Techniques to Save Your Life | Fight To Survive | FD Survive

The merciless wild, the heartless seas. When nature unleashes her cruelty, could you escape? Could you survive? These are the true stories of outdoorsmen, confronted by death, armed with raw courage and a will to live. They are the ones who beat the odds and return from their own fight to survive. Each week, we've relived remarkable stories of hunters and fishermen taken to the brink of life and death. Now, Green Beret Terry Shepard takes us deeper inside these amazing tales with his unique perspective Think about it. The reason these survival stories are so compelling is because we automatically ask ourselves, what would I do? How could I possibly survive such a life and death situation? October 2009, father and son bow hunters Ron Lemming, Jr. and Sr. head deep into the Wyoming wilderness looking for elk. Before leaving camp, they pray for safety and for their arrows to fly straight. The plan is for Ron, Jr. to call and try to lure an elk to walk by his dad. Ronnie hears a stick break behind him. And I turned around, and that's when I seen the bear. His ears went flat, and he came straight at me at full speed. The grizzly is charging down on Ronnie Lemming, and his father can only watch in horror. The very first thing that I thought of when I saw that bear behind him, just for a split second, I was holding him when he was a little tiny baby. Ron does the one thing he can do to save his son and takes a shot at the charging bear. Grizzly keeps coming. I saw my dad draw his bow back. I heard his bow go off, and I seen a flash of an arrow just go. I didn't know if the arrow hit the bear. And about the same time, I was on the ground. I guess the bear had caught me at that point and knocked me down. When I hit the ground, the first thing I could think of was, well, I didn't want to be on my stomach. I wanted to be on my back where I could see what was going on. And I rolled right straight over to my back. Ronnie's laying on his back, kicking and slugging. I mean, he was fighting for his life. But had Ronnie made a fatal error? Ronnie is running for his life. He runs, he gets hit by the bear, and he goes down on his belly. Now, conventional wisdom sort of says, if you're in that position and a bear is on you, the best thing to do is to curl up, use your backpack if you have it, keep your head protected, your groin protected, and hope that the bear loses interest in you. I don't know. I don't like that word, hope. I'd have done exactly what Ronnie did. I'd have turned and fought the bear. I've been training my whole life, and I've never been taught to give my back to the enemy. In this moment in Ronnie's life, the bear, unfortunately, is his enemy. So he did exactly what I would have done. He hit the ground, and he turned on his back. Now, at this point, you've got the rest of your life to figure out how to get this bear off of you. The best place to attack him would be his face. There's no muscle there. There's no armor. His eyes are unprotected. His snout's very, very sensitive. So start striking that. Make that bear so uncomfortable that he's like, I gotta get off this guy. And protect yourself just like you would in a fight, in an MMA fight. Keep your feet up, protect your groin and your belly, and use your hands and arms to shield from the bear's swipe. So by going like this, boom, you can shield it, and then also counter right away. Get off, boom, boom, boom, crack, crack, crack. Do the best you can. Ronnie had no other choice, in my opinion. He did what most of us would do, which is basically fight for your life. They always say, never fight the bear, but here's what I would say to that. Two rules of thumb. Never say never, and never say always, because there's always gonna be an exception to the rule. Ron's fury works. He breaks free. But the bear catches him and keeps attacking. The bear kind of pinned me down up against that tree, and it knocked the wind out of me, and trying to turn around and reach behind me, and that's when he bit through my hand. Do is try and get him off of him, and I started beating on it with my bow. But suddenly, the grizzly turns away, heads down the hill, and drops over dead. Ron's arrow had struck the bear directly in his heart. What's amazing when you think about the shot that Ron made, when you shoot a bow, even the smallest jolt, even the smallest breath will send that arrow off course. Now, if you're shooting 10 feet away, you could make a mistake, and you're still gonna hit the target, but we're not talking about hitting the bear. We're talking about hitting the bear and cutting it through the aorta and into the heart. You can't do anything wrong. Your breathing's gotta be there. Your trigger control's gotta be there. You gotta get the right picture. He just drew and shot, which to me makes the shot even more miraculous, is that it didn't just hit the bear. It was a kill shot. Both Lemmings believe that arrow was in fact guided by a higher power, and that's hard to dispute. But Ronny's survival was also influenced by his unrelenting will to live. Fight to survive. Has shown us nature's fury in the woods, as when Jackson Jordan is torn at by coyotes, but true terror lies below in the jaws of the deadly bull shark. Look, everybody knows when you cut, you bleed, but the ironic part is the sharper the cut, the finer the cut, the less bleeding because there's less tissue damage. A shark bite is anything but a fine cut. You've got a mass of interlocking razor teeth that clamp down, crush, and then tear away. This causes massive tissue damage and thus massive bleeding. Couple that with the fact that you're in salt water that keeps you from clotting, and you've got a life or death situation in a matter of seconds. Surviving shark attacks, next. You wanna find a shark? Go where they eat. Fish like to congregate in the trough of water between sandbars, and they also live right where the shelf drops off into the open ocean. June, 2005. Craig Huddo and his brother, Brian, are surf casting between two sandbars off the Florida Panhandle. Then, seemingly out of nowhere. I vividly remember that the only thing that I was thinking was, Craig, this is a dream, you have to wake up right now. Bull shark is clamped on Craig's leg. Brian grabs Craig and tries to pull him to safety. Craig is, he's thrashing at the water. The look on his face, it was just terrible. The shark is not letting go. It literally felt like I was pulling a dump truck. Nothing has prepared either brother for this horrifying encounter. They rely on pure instinct. I need to get this shark off my leg, and so I reach my hand down in hopes of trying to open the shark's mouth and releasing it off my leg. But the shark's razor sharp teeth rip into Craig's hands. Sharks have a very finely developed sense of smell and electrical impulse detection, and it's all concentrated in their snout. The best thing you can do, if they get ahold of you, is to make it very uncomfortable for them to hang on, and the way to do that is to take your hand and strike down or to the sides. Don't punch in, because you're gonna feed him your hand, and don't reach into the mouth to try and pry it open. You're just gonna get cut. Brian manages to pull Craig to shore, trailing a spreading cloud of blood. Help arrives, and they quickly stop the bleeding. Craig is able to survive the attack. Unfortunately, his leg could not be saved, but today, Craig Huddo has made an inspirational recovery. September, 2011, another near-fatal shark attack in Gulf waters. A group of friends are out spearfishing. CJ Wickersham is alone in the water, while his best friend, Connor Bystrom, and the others are taking a break around the boat. I came back up top, and I was just sitting there for a second, catching my breath before I loaded my gun. Then the next thing, I kind of, I felt like a bump, and saw it was a shark. I saw CJ kind of flail on the water, popped his head up, and started screaming. And then, within a split second, there was a five-foot radius of blood around him, and you just knew it wasn't good. I took both of my fists, like, closed, and, like, hit it as hard as I could on the nose. I just looked down, and I could see, it was kind of like a flap on my bathing suit ripped open. Connor reacts with blind courage, diving into the water. During a crisis, a lot of people freeze. Connor, however, did the exact opposite. As soon as he heard his friend CJ calling for help, without thinking, he dove into the water, swam through the blood, grabbed his friend, and towed him back with the shark still in the area. On the way back, he even had the presence of mind to call for a rope from the people on the deck, because he knew he was gonna have to stop the bleeding in CJ's leg, or CJ was gonna die. When I jumped in the water, saw his leg, could see his femur, it was pouring blood out so fast, like, it looked like a faucet was turned on underwater with blood coming out of it. Once we got back to the boat, I just kind of, like, closed his wound, and I had a rope, and I just kept twisting it until I couldn't twist anymore. And then his leg just turned white, and he quit bleeding. Extremity bleeding. Now, those are wounds we can do something about in everyday situations. The most effective way to stop that bleeding in your arms and legs is to apply a tourniquet. Now, the old philosophies of tourniquets were such that, oh, if you put it on, you have a very short time before the limb dies. That's not true. The general school of thought is you have potentially as much as six hours with a tourniquet on your limb before you have tissue death. So, the best thing to do, put a tourniquet on. All right, so how do you do that? What do you have? Pretty much anything you have can work. I'm gonna use something that we have. There's a T-shirt, I'm gonna cut it wide, and we're gonna go from there. So, now I've tightened this down. Now, take a windlass. You can use a pen, a piece of wood, anything you think is not gonna break, and then go ahead and tie it on. Just put an overhand knot, just like that. Now, you crank away, and you just keep turning it, and turning it, and turning it, and turning it. And already I feel a tightening up on my leg. Once you do this and you've got some real blood loss reduction, now you gotta kinda tie it in place. And just wrap it around this way, and cut across it so that it stays and doesn't turn. That's a field expedient tourniquet. It's the best you can do. Doesn't have to be good, it's just gotta be good enough. The coordinated efforts of his friends save CJ's life, and he eventually makes a full recovery. This whole life or death scenario makes me wanna say two things. Hey, CJ, I hope you realize what a friend you have in Connor. And Connor, I know you've never been in Special Forces, but I'll take you on my team any day. Two friends lost at sea, and an agonizing life or death decision. I'm standing in front of something most of us have great memories of. Whether you're swimming, fishing, or surfing in it, the ocean is a huge part of our lives. But you can't forget that what's behind me has an unlimited capacity to suck the life right out of you. It can happen really fast. March, 2012. Best friends Ken Henderson and Ed Cohen head out for a day of fishing off the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Suddenly, for some unexplained reason, the hull of their boat rips open. Water and emergency gear are trapped inside the sinking boat. Now, Ken and Ed are adrift in the frigid Gulf waters, facing a two-day struggle against the deadly effects of hypothermia. So ask yourself this. How long do you think you could last in open water with nothing to protect you? Not as long as you think. Those guys were in the water for 36 hours. During that time, they slowly succumbed to what it feels like to lose your body heat and your ability to keep your engine going. And they started shivering. When you shiver, that's your body's attempt to make heat by friction. When you do this, you're actually gyrating and you're making heat. When you become hypothermic, meaning that your body temperature drops to a core level that will not sustain life, you stop shivering. So when you see somebody who's very, very cold that's been shivering, not shiver anymore, that's pretty ominous. As night falls, the desperate men cling to each other for warmth. We talked during the night. We talked about a lot of things. We talked about family. We talked about how much we loved each other. We prayed together. But hypothermia affects people differently and Ed is failing fast. All he kept saying was, I just wanna get home and kiss my babies. By the next afternoon, all hope seems to have vanished. Then Ken sees a far off oil rig. Ed's condition is critical and Ken must make a life or death decision. Stay beside his dying friend or use what little strength he has left to swim in hope of bringing back help. Normally, if you're out here like this, it's best not to exert yourself and not expose all of your body to this cold water, which will just suck away your heat. If you can, kind of tuck up a little bit and keep that body heat close to you. This is not that easy to do though. You could wrap your arms around and stay like this, but imagine doing this for 36 hours. Ken knew his friend was dying. He just knew it. Probably he tried to talk to him to get him to respond and I bet Ed wasn't responding. So Ken made the most agonizing decision you could probably make in a survival situation. Leave your buddy. Leave him there to go for help. And I wrestled with that decision inside, thinking, well, if I miss the rig, we'll both die out here. If I make the rig, then at least I can get Ed some help. I took off and I started to swim for that rig and I started to cry a little bit knowing that this was probably the hardest decision I'd ever made in my life is leaving my best friend of 20 something years alone, not leaving him out there to perish in the ocean, but leaving him alone in the ocean. After a grueling five hour swim, Ken makes it to the rig. His kidneys are failing, but he manages to direct the Coast Guard to his friend. Sadly, it was too late for Ed and Ken still mourns the loss. Just for a moment, put yourself in Ken's position and have to make that decision of whether to leave your buddy Ed in the water and go for help. You see your friend dying, you know he's failing and you know no help is coming. In the distance, Ken sees an oil rig and makes the call to swim for it. It'd be easy to second guess yourself, but if I had Ken in front of me, I'd sit him down, give him a beer and shake his hand and say, good job, man. That wasn't an easy call, but I think you did the right thing. Coming up, surviving the Everglades. Before my A-team goes anywhere, we do an exhaustive area study of where we're gonna be working. Preparation in that case is really the key. What it comes down to is this, never overestimate your abilities and never underestimate the ability of the area you're going in to hurt or kill you. November, 2009. Jamie Mosch is an experienced hunter in the woods of upstate New York, but now he's heading into the Florida Everglades alone without any real knowledge of the cruel environment he's about to face. The Everglades is 10 times more harsh of an environment than upstate New York. I thought I could handle it. It wasn't a big deal. Jamie gets hopelessly lost. And over the next four days, he faces insects, starvation, and even quicksand before he is eventually rescued. It was like, you know what? If anybody can make it out of this, you can make it out of this. During his ordeal, he had a chance to be rescued when he saw search helicopters flying overhead. Keep seeing these helicopters and they're flying over top of me, but they're not seeing me. Jamie climbs a tree, but the choppers can't spot him in the dense foliage. Now, Jamie went into the Everglades unprepared and that was gonna be a big problem for him, but something he could have had with him, and most people should carry and they kind of forget about it, is this really small piece of equipment. It's a signaling mirror. This one's made specifically to signal something in the distance. And all you have to do is catch the sun, find the dot, find the reflection point, you can even find on the back of your hand, and walk it right into the target you wanna hit. Just like that. And if I use my V to be very precise as an aircraft is going over, bam, bam, bam. This could be seen for a long way away, some 40 miles with good visibility from the air. The takeaway message for this is that you can, with a little bit of thinking, bring some things out there in the woods with you that can make a huge difference. Jamie had a chance to potentially signal an aircraft. It went overhead. He tried to do what he thought he was right, which was to climb a tree and get its attention, but instead of that, if he had something like this, he could have just flashed that aircraft and who knows how it would have turned out. Every one of these stories proves what I know to be true. Human beings refuse to die. They'll do everything in their power to survive and get back home to what they love. You might be untrained, you might be unprepared, but if you refuse to quit, you do have a chance. And sometimes that's all you need. So ask yourself again, could I do this? Could I survive that situation? You already know the answer. Yes, you can.