This is your chance to ask career Navy SEAL team member (now retired) John Silence all those questions about death and mayhem that have been nagging you for so long. Mr. Silence is here to answer your questions about life, love, ethics, war and death. Mr. Silence will respond to reader questions in his weekly column, bringing his own unique military experience and flair to bear on personal problems and social dilemmas. Or perhaps you are curious about Mr. Silence's experiences as a member of the U.S. Navy. The editors of turtleneck.net asked Mr. Silence a few questions, to give our readers a feel for what the column might be like and to get the ball rolling. Here's what he had to say:

Q. Mr. Silence if I get attacked by a mugger what should I do?
A. My advice is to stab them in the neck with anything handy. I often carry a specially sharpened house key for just such a purpose. Learning how to kill people with toothpicks and drinking straws can really help set your mind at ease. Barring that, supposing perhaps that they have a "weapon" trained on you from behind, try thrashing about like a fish in a boat bottom, making as many loud and bizarre noises as possible in an attempt to draw curious onlookers. But please, don't buy into this "never fight back" bullshit. Attack with maximun prejudice. Scream, bite, kick, gouge the eyes, step on their genitalia. Many times the assailant won't even have a real firearm, and you can then proceed to take my first piece of advice.

Q. Mr. Silence have you ever had to use a dead guy as a life preserver?
A. I needed to once, but the entry wound had gotten his bladder and one lung, so he didn't float so well. So I clung to my seat cushion instead. This was back in '76, on a civilian flight to San Antonio to visit my daughter, pilot died right there in the cockpit of a heart attack (cocaine) and the co-pilot turns out to have been an ex-marine cargo pilot. He'd never even touched the controls through his entire career. We went down hard into the Gulf, and the guy next to me got a structural rod through the torso. I thought he'd still float, but no go.

Q. Mr. Silence how do you make a homemade parachute?
A. If you have silk sheets, use those, if not, it's time to raid mommy's underwear drawer. Be on the lookout for synthetics if your mom is cheap, they may feel like silk, but you need the real thing. Patch together a 3m diameter piece of silk with canvas reinforcement at the attachment points. use good thread, with a zigzag stitch. Then tie several 4m lengths of n.7 twine to the silk. pack the entire thing carefully into a child's backpack, rigging the pack with a simple ripcord by tying a dog collar to the button-style closure of the pack.

Q. Mr. Silence have you ever killed anyone with your thumb?
A. In the Navy's opinion, the thumb is really overrated as a weapon. It's bulky, slow, hard to conceal. Sure you can kill a guy with it, but good luck sneaking it onto an airplane. So we don't train with the thumb a whole lot, just enough to protect ourselves if we have no alternative. Now, the pineal gland--there's a powerful combat tool. Easy to hide, nearly undetectable in modern weapon scans, and deadly, deadly, deadly.

Q. Mr. Silence I'd like to learn a little about Navy SEAL training. Do they really make you run up and down the beach with a boat full of dead raccoons on your back ? Or is it opossums?
A. Its a miscellany of small mammals, mostly rodential. It depends on what they have lying around. If the supplier has racoons, we'll do racoons. If a Team has just returned from a maneuver where they had to kill a slew of sewer rats, we'll use sewer rats. I've seen both racoons and opossums.

Q. Did you ever have to use any antler type quadrupeds in the boat?
A. Cloven-hoofed mammals? We occasionally had to pitchfork truckloads of frozen goats and gazelles into a swimming pool to create a makeshift bridge so we could secure a target.

If you have a question you'd like to Ask John Silence, please send it to: asksilence@turtleneck.net. John Silence will choose the questions he likes the most and answer them weekly here in the exclusive turtleneck.net column Ask John Silence.

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