A Retired Navy SEAL's Field Guide
5 Reasons Why The Hardest Part Of Protecting Your Family Is All The Hours You're Not With Them
4.8 Stars — Trusted By 200,000+ Readers
Reason One
You Can't Be In Two Places At Once
Add up an ordinary week. The commute, the hours at work, the trip out of town, the night shift, the evening you're across the city when the phone buzzes. For most of the people you would step in front of a threat to protect, you are simply not in the room for the majority of their waking life. That isn't a failure of love. It's arithmetic.
Which means the kind of protection that depends on you being present is switched off for most of the week. The checked door only helps if you're the one who checked it. Standing between your family and danger only works if you're standing there. The second your protection needs your physical body in a specific place, it runs on a schedule — and every gap in that schedule is a gap in their safety.
This book is built around the opposite idea: safety that travels with the person instead of the protector. A hundred short, visual responses they carry in their own head, so the thing keeping them safe isn't your location — it's what they already know. It quietly covers the hours you can't, because it doesn't need you there to work.
I Sleep Better On Night Shifts Now
“I work night shifts four days a week. My wife and two kids are home alone more nights than not and there is nothing I can do about that from a job site an hour away. I bought this book and read it first, then left it on the kitchen counter without saying anything. My wife picked it up, read the whole thing, and texted me a week later with three specific things she'd started doing differently. I sleep better on night shifts now. That's not a small thing.”
Reason Two
The Ones You Most Want To Protect Are The Ones You Can Hand The Least
Think about who in your life is stepping onto unfamiliar ground right now. A kid moving into off-campus housing in a city they don't know. A spouse who travels alone for work and sleeps in hotels you've never seen. A parent living by themselves an hour away. The people who most need a second set of eyes are exactly the ones you can't follow.
You can't move into the dorm. You can't ride along on every trip, or sit in the passenger seat of every late drive home. Everything that made you their protector — being there, seeing it first, stepping in — stops at the edge of your reach, and that edge tends to fall right where the risk starts to climb.
What you can send with them is the one thing that doesn't need a plane ticket: knowledge. A short, illustrated field guide teaches the specific checks and instincts that keep a person safe in a hotel, on an unfamiliar street, in a parking garage after dark — the exact places you can't be. It's how you stay their protector in rooms you'll never walk into.
Peace Of Mind From 800 Miles Away
“My son moved to Chicago for work at 23 and I had exactly zero ability to be there if something went wrong. I sent him this book and he called me two weeks later to talk about the surveillance awareness section — not because anything had happened but because it had changed how he moved through the city. That phone call did more for my peace of mind than anything I could have done from 800 miles away.”
Reason Three
You Can't Protect Them From A Danger You Can't See Yourself
Protecting someone starts before anything happens — it starts with spotting the thing early. But most of us were never actually taught what to look for. We can feel when something's "off" without ever knowing why, which means we tend to register danger at the same moment everyone else does: too late to get out ahead of it.
Someone who's been trained sees a different room than you do. They clock the exit, the man whose attention keeps drifting back, the car that's matched three turns, the hotel door that opened while you were out, the setup taking shape a full beat before it moves. That head start is the whole game — and it isn't nerve or instinct. It's a learnable way of reading a space that nobody ever handed the rest of us.
This book hands it over. It's a hundred plain, illustrated lessons in seeing the way trained people see — so you can not only protect the people around you, but teach them to see it too. You can't shield someone from a threat you'd have walked right past yourself. First you learn the eye. Then you pass it on.
I Clock The Exits Now Without Trying
“I didn't expect this book to change how I move through ordinary places but it did. I walk into a restaurant now and I've clocked the exits before I sit down without making a conscious decision to do it. I notice when something in a parking lot doesn't fit the baseline. I've had two conversations with my teenage daughter about what that looks like and she's started doing it too. You can't teach someone to see what you can't see yourself.”
Reason Four
Fear Isn't A Plan, And It Doesn't Transfer
When you can't be there, the instinct is to warn. Text "be careful." Send the news story. Hover a little. It feels like protecting — but all it really passes along is your anxiety, and anxiety keeps no one safe. A tense, nervous kid isn't a prepared kid. A spouse who's permanently on edge isn't a spouse who knows what to do.
Worry is a feeling looking for somewhere to land, and when you hand it to someone you love, you just end up with two anxious people instead of one. What actually protects a person is the opposite of a vague warning: a specific, calm, do-this-then-that response they can run without thinking. Fear says "something bad might happen." Preparation says "if it does, here's exactly what you do." Only one of those transfers.
This book is built to make that conversion. Instead of "please be safe," it gives the people you love concrete, rehearsed actions — how to check a room, break a hold, notice a tail, get gone — taught in a way that steadies them rather than scaring them. It turns the thing you can't stop feeling into something they can actually use.
Steady, Not Scary
“My wife was getting more anxious about safety after some things happened in our neighborhood and I didn't want to respond with more fear — I wanted to give her something practical. This book was exactly right for that. It's not scary, it's steady. Here's what to notice, here's what to do, here's a skill for that specific situation. She told me she felt less anxious after reading it, not more. That's the right outcome from a safety book.”
Reason Five
A Warning Gets Ignored. Something They Want To Read Doesn't.
There's a reason "stay aware" bounces off a teenager and a safety lecture makes a spouse's eyes glaze over. Advice delivered as a warning feels like being managed, so people tune it out at the exact moment you most want it to stick. Protection that doesn't land isn't protection. It's noise.
The thing that changes everything is the format. Short lessons, one idea at a time, each with a picture that makes it obvious — genuinely interesting to flip through instead of a chore to sit through. People pick it up out of curiosity and absorb the habit sideways, without ever feeling handled. The most protective knowledge on earth does nothing if the person won't take it in, and almost nobody takes in a lecture.
That's why this works where nagging fails. It's protection disguised as the most interesting book on the shelf — the kind a college kid actually reads on the flight, the kind a spouse flips through on the couch. You're not delivering a warning they'll resist. You're handing them something they'll want to open, that happens to make them far harder to catch off guard for the rest of their life.
A Lecture Lasts 30 Seconds. This Lasted A Weekend.
“My 16-year-old does not read. Getting him to look at anything that isn't a screen is a full negotiation. I left this on the kitchen table without telling him to read it. Three days later he'd finished it and was explaining the surveillance detection section to his younger brother. The illustrated two-page format is genuinely different — each skill is short enough to finish and visual enough that it sticks. A lecture would have lasted 30 seconds. This lasted a weekend.”
National Bestseller — Clint Emerson, Navy SEAL, Ret.
100 Deadly Skills
You can't be everywhere they go. You can make sure they never get there unprepared.
Rated 4.8 Stars — 200,000+ Readers — #1 in Survival, Personal Security & Tactical Skills
Protect Them When You Can't Be There →