Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [41]
“All right, I want your undivided attention for the next two hours, because what you learn here today and how you apply it will determine your success in this course and at selection. As a Special Forces soldier, you must be able to navigate with a map, compass, and protractor under any conditions. I’ll say that again: A Special Forces soldier must be able to navigate with a map, compass, and protractor under any conditions. Now, you and I know we all go to war with GPSs and Blue Force Trackers and all kinds of neat technology, but you still have to read a map. When your high-speed Garman Etrek or your Magellan Navigator goes south on you, you’d better be able to use a map and compass. And some of the locals that you’ll have to train to fight may not read or write, so you’re going to have to teach them how to use a map and compass.”
The instructor is Sergeant First Class Randy Loften. Loften is from Waycross, Georgia, and has been in the Army for seventeen years, in Special Forces for ten. All his SF time is with 3rd Group. He has two years of college behind him. He’s a French speaker and has seen duty in the Ivory Coast, Guinea, Mali, and Kuwait, as well as two tours in Afghanistan. “I wanted to be a Green Beret ever since I was a little kid,” he told me. “Why be average?” His fellow cadre instructors told me he is a solid Special Forces sergeant, but in at least one way he is far from average. Loften is a top-tier competitive shooter and competes in national-level combat- and precision-shooting events.
“I’m a competitive shooter,” Captain Shields said, referring to Loften. “A lot of us are, but none of us are in his league. Sergeant Loften is one talented marksman.”
Each platoon is crammed into a single floor in one of the old wooden buildings for nav classes. Several air conditioners are running wide open to keep the temperature reasonable, but the air is heavy with the smell of sweat and fatigue. The buildings are old and the post-and-beam construction says they were never intended for use as classrooms, even though they’re now equipped for modern instruction. Behind Sergeant Loften is a large, flat-screen TV, and there are a number of monitors suspended from the ceiling, so none of the fifty-odd soldiers in the room is far from a monitor.
Sergeant Loften makes his way through the basics of land navigation—grid and magnetic north, the military grid reference system, variation, deviation, azimuths, back azimuths, and the mechanics of the Army lensatic compass. He talks about pace count and time-distance calculations. Area maps are passed out to each student, the same maps that they will be using in their fieldwork. They talk about map orientation and terrain features. All this is in preparation for the land navigation problems that are the heart of the preselection training.
“There’s a lot of value,” Loften explained to me, “and, to be honest, a lot of tradition that comes with land-navigation training. Some of these kids grew up hunting and fishing, and they have some knowledge of fieldcraft and reading terrain. Others have grown up in the city, and going into the bush was playing in the vacant lot next door or a family outing in a state park. In Special Forces, we usually work in