Review:
The Relucant Partisan Volume One: The Guerrilla
by John Mosby
384 Pages, Soft bound, black and white photographs
"The bulk of this handbook has concerned individual and critical skills for the conduct of foot mobile infantry patrols in the tradition of the classical light infantry model of the frontier woodsman-scout."
For those of you unfamiliar with his blog, John Mosby (a nom de guerre) is a former US Army Special Operations soldier who offers up his thoughts at this blog (
https://mountainguerrilla.wordpress.com/) and provides firearms/tactical training. His writings are frequently about individual skills and abilities, deep thoughts on team and tribe, and a smattering of tips and tricks from a guy who's been there and done that. This book is an organization and distillation of ideas previously presented in his blog.
Each chapter begins with some combination of exploring the past/current methods for training the skill, identify the critical goals of that skill and then the steps needed to achieve the goal.
The following topics are addressed:
Fitness, Unarmed Combatives, Marksmanship, Tactical Casualty Care, Camoflage, Orienteering, Light Infrantry Drills/Small Unit Tactics and a brief Troop Leading outline.
Reading is not the same as Doing, and 384 pages isn't enough to make anyone a master on any one of the subjects presented. It should be enough to inform you of the gaps in your abilities, spark some critical thinking and hopefully light/rekindle/fan the flames to be better. At the end of each chapter a list of recommended reading is provided should you decide to seek out more depth. The appendix of the book includes a few specific articles from his blog and Programs-of-Instruction from his courses.
There are infrequent spelling mistakes and some formatting/pagination issues. Nothing that is deal breaking, in my opinion.
The book can be purchased via Forward Observer Magazine
https://readfomag.com/shop/or by contacting the publisher
J.W.
c/o 2184 Channing Way #201
Idaho Falls ID8 3404
