Reposted from BonnieGadsden
In light of the Trevon Martin racial hysteria, I'm doing a little research into the LA Riots of 1992 to see what we are to expect if fuel keeps being thrown on the fire and it rages out of control. I found a series of posts on www.aussurvivalist.com from a man about his first hand experience in the riots
http://bonniegadsden.blogspot.com/2012/03/1992-la-riots-first-hand-account-part-i.html#.UdSmJ_numvE
The L.A. Riots: A First hand experience
The truth is that the L.A. Riots were the most extreme physical terror I have ever experienced. Watching the recent remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD last month brought it all back very sharply - the whole movie was just one giant flashback for me.
Solsys, I was working as a security guard at the very high class Rodeo Drive boulevard when the riots started. I knew the verdict was coming down that day on the Rodney King police trial and I had been trying to get ready the best way I knew how, by stocking up on food and buying ammunition. At that time, I was not a true survivalist, just a nascent embryonic paranoid. I knew enough of my American history to be able to predict what the blacks would do based on their previous behavior the decades beforehand if they did not approve of the verdict. I will say that 99.999% of the people I told to watch themselves before the riots were exactly as lame and feeble as we have often accused them of being here on AusSurvivalist.
The average person just has no idea of what a thin veneer civilization is until it cracks underfoot. I have to say honestly - neither did I before the riots.
The thing rocked my world so violently that I have never really been the same person. I think my personality was altered as a result of the riots and I have kind of been on another plane of awareness ever since. I never really came down off the adrenalin and returned to my sleepy eyed sheeple state afterwards.
Anyway, I had been talking to the celebrity slut that day known as Pia Zadora, a second rate softporn star who was rumored to have had sex with nearly every male and most females in Hollywood. She was asking for assistance with the lift down to the parking garage, which wasn't working. I radioed my supervisor to ask why the lifts were keyed off and he came back over the radio sounding really weird and frightened. He said "We're shutting everything down. I need you to make your security check right now and lock everything up. When you've done that, you are released to go home for the day, we are being relieved by some heavily armed private police who are being shuttled over from Beverly Hills." I asked what the problem was. Pia Zadora was staring at me like she thought this was some elaborate prank. "Listen, Cleve, some really strange stuff is happening. There are apparently spontaneous riots breaking out all over because of the Simi Valley verdict. Lock everything up and get yourself home immediately." I showed Pia Zadora the stairwell access, walked her down to the car and then did my security checks as asked.
I was supposed to meet my wife at Soup Plantation, a well known restaurant down the road. I couldn't get her on the mobile. When I got there and parked, there was a queasy air amidst all the shopping mall splendour and people had a frightened look in their eyes that I had never, ever seen before. The easy listening music in the restaurant was so mundane it was hard to reconcile with the outside windows, which had fire engines, police cars and people running on foot outside. I had planned to just eat quickly with my wife and go home, because I was having trouble absorbing the idea that this thing was possibly even worse than I might have imagined. I thought South Central was so far off, truth is it was about five minutes down the road.
People in the restaurant were watching the television reports, which were growing increasingly more feverish and seemed to just show one new burning building every thirty seconds. I was trying to keep a calm demeanour and went to explain to my wife what was happening.
All of a sudden, a woman in the restaurant screamed. A guy dropped his tray and soup went everywhere. A man was standing in the doorway of Soup Plantation and wobbling on his feet. Blood was gushing out of his forehead which had a nasty gash running right down to his ear. He yelled "They're coming! They are next door in the mall!! They're tearing everything to pieces!"
You could have heard a pin drop. Then the restaurant exploded with activity and EVERYBODY was crawling over the women and children trying to get to their cars in the parking lot outside. I'm talking blind panic here, people smacking into each other like they could not give a fugg less about any human in the world outside of themselves. A guy floored his Subaru and tore the toll gate right off the booth. Everybody else was following him out, the attendant was gone. There was cars hitting each other like bumper buggies at the carnival, nobody seemed to care, everybody wanted to get out to the street.
When we made it out onto the highway, I got my first look at the skyline since I left Rodeo Drive. It looked like the fires of hell were consuming half of the city. My wife was crying, she thought it was the end of the world.
When we were driving home, we saw all kinds of bizarre things that were totally out of place. Like right in the median strip, some businessman sitting on his briefcase with blood all over his pants and a tourniquet. A bunch of black guys surrounding some young couple who looked like tourists literally ripping the woman's clothes off one piece at a time. A homeless guy by the edge of Sunset Boulevard holding a cardboard sign reading "REPENT NOW OR BE DAMNED TO HELL." People running everywhere with shopping carts piled high with groceries or possessions. The smoke forced us to close the car ventilation intakes and circulate the air inside.
We stopped at all the red lights until I realized that very few people were and if we sat in place like this we might get rear ended. I was trying to keep my wife from losing it by staying in control myself, but I was having a really hard time convincing myself I was not dreaming. I kept thinking, this is one of those vivid dreams where something so incongruous will happen I will realize it is a dream and suddenly things will be inconsistent and irrational and then I will awaken. I thought there would be riots down in South Central like Watts and they might be bad but there is no way this could have happened to the entire city like this so quickly. That's what I was thinking.
When we pulled into our driveway off Martin Way it is like I was suddenly seeing with new eyes. Our home was right on Sunset Boulevard, close to an alley that accessed a main road on both sides. That was not a good place to be during the apocalypse. It's like my eyes had X-ray vision when we unlocked our front door. We were completely exposed in our one level flat, our door was made of a composite of cardboard fibers and lots of glue. Any man over 200 lbs could probably just tear the door off the frame. It suddenly occurred to me I lived in a fishbowl with full length windows in the front yard. Like most people this just had not struck me as something important until right at that moment. I had been sleepwalking through my entire life.
The first thing my wife did was to rush over to the television and turn it on. I got my Desert Eagle out of the cupboard and I immediately made a tour of the entire house checking to see if all the windows and doors were locked. Then I came back to the living room and sat briefly with my wife watching the news, just as the last rays of the sun were dying behind the drapes. Night was coming. It looked like on television that nobody was going to be in darkness, though, because half the buildings in the city were catching fire.
I was shaking. I could hear loud voices out in the street, some in fear, some in anger. I peered through the curtains and could only see dark shadows moving out on the sidewalk. I turned the porch light off. There was no way I wanted to go out there, I kept thinking we'll keep the drapes closed and nobody will know we are here. I had this really powerful overwhelming urge to want to rush to a strong door down to a cellar, which I would close behind us and have a rush of relief at finding a place with food, water, light and safety. Unfortunately, there was no cellar.
When I went out and sat in the living room and watched some more television, I got one consistent fact from the news ... apparently the police were nowhere to be found, 911 was not answering and the government had completely abdicated it's responsibility to keep order. The people on the news kept saying something about the police waiting for the national guard to arrive. It took a really long time to sink in before I understood what they were saying. The police had camped out in their stations and were not coming out. You were completely on your own.
My wife finally fell asleep on the couch around midnight. I did not sleep a wink and stayed in front of the television all night, making one cup of coffee after another and monitoring the creep of the riots towards us one block at a time from down in South Central. Every few minutes, a helicopter shot appeared of a new building burning at a ferocious rate almost by magic where just an hour beforehand it had been pristine. They never showed anyone running away from the building, no arsonists ... it was just buildings exploding into bright flames glowing like miniature suns one after the other in a slow procession towards Sunset Boulevard. You would have thought the planet had been invaded by aliens made of fire.
Lots of pundits and talking heads were telling us the previous night was the worst part and it was over. I climbed to the roof of my house and looked towards the south - I had this sick feeling that this was the beginning, not the end. That feeling was absolutely accurate. That was just the tip of the iceberg of what was coming.
I gave my wife a gun, locked the front doors and drove to the supermarket as soon as it was open and found myself fighting dozens and dozens of people at the doors to get inside and raid the place for as much as we could cart away. I got it right this time and bought what I thought would be serious provisions ... powdered milk, dry staples like beans and corn, canned meats, 30 liter springwater jugs. There was a serious dearth of cashiers and I heard the manager say that lots of people would not be coming in at all. There was a kind of electricity in the air like before a storm. Everyone wanted to get home with stocks and cocoon themselves. Some guy was trying to argue with me over a big pack of "D" cell batteries that I found behind the empty display case, I kept staring at him until he shut up and went away. One really old codger had a radio with an earpiece and he was muttering something about the "looting" starting in earnest while he was waiting in line with me. I didn't know what he was talking about at the time.
I waited at the gun shop for thirty minutes trying to buy a few boxes of ammo but the atmosphere there was very violent and utterly strange. There were lots of guys trying to buy guns off people waiting in line because the gunshop owner had reminded them of the thirty day waiting periods they had voted for in referendum and told them they could apply for a permit but would not be taking a gun out of the shop. These guys were begging for guns to protect their families in these pathetic reedy voices it broke your heart to listen to. Just about then a station wagon filled with black youths drove by playing some bass ugly rap music, everyone in the line was ultra tense thinking they were going to do a drive-by on all the white gun owners waiting in line. The wagon pulled off down the street and finally vanished. I gave up waiting and headed back to the house, luckily I had bought a little ammo the week before the riots.
When I got home, I immediately drilled holes for security crossbars on the front and back door and mounted a two-by-four on each to hold the door if somebody was trying to force it.
That afternoon, I began hosing down the roof with water to make it difficult for passing rioters to throw a molotov up there and set the house afire if they came by the alleyway. Some of my neighbours were doing same.
The rabid leftist across the street, a guy with a little goatee like Trotsky and an earring, came over and offered me a blank check if I would loan him my .22 pistol for the duration of the riots. He said his girlfriend was so scared she had been unable to sleep and he wanted it to give her a feeling of security. About two weeks beforehand, this guy had given me a long smug lecture about the evils of guns in private hands. I gave him the cold shoulder and told him to go up the street to the gunshop if he needed a gun. He said, "They've got a ninety day waiting period! I already tried!" I told him "You're s**t out of luck, then, I guess. Can you even appreciate the irony? That is called being hoisted by your own petard." It was true. The guy didn't appreciate the irony. He was a creature of emotion and now felt fear, maybe for the first time in his pathetic life. Ah, the utter blindness to self-knowledge of the liberal mind.
I had a roll of rusty barbed wire I ran completely around the property over the little chainlink fence. It was the only thing I could think of to give some measure of safety to our little dollhouse. I actually wired broken glass bottles to the tops of the gates and locked the latches shut from the inside with big thick padlocks. My wife came out with sandwiches while I was working and as usual had a good laugh at me. Not in a mean way, just amused a bit at how grimly I was going about the task. The previous tenant had left the barbed wire, a half dozen animal traps and some buckets of nails. Only the week beforehand I was complaining to the landlord about the big fat coil of rusty barbwire in the outdoor garage. I set the animal traps in the weeds on the other sides of the gates, because they were the most likely spots for a rioter to try to get a handhold to leap over the fence and land on the other side. Then I set my wife to making caltrops out of the nails using some ten penny wire. In about two hours we had made a couple dozen and I spread these all over the front lawn hidden by blades of grass. Since I had never made a caltrop before in my life I had a weird sense of accomplishment at this.
That night, it was like deja vu of the previous night except ten times worse. They now had burned most of South Central to the ground and were working their way steadily north towards Sunset Boulevard. I had this sense of some epic confrontation approaching when they left the ghetto and started to hit the white neighborhoods the following day.
I went up on the roof to try resting my .203 in various gutter brackets and aiming at different parts of the street to see if I had a clear field of fire if it came to that. A police helicopter passed directly overhead and must have seen me with the rifle, but when he made a second pass after turning around I had dropped it into the gutter with my ammo and thrown some leaves over it, then pretended to be sweeping up on the roof so he might think he had seen a broomstick instead of a rifle. The thing about all this is that it was so out of character for me and yet it all seemed to be so instinctual. I was starting to feel like I had another person inside of me for 27 years and it took the riots to bring my true nature out. I was discovering that I was a survivalist. That was the real person inside of me, it was my real nature coming to the fore under stress.
The news was best summarized as saying the gates of hell had opened in Los Angeles. The Koreans were engaged in firefights with looters from the roofs of their stores, in lieu of a police response. The National Guard was on the way, or so the reporters told us. Darryl Gates was getting asked complicated questions like why the police had been holed up inside the station for three days during the worst riots in United States history. He just gave'em dumb looks and shrugged. The looters were getting more sophisticated and organized, confident in the realization they could operate in an unhindered environment by any law and order. The coming day had a quality about it of climax - everybody had a buzz this was the threshold we were going to step over and see what was on the other side of the world we had known previously.
This is what the news told us, aside from martial law and curfew, when I rose from the couch that morning with the smell of woodsmoke in my lungs filling the air and my wife told me she needed fresh milk for breakfast and real bread. She brushed off my suggestion we use the powdered milk and cook the bread flour I had purchased. She didn't like the way it tasted. She pointed out how quiet it was outside this morning and said the rioters were probably sleeping it off indoors ... she said this was the perfect time to make a run to the Quick Mart for some staples. For some reason this made sense at that time. I soon discovered it wasn't so.
When I started to leave with the Desert Eagle in my hand, she screamed and said the police would shoot me if they saw me with it or arrest me on the spot. She said it was only two blocks and that I should just jog over, grab the groceries and jog back. So I left the Desert Eagle at home, thinking she was right and it wasn't worth getting shot by the cops over some milk and bread.
I didn't jog, I walked quietly and calmly down the alleyway with the sun still rising. I could hear birds chirping and some fire engines far away but otherwise the streets seemed empty.
When I turned the corner and could physically see the Quick Mart, a drunken looking black man, about in his fifties, came shuffling along. "You stretched us too far, white motherf**ker!!! See what you got! This is what you got when you stretch a man! How you like it, pink ass porky pecker!"
We kept backing away from each other with ugly looks, he finally snorted and kept shuffling off.
I did not see another living soul until I made the front of the Quick Mart, which I could have sworn was closed and locked up like everything else with the lights out inside and one lone car parked out front. I tried the door just as a formality and it swung open. I stepped inside and said "Hello? Anybody in here? The door was open."
This was how the great battle of the Quick Mart began.
READ THREE MORE CHAPTERS HERE:
http://bonniegadsden.blogspot.com/2012/03/1992-la-riots-first-hand-account-part-i.html#.UdSmJ_numvE
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