For some reason unbeknownst to me, our commanders decided that our last week of training would also be one of the longest weeks of training. During a normal week we start Sunday afternoon or evening and finish Wednesday evening (When I refer to the "week" I mean the time that we actually are training. Usually Thursdays are spent cleaning and checking all of our gear). This week we started Saturday night and finished Thursday morning.
The premise of the week is to simulate what a week at war would be like. This particular war was with Syria. We were given a briefing on Friday so that we would know what our specific missions would be on Saturday night. Our entire company was going to walk 10 kilometers, and then split up into different assignments. My team, as the sniper/recon group, was charged with climbing a nearby mountain and offering both intel and covering fire on two parallel mounds where the Syrians had set up. At this point it was the job of two of the other teams to storm those hills.
So we set out on our mission Saturday night at midnight. Once again everyone with a bag that weighed somewhere close to 100 pounds. I didn't think it would be possible to have a bag heavier than the one I had carried in my individual navigation two weeks prior, but I was mistaken. I had all of the same personal gear, but this week instead of carrying my M-4 I brought the machine gun and all of the ammunition, which adds another about another 40 pounds.
Around 6 AM we finished our task and "crossed the border" in the search for a location we could set up camp during the afternoon. We arrived around 9 AM and were given our first break since setting out. What I didn't know was that it would be both short-lived and the only break we got for quite some time. An announcement came over the radio about 3 hours later that we were moving out. At the time I had been catching up on a night of lost sleep and when I looked at my watch I was in disbelief. We were being asked to pick up all of our gear and start walking again during the hottest part of the day! For those unfamiliar with the Middle East there are only two seasons - Summer and Winter. So just to be clear, we are already well into the summer at this point and this entire exercise was taking place in the desert. With all of that in mind, everyone packed up and started walking to another drill. In retrospect the first day was definitely the most physically and mentally challenging. The first 29 hours from Saturday at midnight until Monday at 5 in the morning I think we walked 24 of those hours.
The week proceeded much in the same way. We walked from drill to drill, at the end of which we would have a long march carrying "injured" soldiers. Normally, this would not be too terrible. When someone is injured 4 soldiers would carry that person on a stretcher. Unfortunately, my team did not have a functioning stretcher. At first we thought this was a good thing, perhaps we would simply not be asked to carry wounded soldiers. That, however, was not the case. On these marches that usually lasted anywhere from 4 - 7 kilometers, we carried our wounded brethren on our shoulders in the standard fireman's carry. This in and of itself often proves a difficult feat when scaling mountains, but when you have to do this with a gigantic bag already on your back it makes for rather slow traveling.
One night there actually was a kind of funny story, or maybe it was just funny to us in our delirium. We were given one portion of food rations (in said rations there are four cans of tuna, one can of corn, one can of olives, a small tin of sardines, one I can only describe as a kosher version of SPAM called loof, and a candy bar sized piece of halva (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halva)) for four people every 24 hours. Meaning that at some point in the middle of marching every day we would come to a point where we could refill our water and receive our rations for the next day. One night the guy in charge of the week decided to leave the food hidden by the side of the road with a replacement stretcher for my team. When we arrived to retrieve the food, five minutes after it had been hidden, we couldn't find anything. Our commander radioed to control trying to determine the exact location of the food, but we couldn't find it. Turns out, in the five minutes that the food was there a group of Bedouins came and took all of our food, and the stretcher (I like to think they opened the stretcher up, piled all the food on, and walked off).
The only thing that stands out as out of the ordinary was the last night. The last night we were helicoptered to a location (actually farther away from our eventual end point) where we than began a 16 kilometer hike to the top of a mountain which would symbolize the end of our training. At this point we were joined by various members of our team who had been sent out to various courses (such as commanders course). We walked to the base of the mountain, where we then opened up stretchers and raced the last 4 kilometers to the top. It was a pretty great feeling when we finally finished. My team made it to the top first and we celebrated with some food and one of my commanders brought a bottle of champagne. After a small ceremony we were told the buses were waiting for us at the bottom of the mountain, another 4 kilometers back down.
Before the week started I vividly remember telling the people I was sharing the food with that there was no need to bring the loof or the sardines because I would not be eating them and it was just extra weight. I also remember that by Tuesday night I was eating both my words and the sardines. We had been through a few other weeks in which we ate almost nothing, but I don't remember a week in which I felt as hungry as I did in that week. I was going to write some absurd analogy in which I explained that I was so hungry I would have probably eaten sand, but then I remembered that on the last day I reached the point that we had nothing to eat and I literally started to eat a packet of ketchup.
It was after this week that I really began to understand what people mean when they say that there are things that you will do that others won't be able to understand unless they have done it. When the week was finally over I had plenty of people ask me how it was and what we did, but there really isn't much to explain. I can say we walked...a lot (probably something like 120 kilometers over the course of the week), but it really doesn't begin to explain how difficult that trek was. Walking up and down mountains in the heat, with a bag that weighs half of your body weight, every few seconds trying to arrange something so it will sit better because if your bag is just a little off-center all the weight will be on one shoulder and what was difficult before reaches the brink preposterous.
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