"Such gear was for killing civilians, not enemy soldiers."

When I was at the range the other day scrounging brass from the weeds and empty packaging from the trash cans, there was a fellow who was wearing his full battle-rattle and had at least two pistols, a shotgun on a back scabbard and a tricked out Kalashnikov. Also hanging from his webbing were two knives and a machete, the latter also slung on his back. He had no butt pack for rations or extra ammo. Pretty much suspecting the answer beforehand, I asked him if he was a veteran of the Southwest Asian conflicts. No, he said, but he had studied under a prominent "prepper trainer." "I see," I replied. "Don't you find that a bit heavy and restricting on the move?" I asked. No, he replied, "it's just a matter of getting used to it." He was also more than a little overweight. I commented that he didn't seem to have a water source on him -- nary a canteen nor a hydration bladder. Yeah, well, he was going to get around to that, he replied. I also noted to myself that he positively clanked every time he moved. I was tempted to try to counsel the boy, but time was running short, my scrounging work was done and more fund-raising beckoned down the road. I hung around long enough to also note that his marksmanship with the AK was of the "empty-the-mag-spray-and-pray" sort. I did give him my card, so perhaps he will read this and reassess his "preps."

In any case, I was reminded of him when, last night in my usual insomnia, I pulled down my dog-eared copy of David Rieff's Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, and read these paragraphs:

Still. if the ordinary Bosnian Serb soldier was often cold, wet, and homesick for his family, he was also overconfident as a result of experiencing the fighting as a nearly unbroken string of victories. Except in a few places like the area around Brcko, where Bosnian army and Croat militia forces had achieved some tactical parity, even Bosnian Serb regiments that had simply been transformed as units to General Mladic's command by their former Yugoslav National Army commanders after April 1992 often took on the appearance of irregulars. Spit and polish gave way to the Rambo look. To watch these soldiers strut around in their headbands and their beards, often carrying not just an assault rifle but a submachine gun and a pistol, and an impressive assortment of knives, was frightening but not impressive. As a UN military observer once commented to me, such gear was for killing civilians, not enemy soldiers. If, he said, the Serbs had believed that they were going to face people who could effectively shoot back, they would have carried more ammunition and fewer weapons, and have fired in the short bursts necessary to hit a particular target, rather than in the wild, clip-emptying salvos of fighters who neither knew nor cared much about where their bullets would finally land.

Another foreign military man, a British member of the European Community peacekeeping monitors . . . once told me that what had most impressed him was that "no one seems remotely interested in digging in." His incredulity did not exactly jibe with the anxieties that his colleagues in UNPROFOR expressed so religiously. And yet, as he pointed out, the tactics the Bosnian Serb Army used -- heavy bombardment,; then shooting at random with small arms to produce the maximum amount of terror in the civilian population; rape, if one believed the stories -- were perfectly chosen tactics if ethnic cleansing was the real goal. "When you fire an automatic weapon," he said, "the whole trick is to squeeze the trigger and then immediately stop squeezing. Even in that time, some of the bullets will go wide or high. But of course those fellows are not aiming at other soldiers. They're aiming at the whole village, so you might say that from their point of view, every shot they fire hits the mark."