Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [59]
For Class 8-04, there are four land-navigation practical exercises on Camp Mackall—two in the daytime and two at night. The time limit of these exercises is five hours, and they range in total distance between ten and twelve miles. Each candidate, with his load-bearing equipment, ruck, and six quarts of water, carries between sixty-five and seventy pounds. In order to get all four points in the allotted time, a candidate has to walk fast and find the point fairly quickly. I walk one day and one night with assigned students—both 18 X-Rays. For the other two exercises, I sit with a point sitter and watch the students as they passed through.
During my daytime trek, I follow a young soldier from Hacketts-town, New Jersey. He’d been accepted into the X-Ray program right out of high school. While he could have gone to college on a soccer scholarship, he elected to join the Army because of 9/11. His father is an FBI agent and encouraged him to join the Army when he decided not to go to college. We do well on the first two points, but the third one proves elusive. Just before the allotted time, he finds the third one to go three-for-four on the nav exercise. The following evening, I go out with another X-Ray for a night course.
“What’s your technique?” I ask my candidate as he plots his first course.
“I use mostly terrain association, sir, and I think we got lucky. In the barracks, we talk about these nav problems, and they usually have a long leg, two medium legs, and a short one. Our first leg is just over four miles, so we got the long one first. That’s a break. If we hustle, we can get most of it done while it’s still light.”
The night courses begin at 2030, or 8:30 p.m., so the candidates have close to an hour of daylight and dusk on the course. My candidate that evening is a nineteen-year-old PFC from Texas. He is a year out of high school and managed a Dairy Queen before he decided to join the Army. He didn’t know what he wanted to do after high school, and college didn’t seem to be for him. His father served a tour in the Army and his brother was in ROTC in college; both encouraged him to take a hard look at the X-Ray Program. He is a small man, slender and just under five-nine. The hardest thing for him, he tells me, were the ruck runs.
“You mean the ruck marches?”
“No, sir. For me, they’re ruck runs. I have to run to keep up with the bigger guys, but I can do it. I usually finish in the middle of the pack, maybe a little better than the middle.” I’d been out with the class on most of the ruck marches. In order to make the cutoff time, the candidates have to run at least part of the way. The technique favored by most is to walk up the hills and run down them. The faster candidates on the ruck marches run the flats as well.
My candidate and I set off on the night nav exercise, and I have to struggle to keep up. I didn’t know a guy that small could move through the woods that fast carrying almost half his body weight. I have only a Camelback canteen, a few PowerBars, and a notebook—about ten pounds. We make our first point just after dark, and he moves well on to the others. I appreciate that he keeps me out of the swamp, and we only get wet fording streams. What amazes me most is his eyesight. When he stops to orient and consult his map, he can read terrain features and contour lines that for me, even with