 Hey Clay, can we talk about this picture? This picture is just ridiculous. Hey everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and we're back with another edition of Tactical Book Review. Today's book is Prairie Fire, guidebook for surviving Civil War II by Mr. Clay Martin. So, I enjoyed this book, I enjoyed the first one, which I just reviewed previously here, and I enjoyed the second volume as well. Some things to note about this particular book. It's exceedingly short, it's only about 160 pages, so it's not long at all, it's again, it's a pretty quick read. I'll be honest, reading this book back to back with Concrete Jungle, I got kind of depressed because Clay is very much of the mindset that the war is coming, the next Civil War is coming and you're either gonna be ready for it or you're not, and it's hard for me to not agree with him, and so it's just kind of depressing because everybody loses in a Civil War. But that aside, if you are also of that mindset and you're thinking, yeah, I think something bad is gonna happen here, and what do I do? Where do I start? How do I prepare for that? I would recommend this book. It is, again, like his first book, it's a very high level kind of crash course primer. He's just touching on major topics. You're not gonna get in-depth knowledge about tactics from this book. You're not gonna get in-depth knowledge about prepping from this book, but you are gonna get a good understanding to touch on the major topics of things you need to think about, and that's where the value of this book comes in. Again, I view this book and his other book as primers, and I think that's the best use case, it's the best way to explain what this book is. It's a primer, again, 160 pages. It's super short, so it's a primer to say, hey, here are some major topics to think about. Having read several tactical books, a lot of which I've reviewed on this channel, it helps me understand what he's talking about when he just gives a very cursory, like, yeah, I think it's like three paragraphs on fire maneuver tactics. Maybe it's like two pages, but it's not very much, is my point, or patrolling, like he just kinda glazes over a lot of patrolling things, and if you don't necessarily know what those concepts are, this will give you a bucket to understand it, but if you really wanna know more about patrolling or fire maneuver or whatever, you need to go read some other books. This isn't, you know, it's not be all end all. It's not the Bible of how to survive the next Civil War. Again, it's a primer. It's helping you get started with categories and start thinking for ways that you need to deal with this. So that's where the value of this book comes in. As you can maybe tell by the cover here, this book is targeted more towards what I would say, rural areas. Like the audiences for people who are in a rural area. I put that in quotes because really what he's talking about here is people that aren't in the main city center. So, you know, if you live in a main city like, you know, Chicago, LA, New York, San Francisco, like, you know, kind of the major big cities, this book doesn't exactly have you in mind for that. This is more focused towards those of us who are in smaller cities and or rural areas. It doesn't have to be like out in the middle of nowhere, but smaller towns, you know, really middle America, right? That's really what this book is primarily, again, minus those major city centers, primarily targeted towards. One of the real good values of this book is that he talks about having, or how to start a militia. And you know, I'm 35, so I've grown up in the time when militia is a dirty word. And I don't think it should be, right? I think that's kind of our American militaristic heritage and everybody, either former military or civilian, we all need to embrace that and love it because it's awesome. And so he helps you give some good starting points on how to start a militia. And I think that's super helpful actually. He's the only person I've ever read that's actually talked about that. And so that was an extremely helpful thing that I pulled from this book. I plan on trying to apply some of those steps here in the next coming months. So if you're in South Dakota and you wanna join a militia, hit me up. Sticking with the primer kind of deal, he does reference multiple other books for further reading. Those are always helpful. Anytime you read an author and you like them and they recommend other stuff, go read that other stuff. That's just a good reader tip. Another helpful thing that he does in this book that I like is he starts to break down the coming conflict again, if you think that's where we're going, into phases. And I think he gives a total of four phases if memory serves me correctly and kind of explains how things are gonna go in each phase. Again, that's helpful. This book came out in 2020, I think a couple months ago. And as of right now, you can kind of see how those phases match up to reality. And that's helpful to kind of understand, again, big picture, where are we in the sequence of events? Assuming that you think like I do and like Clay does and like probably a lot of people that watch this channel and read this book that things are gonna go bad. It helps again, explain where we're at in the timeline and allows you to understand things. One of the things he talks about in here is that he goes through gear. And again, cursory, short thing on gear, which is great. And he does recommend that you get night vision because as he talks about in the book, if you don't have it, it's kind of hard to fight people who do have it. So one of the things that I did take away from this book is that it convinced me to just pony up the cash and buy night vision, which I'm sure I'll be glad when it gets here, but right now I'm just feeling the pain of having to make that purchase and it hurt. That's all I have about Prairie Fire by Mr. Clay Martin would recommend it. Again, if you think things are gonna go bad and you're not sure how this is all gonna play out and you wanna start thinking about being prepared for things that are potentially coming down the road, this book can help you do that. Do brave deeds and endure.