My wife and I were walking our dog, Oscar,
and as usual I drop back a few paces during the adventure; usually due to
behavior where once Oscar finds something he really wants to remember he’ll
sniff it for almost a half minute ~ sometimes longer, and I’d rather not tarry,
or like on this one occasion he stopped abruptly at the very same time I was
mentally out there flapping; I walked right into Montse’s back and got
entangled in Oscar’s leash. No harm
done, beyond some choice words from Montse about my being clumsy; but that is
to say no injuries were inflicted. The episode got me to thinking about tracking my buddy; a term I learned
while serving with the 10th Mountain Division (LI) The LI designates light infantry; another way
of saying they walk…everywhere…and they fight with what they can carry.
One
day, while on one of many field exercises, I asked the Company Commander what
the meaning of all the two feet by two feet signs nailed to pine trees about
ten feet high throughout the maneuver area. They all conveyed a warning: “Don’t
track your buddy.”
He
told me a common occurrence while walking single file towards a distant
assembly area was that one’s mind tends to wander; in effect, just follow the
helmet in front of you. As time goes on,
you stop thinking and move mindlessly; each person following the guy in front
of him.
While
in the bush sometimes you have to go around natural obstacles; water, fallen
trees, that sort of thing. That means the
path deviates with abrupt turns. For the
guy who is just following In la-la land he may miss that crucial turn and
continue on without noticing he is no longer on course. Then the silliness happens, because the guy
behind him doesn’t know they’re no longer on track, since he too is following
the helmet of the guy in front of him; just as the guy behind him is doing, and
the guy behind him too; and well, you get the picture. So the caution is to stay alert to changes
and don’t let your mind go off wool gathering on you.
It just so
happened soon after being told about this pheromone, that our company had night
mission practice. In it, we were
required to move through five kilometers of swamp; at night. During that movement I remember Capt Travis’s
story, and sure enough we lost a platoon doing the very thing he mentioned. One soldier lost track of the guy in front of
him because he was droning, as we called it, and the rest of his platoon
followed him out into the nowhere depths of the Georgia swamp. No one got hurt, but a lot of scolding and
humiliation was passed out; which reminds me of yet another fine lesson I was
taught years back in the Army. One I
learned to respect. I was told
“Al, to make a lesson meaningful it has to be
emotional.”
At least then I
reasoned out why there’s so much screaming and frightening going on during the
training of the recruit… it’s for their own good.
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