Had I company now, it would be much better.

 

But I have no company.  Yet it is still good.

 

Felt again like a warrior running today.  Even more so like a guerrilla fighter. 

 

I spent several years as a youth studying guerrilla warfare and tactics, counterinsurgency, evasion  and escape, special weapons and tactics.  What’s the most important lesson I learned?  That farmers, woodsmen, or basically any sort of outdoorsmen make the best fighters.  What do you think most of our revolutionary fighters did for a living?  Or how about the Viet Cong that defeated us in the last war?   Farmers.  What about the average American soldier today?  Probably 90% or more are pure urban.  I’d bet over half never even gone true wilderness camping before joining the service. 

 

You see, the average regular army soldier, with his urban bent, fights both the enemy and the elements,  However, while the seasoned guerrilla also fights the enemy,  his typically more rural bent disposes him to employ the elements to his greatest advantage. 

 

Take George Washington, the farmer general, for example. 

 

He was one of the greatest guerrilla generals that ever lived!  Once upon a time, on one side of the Delaware River, were the British: a superior force in raw numbers, weaponry, and traditional military discipline.  On the other side of the Delaware was George with his rotting teeth, forces in anguish, and options few. 

 

The British knew they could defeat the Americans and extinguish the rebellion anytime, if they took the battle to them and ferried across the Delaware.  But they dreaded the heavy losses in casualties that ferry-crossing a river while fighting would entail.  So they planned instead to wait until the Delaware River froze over sometime in January or February, then cross the frozen  river, and end the insurgency with a minimum of British causalities.  Brilliant! 

 

But George knew that.  Nobody had to tell him.  He was a farmer and knew that kind of stuff instinctively.  So what to do?  What to do? 

 

Wait and face certain defeat?.

 

No.  Embrace the element as it is (was).  Don’t wait upon it.  Turn it, instead, to one’s only advantage.

 

Of course, it helped  that the Prussians or Hessians or whatever the hell those German-for-hire forces in the British camps were called were all Catholics who traditionally got stinking drunk around raging campfires on Christmas Eve…

 

On the other hand George and his band faced…

 

Deadly cold.  Darkness.  A treacherous crossing.  Uncertainty.

 

Embrace the element.  Be like the wind, and the water, and the sky, and the trees and blend and blend and blend…

 

Such was the great guerrilla general and his ragtag half-regular force’s  victory.

 

As I have said that the Tao has said that Nature has whispered before:  “Darkness within darkness.  The gate to all mystery.”