COLD WAR PREPPER

Who Is Lee?

Lee grew up in El Paso, TX during the Cold War until the only lottery I ever won took me away to the Army.  The Cuban Missile Crisis had a dramatic impact on me. His next door neighbor was the block Civil Defense Warden and he built a cinder block fallout shelter in his backyard.  He devoured any and everything he gave me to read about what we then called Survivalism. He attended Blessed Sacrament School and then Jesuit High School and spent the last years of High School at Burges, where he graduated during the Vietnam War.

Lee served almost 21 years in the Army – originally as a 98B (Cryptanalyst), then a 98G4HRUC8 (SFC Russian Voice Intercept Operator), and finally as a 352C – Signals Intelligence / Electronic Warfare Intelligence Analysis Technician (CW3). He spent one year studying Indonesian language and just over two years studying Russian. All 3 years were at the Defense Language Institute – Foreign Language Center (DLI-FLC) Presidio of Monterey, CA.

The Army was good to and for him. Tuition assistance (80% paid by US Army) provided me

BA Russian MBA Production Operations Management MPA Human Resources Management

And coursework for PhD – Andragogy (Adult Learning Theory) This was VA – not tuition assistance

Since the Army, Lee has worked for Texas’ Environmental Agency, a hospital system, Dell Computer, an electric coop, Austin’s Homeless Shelter, and finally bought a Postal Annex franchise.  Helen, his wife, had a terrible auto accident with major injuries and as a result, he sold the store (10/18/21) so that he might devote my attention to her recovery. His new venture(s) will be this website, videos on YouTube, our grandchildren, fishing, and will be on a quest to find the best Chicken Fried Steak and the best Chile Relleno in Texas.

Lee is Roman Catholic and totally devoted to his wife, daughter, and two grandsons.  He hopes to be almost as good of a father / husband as St Joseph. His daily prayers are for wisdom / discernment, safety of our military and first responders, and the healing of our country.

Politically, Lee considers myself a Constitutional Conservative.

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He's had customers tell him that they will miss his smile, jovial demeanor and love / respect for his fellow humans.  An older Indian gentleman told him he loves to come to the store because he knows Lee cares about him, respects him, and listens to him just like a best friend.

Lee started his Prepping Journey as a hunker down kind of guy – you know the cinder block fallout shelter type, then after the movie Rambo, he put together a bug out bag and focused more on bugging out than hunkering down.  Bugging out also made the Permanent Change of Stations (PCS) in the Army within his weight allowances for the moves.  He is now back to the Hunker Down primary focus and would love to buy some land and become a homesteader.

His biggest piece of prepping advice – If you have a BOB (bug out bag), make sure you keep an inventory of everything inside.  As he has mentioned, he started building his BOB in 1976 and in 2015, while using it as a get home bag while he was working out of town, someone stole it out of his car.  No way could he list all the items for the insurance company. He lost at least $1,000 in property he didn’t enumerate in the claim. 

Lee felt naked and searched the web for a replacement he could get real quick and ended up buying a pre-built bag from Echo Sigma.  He spent 40 years upgrading or replacing and adding or subtracting items in my original bag, he would eventually do the same with any replacement whether pre-assembled or self-assembled. 

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A simple rule of thumb in the decision-making process – draw a triangle and at each point write one of the following words Cheap, Fast, Good.

You can only have 2 at a time –

You can have cheap and fast, but it won’t be good.

You can have cheap and good, but it won’t be fast

You can have fast and good, but it won’t be cheap

In the prepping community, people tend to put more effort into some areas than they do others. Lee has focused my efforts on food storage, post disaster cooking / heating, and sanitation & hygiene. He also has a lot of medical (first aid) and security training and can readily assist someone with more extensive knowledge / experience. 

Future goals –

1. HAM radio operator license (should be easy for a SIGINT guy)

2. HAM HF station

3. Successfully (after years of trying) raise a garden - did get small potatoes and a lot of tomatoes this year

4. Better field dresser / butcher of wild game

5. Unify / Unite / Organize my neighborhood into a cohesive mutually supportive group

Remember to watch your six (back) as you prepare. Lee entrusts his back to St. Michael the Archangel, the General of God’s Army of Angels and to Saint Sebastian - Patron Saint of the US Army.

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