Photo By Malcolm McClendon | Sgt. Edith Banda with the 712th Military Police Company Task Force Raptor (3-124), out...... read more read more
BASTROP, Texas - “Move over about 10 meters to your right”… “Here?”… “No, a little more… Right there!” Soldiers yell out to each other from behind the tree line. “I found it!”… “Give me the numbers”… “Six, two, four, two… four, three, nine, nine!”… “That’s it, we got it, stay there so we can shoot the azimuth to the next point!”
One hour into the course and the Texas National Guardsmen have only found their first grid point.
“I think we’re thinking too hard, trying to do it too much by the book,” says Sgt. Joshua Havens from Garland, Texas, Headquarters and Headquarters Troop Task Force Raptor (3-124), “shooting the same azimuth several times, trying to be too precise with our pace counts.”
“And the heat did not help,” Havens continues, “As you're trudging around in the woods you start getting tired and sweaty; it’ll mess up your concentration.”
In the unending, sweltering Texas heat, the soldiers of Task Force Raptor continue their Pre Mobilization Training (PMT) with the Land Navigation Course (Land Nav) at Camp Swift. The course refreshes the soldiers’ ability to read a map, use a compass, and navigate.
“If you don’t use it, you forget it. Land Nav is a perishable skill.” Explains Staff Sgt. Joshua Lancaster, an Instructor at Combat Support Training and Evaluation Battalion (CSTEBn). “What we do here is give the Soldiers the tools they need to be able to navigate successfully without having to rely on GPS or similar technology.”
The soldiers are broken up into teams and issued a compass, a map, five six-digit grid coordinates and sent on their way. To pass the course, the navigators have two hours to find three out of five points.
“Plotting the grid points is where people mess up the most,” Lancaster says, “if you can’t grasp that concept, then you’re lost in the sauce.”
As to not be lost, plotting points begins with having a map that is broken down into the military grid reference system, with 1000 meter grid squares numbered sequentially left to right and bottom to top. Each square can be broken down even further to 100 square meters, 10 square meters and down to a single-meter point on the map, the grid point. Get the point?
“To be able to do it on paper, that’s the easy part,” Havens confesses. "Once you get out into the woods, you gotta adjust a little bit. The plotted course on the map says you’re supposed to go that way, but once you’re there you see big clumps of trees and brush you have to walk through, making it hard to see where you’re going.”
In the end, the course, with its classroom doctrine and real-world realities, gives the Soldier the confidence needed to trust their navigational skills.
Havens continues, “once you find that first point you realize what you did wrong and after that, finding your points gets quicker.”
| Date Taken: | 08.15.2011 |
| Date Posted: | 08.20.2011 17:06 |
| Story ID: | 75673 |
| Location: | BASTROP, TEXAS, US |
| Web Views: | 242 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
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