The Chanticleer

Issue date: 2/16/06 Section: News

Media Credit: Angela Reid Cadet Stephen Smith plots points on the map for Team 2 during the land navigation competition Saturday in Oak Mountain State Park.

We started out talking on a cell phone, walking on a paved road, eating beef jerky and looking for a white and orange flag in the woods about a football field off to the left. "This isn't so bad," I think, "I can handle this." It's almost freezing and it's wet, but I have my waterproof, weatherproof, fleece lined jacket. I'll be ok.

Now let's fast forward about half an hour. I'm 15 yards behind Cadets John Miles and Jonathan Greene, my guides for the day, running up the mountain in front of me. They say it's just a hill, but I know better. I can't breathe, I can't decide if I'm hot or cold and I can't figure out why I wore such a thick coat. I don't even know why I suggested we try to find another point. But I did.

Today is the Viking Pursuit land navigation competition for JSU's ROTC cadets and the cadets from 14 other schools. I'm just here to watch, but the JSU cadets treat me as one of their own, except they have to show me where to go, wait for me at the top of the hill, and translate their military jargon for me.

Ok, so maybe I'm not quite one of them.

I'm one of the few civilians. A speck of sky blue in an ocean of green camo, I try to blend in but it's impossible. I decide to follow along and pretend like I know what's going on and where I'm going.

The cadets line up, by school, around the perimeter of a large field for their first formation. After some basic instructions and a safety briefing over a megaphone, the teams from each school are dismissed in order, Team 1, Team 2, then Team 3.

Miles, Greene, and I follow the other cadets to the starting point where the teams pick up their maps. They also carry a compass and protractor. The cadets are given a list of 8-digit coordinates to plot on the map. Then they devise a strategy to find the most number of points using the compass, protractor, contour lines on the map, terrain association, and pace count.

The coordinates correspond to the location of white and orange flags placed throughout the area. The flags closer to the start point are worth five points, while flags farther away are worth 15 points. Each team has 3 hours to find as many flags as possible and return to the start point. At each flag, there is a different clacker, a high-tech hole-punch, to mark the scorecard and verify the team found that point.

Continued...

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