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By Root 1678 0

But then one of the nav instructors gave me some one-on-one help. They yell at us a lot, and that’s their job, but when you need help, they’re right there. You see, to do the nav courses, there are three things that’ll get you from point A to point B. You can shoot a good azimuth—or series of azimuths, which you have to do at night—to get you to the point. Another thing that will get you to your point is you have to walk a good line. By that I mean you can’t drift left or right of your azimuth or bearing, and you have to know your pace—dead on. When your pace count says you’ve covered a thousand meters, you’d better be at a thousand meters, give or take five or ten. It’s not easy. And the third thing you can do is find the point by terrain association. That means as you shoot your azimuth and walk your line, you have to be aware of terrain features: low areas or draws, the crowns or hills, the steepness of the slopes, roads that cross the terrain—that kind of thing. I do them all, but for me the key is the pace count. I know almost exactly when I’ve covered a thousand meters. And I shoot a lot of back azimuths, checking the line of bearing I just walked. This helps me stay on course.”

I asked Pantella why he joined the Army. “I always thought I might want to be a soldier, ever since I was a little kid. Then I got into baseball and I was a pretty good catcher. So I worked nights, and in the daytime I went to school and played baseball. I only got as far as double-A ball, but I had my dream. Finally, I got my associate’s degree and was making pretty good money working on airplanes. I visited Ground Zero two days after 9/11, and it made an impression on me. Once I’d paid off my school loans, I quit my job with the airlines and here I am. My family thought I was crazy, and maybe I am. This might sound funny to a lot of guys, but the hardest thing for me is that I miss my family. I’ve never been away from them this long.”

“And the land nav was not a problem for you?”

“After a rocky start, I got twenty-five points out of a total of twenty-eight,” he said proudly. “That’s better than most guys.”

During the navigation exercises, I’m assigned to a student and follow him on his compass course. I have my compass, an old Silva Ranger that I had in the SEAL teams, and I soon learn that for me, 1,116 paces is a thousand meters. Yet my role on the nav course is to trail along a few meters to the rear. Wherever my student soldier goes, that’s where I go. One night my student and I are terribly lost. That’s when I learn about the draw monster. A draw is a low-lying drainage area or slow-moving stream that can be knee-deep mud, waist-deep water, and thick with undergrowth. They have to be crossed walking on a line of bearing, or “boxed.” This is a technique whereby the student goes around the draw or marshy area, boxing it, so he comes out on the other side, on course and with some idea how far he’s traveled. My soldier crosses these draws on a compass bearing. On one draw we are up to our waist in the swamp at night for forty-five minutes, fighting tangles, vines, mud, and bugs. Then we come out on the same side. “Sorry about that, sir, but I think I got it figured out now,” he says, and back into the draw we go. It takes us three hours to get to the first point on the course. My soldier only gets two of his four points, but he never quits trying. We walk a long way that night.

Land navigation is a practiced skill, and the students have to learn by doing. I’m assigned different students to walk with, but after my long night in the draw, I ask if there were someone a bit more accomplished that I might follow. “Put Mister Couch with the Kiwi,” Sergeant Loften says.

The next day I’m out with Private First Class David Rule. Each of the X-Rays is a story, and Rule is no exception. He grew up in Auckland, New Zealand, and left college there to come to America. He holds dual U.S.-New Zealand citizenship. Rule is twenty-five and was working as a waiter in Denver when he joined the Army.

“I’ve always been interested in the military,” he tells