Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [42]
“It’s more about what this training teaches a man about himself than a skill he’ll take with him into the groups or into combat,” Captain Shields added. “It’s a confidence builder. If a kid from New York City or LA can take what we teach him and go out on a dark night in these swamps and woodlands and find four separate points on the map that’re two to four miles apart, then that tells us something. It tells us that he’s smart, that he can solve problems in a stressful and unfamiliar environment, and that he’s self-reliant. It also tells us he can perform when he’s tired, a little beat up, and he’s not getting the sleep he’s used to. It’s a pretty good indication that he can learn the other skills he’s going to need to become a Special Forces warrior.”
The navigation classes move outside, where the TAC sergeants and navigation instructors work with the students. They walk with them over various types of terrain, point out the relationship between their two-dimensional contour maps and the actual terrain features. These outdoor classes in the Fort Bragg training areas also allow the students to calibrate their pace and to learn to take a bearing with their compasses. Now they’re ready to be out on their own—almost. The first two nav problems are a day compass course followed by a night compass course, and these initial outings are done in buddy pairs. The following day, they’re out on their own, first in the daytime, then at night. The waypoints on the course are white five-foot plastic posts sunk in the ground. At night they are lit with a chemical light stick, or Chemlite. When they find the point, the students clip their scorecard with the special hand punch tied to the post, take a new bearing, and set out for the next point. On these first iterations, there are a lot of lost soldiers out in the woods, trying to find their way. It takes practice. After two days in the field, walking in the woods with sixty-five pounds of equipment, some of them are getting it and others aren’t. The class is brought back to the barracks area for additional classroom work and advanced navigation techniques. The nav instructors are now starting to focus their attention on those students having problems. Then it’s back out to the field for more day and night compass courses.
There are seven graded land-navigation problems—three daytime courses and four nighttime courses. Each course has a starting point and four points that each student has to reach in a prescribed period of time. These points or destinations are given to the students in eight-digit military grid coordinates. Students are given their coordinates at the beginning of the course and allowed a few minutes to plot them on their maps. They take a compass bearing to their first coordinate and set off, noting the distance to their first destination and the pace count that will take them there. The courses range from six to ten miles as the crow flies, but that’s seldom how the Pre-SFAS students walk the ground. More often than not, they’ll walk 20 to 40 percent farther to navigate around obstacles—and even farther if they get lost. The allotted time on the courses ranges from four and a half hours on the earlier, shorter courses to nine hours on the final night problem. A student scores a point for each point he finds on the course—seven courses for a total of twenty-eight points, with consideration given to those who may struggle at first but do well later on.
“This was all new to me,” Private First Class Roberto Pantella told me. “I grew up in Queens, and my rural outings were into the city to Central Park or out for a drive with my family on Long Island.” PFC Pantella is a twenty-four-year-old Dominican-American. Prior to joining the Army, he was an aircraft maintenance technician working on 747s. He’s five-eight with a stocky, solid build. “At first, I was doing very poorly.