some things

To make some things understandable i ll try to describe my street in that time, it was street in older part of town, all houses made from brick, small yards, usually with gardens, every yard had wall, brick or concrete, street was dead end street, maybe some 20 houses, not sure.

Neighborhood was nice, middle class, normal people, kids, cars, lawns...

When everything started due to advancing of enemy army, and occupation of some parts of town, population gone to maybe 50 000-60 000 citizen, not sure. Lines of separation between "us and them " formed pretty soon as advance was stopped.

I guess then they decided to conquer it with long siege, starvation or something like that.

Whatever reason was , it resulted with lot of people in condition of constant shelling, sniper fire, no distribution of any kind of goods, no authority or anything else that means civilization.

Very soon things started to go down, people realizes that everybody is potential enemy, so if anybody thinks there was some feeling of union in trouble or something like that, no sorry.

Some folks realizes that they can not survive alone, without weapon in that new world.

In my case some family members came from other parts of town, from their houses to my house, because they did not feel safe there, some of them bring weapon, some bring some food,some did not bring anything.

Now when i remember, i think maybe we needed 15 days to realize that is not gonna be war like war in some other . Houses gets cold without heating, people slowly realizes it is gonna be fight for life, every single day. Like every normal city in world we had stores, markets and malls, but trust me, folks just break and take everything in day or two. And that s it.

Some order on storages and granaries was maintained, but pretty soon we realized that it was not order, gangs just take it.

Anyway soon we found our neighbor and his family killed, and robed, nobody knew anything but i guess that was one more awake call, maybe half of the people in street were armed, rifles, pistols, different things.

So we formed something like watch or guard at the street entrance, we roll over burned car as barricade, few men always guarded there.Even then we never were sure is our first neighbor going to attack us, or he ll be friendly.

So we barricade our street from outsiders and put some kind of guard, or watch, but we also barricade our houses from everyone, you can say that was very loose alliance between neighbors.

We used what we had, with constant shelling there was a lot ruins from where we used rocks, pieces of metal plates or anything to make house harder to penetrate.

My weapon was AK 47, folding stock. Lot of the people asked me is it good? Is it better then...? I don t think that s right question, you see many years after that SHTF i had and used for some time m16 ( i think it was M16 A1) and i found it much better than AK47, but in case of another SHTF i going to have Kalashnikov again. Reason is simple, most of the people here use that rifle, that caliber.Same with pistol and same with everything else.

Keep it simple and ordinary.

In that time US air force had mission to drop food from airplanes from high altitudes as a part of the mission to help surrounded cities(not only mine)  there was not any kind of schedule, or right place to wait for them, it was matter of luck.

I ll try to describe one waiting for MRE (it was not only MRE, but we called it, hunt for MRE )

At first real dark we took rifle (if you had it) or any kind of weapon, and go out, usually 3-4 men, never alone.

Some 2-3 miles from my house there was hill, it used to be dense wood, but soon it was naked because need for firewood, so imagine bunch of people climbing on that hill, complete darkness, maybe 300-500 people every night, and waiting for the distant sound of airplane, it was matter of luck, i guess because they dropped that things from high altitude they just never know where they gonna go.

Funny thing was that few miles across that hill was another hill, on that another hill was enemy army, they usually shoot every half hour on our hill with PAT (anti aircraft cannon) in dark, without aiming, because they knew we are there.

They could not see us, but i guess they did not need to see us, every time they hit someone.

On the other side, most of the folks were armed, we fight regularly between us on that hill, for better position behind some rock, or to get some pallete with parachute.

It was regularly to see guy climbing with his buddies on pallets full of flour , loading his rifle with statement " OK this is mine" If you and your friends had more fire power, you tried to convice him somehow:)

So if you had luck and plains dropped something useful right on that hill, you still mostly needed to fight for that.

I still remember everything from that MRE s , food, matches, sauces, salt, cookies...

Many many years later, after peace came, when i had MRE s again in hands, i just felt strange, i wanted to cry and laugh in same time.

Other important thing was with that airplanes missions, we just felt that we are not forgotten, that somewhere somebody thinks about us, sometimes that was more important than food.