenniumfly on January 19, 2012 at 1:17 pm

    … I guess I’ll take my kids. 🙂

    Reply
  5. Padre
    Padre on January 20, 2012 at 11:28 am

    @ Mas­ter­Po — In any high stress sit­u­a­tion peo­ple’s tem­pers may flare, but so long as most are ratio­nal and rea­son­able a good leader can get them through that. Not all or us are that good lead­ers, no mat­ter how much we fan­ta­size about it, and, espe­cial­ly if we are con­sid­er­ing a larg­er com­mu­ni­ty mod­el, we should real­ize that this is an essen­tial skill set and in humil­i­ty be ready to accept that some­one else may be bet­ter in this posi­tion than you!

    Any­way, most peo­ple will want to be tak­en care of, and real­ize that they don’t have what it takes to sur­vive alone and so as long as the sit­u­a­tion remains grave they will mod­er­ate them­selves so as to fit in. The prob­lem is the type A per­son­al­i­ties. Hav­ing a few of these can be a good thing but they need spe­cial atten­tion so as to make sure that they will con­tin­ue to be team play­ers.

    I agree that men­tal illness/drug addic­tion may be a seri­ous and hid­den issue, espe­cial­ly as psych drugs run out, and occa­sion­al­ly there will be irrec­on­cil­able dif­fer­ences, how­ev­er, this is the rea­son why the “more the mer­ri­er” approach is supe­ri­or to the select “per­fect” few. That way con­flicts can be usu­al­ly over­come by a divi­sion of labor, i.e. sep­a­rat­ing those in con­flict from each oth­er. The dan­ger is depend­ing on any one per­son too much, as they would then hold far too much power/influence over the com­mu­ni­ty’s well-being.

    You would also need a plan for how to deal with a cat­a­stroph­ic break with mem­bers of the com­mu­ni­ty. I think its in the book “Lights Out” that a com­mu­ni­ty mem­ber is alien­at­ed and even­tu­al­ly eject­ed from the com­mu­ni­ty, only to return with friends to attack the com­mu­ni­ty. Expelling a mem­ber of a com­mu­ni­ty is a dan­ger­ous breach of OpSec and thus should be con­sid­ered before­hand whether your com­mu­ni­ty is small or large.

    One thing I would like to add, its not just that we need bod­ies and skills to sur­vive a par­a­digm shift, although we do, its also this real­iza­tion: in a world with­out hope if you don’t give peo­ple hope then per­haps no one will and peo­ple with­out hope are very dan­ger­ous. We might be indig­nant that so many peo­ple failed to prep and now they want our help, but each of us at some point of our life could have been caught like them with our pants down. In fact we still might, as we nev­er know if we might get sep­a­rat­ed from our preps when it hits the fan. Trust­ing peo­ple might be a risk, but not trust­ing any­one is in my opin­ion a big­ger risk.

    Reply
  6. Bud
    Bud on January 20, 2012 at 8:05 pm

    When it comes down to sur­vival you will choose blood over friend and they will do the same. If your group is 100 peo­ple then I’m assum­ing it will be a num­ber of fam­i­lies and not 100 indi­vid­ual sin­gle men/women. Now imag­ine that there are 15 mem­bers of fam­i­ly X in your group and one of them is a total screw up who falls asleep on guard duty, does not know any real skills and refus­es to be just anoth­er strong back for man­u­al labor. You can’t kick him out of the group because the oth­er 14 fam­i­ly mem­bers will not stand for it. Do you kick the entire fam­i­ly out? You will end up with a civ­il war on your hands. Any large group will devel­op more than one leader and you cant assume that since that is your land, you make the rules. If it’s real­ly bug out time, there are no rules. With fam­i­ly at least you can hope to set­tle things peace­ful­ly. So in my case its fam­i­ly, extend­ed fam­i­ly, and only then pos­si­bly trustworthy/prepared friends.

    Reply

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