Glen Tate - 299 Days - The Preparation

Manda read the side of the MRE boxes, which said “Commercial resale is unlawful.” “Dad, where did you get these MREs?” she asked. “You’re not in the Army.” These were the real MREs, not a commercial knock offs.

“I have some friends.” Grant said with a smile. He wanted her to think he was magic, which was what every dad wants. There was another reason to make her think he was magic: it would give him credibility when a collapse hit and he needed her to trust him.

The truth was that he got three cases at a Ft. Lewis surplus store where soldiers sold extra MREs. Apparently, there was no real restriction on selling to civilians, or everyone just looked the other way. A case was $60.00, so that was $5.00 for a big, complete, portable, pretty tasty, and highly nutritious meal that stored for fifteen years.

The other two cases were a gift from Chip, who got them from Special Forces Ted. While he was on active duty just before he retired, Ted taught ROTC cadets during their summer training camps out at Ft. Lewis. These college kids would be issued MREs to eat out in the field but they didn’t eat them all. Ted said that some of them were spoiled little brats who wanted the scholarship money from ROTC but didn’t want to eat “Army food.” So Ted got dozens of cases of leftover MREs each year. Ted, who knew how valuable the MREs would be when things got bad, stored them at his bachelor pad after his divorce. He would hand them out by the case to friends. The Army issued them to people, it was a paperwork pain to turn them back in, and Ted was putting them to good use. One day, Grant was in the gun store and a big shipment of guns came in. Grant, who had a suit and tie on, helped Chip unload the truck. Chip thanked him with two cases of MREs.

The shed had more than just food in it. Each tub had a can opener in it. Grant also put medical supplies in some of the tubs. He didn’t stock complete trauma kits; they were expensive and he didn’t know how to use them. He knew first aid well, but didn’t want to waste money on fancy medical gear he couldn’t use. He thought he’d stretch the money he had on things that are more likely to strike people and were cheaper to remedy. He watched YouTube videos by “Patriot Nurse” who provided valuable insight on field medical issues.

A small sample of the medical-related things in the shed included lots of electrolyte pills from a running store to supplement the Gatorade mix. He had Imodium for diarrhea. He hoped the water supply would be OK when the collapse hit, because he saw a partial breakdown rather than a total one, but knew that a dollar’s worth of electrolytes or Imodium could save someone who is dehydrated from drinking bad water.

Grant also got many one-quart containers of rubbing alcohol. They were $4.00 each at Costco. For about $5.00, he got a few 250-packs of cleaning wipes for glasses in individual packets; they were made of rubbing alcohol. The wipes and jugs of rubbing alcohol would come in handy for sterilizing instruments and dressing wounds. And they were very cheap and stored for years.

The medical tub also included the caffeine pills and the non- drowsy allergy pills he needed for his hay fever. It was thinking of little things like this and acting now that would make life so much better later.

Manda noticed that all the receipts were in the tubs and asked why.

“So,” Grant explained, “during a collapse, we can look back at the receipts and realize how little all these things cost beforehand. It will make it even more apparent to people how much sense it made to spend a little money now.” Grant grinned.

At the very beginning of his prepping, when he was frustrated that Lisa wasn’t on board with it, Grant dreamed about the gloating he could do when she realized how right he had been all along. Then he realized how stupid that was. He decided that he would not gloat at all; that would only drive her away from him and turn prepping into an “I told you so” instead of what it was really about: taking care of his family, which is a man’s first and most important job. No gloating. But, he might need a little bit of credibility with her. Why he felt he would still need credibility with her after his family was eating and was protected while others weren’t, he didn’t understand. She would see that fifty pounds of pancake mix was just $35 in peacetime, but was twenty times that much during the collapse. The receipts would increase his credibility with her right when he needed her to trust him with her life in circumstances that she could never imagine. This trust would be a matter of life and death, and if a little thing like a peacetime food receipt helped with that, then he should do it.

Grant finished showing Manda all the tubs and then asked, “What do you think?”

“Awesome, Dad,” she said with a big smile. But she was very practical, so she asked, “How much did all this cost?”

“About one ounce of gold when I wanted to buy it and your mom said I couldn’t,” Grant said. “I decided to take the money I would have spent on one ounce — about $900 — and invest in some assets that would be far more valuable later.” Grant was trying not to scare his lovely, bubbly innocent daughter with all this gloom and doom talk. That’s why he didn’t show her the guns or the twenty or so ammo cans in the cabin basement, or the tubs with the fifty-five bricks of vacuum-sealed .22 ammo. No, he would just show her the food for now.

“You can’t tell your friends about this, Amanda,” Grant said, using her full name to emphasize the seriousness of the point.

She nodded. “Not even Emmy?” She was Manda’s best friend. “Not even her,” Grant said. “Sorry, dear, but if you tell her, she’ll tell her parents. And when a collapse hits, they’ll try to come out here. We don’t have enough for everyone.”

“They could have bought food like you did,” Manda said, “but probably didn’t.”

“Exactly,” Grant said, thanking his lucky stars that his daughter understood all this better than most adults.

“What would you do if Emmy and her parents came out here and asked for food?” Manda asked.

Time to tell her straight, like she was a grown up.

“Turn them away because this food is for my family,” Grant said. “I spent my time, money, and stress of hiding this from your mom when Emmy’s parents were playing golf or whatever.”

“What if her parents wouldn’t leave or got angry?” Manda asked.

“I’d make them leave,” Grant said.

“What if they wouldn’t leave or tried to take the food?” Manda asked.

“I’d give them another chance to leave before I resorted to force,” Grant said. He looked her right in the eye when he said that. He wanted her to understand how serious this was. Manda just stood there, trying to take in the thought that her dad would use force against her best friend’s parents.

“People knowing about our food could get us killed,” Grant said. “Those hungry and desperate people could try to hurt us for the food or they could tell other people we have food and the other people, maybe even a gang, could try to hurt us.”

Manda nodded.

“New friends are easy to come by. Resurrecting your family from the dead isn’t,” Grant said.

“That’s a pretty good reason not to tell Emmy,” Manda said, “because if she doesn’t know about the food, you won’t have to hurt anyone.”

“Exactly,” Grant said.

Grant wanted to ease his sweet teenage daughter’s fears about the terrible topic of shooting her best friend’s parents, so he tried to change the subject back to the reasons for having the food.

“Assume that there is no collapse,” Grant said. “Worst case scenario is that in a few years as the expiration dates start to come up, I donate the food to a food bank.” He was trying to act like he thought that would happen.