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Originally Posted by x_sf_med
Oh, I see a Ranger joke in hiding here. [restrain yourself].
COL Jack, if you can't navigate, you tend to be lost in the woods, you might be in the lead, but you go around in circles.
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As long as you have mentioned Ranger, let me expand on a minor experience I had as a Ranger student. I was given the "honor" of having a Thai prince as my Ranger buddy. He was a good guy, but he was also a prince and obviously at that time a State Department selectee for political reasons to attend our Ranger school in 1965. I am sure that this was a political driven decision, much like the Barretta was for landing rights in Italy. Anyway-the lad could not run-I had to carry him on my back for the 2 mile buddy run. He was afraid of heights and during the buddy evacuation rappelling exercise he damn near choked me to death hanging on to my neck. The hand to hand pit was pitiful and I asked for an instructor to be my opponent as I was killing this poor lad. In addition to hauling my sorry butt on the drown proofing class, I had him as an additional piece of equipment. He froze to death in the mountains, but did well in Florida. When he was appointed Patrol Leader he of course appointed me his assistant patrol leader. He took off on a leaders reconnaissance during the patrol after I pre-set his compass, gave him a complete discription of the terrain he was going to have to cross, and thought I had done everything I could for him to succeed in a simple one-leg, 400 meter dead reconing shot with a 50 meter offset to the biggest damn stream intersection in the area which would have allowed him to stop, do a right face and sneak and peek downstream to the target area. After 4 hours my PRC-6 started to crackle with a real faint voice, "Ranger buddy this is me, I lost". So I asked him to describe what he had done and he told me that he had taken out his compass, lined it up on the first tree in the distance, put it away because the moon was just beyond the tree he had shot his azimuth on and decided that it would be just easier to head towards the moon. Took me an hour to find him.