Hearken to Adventure, Outrider: Your Nation Cries Out for Action

There is always something to do.

Mr. Ford delivered the following speech at the Old Glory Conference this May.

To my brothers:

I am ever grateful for the camaraderie and support from the Old Glory Club. Over the course of six months, I tried to help the people in the wake of Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina. The storm slammed the region, then vanished from the attention radar in a week, despite being the deadliest to strike the mainland U.S. since Katrina in 2005. Stepping in to fill a gap in the competency crisis was not how I envisioned my year to go.

Initial Call

I felt in my heart a very strong calling to venture into the affected areas, but I had no plan of how to do it. It was much too late to get in with a large disaster relief charity, as they require training and would not deploy people who were not full-time members. Heading out there by myself seemed less than useful, and I wasn’t interested in showing up just to look at people’s miseries.

Just as I was beginning to write off going down there, as it seemed that there were to many issues in the way to make it meaningful, fortunately one of our members from the nascent Nathanael Greene Society chapter of the Old Glory Club put out a call for help in his home county in North Carolina. I, along with members of the OGC, responded, and a team headed out.

I stayed three days with them, cutting down trees, reconnoitering roads, doing check-ins with many of the locals, and getting some supplies out to people. The people of this county were good and kindhearted, keeping eyes on their neighbors and making sure that, on the personal level, everyone was taken care of. We were able to talk with the Emergency Manager of the region: although a retired man who had not done this particular work before, and he wanted nothing to do with spreadsheets, he was called by his community members to stand up and take the position; he did, and a single verse of scripture was all that he needed to be convinced. Tragedy had struck this region, but it was clear that they would take care of each other.

Toward Black Mountain

Time demanded that we move onward, our host having to return to personal duties elsewhere in the state. The team largely disbanded, except for two — myself and Not Me Not You, a charter member of the Old Glory Club. We had both traveled very far out to this region, each of us having driven around 15 hours to reach the affected area. We looked for new locations where would be useful, and through communications on X and outreach by Pete Quiñones, we located our new staging area. We had settled in the small incorporated town of Black Mountain, just east of Asheville. Our point of contact was in the Emergency Operations Center, and we had to find something that was useful for the people, but didn’t require formal clearance. The town had established a Volunteer Corps in the visitors’ center for the town, and they needed capable people helping run it. We introduced ourselves and gave verbal résumés; myself being a cyber operations troop and NMNY being a businessman, they happily accepted our help.

Assisting Black Mountain

We walked into a chaotic environment. There was scant cooperation between other organizations, no lines of communication between them, no logistical support, and very little direction for the volunteers. Official hubs of information were set up early, the nearby supermarket being the point of distribution. Many organizations were unaware of the presence (or even existence) of other organizations, resulting in overlapping operations. We took a list of known organizations and hopped in our cars to try and reach them. We established connection with most of them, although some thought themselves perfectly capable of doing whatever they needed to do on their own. Keep in mind that one of the key duties of FEMA is to organize and coordinate nonprofits, and we had arrived to the scene a week late.

Once lines of communication became established, it was time to start invoking soft power to these orgs. Given that we were a volunteer group, not an official government organization, people did not have to listen to us for anything. Our power came from our ability to get manpower in the form of volunteers to people and to distribute information faster than anyone else. The Town of Black Mountain put out regular official press releases, letting people know of advisories and locations of resources for the average person. This required a lot of moving parts: spreadsheets, whiteboards, notepads, sticky notes, and holding a great deal of information in one’s head.

I was used to this sort of operations and coordination from my time in the military, but I lost one of the most important assets available to me only a few days after we arrived: my OGC brother. I was working 12–14-hour days, caching large amounts of information in my mind, and without a second person with whom I could communicate and freely bounce things off of, I slowly went insane over the course of the next month. Fortunately, I had other people on the ground whom I could characterize as “our people”; I could deploy them, but besides them, I was rather alone. OGC member Melon arrived about two weeks into my breakdown, and I was able to shift some of the work with his help. I was completely shot by the time Halloween arrived. I had distributed OGC volunteers who had come up to volunteer temporarily, but someone who could stay a few weeks greatly improved continuity. During this time, the director of the volunteer corps had built a contiguous operations plan to help keep efforts sustained into the long term, and as people left the area, we had to scale back our operations. We also had to leave the visitors’ center, which was our staging ground, because by now tourists had started coming into our office to ask us whether nearby local parks and stores were open. The Volunteer Corps relocated, and right before the move, I received a personal call from my cousin asking me to help with his brother who was in a personal predicament of his own. Consulting the team, I made the choice to take care of family matters, and made a promise that I would return as soon as I could.

Redeploying

Three days after I left, operations imploded. The Governor, Roy Cooper, ordered an end to the state of emergency on November 5. This ended operations for the Emergency Operations Centers, FEMA support, and Red Cross Readiness, and many of the out-of-state charities ended operations with them. People still had problems with mold and health hazards, nowhere near rebuilt. People would die from secondary and tertiary causes that were not related to the hurricane. And unfortunately, because the officials had left shortly after the disaster, we will probably never get good metrics on just how devastating this event was (and will be) to the region. When I attempted to return, I looked at organizations that I could integrate with, but I was shocked at the number that were no longer there. I made contact with a few people to whom I had assigned missions while I was down the first time, and I was fortunate that one of my teams had grown and had started their own mission.

Reorienting

I fell into their operations, and we tackled the next big thing that we were concerned about: the cold. While FEMA had provided temporary hotel vouchers to some people, there were still many who were unable or unwilling to move, sometimes hours away, into a hotel in the ghetto of Asheville. The hotel vouchers also had a nasty habit of not being renewed, causing people to have to move again. These vouchers were also only available to “Vulnerable Populations,” so you often had a combination of single mothers and immigrants being the only ones at these hotels. We came up with several options for most people, and worked with a few charities to source shelter: campers, “climate-controlled storage units,” and hot tents. Many people were staying on neighbors’ property, using Ozark Trail tents which were not suitable for the weather. It rained often, and the biting cold often brought temperatures below freezing, meaning that a heat source had to be included in any solution. We moved 40 families into winterized campers, and put over 60 people into hot tents, and passed many people on to other organizations that built climate-controlled sheds. These hot tents were waterproof and flame-resistant, and they had a slot in them where we could install a food-burning stove. After all, there was plenty of firewood to go around.

I would like to take a moment to thank Pete Quiñones. He got many tents donated to us, and helped us in a critical supply time when we had no tents left to distribute. We were working with significantly less resources than big disaster relief organizations, and he was able to keep us operating at a critical juncture.

The food and clothing that people donated was directly dropped off all around the larger Asheville area, getting people who lost everything a little bit of something. Fuel was also an issue; people needed propane to cook. As a small organization, we still received physical donations and had people reaching out directly to us for help, but we had significantly less throughput than the organizations that were there in the first few weeks. We had to make do with what we got.

I learned from a few conversations that I had with some charities that a lot of their work was going to need to be picked up by people locally, because we didn’t want to hurt the local economy by providing labor for free that was non-emergency and that we were not exactly qualified to do. We tried getting people jobs and tools that they needed by networking with the larger area. People needed these jobs, because businesses that were all along the river were completely wiped out, along with many homes that were in the area. Water had crested to 50 feet along the Swannanoa River, and debris and houses were lodged in trees along the path of destruction.

Inauguration Day

On the day that Trump took office, things immediately started changing on the ground. I saw C-130s in the airport and boots on the ground. On the fourth day of his presidency, he headed down to the area again to survey the damage.

Breakdown

This work was exhausting, but with a good team, things were certainly getting done.

Unfortunately, interpersonal drama and six months without a break led our ragtag team to dissolve.

The team was out of money and out of energy, and a few of us went out of our minds. Some members shifted over to other organizations that they had built relationships with, while some of us went home to the far-flung places that we came from.

In mid-January, floods came to the region just north of us. Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia experienced floods that were quickly followed by six inches of snow. Disasters seemingly are plentiful in this day and age, and there are always people who are needing help. Recently, I was called by one of my team members, letting me know that there was work to do in Maryland. Disasters are ever present, and there is always something to do.

Remote

Having no team and no place to stay, I had to return home. I fortunately still had my laptop, my contacts, and an Internet browser. After returning home, I provided a lot of remote support to people who still needed it, leveraging our large network of contacts to get advice on some structural projects, like a bridge and a home that had extreme drainage issues. After asking, I got 15 people contacting me from all disciplines who were able to give their input on how we should proceed. I requested transportation of water directly from trucking companies, leaning on the fact that there are federal provisions for them donating their time and equipment for charitable work, and one of our own Old Glory Club members made the drive. I continued the work: grant-writing, appealing to the government, pushing for help, even when no one had heard or really much cared about these regions once they were hit with other disasters. I slowly had to transition out of this role, passing off my knowledge base and contacts, my procedures and experience, to the people I was helping. It had been six months, and I had done what I could.

Sweeping Lessons Learned from Western North Carolina Disaster Relief

During my time there, I saw many things that revealed critical organizational issues, individual competence, and systemic failures. While trying to keep the targets of my critiques limited, here are the key lessons learned from six months of relief efforts:

1. Competence Drives Success: The quality of individuals within an organization is the single greatest predictor of mission success. Faith-driven and veteran-led teams consistently outperformed others due to their adversarial stance toward bureaucracy and experience in high-pressure, low-resource environments. Combining both traits—faith and military background—created uniquely capable individuals who understood what time it was and executed effectively. Organizations must prioritize recruiting and retaining high-caliber talent to avoid failure in chaotic settings.

2. Small Teams Outmaneuver Bureaucracy: Small, agile teams achieved greater results by bypassing official roadblocks. Using social media and word of mouth, they gained local trust and delivered aid to areas where officials couldn’t reach, or where access was restricted due to fears of looting or distrust of outsiders. While this was a stopgap compared to a larger force coming in, having small teams will be necessary to accomplish detail-oriented tasks in a grid-down situation.

3. Government Inefficiency Hampers Response: FEMA, tasked with coordinating disaster response under the National Response Framework, arrived three days late, understaffed, and unprepared to deploy infrastructure. Their remote claims process met some needs but failed on secondary damage or cleaned-up sites, and their early withdrawal, using the excuse of local threats and the anticipation of Hurricane Milton, left communities stranded. Similarly, the Red Cross failed to deliver on promises, mismanaged destroyed structure searches, failed to deliver critical supplies like hot tents, and neglected volunteer coordination.

4. Bureaucratic Barriers Stifle Coordination: The National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (NVOAD) aimed to coordinate relief but was hindered by certification requirements, dues, and bureaucratic red tape, excluding capable smaller groups. Many meetings were unproductive, slowing response efforts. This organization varied in quality from county to county.

5. Local Distrust Complicates Aid: Unelected officials, such as volunteer fire chiefs and community leaders, often blocked external aid due to concerns about looting or outsider interference, sometimes with near-malicious intent. This resistance choked goodwill and delayed shelter and supplies. Unincorporated towns leaned on de-facto rulers, such as their Volunteer Fire Departments, because there was no other organization that could interface with the government.

6. Resource Scarcity Breeds Mission Creep: Smaller organizations and local churches, while vital for immediate community support, struggled with mission creep, manpower shortages, and conflicts with normal operations. Larger, well-funded groups had deeper resources but lacked operational mobility and suffered from trust issues due to inconsistent volunteer vetting.

7. Volunteer Impact Depends on Quality: Volunteers from the Old Glory Club were force multipliers, often outperforming others by a factor of two to ten in the organizations they were deployed to. In contrast, government-affiliated or mercenary volunteers frequently missed targets, dropped communications, and failed to deliver.

The Dynamics of Power

Domains of Power

First, there are only three domains of power that mattered on the ground. There was political power, social power, and financial power. If you had holdings in any of these domains, then you had real impact on the ground. Each of these domains had different specialists, and often time one domain would leak power into another domain as a dynamic and ever-changing struggle. There was no supremacy of government, churches, or financiers, although the assumption of most people was that the government had all of the power. When talking with a community organizer, she shared that she had expected FEMA to come rolling into town, with a mobile command station and confetti, and, using my own words here, effectively set up a fascist temporary government that would fix everything. She didn’t see action, and, as a business owner, she had to take initiatives into her own hands to fix her community.

It was painfully clear that after a week out, most of these people were going to be on their own. To many of the deep red mountain folk, this was perfectly fine, because their assumption was that old Reagan saying that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” This attitude helped get them through the worst of it, but even now as we speak, there are still debris piles all along the rivers of Tennessee and North Carolina that are not cleaned up. People in these areas rightfully view their local governments as completely useless and corrupt, and it’s been a known issue to them for a long time. Corruption, funneling funding, managing-not-fixing, crisis events — all that has been a feature in these counties for many years, and it simply is the way things are to most of them. Many of the towns were unincorporated, meaning that they had no official government structure of their own and fell underneath the county for their need. This ultimately left them vulnerable and unable to interface with the larger state and federal governments to get support. Incorporated towns, such as Black Mountain, were able to get water in their pipes after three weeks due to their connections and their ability to wield the political domain. Many of these places won’t have water until next year, not to mention the roads and power lines. Political power is only there if you nurture and guard it, and without it you are left to the mercy of the other domains, or worse, stagnation.

Financial Domain

The state of play on the ground was often shaken up by people who had the ability to move and accomplish things on their own dime. Government and local groups were overwhelmed with responsibilities, and people who had independent wealth were able to take some of the pressure off their hands. A place named Silverado’s was a local business that suspended their bar, grill, and stage to provide a local resource hub and propane refill. Flight for Life was another organization that was independently started with the express goal of helping airlifting people out. The Red Truck Men had the ability to get specialized supplies that were scarce. They were able to provide labor, funding, and repair work, and fund other smaller organizations and teams.

Social Domain

The Red Truck Men were very prudent when it came to the social domain as well, refusing to attach their name to another org, and staying well away from media teams that were not their own. Although they were not exactly locals, they knew the social landscape of the area far better than other out-of-staters. Their leader knew exactly what he wanted to achieve and where he shouldn’t be, and they conducted themselves well as guests.

The social domain of power was heavily leaned upon during this time, as there was solidarity in the culture and a powerful but shy church presence. It was evident that the culture war had eroded the connections between people, as it has affected us all. People couldn’t speak plainly, people had to bounce from distribution point to distribution point, or help sometimes couldn’t be found for people because they simply didn’t have the connections. conversely, the people in churches were the best off, as they had the immediate gathering places, manpower, and social connections to make things happen among their congregations. Churches often housed volunteers, provided space for urgent care workers, and used their space for storing supplies. One of them had a weekly propane refill, but was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people in need.

Other people stepped in this gap, providing social and supply needs, but it was always subpar and had this almost fake feel-good liberal tone to it. This fakeness reached out further than hubs, though, and anyone who had a significant presence on social media could easily use his audience and reach to sway where supplies went. For instance, if a person donated to a social media person instead of a church or official organization, the donation couldn’t be reclaimed at a later time if the recipient proved to be a bad actor. Scammers, profiteers, organizations that came to get views on social media were all rampant in the area. Because the social domain has been corroded and allowed anyone to fill in, there was extreme difficulty in being able to vet who was getting power and limiting their actions from hurting others. Specifically, if an organization like the United Cajun Navy used its platform and power to sway where resources went and which people got them, a bad actor in their organization would have the ability to coerce volunteers and survivors into situations that would not be tolerated in a properly ordered social sphere. Outsiders, unfortunately, did a lot of harm.

Network Effect

So seeking to be an outsider who did things right, I wanted to make sure that my efforts were the most effective being in a small team.

Because the environment was so dynamic and ad hoc, the network effect was particularly useful. If you had the ability to make friends quickly, and act as an in-between for people in need, you could maneuver in the spaces of the domains of power and make measurable improvements to people’s lives. Being comfortable as a generalist and as someone who wants to learn skills, you too can make a manifestly more powerful impact than someone who only knows one particular skill. Interfacing with built systems, such as learning the Incident Command Structure (ICS) that FEMA should have used and been trained in, is free and not too expensive of a time sink. Knowing Incident Command lets you immediately understand the structure of any organization worth talking to, allows you to build your own command system with your team, gets you intel, and helps you report incidents such as road outages. The Department of Transportation uses ICS, FEMA uses ICS, EOCS and milbro orgs use ICS. Knowing it can also net you a job as an Emergency Manager, a pretty good job to be in if you’re worried about community.

Tools to Help You Succeed

This brings me to what I learned from my time in North Carolina. Organizing is hard, and nearly impossible if there is a breakdown in communication. For all of our ability to have instant communication over the Internet, our ability in real life has deteriorated. Antisocial tenancies were all around and typical when dealing with people, and the high-trust environment of the past was all but annihilated. Still, despite our antisocial age, things can still get done, but it can be risky to assume that you can rely on prosocial, strong communities.

Tools

These are notable tools that we utilized that I would like to mention again. You should lean on these:

• X and Telegram Networks: Our networks allow us to pull in experience from all across the country and provide much-needed advice on projects that we simply may not have the manpower for, or we may be missing expertise on. Because of our selection of high-quality people, we’re able to get specific and correct information that can be critical to keeping people alive, getting funding, getting intel, and more.

• Facebook: Facebook is ubiquitous among a large portion of the population. Because of the Friend suggestion feature, you’re able to identify key people who are operating. It also has groups that anyone can join to provide intel, requests, updates, and contact information for any given region. While you cannot specifically lock a group down by geography, the given result of friends and groups gets you near that functionality.

• Short-range radios: Radios are key to running a small team. Phones are less useful as update and request tools, and are often overloaded. Radios allow you to ask immediate questions and get immediate feedback in a team, especially if you’re operating a camp or a point of distribution.

• Starlink: One of the good things that was provided in the area was free Starlink service. While the dishes themselves were not free, they were able to be hiked into areas that had damaged communications and were critical to keep up to date on teams who were constantly hiking in wooded areas.

• Trash equipment and old methods: Rescue rafts were pulled out of the trash. Old, outdated equipment still functioned 20 years later. There isn’t a need to get the newest equipment in order to be functional, especially if you still need to secure a site or if you don’t have power. Old ways of setting up physical alarms and even watchmen were needed. I used a 60-year-old flatbed to make a lot of supply runs.

• Area Study: Conducting a full Area Study was not possible before I deployed to North Carolina. This would have been incredibly useful to do beforehand, and I have one built for my area that I live in. Key points of an area study include: Geography, Populations, Infrastructure, Resources, Political and Social Power Structures, Economic Factors, Threats and Vulnerabilities, and the Cultural and Historical Context of an area. An area study helps you know where to stage, whom to trust, what to prep for, and how to move around the area. This is a key intel tool that speeds up your operations if you have it, and can be built as you go along, but it’s important to have for your area. Look to Mike Shelby of Gray Zone Research on X for resources on this.

• Virtual work spaces: Have a plan ahead of time of what you intend to use for your virtual information collator. Pen and paper will get you far, and operations can be completely done on whiteboards, but having a shared platform through which you can coordinate information will be useful. For instance, if you want to have a virtual phone number for your team, you would want to get a Google Voice number that can be logged into from the Web or from another team member’s phone.

Points of Pain

People can make disaster areas much harder than they need to be. While I’ve already given an overview, these are some key issues you should meditate on in any given disaster:

• Manpower: Everywhere you looked, there was a lack of manpower and people who could simply do the grunt work. Having a spreadsheet of your members list, and making the correct call on whom to delegate where, is critical to making sure that you’re not wasting manpower. Use the buddy system for any and all operations.

• Bad Actors: Filtering bad actors is painful and difficult to do. Putting the wrong people in positions of any authority will create a petty tyrant, and not being smart about turning people away can mean lost equipment, bad image for your organization, and many lost man-hours trying to solve the problem. Be sure that you know who is in leadership, have direct accountability, and make sure that you already have a gameplan on how to filter people and ask them to leave.

• Logistics: Plenty of supplies were going in, but having a warehouse, a method of transportation for larger items, and timed deliveries always had some points of pain. Be sure that you have someone familiar with the principles of logistics, and have an officer dedicated to making sure that supplies can go where they need to go. Plenty of orgs did not have this, and it was frequently their bottleneck. Redundant supplies, too much of a given supply, and distribution were always difficult to manage.

• Space: Real estate quickly became much needed, as staging areas filled up quickly and stayed full of donations that would not be moved quickly. When receiving donations, be sure to look at what they’re giving before you accept it. Plenty of summer clothes were given to large points of distribution when we had winter on our heels. Filled warehouses were not able to function, and the cost and time to get one up and running is not worth it if you simply cannot get things out.

• Tracking: Have a method of tracking requests, missions, tickets, and operations. Have a method of check-ins, for knowing where your teams are. Delegate responsibility. I know that this may seem obvious, but not having this in play early led to a lot of screw-ups and lost details, such as even failing to establish a point of contact.

• Finance: Most operations cannot be self-funded for too long. Be sure to have a method of either getting grants, or having large sponsors. Having this ahead of time means that you can anticipate exactly how long you’ll be out there, and helps relieve the stress of not knowing where your next meal comes from. You need to be putting in requests to large businesses to request donations, equipment, and help. Directly appealing works, and it is worth the effort.

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A special note on political power: seek power. This may seem trite, but you need to be actively trying to seek power if you want your area to be taken care of. Governance only works if there is someone at the wheel to steer and to make decisions. Take control, because I know you can make the world better, and I cannot trust those in power to know what to do. Go out and conquer.