- ZEBRA PEN 100 DEADLY SKILLS HOW TO
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Emerson advises his readers to practice cultural awareness, but only enough to blend into a crowd.
Emerson has clearly bought into the system.ĭeadly Skills evinces a special distrust of foreign governments, which “sometimes use Western detainees as a form of political currency.” Emerson never names specific countries as particularly dangerous for Westerners, but it’s easy enough to read between the lines: for the reader hoping to assemble some makeshift body armor on the go, for instance, the reader is reminded that “every hotel has a Bible or a Koran stashed in a bedside drawer.” This special attention to the Islamic world is reinforced by Ted Slampyak’s illustrations, which frequently portray “bad guys”–or good guys impersonating bad guys–wearing Middle Eastern keffiyeh headdresses.
ZEBRA PEN 100 DEADLY SKILLS SKIN
Similarly, in the event that your homemade Taser doesn’t discharge, you’re still jamming two sharp screws into a person’s body, so “breaking the skin should injure an attacker enough for the operative to gain the upper hand and make a rapid escape.” One hopes this book’s readers will never have cause to apply these deadly skills, but nonetheless they offer a fascinating glimpse into the world of shady intelligence gathering.Įmerson spent 20 years conducting special ops around the world as a Navy SEAL and NSA staffer, and Deadly Skills takes a simplistic, binary view of the world, splitting it into good guys and bad guys without pausing to consider anyone’s motivations. “For an operative,” Emerson deadpans, “collecting fingerprints is frequently a postmortem scenario…the operative will go the most direct route: severing the target’s thumb” (Skill #081: Trick Fingerprint Scanning Software). In some cases, Emerson veers into the brutal facts of real-world espionage. And then he continues talking about cutting off thumbs, crushing skulls, and impaling people with screws. “Be deadly in spirit, but not in action,” Emerson impels.
An author’s note states that the book’s primary goal is to entertain, not create vigilantes.
ZEBRA PEN 100 DEADLY SKILLS HOW TO
“In order to remain deadly,” Emerson explains in a chapter on how to brace oneself for a car crash (Skill #093: Survive Vehicular Impact), “a Violent Nomad must remain safe.” Some of the skills on offer truly could be fatal, as when the reader learns how to turn a fishing weight and a bandana into a weapon “powerful enough to crack a coconut and do equivalent damage to a human skull.” What connects these violent how-to’s with the book’s more general-interest tips is an underlying hope that the reader will learn to think like a Violent Nomad without becoming one. It’s intriguing to read about the lives of Violent Nomads, but the world sure as hell doesn’t need any more of them.Īs it turns out, fending off the bad guys requires a lot of MacGyver-esque creativity-and yes, some of the “deadly” skills in this book are defensive, not offensive, rendering the title a little misleading.
ZEBRA PEN 100 DEADLY SKILLS MANUAL
The result is a book that is less of a survival manual and comes off as more of neo-conservative propaganda tool. In Deadly Skills, the danger mostly comes from other people: mass shooters, kidnappers, terrorists, and foreign governments. Where The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook and Deadly Skills part ways, however, is in the threats they prepare their readers against. The worst cases conjured in Piven’s and Borgenicht’s earlier book tend to pit man against nature: quicksand, earthquakes, poisonous snakes, and the like.
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That could bode well for Deadly Skills, since its spiritual predecessor blossomed in the early 2000s into a minor multimedia phenomenon that was spun off into card games, calendars, a TV show, and a wide range of tongue-in-cheek “survival handbooks” for distinctly non-fatal contexts such as college, parenting, and golf.
In 100 Deadly Skills: The SEAL Operative’s Guide to Eluding Pursuers, Evading Capture, and Surviving Any Dangerous Situation retired Navy SEAL Clint Emerson molds the cultured warrior trope into something more belligerent: a ruthlessly pragmatic role model he calls “the Violent Nomad,” who avoids gun fights and car chases to preserve his strength, rather than his honor.ĭeadly Skills bears many similarities, both in theme and aesthetic, to 1999’s The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, by Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht-all the way down to both books’ field guide-style rounded corners and simple but evocative illustrations, reminiscent of an old Boy Scout Handbook. These are cultured warriors, always ready for a fight but never eager for one. Think James Bond, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or MacGyver. The best heroes in our pop culture tend to save the day not by brute strength alone, but by employing their quick wits between blows.
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