This is the author’s note at the beginning of my latest novel, Slow Fall.
Most novels, tv series and films in this genre do you a favor. They kill almost everyone in the first chapter or before the story even starts. An asteroid, a plague, an ‘almost’ extinction level event—something fast that wipes the board clean and leaves a handful of survivors to pick through the wreckage of an empty world. There’s a comfort in that scenario, whether the authors intend it or not. You’re either alive or you’re not, and if you’re alive, the only question is what you do next and you have the entire remnants of civilization to scavenge.
That’s the fantasy. The most likely reality is worse and gives me nightmares.
In my years in the United States Army Special Forces, I served in places where civilization didn’t end with a bang. It ended the way a bridge rusts—slowly, from the inside, in places nobody checks until something gives way underfoot. I watched it happen in countries whose names most Americans would have to look up on a map. The lights flickered before they went out. The garbage piled up before the disease spread. The police stopped coming and then the checkpoints went up and it wasn’t to enforce the law. And the most dangerous period wasn’t after the collapse. It was during. The window when the old rules had stopped working but nobody had agreed on new ones and most people don’t realize it. When everyone is still there—all the people, all the need, all the fear—but the systems that keep them fed and watered and civil are failing, like instruments dropping out of an orchestra until all that’s left is the drumbeat.
That’s the scenario I’m writing about in this series. Not the empty world. The full one. The world where everybody’s still here and the dying system is more dangerous before the dead one. When one of the hardest things is to actually realize the system is breaking down, which is the core of this first book.
I wrote The Green Beret Preparation and Survival Guide because I believed the skills I’d spent a career learning and teaching shouldn’t stay locked inside a community of professionals. The guide is practical. It tells you what to do. But there’s a limit to what a manual can teach, because survival isn’t just a set of skills. It’s a set of decisions, and those decisions are made under pressure, in confusion, with incomplete information, by people who are frightened and exhausted and operating on instincts they’ve never had to test. A guide can tell you to size up your surroundings. It can’t show you what it feels like when your surroundings change faster than your ability to process them.
Also, those decisions will come with a heavy moral cost. Everything you believe now is put to the test. What kind of person are you?
I also wrote The Green Beret Area Study Workbook. I even put together an example Area Study in an Appendix of the book for Knoxville, TN, where we lived at the time. This book uses that Area Study with most of the action taking place there and in the adjacent Smoky Mountains.
Interestingly, in writing this series, I’ve learned some limitations of my Area Study and my Preparation Guide. Better to learn and adjust in fiction than real life.
The only thing I made up is the characters. Everything that happens to them is waiting to happen to us. The question we have to ask ourselves is: What would we do in the situations these people find themselves in? What choices would I make?
Bob Mayer
