I hope I would survive based on my previous experience, though not sure if I can call it "survival":
In 1989 I was 14. My father took me, my brother and two other relatives for fishing to Kazakhstan on Ili river. At that time it was difficult with everything in USSR, so the only food we managed to get with us was a few kilograms (2-3) of tomatos, couple of kilograms of onion, and a bit of bread (2 loafs). Our gear was a car, extra fuel (about 50 litres), a shotgun, 4 fishing rods, some fishing gear, shovel, warm clothing (but no extra t-shirts or trousers), one torch, toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, one hand-made knife with very brittle thin blade, one axe and a cooking pot. I guess this was everything.
We lived on this for about 8 days. Yes, we had one or two encounters with criminals collecting marihuana, were stopped by rangers, police and on one occasion saw night training bombing of MiG-23 fighters less than a mile away from us. We got our food from the river, i.e. fish. Theoretically speaking, if we caught nothing we would eat nothing because the nearest villages were something like 40 miles away from us, and roads there are still almost non-existant. However, we were very lucky every day. It may sound strange, but I got used to fish so much that when we came back home I did not really want to eat normal meat.
I really enjoyed that trip, therefore cannot really say it was "survival", but, well, I learnt many skills from that trip, especially how to avoid snakes (there were so many of them! One crawled into our sack and ate our fish, became so fat that could not crawl out through the sack net and we had to kill it... It was disgusting!) at night, what grass you can eat, how to find spots which most likely will have fish etc.
Victorinox is much better knife than anything I had until, probably, 1997, so I would say, yes, such a knife would help a lot. Plus, you need to remember that most armies in the world issue knives much worse in quality than Victorinox to their soldiers. Is it only american army which allows thier soldiers to buy their own knives?
In 1989 I was 14. My father took me, my brother and two other relatives for fishing to Kazakhstan on Ili river. At that time it was difficult with everything in USSR, so the only food we managed to get with us was a few kilograms (2-3) of tomatos, couple of kilograms of onion, and a bit of bread (2 loafs). Our gear was a car, extra fuel (about 50 litres), a shotgun, 4 fishing rods, some fishing gear, shovel, warm clothing (but no extra t-shirts or trousers), one torch, toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, one hand-made knife with very brittle thin blade, one axe and a cooking pot. I guess this was everything.
We lived on this for about 8 days. Yes, we had one or two encounters with criminals collecting marihuana, were stopped by rangers, police and on one occasion saw night training bombing of MiG-23 fighters less than a mile away from us. We got our food from the river, i.e. fish. Theoretically speaking, if we caught nothing we would eat nothing because the nearest villages were something like 40 miles away from us, and roads there are still almost non-existant. However, we were very lucky every day. It may sound strange, but I got used to fish so much that when we came back home I did not really want to eat normal meat.
I really enjoyed that trip, therefore cannot really say it was "survival", but, well, I learnt many skills from that trip, especially how to avoid snakes (there were so many of them! One crawled into our sack and ate our fish, became so fat that could not crawl out through the sack net and we had to kill it... It was disgusting!) at night, what grass you can eat, how to find spots which most likely will have fish etc.
Victorinox is much better knife than anything I had until, probably, 1997, so I would say, yes, such a knife would help a lot. Plus, you need to remember that most armies in the world issue knives much worse in quality than Victorinox to their soldiers. Is it only american army which allows thier soldiers to buy their own knives?
