Resiliency and Land Navigation

09 July 2011

Today was one of the longest days, if not the longest day I've had since I've been at Ft. Benning. The day started as usual with 0400 wake up, PT at 0545, and chow at 0730. The platoon came back to the barracks and had locker inspections by the drill sergeants. (Note* When I get to use my phone for the first time I am going to snap some pics to send to Jesica for posting to give everyone a visual*) My locker passed inspection, but I need to work on rolling my PT shorts tighter. From 10:00 to 12:00 we had soldier resiliency training. Basically, the Army wants soldiers to keep a balanced lifestyle physically and mentally. The course was actually really interesting and really stressed setting goals. Chow was at 13:30, then came the fun part. By this time, it was around 93 degrees outside and we were told to get our gear and line up in formation. Right now our gear consists of our Army combact uniform (ACU), fight load carrier (FLC), our assault pack, and our M16 and camelback. About 50 lbs worth of gear. We marched about a mile until we got to the Land navigation course where we performed three exercises. During the first exercise we (a team of 4) were given 5 points to find in the woods, using only a compass. Fairly simple, only the woods were very dense. Our squad completed the task and got 5 out of 5 right! The second exercise consisted of the squad using a map and converting to the corrected grid angle from the magnetic angle of Azimuth. We had to find 3 points. We found the first one but ran out of time because one of our squad members, my bunk mate Cheang, twisted his ankle. So instead of going on, we navigated to the nearest road and waited for help. Cheang is ok, but he rolled it pretty good. We would have found the points, but getting Cheang out of the woods was more important. We stopped around 20:00 hours for Chow (field chow) and were the given our exercises for night navigation. The moon was out, but it was also cloudy. Oh yeah, we could only use a back-lit compass and our "red" light (which has no range at all). Since Cheang was injured, only two of us went on this exercise and another guy stayed back with Cheang. We had to find 2 points and report back to the range leader in one hour.  Myself and this guy we call Beetty found the last point with 3 minutes to go. By this time it was 23:30 and I was spent. I think I drank 3 camelbacks and 3 canteens of water. The whole platoon smelt like pigs and we were tired! Luckily, wake-up tomorrow isn't until 0600 hrs.

Matthew