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fighting lights, and visible laser aiming devices. If you own any night vision gear or an IR laser, bring them too. Use every tool at your disposal, and learn their best uses and worst limitations. Does your red or green laser light up a quarter-mile of tree branches and other foliage, pointing in a direct line to your position? Does your 200-lumen tactical light serve as a beacon for miles around, while also killing your night vision? (Hint: one-eye-open.) Properly used, tactical lights and lasers can end a fight quickly and successfully, but they must be understood as two-edged swords.
     
    NEXT, BRING YOUR FRIENDS
     
    Now that you are becoming an expert at stealthy night movement, initiate some friends and relatives to join your nocturnal habits, and teach them what you have discovered. Their learning curves will be more rapid, because they will benefit from your prior experience on your established land-navigation routes. Teens often take to this like ducks to water. Practice using hand signals, and the least and quietest mouth-to-ear whispering possible to communicate. When you have brought a few buddies up to a certain standard, the highest level of learning can begin. Force-on-force tactical training! “Top Gun,” down on the ground, in the darkness. Man, this is so “tier-one training,” that you should send me loads of money just for giving you this idea. (Or, just buy my novels.)
     
    Since all of your night movement is made in ultra-stealth mode, as silently and invisibly as an Indian (and I mean that in a very admiring way), you will be able to conduct training even in urban and suburban areas. While the placid sheeple in your AO are sleeping, you and your pals shall be creeping, sometimes even right between their houses, (but more on that later).
     
    Okay, on to force-on-force training at night. You will need a few acres or more of mixed terrain where your occasional lights and lasers won’t cause distress. Abandoned commercial property often works well. Or your local woods and fields, or whatever available terrain that you have nearby that combines open areas and areas with limited sight lines such as buildings or woods. Designated roads, fences or streams can signify out-of-bounds.
     
    If you need to keep both hands occupied to “keep it real,” then tape your light or laser to a walking stick, but leave your “M-Forgery” at home. Since you might be sneaking around on land that you don’t own, you might just end the night talking to someone in authority. A light or even a laser you can explain to a corporate security guard or even to Officer Friendly, but a few “deadly high-powered assault rifles,” no way! Plus, going gun free while night training avoids the sticky area of certifying every firearm as perfectly, virginally, ammo-free. No guns, no negligent discharges by gung-ho but careless buddies. But hey, it’s your life, so you decide. Nobody knows your AO and your friends better than you do.
     
    NIGHTTIME FORCE-ON-FORCE TRAINING
     
    There are many force-on-force scenarios you can cook up or adapt depending on your AO and the number of participants, but this is a simple one to start you off. Two players begin on a time signal at opposite corners of the several-acre site. The boundaries are clearly known to both. Both are given identical marching orders.
     
    “This is your land. Violent prisoners have escaped from a local penitentiary after killing the guards. It’s post-SHTF, so no police are available to search for them, but one dangerous killer has set off an intrusion alarm, and is believed to be roaming on this very property. You have fifteen minutes to find him and light him up, or he will leave this area and invade the home of one of your relatives nearby, and do terrible things there. So if you don’t find him in fifteen minutes, it counts as a loss for you.” (Depending on the terrain, you might want to make this a half-hour period.)
     
    The reasons for the time limit and