As it turns out this was almost a punishment of sorts. Why do I say that, while everyone else had lessons during the day and the rest of the night off to do whatever they want (poker has really picked up in popularity here lately), the navigators, there was about 2 from each of the three units, had lessons during the day and then navigated all night.
I had navigated several times before, I would estimate that at least a third of our training was navigation, but this time was a little different. First of all, these navigations were alone instead of in pairs. Second, they added a few twists. The first and second night in addition to the normal navigations in which they ask you to find a specific location and describe what is written there (something they spray painted) we were also asked to point out specific houses. What does this mean? We would navigate to a point on the border of an Arab village and then someone would be waiting with night vision goggles and we would be asked to take a laser pointer (that can only be seen with thermal night vision) and point out our house to them.
The third night we were given 4 houses that were inside of an Arab village and asked to make drawings of them, which they would later check against pictures they had.
The truth is that it did make the navigations a little more interesting to have a new element thrown in, but I still couldn't help myself from thinking how everyone else was watching movies and basically doing whatever they want while I was walking from 9 PM until 3 or 4 in the morning.
On a side note, on my last navigation I wasted an hour looking for a code that apparently wasn't even in the right place. I new I was in the right place based on the aerial photographs I had seen, but the code wasn't there. I called my friend who was in charge of the navigations (as a general rule phones are not allowed, but since this was a week for self improvement I don't think they minded) and described to him the place where I was located only to have him tell me that someone had had the same point two weeks ago and told him that it was 20 meters south of the place it was supposed to be. Needless to say that after wasting close to an hour looking for that spot I was pretty frustrated.
1 comment:
At any point during this exercise did you feel like Batman? Because I did while I read it.
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