Land Nav Part I (Butterflies)

Last week Bravo Company packed up its bags and went out to the field to spend three nights sleeping under the stars at a small base camp lodged just in between Yankee North and Yankee South. Yankee North and Yankee South are land navigation courses used for OCS, IOBC, NCO courses, and Ranger school. They can be pretty difficult, especially Yankee North, due to the thick vegetation and ruggedness of the terrain. Our object was to have all 154 OCs of Bravo company get a “go” on Yankee South in three tries or less. My personal goal was to gain some confidence in my LandNav abilities, a skill I will need moving forward in the Infantry world, and to get a “go” on my first run if I could. I was nervous as we prepared our sleeping bags our first night out in the field.

My LandNav experiences in the past had done little to build my confidence in my abilities. We had done three different lanes on two different courses at Basic. The first two were extremely easy, but even still, my first time out I became disoriented on our second point and was flustered the rest of our time on the course. The third lane we did, almost at the end of Basic, was much harder. It was a difficult course and in my group we had trouble finding our first point. In fact we spent over an hour and eventually were forced to move on without it, because we simply could not locate the point. We went on to have mixed success with the rest of the course, finding our next two points through terrain association. That felt good. Our next two points eluded us, however, and we became disoriented on our way back to the rallying point. We ended up coming back in an hour late with only two out of five points for the course. It was disheartening.

The hardest part of these failures was that I knew I could do better than I had. While I had never done any formal land navigation before coming into the Army, like some might do in Eagle scouts or in an orienteering club, I had used maps and terrain association quite a bit when scouting out my hunting positions last summer in anticipation of the Fall archery season in Connecticut. I had taken to it with ease and found maps and locating specific points to be enjoyable. I couldn’t, therefore, understand why I was having so much trouble with Army LandNav.

Monday night at 19:30 we paired up into buddy groups to get a practice run on Yankee North before the next morning when we would get our first try on the actual course. I paired up with OC Redemption, a good partner to have because he keeps his cool under stress. He is not a whiner, which is always a relief. There are too many whiners in the Army and they all seem to come out of hiding within an hour of deploying to the field.

We received a lane with 7 points. We had 2 and ½ hours to plot our points on our maps, determine our route, go get the points and get back to our camp. We both knew we would probably not get all of our points, but we still set out with an optimistic plan to take them all. We found our first point with ease, only 100 meters off of Yankee Road, which dissects the two courses. From there we had to shoot an azimuth through the woods, just a shade North of due West, for roughly 900 meters. The vegetation was thick. We struggled to break through thorn bushes and spider webs to keep on course. Redemption was the compass man and I kept the pace count, to make sure we didn’t over or undershoot our point.

When we go to about 850 meters, we slowed down, swiveling our heads back and forth, scanning through the thick vegetation looking for the orange and white signpost of our point. 900 meters came and we hadn’t seen it. 950 meters and we came to a clearing, on a small hill. We couldn’t see it. At one klick we hit an unimproved road at the edge of the clearing. It was on the map and we had overshot our point. We walked up and down the road trying to spy our point for about 10 minutes unsuccessfully. We then double backed to see if we had missed the point the first time. Nothing was found upon closer inspection. We were off track. I kept looking at the map, trying to use terrain association to pinpoint where we were in relation to our point. I just couldn’t visualize it though. My brain was clogged. There were to many hills right in that area. It could have been either North or South of us, I figured. But it wasn’t far, either way. Frustration started to grip my mind as the clock continued to tick.

OC Redemption and I needed a plan to locate this point. We needed to use the dirt road, which was the closest major land marker. Just about half a klick to our south the road intersected with Yankee Road. We figured we could run over to that intersection, shoot an azimuth to our point and track it down from there. And that is exactly what we did. And this time we fanned out, with about 50 meters in between us, to cover more area. So as we tracked our way up North from the intersection, we kept in visual and voice contact, checking with each other every 100 meters or so. We walked over the hill we had searched before, on the edge of the clearing, and I was about 30 meters short of my end count when we hit the northern edge of the clearing and there was a drop off the hill down into a little draw of a dried up creek. I shouted out to Redemption with joy as I looked left and saw our point just another 25 meters in front of me. “Hell yeah!” I high fived Redemption as he ran over, smiling wide, “We got that shit”. It felt great to track down the point after not being able to find it initially. It is that kind of trouble shooting that really builds confidence.

At that point we should have called it a night. It was 2100 already and our next point was another klick and a half through the woods. But it was still light out and we were feeling confident after our success with the last point. I also think neither one of us wanted to come in with just two out of seven points. So we quickly developed a plan to track down our next point by cutting due West through the woods to the western limit of the course, Jamestown Road. From there we would head North until we would reach an intersection between Jamestown Road and an unimproved road; the intersection is only a couple hundred meters from our point. From there we would shoot a quick azimuth and track it down.

We got off to a quick start, heading due West, down little draws and up hills, thick with vines and felled trees and weeds growing every which way. It took us a little longer than we had hoped, but we eventually came out of the thick onto Jamestown Road. We picked up a quick pace and by 2130 we were at our intersection, but it was getting pretty dark by this time. We shot our azimuth and started off for our point. When we got to 300 meters, our estimated count, we couldn’t see our point. It was too dark to track it down and we were running out of time. Suddenly we saw some red lights up ahead of us, about 150 meters out. We couldn’t tell what they were, but as we got closer we realized they were the lights on a pick up. As we got within 10 meters of the truck, I knew it was Captain Sunshine and SSG Runswaytoofast. Oh boy, here we go, I thought.

We walked right up to the window. Sunshine sort of chuckled and asked what were doing so far out from the camp this late. OC Redemption explained that we were trying to get one last point before we headed in and that we simply couldn’t find it out here in the dark. “Well yeah you guys are right on top of it actually, I mean if it was light out I could point to it from here, so good job on that” he said with a surprising degree of gaiety in his voice. “The trouble is you guys are about three kilometers out from the camp site and you have 10 minutes to get back before time is up” he said smiling big and broad. He looked back at SSG Runswaytoofast, who was smiling too and then he sort of motioned back to the bed of his truck, which had a cover on it. “As you can see I don’t have any room for you, so you guys are going to have to do some double time to get back”. With that he let out a loud laugh and, SSG Runswaytoofast, laughing as well, added, “Yeah you guys are going to have to get some PT time in on your way back”. OC Redemption and I just smiled and laughed and turned around and headed off on our way South along the unimproved road we thought traveled parallel to Jamestown Road.

About five minutes down the road, we realized we should have just back-tracked to Jamestown Road from where we had been, because we had gotten all turned around on this stupid dirt road. So there we were, it was totally dark out and we were lost in the woods roughly three kilometers from where we needed to be, if not more. We shot an azimuth due south and just started trudging through the thickest vegetation we had thus far encountered. It was comical. We were in the thick of it and while we were in good spirits, just below the surface we both knew that we needed to get out of the woods. If we ran up on a wild boar in the dark, thick vegetation like that we would have been in deep doodoo. Neither of us mentioned that, or any of the other dangers, but we both knew it. So we kept pushing through the vegetation and giant, prehistoric spider webs of Yankee North, fighting our way South through the dark, warm Georgia night.

Eventually we got to a dirt road we recognized and we followed that down to Yankee Road, where a cadre member who did have room for us in his Pathfinder gave us a ride back to camp. The ride back was quiet. It had been a partial success, I reasoned, because we had found that one point which we had been unable to find at first and we had successfully gotten ourselves to within eyesight of another difficult point (if only we had had light enough to see it). Nonetheless we were a “no-go” when we handed in our answer key back at camp, because we had come in almost an hour late. “No-go”, the words sunk into your mind bit by bit. LandNav is the single event, aside from the history test, which causes the most recycles at OCS. I didn’t want to get recycled. I didn’t think I would, but still those words “no-go”, rang through some distant, yet present room of my mind. So as I unfurled my sleeping mat and took off my ACU blouse I was, in spite of my efforts to remain upbeat, somewhat nervous for what the morning would bring and my first solo run on Yankee South.