Story XXXVII: BASIC SURVIVAL SCHOOL

XXXVII
BASIC SURVIVAL SCHOOL
(the first 10 days)

1
February, 1978
On a mountain road outside Spokane, Washington
A COLD DAY IN HELL

The bus grinds its way up through the snowy mountain switchbacks, a big, ugly box on slush-gray wheels—an Air Force school bus—filled with parka-clad airmen and officers staring out through the smeared fog of its windows. And I am among them. A second bus is following right behind us, each vehicle carrying half of the class’s students, bound for the same deep snows at the higher elevations. And all without heat.
Oh, the buses are perfectly capable of venting a modicum of engine heat into the passenger compartment, but what’s the point? The driver’s already having a bitch of a time keeping the windshield clear, just from all the warm breathing and hot air being outgassed by the gabbier passengers. And besides, considering where we’re headed, we’re all wearing parkas and thermal underwear anyway, so turning the heat up would only turn this into a rolling sauna for us. No, the driver can just crank the heat up later, if he wants, when he’s headed back down the mountain, empty.
For me, gazing out at the pines and firs as they slide past my window, like an expectant crowd watching concert tour buses arrive—each of them poking up out of the six-foot-deep swaddling of snow that’s blanketed everything up here—spiders of dread just keep scampering up and down my spine. Maybe it’s flashbacks to that first spooky bus ride from San Antonio’s airport to the base at Lackland, or something… that feeling of nothing but pure suck-ass misery looming up ahead. I don’t know. But it’s real, it’s dismal, and it makes me wish I’d come down with the mumps again about a week ago.

It’s Monday—the first day of the second week of Survival School—and it still amazes me not only how fast that first week in the classroom flew past, but how much faster this second week in the field rushed up to fill its place. And that just BLOWS!
I already knew how much I hated field work—CCS beat any curiosity I might have possessed right out of me. But after five straight days of sitting at a desk in a heated classroom, listening to instructors, reading books, and watching films, slides, overhead projections and blackboard scribblings depicting all the myriad ways that Mother Nature conspires to poison, bludgeon, drown and freeze my ass to death, I am in no mood whatsoever to step out into Her domain now and test my abilities to defy Her efforts.
Truth be told, I hate that bitch.
According to these guys though, that feeling is apparently mutual.
At least it’s not snowing today. The ceiling is still the same low, gray, fuzzy lid that’s been smothering the world for the last week-and-a-half, but unlike the six previous days, the heavy and constant snow has finally stopped falling. So it’s just a regular old black and white (and icy chrome) day outside, the kind of day for which you wouldn’t normally leave the comforts of home… only there’s no “home” where we’re going today.
As the hummocks of passing snow deepen along the roadside—thrown up by snowplows, and mud-spackled by everyone else—they embrace and bury everything for as far as the eye can see up to a depth of almost eight feet. And my mind harkens back to a similar scene, from a week ago, when I first pulled into the Survival School’s “campus” along the far periphery of Fairchild Air Force Base, in my little mud-winged Datsun.

2
February, 1978
Fairchild AFB, Spokane, Washington
WHERE THE FUGGARWE?

The sky was just as low and as slate-gray then as now, the daylight dark. The trees were dead, the buildings dreary and frosted, and the roads little more than slushy trenches furrowing through the equally gray and rolling snow fields. Though Fairchild is a large and thriving installation, between the weather and the Survival School’s isolation from the rest of the base, the campus had the look of a bleak and desolate outpost somewhere above the Arctic Circle.
I found its three big ugly and uninspired buildings—dragged straight out of some low-rent Russian apartment complex, it looked like—arranged in an L around two sides of a small snow-choked quad. Two office/classroom/equipment storage buildings, and one depressing old barracks building… our ‘motel’ for the next two weeks.
Rocky and Spew had driven over in Spew’s Jeep—on their own schedule and itinerary, so we never saw them—and Greg Dorn had ridden along as my passenger in my new-used little green B-210. He even hooked up his CB radio under my dash, so that we could keep tabs on the cops during our six hour crossing of the state. And as we squished through the ice slurry that coated every horizontal surface at Fairchild, looking for a parking space close to the headquarters’ front door, I just couldn’t believe that this was where I had to come to now. Of all the places, and of all the times.
We parked, got out, and clomped into the building’s entry corridor, stomping the mud-Slurpee off our brand new boots, and all over their welcome mat. And the first thing I saw once I looked back up, was a framed poster mounted prominently beside a pair of double-doors that opened into an empty auditorium. It was a painting of an Indian scout, a ‘noble savage’ standing on a rocky outcropping, staring off into the sunset with one hand shading his eyes. And at the bottom of the picture, in large bold type, was the Survival School’s motto: “Where the Fuggarwe?”
Apparently long-lost tribal descendents of the HECKawees of “F-Troop” fame.
Well, if nothing else, it certainly summed up my feelings at the time.

3
A MOUNTAIN OF FACTS, AN AVALANCHE OF RETENTION

The snow began falling that very first night. And, with one half-assed exception three afternoons later, it never let up again for the rest of the week, nor half of the weekend that followed. The dense snow-laden ceiling drooped low and swollen the entire time—seemingly just above the rooftops—sloughing off fat flakes, and floating atop a constant gauzy mist that reduced visibility down to maybe half a mile at most. And that, in turn, veiled us off from the rest of the base, both physically and psychologically. For all we could tell, we might just as well have been marooned on an ice floe in Siberia.
Or the far side of one of Saturn’s moons for that matter.
It was depressing… cold, dim, wet, windy, and perpetually flurried with snow. For six days straight! I never went anywhere outdoors without being bundled up for a deep-space EVA, my head down, and one thickly gloved hand pulling the fur-lined hood of my parka almost down to my nose. That was outside.
But inside, it was bright, warm, dry, and convivial. A whole ‘nuther world.
And it was busy, too.
Every instructor seemed to have a ‘specialty,’ and there were lots of instructors. And for every good or reassuring thing that they taught, they immediately countered it with something else that was nasty or terrifying, just to keep things balanced, I guess.
Here are all the plants that you can eat, but here are all the ones that’ll kill you. Here are all the bugs, beasts and in-between critters that you can find, trap and eat, but here too are all the ones that can bite, poison, eat or stomp your ass to death.
Melted snow can keep you hydrated and alive, but eaten snow is worse than no food at all. You can use the sun as both a clock and a compass, but here are all the different circumstances under which it can burn or blind you. A stream of mountain run-off can mean water to drink and to clean wounds with, but falling into it can mean hypothermia and death.
Here’s how to build weapons, traps and shelters out of sticks, rocks, mud, snow and dissected parachute parts, but here’s all the ways that these too can backfire on you, injure you, waste precious escape time, or give your position away to the enemy.
Then there’s all the specialized survival equipment that you’re expected to be proficient with: handheld radios and beacons, flashlights and K-Rations, HELP messages written in different languages, maps and foreign currency, and, of course, the tools of rescue themselves—sling harnesses, tree penetrators, and retrieval baskets, all lowered from helicopters—flares and colored smoke and strobes and mirrors, and the list goes on and on and on.
And just so damned much of it!
And all this before they even got into the plot twists of dealing with an enemy force that’s trying its level best to catch you at the same time that you’re trying to survive the elements. Covering tracks, camouflaging campsites and yourself, discreet movement, observing and taking notes (for future debriefing), plus hiding, evading, and escaping from a pursuing adversary. And finally—worst case scenario—dealing with capture, interrogation, and that most dreaded of all possibilities, torture. They’re putting that off until the end though—saving the best for last, I guess—so we’ve got that to look forward to at the end of this week.
The downside was that it all blurred together. Always interesting, but a blur.
The upside, though, was that we were never tested on anything. And this was because, as we were told, the course wasn’t so much a “school” as an “experience.” We were there to meet, touch, taste, feel and do—in other words, experience—all those things that we might have to encounter, engage, or use in the unlikely event that the normal technology, support networks, and/or best laid plans ever failed us.
Oy.
Certainly good and helpful information to have at one’s fingertips in a moment of crisis, but depressing and unnerving having to spend so much time contemplating such exigencies.
Especially the interrogation and torture part.
I say again for emphasis, “Oy.”

4
LEARNING HOW TO FALL DOWN… AGAIN

Since, in the Air Force at least, the aircrews tend to be the folks most often and most likely to find themselves in survival situations, the Survival School’s curriculum is oriented quite heavily to their needs and perspectives. As such, most of the scenarios discussed in the classroom rightly began with those instances that would typically put a flightcrew member in peril in the first place… like stepping out of an aircraft that, for whatever reason, is no longer doing its job, whether it’s still in the air, or scattered across the ground in little smoking pieces. And, since wading out of a debris field apparently does not require all that much specialized training, the initial emphasis instead focused on surviving a jump from an aircraft, a descent under a parachute canopy, and of course, a parachute landing in hostile environs.
Surprisingly—especially for the veteran fighter pilots in the group, who have theoretically been donning a parachute every time they’ve ever entered a cockpit—almost none of my fellow classmates here had ever received training on how to do a basic PLF, or Parachute Landing Fall. So, on Wednesday—Day Three of Week One—they led us through the never-ending blizzard to the building next door, and into an odd little room that had apparently been set aside for just that purpose… practicing PLFs in bad weather.
It was all the way at the end of the building’s central corridor—the corridor ended at its door—and it capped off the first floor’s layout like a T. In other words, when I stepped into the chamber, the opposite wall of the room, directly in front of me, was barely fifteen feet away, but ran some thirty to forty feet to right and left. Very strange. A long, narrow, rectangular space, open and uninterrupted to all three walls of the building’s outer shell at that end. But that wasn’t the strangest part.
Once inside the room, my classmates and I found ourselves standing atop a five-foot-wide ledge or “stage,” if you will, like a subway platform that ran the length of the long near wall, overlooking a three-foot drop-off into a room-length sawdust pit!
The building had its own skinny little “indoor swimming pool” of wood chips!
Not your standard Air Force office building accommodation.
Well, needless to say, I—plus the three other guys with me who were dressed in camouflage—had plenty of experience with jumping, not to mention some finely honed falling-down skills. So, when the call went out for volunteers who could demonstrate the correct PLF form, we got the nod. And while the official instructors called off the positions and movements, we—like the mermaids in an Esther Williams aqua-musical—peeled off in sequence, and dropped into the sawdust in perfect form and spacing.
The procedure was pretty elementary stuff, of course. So, in no time, the “indoor shavings pool” was full of leaping, flopping, tumbling pilots, navigators, loadmasters, and a loose assortment of other related specialists. Including me.
I was so proud.
But it was the first physical challenge we’d encountered in the course up to that point, even though several “outdoor activities” had been scheduled… and then canceled. The weather had just been too consistently lousy. It hadn’t stopped snowing for even five minutes since we’d gotten there on Monday. The ceiling was too low for helicopters to fly, and with snow mounded up to four and five feet deep everywhere, there were no show-and-tell excursions outside to look for edible or medicinal plant life either. But thanks to that strange little sawdusty chamber, those folks who were not regular jumpers could at least practice some PLFs during those canceled time slots.
And there were some pretty senior ranking types among our student body too; a couple of master sergeants, a major or two, and even a full-bird colonel. I could understand how a colonel could still be an active pilot, but I didn’t understand how he could have been so far into his career without having gone through this course already.
There were also a few folks among the rank and file whose job specialties weren’t exactly “front line” positions—mostly aircraft or radio maintenance people—whose career progression checklists you wouldn’t think would have included Survival School. But there they were, women, administrative types, and one gangly stork-like goober named Spiegelman… or as I referred to him, “Spazman.”

Airman Spiegelman first came to my attention during that PLF practice session.
Notable for both his clumsiness and hesitancy when attempting anything physical, Spiegelman—or “Spazman”—managed to achieve even greater notoriety when he became the first student in our class to injure himself… in a sawdust pit… hopping off a ledge barely three feet above it.
On his very first PLF attempt, after several minutes of tentative stutter-stepping and indecision at the pit’s edge, he finally overcame his diffidence by mustering all of his deskbound willpower and hurling himself off the ledge. And when I say ‘hurling,’ I mean friggin’ hurling… as in, a massively overpowered leap into space, rather than a simple, tidy little hop like everyone else was doing.
Well, as I might have mentioned before, the sawdust pit was barely ten feet wide—hell, the ceiling was barely ten feet over our heads, and he almost hit that too—so Airman Spiegelman flew almost completely over the landing area, kicking and flailing most of the way, until his boots dug in barely a foot or two short of the pit’s far side, and smacked everything else from the waist up against the wall. He banged his head—leaving a mark and a dent in the sheet rock—crumpled his shoulder, and landed face-down in the wood shavings.
I couldn’t believe it. Did he really have that little control over his body? That little coordination? That little ability to judge distances?
Apparently so.
The course instructors rushed to his side, and helped him to his feet, his hand pressed to his bleeding forehead, his shoulder hunched and immobilized, and his mouth uttering a steady (and nasal) stream of, “Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow.”
Once the door closed behind them, the rest of us stopped to look at each other, then busted out laughing.
What the hell was that?

5
February, 1978
Back up in the mountains above Spokane, Washington
THE SPAZMAN COMETH

And now here we are, the road rising up against the bellies of the scuddy clouds and slaloming through the mists like a bobsled chute. Only a couple of ranks of snow-smothered trees are even visible from the road-cut any more. And as we round a hairpin turn, a graded pull-over area comes into view, and both buses turn off onto it. This is apparently the end of the line. This is where we get off.
The four instructors on my bus bound to their feet, and storm out the door onto the packed snow outside, shouting, “Everybody off!” “My group, form up on me!” “All my guys, over here!” and “Come on, let’s go!” Behind us, the second bus disgorges an identical quartet of yodeling instructors, and the exodus begins.
Kee-reist-amighty, I do NOT want to spend the next four days out here in this shit. But, much like everybody else, I sigh resignedly, hoist my “improvised backpack” off the floor, gather my “improvised snowshoes” from the overhead rack, and bumble down the aisle to the door along with the rest of the parade.
Before we left Fairchild, we were each assigned—in six-man “field classes”—to a particular instructor. So, as I step off the bus, I angle left over to where Sgt. Goodwin is waving and shouting for his specific half-dozen students to join him. Like him, I jam the “heels” of my snowshoes—the “hand-grips” of the tennis-racket-shaped devices—into the deeper snow rimming the turn-out, and dump my backpack beside them. Then I turn around… just in time to hear a yelp and the clatter of spilled utensils coming from the second bus. And as I watch, a disintegrating bundle of loose gear—clothing, cups, canteens and compasses, and the unraveling twine that had bound them all together—comes cartwheeling down the bus’s steps and bursts fully apart on the ground. Airman “Spazman” comes scurrying down the steps right behind them, fretting and cursing and apologizing to all around him. And as he goes about gathering them all back up again, it reminds me of another one of his “escapades” back at the school’s grounds.

After three days of unrelenting dark skies, weighty, lumbering clouds dragging across the rooftops, and air so filled with swirling snow that it was almost hard to breathe, we’d been forced to cancel almost every outside activity on the schedule. But, by late morning on Thursday—the fourth day—the snow mysteriously abated, the clouds thinned and lifted slightly, and the wind died off altogether. So the instructors, looking at only a brief window of opportunity, had to choose which of the many canceled activities they wanted to attempt during the lull. Flora and fauna identification, tracking, and solar navigation (did you know you could use your watch as a compass?) were still off the table, on account of the chest-deep snow banks and the still-occluded sun. And we’d already done the PLFs in that little PLF room. So that left… “The Tree Penetrator.”
I was surprised to learn that they didn’t have a simulator for the Tree Penetrator. I mean, it couldn’t have been simpler to make… run a rope up through an overhead pulley, and hang a Tree Penetrator from it. Tah-dah! But the fact was that they didn’t have one… which meant that the only way to train on an actual Tree Penetrator was to use an actual helicopter… which was why they needed the weather to be at least a little bit clearer.
And on that particular Thursday afternoon, it was just clear enough.
So, much to my amazement, they bundled us up in our parkas and mukluks and heavy gloves, marched us out across the crunchy parking lot, split us into two groups, and had us wait beneath the gloomy skies… until we could hear the deadened wop-wop-wopping of a helicopter hammering its way toward us.
Although the solid charcoal-gray ceiling had retreated to a slightly loftier height, it was still low enough that the helicopter had to skim the treetops just to remain under it, and it was still thick enough to dim the afternoon light down to late evening hues. The streetlights had even come on. But they’d somehow managed to find a lunatic chopper pilot that was willing to fly under those conditions, just so that we could play with the Tree Penetrator for a half hour or so. I imagine the pilot needed the stick time as well.
The helicopter—a stock model UH-1 “Huey”—came clattering over the school’s classroom building, bent its course towards the two clusters of shivering students at the edge of the cleared area, and flared to a hover above us. A splash of loose snow was flung skyward as the rotor’s downwash battered its way over the plowed edge of the parking lot, and it filled the air with a mist of slush and ice. And while that rained and pelted down on us, driven by the same rotor wash that launched it, the helicopter centered itself above the group opposite mine, and began to lower the Tree Penetrator.
The Tree Penetrator, as it was being lowered, looked like a large, heavy, metal “arrow” dangling from the end of its cable, pointing straight down. It was a little over four feet tall, with a thick, blunt, conical “point” at the bottom. In this configuration, I could easily see how it could penetrate a jungle canopy, punching through the leaves and branches all the way to the jungle floor. Once down then, the cone-shaped point—which was actually segmented into three separate plates closed together—could be folded down into three separate seats which stuck out from the core, flat, like the blades of a propeller. Up to three rescuees could then climb onto the Penetrator at one time, each straddling one of those folded-down “seats” and hugging the center post, with their arms slipped through one of three hanging safety straps. And from there, all the helicopter had to do was winch their ass(es) back up through the tree tops—twigs, leaves and branches be damned.
Simple.
So naturally, Airman Spazman managed to fuck it up… and hurt himself… and get the whole session cut short for the rest of us… all at the same time.
There were no trees for the Tree Penetrator to penetrate this time, of course, but that wasn’t the point. No, the plan was simply to dip the Penetrator into one group, load up three students, hoist them over to the other group, drop them off, then load up three more to be hoisted back the other way… back and forth until everybody had gotten a chance to ride it. That’s it. Just enough to familiarize everyone with how to fold down the seats, squirm their head and shoulders through the safety straps, hang on to the center post, and signal to be lifted. That’s all.
At least that was the plan.
Despite the threatening clouds above, and the whirling snow and ice below, the helicopter managed to pluck three students out of the first group, side-hover over to my group, and drop them at our feet… amid a gale of ice-flecked rotor wash that made it damned hard to face the action with your eyes open. Then three of our guys climbed on, and were hoisted back across to the first group. Nice and easy. Just like clockwork.
Except that the next three riders from the other group included Airman Spazman.
I didn’t get to see all of it—dang it—because most of my group was standing between me and the scene (and I placed myself that way on purpose, using my fellow students as blast deflectors against the wind-whipped ice chips). But from what I could tell, it started when the rotor wash blew Airman Spiegelman’s hat off.
Everyone else had already removed and stowed their hats. The Spazman however, had chosen to pin his hat to his head with one hand. So, shortly after straddling the fold-down paddle on his side of the Penetrator, and slithering his head and shoulders up through the safety strap, his hat was suddenly (and inevitably) snatched away. His first reaction was to whip his head around to see where it went… which either dislodged his glasses, or snapped his head back in such a way that the angle allowed the helicopter’s downdraft to batter them sideways across his face. Either way, what immediately ensued was pure slapstick, a fumble-fingered juggling act in the middle of a hurricane.
First he “caught” his glasses by essentially pinning them to the side of his face with one hunched shoulder. He couldn’t easily get his hand over to grab them though, as long as the safety strap was hiking upward under his armpits. So, without really thinking it through ahead of time, he pulled one arm and shoulder out of the safety strap, and reached across to seize the glasses with his fingers… all while still twisted around half-backwards (keeping cheek to shoulder)… and just in time for the helicopter pilot to take the last of the slack out of the line, and begin the lift.
For anyone else, having only one hand with which to grip the Penetrator’s center post would have been more than enough to hang on… but not for the Spazman. Combined with the twist in his body, the odd angle of the one arm that was still looped through the safety strap, and the sudden upward motion of the hoist, his head slipped out from under the strap, he toppled over backward, did a complete ass-over-teakettle back-flip in the air, and fell the four or five feet to the scoured parking lot, where he landed face-down… and immediately curled into a fetal ball in the middle of the blast zone.
A flurry of hand signals drove the helicopter back, as the instructors converged on Spazman. And while the two remaining students on the Tree Penetrator were gently deposited on the far side of the parking lot, Airman Spiegelman was assisted to his feet, and escorted back to the building—again—to await an ambulance—again—all the while reciting his own personal mantra, “Ow. Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow…”
You know, I’m starting to detect a theme with that boy.
I never did get to ride the Tree Penetrator myself. And I was looking forward to that too! They waved the helicopter off, calling it a lost cause (the conditions really were too nasty for a helicopter and crew to be out in that weather anyway, just to give rides to shivering students who’d already gotten the gist of the system the first time it was used), and they bundled the rest of us back into the classroom for the day.
Thanks, Spaz.

And now look at what we’ve got here again today… Airman Spiegelman on his hands and knees, half under the bus and blocking its doorway as he scrambles to gather up the scattered detritus that used to be his “improvised backpack.”
You know, you don’t want to be angry with a guy who is, by nature, nice, quiet, shy and unassuming—and covered with more and more bandages every day—but man, it’s tough to empathize with that little coordination, that little common sense, and that much disruption of the class. And as a result, everyone’s impatience is starting to show.
I look away once the passengers that are still on the bus begin stepping over him.
My condolences to the rest of the guys in Spiegelman’s ‘field class,’ whoever they are (thankfully, I’m not one of them). This is going to be a long four days for them.
Then again, it’s going to be a long four days for the folks in my field class as well—I’m the guy for whom fires just don’t light, tents just don’t stay pitched, and knots just don’t hold, remember?­—but at least my group has Greg Dorn in it too. I do believe he could build his own rescue helicopter out of sticks, mud and weasel pelts, if he had to. And, for whatever reason, he also gets along with me. That’s a good combination.
So we might just survive this after all.

6
STRANDED

By mid-afternoon, I’m the last one in my group who’s still working on my “parachute shelter”—made of pre-dissected parachute parts, which also served as the key components of the “improvised backpack” that lugged them all out here—but it’s finally starting to look pretty good, all things considered.
It took me forever to find a suitable configuration of ground clutter upon which to begin construction. And in the end, my final selection really wasn’t that ideal, since it wasn’t very well hidden from the eyes of any potential enemy pursuers. But by the time I finally settled on a spot and started picking through my gear for the materials I’d need, even the exasperated instructor no longer cared about the lack of subterfuge. I just needed to get something up before nightfall.
The spot I’d chosen would have been almost ideal for emergency shelter-building if it just hadn’t been out in the middle our little forest clearing. Everyone else had been quick to find good locations back among the surrounding trees, although it seemed a moot point to me, considering the skeletal leafless condition of those trees, and the unblemished blanket of snow between them. No matter where you set up, you were going to be plenty visible. But that wasn’t the point, of course. I was supposed to be learning how to find good cover, even if there wasn’t any available in the immediate vicinity. Still, I just wandered aimlessly among the potential shelter sites, rejecting everything I came to on account of one shortcoming or another. After all, I was going to have to sleep in my construction for two nights in this weather! Therefore comfort and protection were more important to me than any half-assed camouflage against fictitious enemy hunting parties.
I understand the principles just fine. It’s their necessity among these naked trees, in this snow-smothered forest of sticks, that makes me want to shrug it all off for the moment.
So here I am now, squatting atop my miserable pain-in-the-ass snowshoes, flipping through the bright orange folds of parachute material that I’ve got draped over this fallen tree trunk (bright orange… another reason to not be too concerned about camouflage), and tussling with my very first “acorn anchor” that will hopefully help me get this one edge of my “tent” tied off. Thankfully, Greg—who finished his shelter a long time ago—is helping me with my struggles.
An “acorn anchor” (or as I call it, an “ancorn”) is nothing more than an acorn—or a small stone, or a large button, or just about anything that size—that you place against the inside of your shelter material (in this case, the nylon of my parachute canopy), thereby making a lump around which you can then tie off one end of an anchor line (in this case, one of the severed suspension lines from my late great pre-dissected parachute). And amazingly, despite the armpit-deep snow burying everything in sight, there’s a pile of acorns pooled at the bottom of the relatively snow-free depression at the base of this three-tree cluster.
Man, I’ve got enough ‘ancorns’ to tie down a small revival tent!
Since I took my gloves off—in order to do fiddly little things like tying parachute cord around ancorns—my fingers have gone almost numb. It’s also surprisingly difficult to see small finite details through the nearly perpetual veil of steam chuffing from my nose and mouth, so I regularly have to stop breathing for the duration of a short task.
In the distance, in the ‘woods’ beyond the far side of the clearing, somebody suddenly belts out, “Fucking snow-fucking-shoes!” And I can relate. I’ve grown to hate the damned things myself. Greg chuckles.
All this bending and squatting and climbing and plodding around our campsite has repeatedly stretched and loosened my snowshoes’ jury-rigged laces (improvised from more dissected parachute harness parts), and they’re once again barely hanging on to my boots. Once I’m done tying off this one anchor line to that little stub of a branch over there, I’m going to have to once again re-tie everything on my friggin’ snowshoes—again—and I too am dead sick of it.
Greg doesn’t seem to be having any problems with them though.
However, despite my innate tendency to tie consistently slipshod knots, this ancorn manages to hold strong and true, and my shelter finally takes on the reassuring shape of a small saggy-roofed ‘house.’ Tah-daahhh!
Of the three lifeless trees poking up out of this dimple in the snow—two naked oaks (or maybe one with two trunks), and some white-barked thing (maybe a birch) that snapped about five feet above ground level and now lays across the depression like a drawbridge—I’ve used the downed birch as the “ridge-pole” of my “tent.” The orange folds of my parachute are draped over it—and thereby over the bowl of snow beneath it as well—as my ancorns, and the suspension lines pulling on them, draw the material tight.
My little crooked orange ‘house’ in the woods.
Greg finally leaves me to my labors, and heads over by the communal fire-pit, where I see a couple of the other students dumping armloads of gathered kindling and firewood, preparing for the group’s evening meal. I take a little more time tidying up my little domicile though. Excess parachute material—and most of it is excess—I curl inside and under at the bottom and pack snow atop it. I wrestle the remnants of my “improvised backpack” under the canopy, and dig a little shelf for it out of the rim of the snow bowl inside. Then I unfurl my sleeping bag, lay it out across the bottom of that ‘bowl,’ and—once again—stop to retighten all the knots and buckles and straps of my goddamned snowshoes!
Man, these things are a friggin’ pain in the ass!
When, at last, I squirrel my way up and out of my little snow hutch though, it’s dark enough to be almost night. My watch says it’s barely after five, but the low clouds, still dense and crawling through the treetops, say it’s closer to eight. I take only a moment to appraise my shelter before tromping off to join my fellow campmates, and I’ve gotta’ tell you, it came out pretty danged cool.
The spread of orange “silk” doesn’t rise very high above the ground, since the felled tree over which it’s draped snapped at a height barely a foot-and-a-half above the crest of the heaped snow, so it’s really not all that visible to begin with. I suppose that if I was feeling really industrious, I could probably round up a few sprigs from some of the still-green pine and fir trees sprinkled throughout these skeletal woods, and mask that orange sheet a little better, but then… naahh.
Besides, considering the riot of snowshoe-prints already encircling my little fortress (which makes it look more like the lair of a very socially active Sasquatch), a half-assed and glaringly out-of-place screen of pine boughs would probably prove to be somewhat of an eye-catcher, kind of defeating the whole purpose of the camouflage in the first place.
I close the entry flap against a flurry of wind-whipped “ice-dust” that suddenly tickles my neck, kick a shovelful of snow off the top of my right snowshoe, and tromp off to the central campfire to see what’s for dinner.

Moose jerky and K-Rations. Mm-mm good!
Actually, all sarcasm aside, it tastes damn good. The jerky’s only slightly more leathery than the store-bought stuff (although somehow I missed the moose-hunt that garnered us this ‘kill’), and the K-Rats, well… those are a whole new dining experience in themselves.
Unlike C-Rats, which are full-fledged field-portable meals, K-Rats are strictly survival rations. Compact, nutritionally dense, and sized and shaped to fit in the limited confines of a survival kit (like the ones built into an ejection seat), they are handier to carry, easier and quicker to eat, and are made to last despite their smaller dimensions. They come in what look like little sardine cans: flat, rounded-rectangular ‘tins’ with roll-back tops. Most of them would not appeal to me at all, outside of a survival situation—too much chocolate, or too much salt, or too much grease… too much something—but I quickly discover that there’s one that I love.
The “lemon bar.” I could live off that alone, I do believe.
Basically, it seems to be a sardine-can-shaped ingot of compressed Corn Flakes that’s been soaked in some kind of lemony juice. It tastes sorta’ like a hard, brittle, lemon meringue pie. And even though it’s barely the size of a large harmonica, I find that I can stretch out its consumption to last almost half an hour.
And while we eat, our instructor regales us with tales of trap-setting, snow-boiling, and ways to urinate in the snow that make it all but undetectable (hint: work on your marksmanship). He even pulls a thin metal wire out of the chest strap of a parachute harness, and shows us how a simple wire slip-knot and a piece of K-Rat “bait” can nab you a fine squirrel banquet.
And I’ll tell you what: because of that demonstration, I think I’m starting to appreciate this snowpack a little more now. It buries all the foul-tasting plants we would have had to pick and eat, not to mention the innocent woodland creatures we’d have had to lure to their deaths, gut, clean, cook and eat. And that’s a worthy trade-off, I believe.
The conversation becomes more social and giggly, the darkness swallows the world outside our campfire glow, and finally, somewhere around 8:30, I do my awkward snowshoe slog-waddle back to my shelter, and cave in for the night.

7
DAY TWO: SNOWSHOE APPRECIATION DAY

We awaken to the first clear sky we’ve seen in more than a week.
Actually, it’s only clear above us. Below us—as viewed from a little promontory about a hundred yards downhill from our clearing—we discover the boiling cloud-tops of that same old overcast deck scouring the lower world with a heavy wet ruthlessness that we’re perfectly happy to have missed. Beautiful! The sudden appearance of the sun even gives us a chance to try out some of our signaling and navigation techniques that its previous absence had denied us. But we’ve got to hurry; the clouds will be deepening again soon, and we’ll be back in the murk once more.
So, following a scrumptious K-Rat lemon bar breakfast, I join the others as they tromp their way out into the clearing—fussin’ and cussin’ the whole way, of course, about how our snowshoes feel like we just walked through a field of frozen elephant turds, and now they’re stuck to our boots—then we set about locating north, south, east and west using our watches and the sun. Shortly after that, we’re flashing each other—with the sun and our survival kit mirrors (what did you think I meant?)—learning how to sight through the little eyeholes in the middle of the mirrors, and signaling high-flying aircraft with them. Neither of these takes very long, and they’re actually kind of fun. But after about twenty minutes of blinding each other with science, at least half the group is down on one knee again, tugging and adjusting and tightening their goddamned snowshoes—again—and exchanging sarcastic barbs about their inconvenience.
“Okay, gentlemen,” the instructor finally shouts, “come and join me over here.”
It takes a minute or two for us to straggle back together again, converging from all corners of the snowbound clearing, padding along and doing our painstaking little penguin-waddles as we try not to step on our own twenty-inch-wide ‘feet’ in the process. Sgt. Goodwin—our instructor—waits patiently, his tolerant smile barely visible through the steam boiling from his mouth and nose.
Once we’re finally assembled around him—not far from my shelter, actually—he claps his gloved hands together, and announces, “Good news, gentlemen; it’s Snowshoe Appreciation Day. You can take those damned annoying things off now.”
Oh, thank gawd! Everyone goes off giggling.
I plod the five or six steps over to my shelter, kneel to remove one snowshoe, then plop back on my ass in the snow to remove the other. Man, it does feel like I just pried a couple of frozen elephant turds off my feet. I jam their heel-stems into the snow, posting them there like a couple of cold tiki torches, and then stand up.
Well, I try to stand up anyway. What actually happens though, is that my left leg plunges into the snow clear up to my crotch. I try to heft it back out by rocking my weight over onto my right knee… which, naturally, follows suit by punching through the thin crusty surface itself, and dropping my balls into the ice as well. Hoo-HOO!
My first reflex? Palms down on the snow to press my way out.
Reaction? Both hands break through, collapse all the way up to the armpits, and my face hits the powder next. I rock my way back upright, spitting snow and slapping it out of the fur of my parka’s hood—and noticing for the first time that others around me are doing much the same thing. My ass drops lower when I resettle myself onto that cheek, but, with enough sustained straining and delicately applied leverage, I am finally able to suck one leg up out of its hole.
“Come on, guys,” shouts the instructor, “We’ve still got to make the rounds of all your shelters. Come on! Let’s go! Get on your feet, and get your asses over here!”
I jerk my leg the rest of the way up, and, with only a minor collapse on the other side, I wind up tentatively spread wide across the snow on hands and knees. Okay, then… next step. Aiming all my extremities for those foot-, hand- and ass-prints up ahead there, where the snow has already been compressed and packed down a little, I heave myself upright… and immediately fall forward into another underfoot cave-in… only this time, I attempt to sort of ‘stumble-run’ through it… which only ploughs me in up to my ribcage. My chest folds over the top—making me say “Oof!”—and I end up submerged clear up to my pits again, only my arms, shoulders and head still above the surface. I look like I just fell through the ice, and I’m clinging to the edge for dear life.
“Son of a bitch,” say I.
“Hey, gentlemen… dudes… come on!” the instructor chides, “We haven’t got all day here. You got what you wanted—you don’t have to wear those stupid godawful snowshoes any more—so let’s get a move-on here. We’ve got places to be, people to see, things to do. Let’s go!”
You know, I’m starting to suspect there might just be a lesson in here somewhere.
I squirm and tug for purchase, but now nothing can find traction. Any downward pressure, by any appendage, only results in a further collapse. Is this snow, or quicksand?
I look around at my fellow classmates, and find them all in varying degrees of immersion in the snow… and all looking around at each other with sheepish grins.
“Now, folks! I’m not kidding!” the instructor continues. “Get over here!” And he points to the very spot where we’d just been standing, the snow still chewed and compacted by all our overlapping snowshoe-prints.
Okay, okay, I get the point. Now can we please…
“Don’t you touch those snowshoes!” And I look over to where he’s pointing, to where Lt. Cavanaugh—an annoyingly cocksure and infamously vocal F-4 pilot out of California—is sprawled across the snow, trying to slide his snowshoes under his hands for leverage… pretty clever, actually. “This is Snowshoe Appreciation Day—you won’t need ‘em—and we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. So get over here! All of you!”
I shove and dig… and slip and crash… and claw and drive… and plunge in even deeper. Goddammit! There’s got to be a way to do this!
Down at the bottoms of my latest leg-holes, I squirrel the toes of my boots into the snow, digging toe-holds as I go, trying to stair-step my way up and out. But that only goes so high, and then the more lightly compacted snow gives way, and I drop back in up to my chest again. Shit! This only makes me crankier and more determined though, which, in turn, only makes my next attempt all the more aggressive. And I throw myself into it with renewed vigor.
Off to my left, I catch sight of my buddy Greg, as he suddenly rises to his feet, and teeters there for a second as if balanced on a rolling log. He’s only about ankle-deep in the snow, somehow—probably packed down a small area in front of him where he could find some purchase—and is now steeling himself to make a lunge for the instructor. I can tell. And he does… he gets three whole steps into a staggering charge, one shin-deep, one knee-deep, and one groin-deep that then caves in up to his belly button. He doesn’t quit though. He just throws his arms out wide, and rolls hard left and right until first one and then the other leg flops back out onto the surface. He then half-swims, half-crawls another five feet forward, until he somehow magically hoists himself the rest of the way up onto his feet again… right in front of the instructor. He’s now standing, roughly knee-deep, on the pre-compacted snow where we’d all been milling around earlier.
“Okay, that’s one!” shouts Sgt. Goodwin. A couple of the guys collapse into helpless laughter, and rouse just enough energy for some exhausted applause. Fuck.
With another mighty heave, I bully my way forward again. Enough of this ‘trying to get on top’ stuff—I’m too big and heavy for that. Instead, I think I’m just going to batter my way forward, bash my way through it like an ice-breaker (or like Bugs Bunny, burrowing his way to ‘Albakoiky’), and see how far that’ll get me.
Turns out, not very far.
I throw everything I’ve got into it—legs stomping and driving and digging, hands clawing and scooping, arms pushing up or pulling forward as the moment demands, feet tripped up and hobbled by the funnel-like confines of my trench—and the goddamned snow just absorbs it all. My breathing flies hopelessly out of control, of course, worsened by the higher elevation of our campsite, I’m sure, and forced into arrhythmia by the herky-jerkiness of my spastic flailings. I grunt and heave and growl—and gasp and swear and gulp for air—and I assault the battlements with an almost obsessive fury… until, at long last, I finally surrender, and flop, breathless and deboned over the lip of my trough.
The bare side of my face is lying in the snow, and I’m sweating in sheets inside my parka… and I can’t stop chuckling… at myself. I must look pathetic. I look up at the instructor, and he’s still at least thirty feet away. The bastard musta’ been backing up!
I rock up onto one elbow—which once again drops through the crust of the snow, sinking me almost up to my armpit again—and look back at the trail I just blazed. And I doubt if the channel I carved is even ten or twelve feet long! I could probably take two steps back down my rut, and reach my snowshoes where they stand, right where I left them, what, half an hour ago?
“Are you fuckin’ kidding me?”
Did I just say that out loud?
I look back towards the instructor—and the three students that are standing or kneeling there now—slap the hood of my parka back out of the way, and nod my head.
“Okay,” I gasp, “I get it. I get your point.”
“Well, that’s just fine,” says the instructor, “But I still need you to get your ass over here so we can get this thing started. Come on. Let’s go!”
Oh gawd. ‘Get this thing started?’ He’s really going to push this, isn’t he.
Well, enough of the ‘ice-breaker’ technique, then. That about t’killed me.
Following a deep, lung-steadying sigh, I scoop a couple of armfuls of snow into my hole, and, on my elbows and knees, I creep my way up over it and onto the surface. From there then, it’s back to my original one-caving-in-slipping-buckling-step-at-a-time method, slogging my way clumsily across the chest-deep snow pack to where the rest of the gang is slowly converging.
Hours later—okay, maybe ten minutes later—I slither the last of the distance up to the instructor’s tapping toes, and flop over onto my back, the second-to-the-last student to make it. And if it weren’t for my heaving chest, I’m sure I’d look just like I’d been shot dead in the middle of making a snow angel. Sergeant Dobbs, the portlier one of the two C-141 loadmasters in our group, is the last one to stagger into the circle, aided in his final push by Lt. Cavanaugh… who drops into the snow almost crotch-deep as a result of his helpful gesture. We all chuckle wearily, and applaud our own sorry asses.
“Okay, gentlemen,” says Sgt. Goodwin, with an exasperated shove away from the tree that he’s been leaning against for the last half hour. “Step One of Snowshoe Appreciation Day; choose between walking around with or without your snowshoes. If you’d rather have your snowshoes on, go ahead and put them on again.”
Huh? But…
“Um…,” says Sgt. Dobbs, “You mean…?”
“We still have to do a walk-around inspection of your shelters,” says Sgt. Goodwin, “So if you think you’d rather be wearing your snowshoes for that walk-around, I would seriously recommend that you go and put them on again before we leave.”
We are hesitant however, stooped, sitting or kneeling where we are at the ends of our respective Trenches of Torture. Is he serious? After all this crap, we’re just supposed to turn around and go back to our snowshoes now?
“So then,” he adds, “I gather you’d rather not have your snowshoes for the walk-around. Well, that’s just fine with me.”
“No, no, no,” we reply, almost in harmony, and we each turn around to begin our slogs back through our outward radiating snow-ditches.
Miserable son of a bitch.

Two hours later—okay, fifteen minutes later… okay, maybe FIVE minutes later, five minutes that just seem like two hours… five brutal and utterly debilitating minutes of fighting my way right back down the mulched-up channel that I just finished carving going the other way, looking like an escaped prisoner fording waist-deep rapids at a clumsy stumbling sprint—I finally flop into my old butt-prints in the snow, and lie there, puffing and panting beside my snowshoes… my beautiful BEAUTIFUL snowshoes.
They just look so wonderful now, so sleek, stylish, functional—actually, they look downright ethereal—standing there against the sun like lacey teardrop-shaped sculptures. The light is not only sparkling off the snow dust lining every strand and edge, but the jury-rigged webbing has splintered the light into fans and beams of heavenly radiance.
Yes, I am that tired.
I release an epic sigh, then roll over and pluck them from the snow bank. Their donning goes quickly and easily, especially considering the flaccid burn of my limbs, until finally, with one last mighty heave, I am able to heft myself back up onto my feet.
Holy crap! I’m standing on the snow! Atop it even! What a miracle!
True, I was also standing atop the snow before Snowshoe Appreciation Day, but for some reason, it just wasn’t the same wondrously emotional experience then.
Turns out, I LOVE my snowshoes.

8
WINTER WONDERLAND

Somewhere just after 1:00 in the afternoon, we finally hike up out of the tops of the clouds. They’ve been slithering over the mountains all day long, frequently eliciting the rather disconcerting sensation that the mountains underfoot are moving through them.
But now, as we trudge the last few hundred feet uphill towards the absolute apex of this one little snowy-naked peak, tromping carefully up the slope in our snowshoes—moving out of the silent stampede of cloud-shadows and into pure, dazzling, unfiltered sunlight… past the last lonely whistling tree and into vibrant blue skies so intense they look polished and buffed to a rich sapphire luster—the world above the weather unfurls around us. And, without a signal to do so, we all stop, in unison, to take in the tableau.
Magnificent.
Below us, on all sides, the clouds are combing through the mountain range like milky water through shallow rapids. Hardly a handful of trees visible across all these snow-cone mountaintops, hardly a wisp of cloud to mar the indigo dome above, and not a trace, not a nick, not a ding of civilization anywhere to be found. Just white-on-white capped by blue-on-blue. For all we can tell from up here, we could just as easily be atop the Himalayas right now.
The cold scours my nose red, the wind snuffles through the fur of my parka’s hood, and the vista is almost too bright to look at.
Breathtaking. Somebody give me a flag to plant!
This, of course, is balanced—in its totality—by the shaking of my exhausted legs, the deep, raw, and hollow scratchiness of my heaving lungs, the throbbing ache beneath my tongue, and the frozen snot bridging the gap between nostrils and lips.
I’m gasping so hard, it makes me laugh.
My “improvised backpack”—nothing more than a wad of loose components now, bundled up in a poncho and some leftover parachute canopy material, and bound together by a sloppy web of parachute suspension lines—has been steadily disintegrating as the march has gone on, requiring the occasional backtrack to pick up a dribbled sock or two, a canteen cup, or maybe a mess kit spoon. Thank God I haven’t dribbled any underwear along the way… yet.
And then of course, there are my friggin’ snowshoes—I’m sorry; I meant my BELOVED snowshoes, whose helpful and crucial role I can fully appreciate now, thank-you very much. But they absolutely will not stay tight for more than about fifty steps or so. They’ve been slapping at the soles of my boots and dragging their tennis-racket-hand-grip “heels” through the snow for the last several minutes. And as “appreciative” as I may be of their assistance, I am dead fucking sick and tired of these jury-rigged monstrosities.
We’ve still got close to another half mile to go, though. At least that’s what Sergeant Goodwin tells us, anyway. Great.
As a group, we gasp and snort and swallow hard—trying desperately to lubricate our chilled-dry throats—and slowly congregate around our instructor. He looks like he was just dropped off in front of us by a luxury helicopter. We look like turn-of-the-century polar explorers, bearded and chapped-lipped and disheveled and one step from Death’s Door, gazing hopefully into his face and waiting for him to give us meat or something. At least I do. Greg never looks mussed.
Sgt. Goodwin points ahead to the next vanilla ice cream mountain ahead of us. There’s a lazy swoop of a saddle connecting our peak to that one, almost like a snow-draped suspension bridge—so the walk from here to there shouldn’t be too hard or long—and there’s a broad ledge on the side of the summit, as if a dollop had been scooped out of the ice cream. Goodwin’s finger points to that ledge.
“That’s where we’re going to bivouac tonight,” he says.
I pour the last of one canteen’s water down my throat, and stare at that divot of pure snow in the distance.
Are you kidding me?
We won’t be rigging improvised shelters tonight; we’ll just be making do with whatever we can find on-site, we were told. But… there’s nothing there! Not a tree, not a rock, not a bush. Just a wide concavity of snow lopped out of the side of a smothered mountaintop.
Home, sweet home, my ass!
I hate this shit.

By late afternoon, we’re still slogging our way across that damned saddle. Seven tiny, insignificant, hunched little figures—a parade of fleas against the vast, surreal, and pristine white backdrop—plodding along in awkward, cautious little steps that still fail to keep our snowshoes from clacking against—and stepping on top of—each other.
Between the six students, there’s so much stumbling and dropping to knees and falling over on hips, rippling up and down the line that, from any distance, we must look like target ducks getting repeatedly shot flat as we chug across a carney shooting gallery.
For a while, it was funny—in a giddy, bone-tired kinda’ way—but by now, with the sun settling lower on our cotton-candy horizon and blazing right into our eyes like a massive laser, every little slip and stagger just hits us as more and more exasperating.
I’m beginning to see the wisdom, though, in having us hike so far before crashing for the night under whatever rock or bush or fallen tree we can find, because right now, I am fairly certain that pickiness will not be an issue with me. I could topple over right where I’m standing right now—face-down in the snow—and sleep like a baby.
A dead baby.
I’ve got to say though, all miseries and inconveniences aside, this really is an unbelievable panorama up here, especially now that the lowering sun has made a sundial out of every pinnacle, hummock and ridgeline that’s pierced the solid cloud deck below us. This may be what Heaven looks like—on TV, at least—but it’s probably closer to what Hell feels like.
A frozen Hell, anyway.
At the front of our little weaving, staggering, lurching, high mountain procession, Sgt. Goodwin suddenly steps aside and stops. The rest of us have to almost pile into each other before we think to look up from our snowshoes and come to a stop ourselves.
“Okay, gentlemen,” he shouts breathlessly, “This is it.” And he waves a gloved hand across the field of snow as if sprinkling it with holy water.
We look around at the plain of unblemished and glaring white powder.
“This is what?” gasps Lt. Cavanaugh.
The rest of us chuckle wearily.
“This is your home for the night. Make the best of it. You’ve got about an hour-and-a-half until nightfall, so I wouldn’t waste any time.”
“Doing what? There’s nothing here.”
“There’s plenty here, and by now you should know just where to look to find it.”
A few more helpless giggles spill out through the steam jetting from all six gaping mouths, saying, in no uncertain terms, ‘you have got to be kidding me.’ Then, as a group, we sigh, shrug and disperse toward the perimeter of the snowfield in dejected resignation, searching for something—anything—upon which to jury-rig a shelter.
Me? I decide to stand right where I am, and watch what the rest of the gang does first. As much of a ‘natural survivalist’ as I am—as adept as I am in the wild, as gifted as I am with improvised or hand-fashioned ‘tools,’ and as intuitive as I’ve proven to be when confronted with no available flora, fauna, ground features or an RV—standing here right now, staring at all this unspoiled desolation and trying to imagine what I should do with so much nothingness turns out to be just a little too daunting for my morale.
Let’s see; should I jury-rig my overnight shelter over there, where the snow is really flat, and there’s not a stone or a log to start from? Or maybe I should assemble my all-natural lean-to over there, where the snow is really REALLY flat, and there’s not a twig or a stump anywhere to be seen. Decisions, decisions, decisions.

Turns out, this snow is actually covering stuff! Usable stuff. Who’da thunk it?
I don’t know how this Florida boy missed that simple little Truth, but there it is.
Once one of the guys finally resigns himself to digging a snow-cave out of the mountain’s powdery coat, he quickly discovers that just beneath the rolling surface are all the things that made it roll… like rocks and logs and bushes. His excavation burrows right into a submerged bush, beneath which there is an air pocket, a small patch of dry grass and pine needles untouched by the snow because of the protective umbrella of the bush. Perfect! A ready-made cubby hole. He need dig no more.
Greg, on the other hand, strikes rock with almost his first scoop of snow—a small cluster of mini-boulders which, though not “sheltering” enough to create an air pocket, are close enough, vertical enough, and leaning-against-each-other enough that Greg can dig out his own little cubby hole which should maintain its structural integrity.
Suddenly, this starts to look like fun.
I pad around the snow field looking for new angles on the sun’s long shadows that might reveal a promising swell or undulation, beneath which might lie the underpinnings of a viable shelter… preferably one with electricity, indoor plumbing, and a fireplace.
But I’ll take what I can get.
As usual though, having waited to see how the others did first, I’ve now waited too long. The criss-crossing trails that they’ve mulched through the snow as they’ve gone about their scavenging have all but obliterated the smooth and subtle rises and falls in the snow cover. I have to slog my way over, almost to the very brink of the shelf’s downslope—where it plunges uninterrupted all the way down into the cloudy rapids filling the valley below—before I detect a ripple in the snow so faint that a second look almost convinces me to walk away. But it’s there nonetheless… like an ancient speed bump, eroded almost down to nothing… like the fine knuckling of a woman’s spine beneath her skin… there’s something.
I scuff away the surface powder with my snowshoe and lo and behold, right there, not even five inches down, I hit pay dirt. Well, I hit pay-bark, anyway.
Yes… bark.
A small tree—with a trunk barely eight inches thick—lies horizontal just below the surface, snapped several feet above ground level and fallen to one side like a lowered gate. In fact, it seems to have dammed up a fairly large drift of snow, which would otherwise have just sloughed off down the mountainside, I imagine.
I chip away at the snowy rise leading up to it, and almost immediately it caves in, revealing an immaculate little man-sized pocket directly beneath the log. Tah-daahhh!
Are you kidding me? That was so easy, it’s almost embarrassing. My “search” for shelter turned out to be about as challenging as unwrapping a Christmas gift.
The collapsed opening is little more than a narrow slot though, running left to right alongside the log. I drop to my knees (which sink into the snow up to my crotch), and stick my head into the slot.
Awesome! The spindly branches of the felled tree—still flocked with dead leaves, and bent by the weight of the snow atop them—arch over the hollow like ribs, providing a dry and well supported ceiling overhead. And though the space below is shallow and pinched off towards its ends, it looks to be the perfect dimensions for me. It’s actually a little spooky, truth be told. It looks more like a cocoon from which I’ve just emerged, rather than just a convenient little air bubble in the snow into which I’m about to enter.
Well, no reason to look any further. ‘Honey, I’m home!’
I don’t even bother calling the instructor over to get his approval first, like everyone else has been doing. I just thrash my makeshift backpack off my back, wrench the sleeping bag from its guts, lay it down along the length of the trough, then stuff the rest of the disintegrating ‘pack’ into the hole, bundling it up at the ‘head’ of my ‘bed’ like a pillow. And the instant everything’s in place, without waiting, I rip my snowshoes off, toss them inside, then roll in after it all. And I am GONE! I am just a bundle of green insulation and steamy breath wadded into a nearly invisible little slit in the snow.

Sergeant Goodwin startles me awake again—Jeezy Pete, I must have conked out as soon as my head hit the pillow!—and behind him, the sky has turned a much darker charcoal-cobalt color. The sun has apparently set since I rolled into my little cubby-hole, what, an hour ago!?!
Man, I musta’ been WASTED!
I notice, though, that I am comfortably warm and snug, even though I’ve been laying on top of my sleeping-bag-bed the whole time. Nice insulation in here.
“So,” says Sgt. Goodwin, “Are we all safe and comfy in there, Airman Stipp?”
I don’t sit up—I can’t, without stuffing my head into my low twiggy ceiling—but I roll to face him more squarely, and I smile. “Why, yes, Sgt. Goodwin… as a bug in a rug, as a matter of fact.”
“Well that’s just excellent. You’ve got a good spot here, I see: good cover, good protection, good camouflage. I had a hard time finding you, actually. And it looks right toasty in there, too.”
“That it is, Sergeant. That it is. Didn’t think I’d fall asleep like that, though. Sorry about that. Musta’ been more tired than I thought. Did I miss anything?”
“Not yet. But why don’t you grab your snowshoes and come join us over here? No fires tonight, but I hear the K-Rats and squirrel jerky are top notch.”
“You talked me into it. I’ll be right there.”
“Excellent.” And Sgt. Goodwin turns and tromps away.
Getting out of my little ‘snow womb’ proves to be a tad more difficult than tumbling into it was, though. Trying to slither out between my thick tree-trunk roof and the crumbling lip of snow—without collapsing that lip of snow—rakes my neck with bark, fills my collar with snow, and forces me to do a one-armed push-up off the floor of my shelter. Finally—a use for that unappreciated skill! But once I’m up and out and manhandling my snowshoes back onto my boots, I take a moment to assess my shelter-rigging handiwork.
Damned sweet! More homey, cozy and warm than the shelter I’d spent half an afternoon assembling out of parachute parts at our last site. So…
… apparently I make a great shelter, as long as I don’t have to actually build a shelter.
Know thine limitations.

9
DAY THREE IN THE FIELD: ESCAPE & EVASION

At just a little after 9:30 in the morning, the rendezvous site comes into view.
Despite the fact that we’ve been plodding our way downhill since sunrise, we’re still above the soupy undercast of clouds—just barely—when our track arcs us around the end of the neighboring ridgeline, and reveals the gathering of other students who also spent the morning marching down to here. In addition, there’s about half a dozen large pick-up trucks and a small army of additional instructors that they brought up to join us, all convening over steaming cups of coffee on this little logging road pullover.
More instructors, huh. That can’t be good.
Fortunately, the snow here is thin enough and muddied enough by the vehicles that we can take our friggin’ snowshoes off, and just mill around among our “long lost buddies,” while we wait for the remainder of the scattered student groups to arrive.
If I could tolerate coffee, I’d have a cup. But I can’t, so I don’t. Instead, I peel open my last K-Rat lemon bar—which I acquired only this morning by bartering off two chocolate granola bars for it—and park my ass on the rear bumper of one of the trucks.
The bright unfiltered sunlight has me squinting hard, but it is heatless. The cold lays on everything up here, and plumes of steam boil from every mouth, nose, coffee cup and exhaust pipe around me. I hear a familiar outburst of bawdy laughter, and look up in time to catch a glimpse of Spew, his hair tweaked and tousled by three days without a shower, peaking out from under his field cap in matted flicks. He grabs an exaggerated handful of his crotch and hefts it, as part of some ‘hilarious’ joke’s punchline, apparently. The three or four guys standing around him erupt in extra-manly guffaws themselves… and I turn away to avoid any possible recognition.
Instead, I stroll over to the edge of the drop-off, and look down.
I feel like an ant standing on the center knuckle of a large hand… a hand splayed flat in a pool of milk. The three middle ‘fingers’ radiate out away from me, sinking into the pooled clouds between them as they go.
Trees—sparse along the tops of the ridgelines—thicken the further down the sides they grow. But they too vanish into the clouds that fill the valleys. I wonder what this place would look like without the clouds.
Behind me, a cheer goes up, and I look back to see the long-awaited Last Group of Students—“Spazman” Spiegelman among them (he’s probably the reason they’re late)—slog-waddling their way down the uphill slope, and waving in response to the applause. At the same time, I notice the cadre of extra instructors tossing out the last of their coffee now, nodding to each other, then piling aboard the pick-up trucks. Their engines roar to life, they back and jostle and maneuver around each other, and then drive off in both directions. And by the time those last students plod into the clearing, no vehicles remain, and the mountains are silent again.
Hmmm. Interesting.
The newest arrivals are given the chance to shuck their snowshoes and rustle up something hot to drink. Then the remaining instructors—the individual group instructors, like our Sgt. Goodwin—herd everybody together again, this time into a single tight clot arced around the lead instructor, Sgt. Sharp.
“All right folks, listen up!” he shouts. “It’s E-and-E Time! Escape and Evasion!”
We already know this. We’re already dreading it. Or at least I am.
“This is the home stretch, ladies and gentlemen! Finally! But, if you think you’re tired now? Well…” He sweeps his hand back and forth between the two gullies below that plunge into the clouds between the finger-like ridgelines, and says, “Down there, a little over a mile or so down those creek beds, are the buses that will take you back to base! All you’ve got to do is walk to them! And that’s it! That’s all there is to it!”
Of course, by that, what he really means is “there’s a LOT more to it than that.”
“The only problem is,”—and he pauses again to let us get a good look at his spreading grin—“that’s all ‘Enemy Territory’ down there! Starting right here, at the edge of this road, and going all the way to the buses, ‘The Enemy’ will be looking for you! And it’s your job to make your way out of Enemy Territory safely—undetected and uncaptured. In other words, you’ve already ‘escaped:’ now you must ‘evade!’”
Great. I can’t wait to see how I’m supposed to elude a posse when I’m ‘running’ through neck-deep snow in snowshoes and a disintegrating improvised backpack, plowing a ragged scar through the snow as I go. Maybe if I tuck my hands under my armpits and flap my arms like a bird, honking a bicycle horn as I run, I can keep my pursuers laughing too hard to catch me.

They pair us up into two-man teams. No particular selection process this time; just whoever happens to be standing next to you when an instructor walks by. I turn and introduce myself to my new survival partner. He says his name is Maither—Lieutenant Tom Maither. He’s a helicopter pilot… or he’s going to be… or something like that.
Tom Maither? Tomaither? Tomater?
Lord, give me strength.
He seems a decent sort though; friendly, prone to smiling, polite—maybe even a little timid—even deferential… to me? An airman? Then again, he might be reading a little too much competence and confidence into my camouflaged fatigues, my cocksure smart-ass sarcasm, and my snowshoes being on backwards (just kidding).
Perfect officer material.
They tell us we can head out whenever we’re ready, taking whatever route we choose—as long as it follows the grain of those ridges and valleys dipping down into the clouds below us—bound for the buses at the other end. And since Lt. Tomater and I were quick to wrestle our snowshoes back onto our feet, we are among the first six or seven teams to step off the edge of the logging road and forge our way down into the gullies.
With me in the lead—I don’t know whether ol’ Tomater is just being ‘deferential’ again, or if he’s just being a typical officer and letting me break trail for him—I angle across to the right, first to the top of the rightmost ‘finger,’ then side-step down its left flank into the misted pines, where they’re shrouded by the uppermost tendrils of clouds.
Remembering everything they told us about covert cross-country movement, I’m staying off the ridge tops (where we’d cast a conspicuous silhouette against the sky), staying well above the creek bed (where our pursuers would expect us to go), and—thanks to today’s weather—staying within the soupy clouds (to help mask our glaringly obvious tracks through the snow). Of course, even though the fogginess might white-out the posse’s view of our snowshoe-mangled trail—at least as viewed from the creek bed looking up—if they ever do find our trail, there’ll be no more ‘hiding’ after that.
I stop for a moment to look back… and Jeezy Pete, the trace we’re leaving behind us looks more like a herd of moose passed this way… or maybe a derailed locomotive. It’s like a big fat arrow of mulched snow pointing right at us! They went that-a-way!
How could they not find us?
While I wait for Lt. Tomater to catch up, I lean against a tree, and wrestle with my damned snowshoe straps again. The lieutenant’s really having some balance issues, apparently, trying to walk across this steep incline in loose and sloppy snowshoes, top-heavy with his improvised backpack, and even more breathless than I am.
When he finally gets close, he twists to swivel his butt towards a tree—like me—but gets torqued completely off his feet when (a) his snowshoes don’t ‘twist,’ and (b) his backpack just keeps on going. He lands in the snow on his side instead, as if he intended to make a snow angel in profile. Then just stays there, giggling.
It’s a light, airy, slightly phlegmy giggle—kind of a helpless ‘kee-hee-hee’ sound—and it’s infectious. It makes me snort and chuckle a little myself, and I slide down the tree and sit down beside him.
I like the Ol’ Tomater-Man. And his harmlessness is smoothing off some of the stressful edges of this forced march quite nicely.
Finally, he sniffs and gulps down a little extra air, then shoves himself up onto one elbow. “I don’t know about you,” he gasps, “but I haven’t seen anybody else’s trails since we started. Have you?”
“No. Not that I’ve been looking, though.”
“But we weren’t the first to come this way, were we?”
What are you getting at there, Mr. Tomater?
“No. I’m pretty sure a couple of other teams already came this way first. Why?”
“Hmmm,” he says, dabbing at his dripping red nose with a well-used hanky, “Guess I’m just hoping we’re still going the right way, is all. Can’t see shit in this fog.”
“Well,” I chuckle—keeping it ‘light’—“that’s kinda’ the whole point: staying out of sight. If we can’t see shit, neither can they. But we are definitely going the right way. There’s only one way to go as long as stay with this ridge.”
“Okay, then,” he says with a nod, jerking himself upright into a sitting position and pulling up his first stupid snowshoe for readjustment, “that’s good enough for me.”
Well, I huff in my head, it damned well oughta’ be. I mean, who’s the pilot here, and who’s the air traffic controller?... or will be… someday… eventually. Huh?
I wrench and tug and tighten my own snowshoe straps again. Then, before pulling myself back up onto my feet, I take a brief moment to scan the ghostly forest surrounding me, looking for traps or curious instructors peeking around trees, and confirming our continued route of travel at the same time. And in so doing, I discover, much to my chagrin, that I’m actually having fun right now. And who’da thunk that?
I’m busy outfoxing The Man here, threading the enemy’s needle, slipping through his noose, ducking his swing and trumping his hand. And as long as we’re headed for those buses up there, I’m also running for home! Getting the hell out of here!
The flank of this ridgeline is pretty damned steep, though—at least forty-five degrees—plunging from its crest above the clouds down to the meandering creek bed about thirty meters below us. And we are edging along it, remaining fairly equidistant between the top and bottom… maybe a little lower than higher, just to stay within the murkiness of the mists. To walk across it like this, however, requires some cautious trickery with these damned snowshoes, especially for the idiot who has to break trail… namely, me. I’ve got to essentially swing my foot sideways into the snow, dig it in edge-on, then press down to flatten out a level footprint each time. Lieutenant Tomater just has to plant his snowshoes in my snowshoe prints. It’s the same old officer-vs.-peon story.
Looking back the way we came, I can see where the crumbling rut we created swoops across the slope from tree to tree like Christmas bunting. It wouldn’t take a whole lot of squinting to pick that out against the otherwise immaculate sheet of snow.
Yet another reason to keep trekking along up here in the mists.
I hang on to the tree, heft myself back onto my feet, and press on.

Another ten minutes pass in grunting-gasping ‘silence,’ as we chip our way across the flank of the ridgeline in tottering half-steps. We see no one, above or below us, and I get the feeling that Lt. Tomater is beginning to weary of the torturous and hobbling course I’ve chosen. I mean, we seem to be alone up here—no other students, no visible instructors, and no other comparably inconvenient snowshoe trails crossing through the snow—so what are we beating ourselves up like this for? It’s taking us for-bloody-ever to trek this measly little mile-and-a-half to the buses. What if everybody else has already finished this damned thing—because they took more sensible streamlined routes—and we’re just thrashing our way along like this for nothing?
Those are the ‘whiny-waves’ I’m starting to receive from the officer who is my survival partner slogging along behind me. He doesn’t actually say anything—out loud—but I know he’s thinkin’ it!
Especially when we suddenly hear voices below us.
We freeze in our tracks, and look down to spot two other students—finally, other people!—picking their way among the relatively flat snow-covered stones lining the edge of the creek. Right where they were specifically told not to go. I don’t recognize either of them, but Tomater Man seems to. They’re talking to each other in subdued tones—I can’t actually make out any specific words—but even their low chuckling and jostled murmuring sounds downright riotous in this otherwise muffled silence.
“What the hell are they doing?” I whisper.
“Being posse magnets,” answers Tomater without looking away from them.
I turn my gaze to the top of Tomater’s head, where he’s laying low in the snow behind me… and I chuckle. Good one, ‘Mater Man. Then he starts looking around the woods that surround us, as if looking for other observers… or instructors… the ‘posse’ that those two dumb-asses down there are working so hard to attract.
Hmmm… good point, Mr. Mater. Perhaps we’d best find ourselves some better cover before one of those chase teams finds us in the process of homing in on them.
I had been tracking a little uphill just before we’d gone to ground, angling towards some scruffy bushes that I’d planned on passing above (in order to mask at least a little bit of our trail from below). I scramble the rest of the way up to those bushes now, low and scuffing my way through the snow on my ass and elbows. Lt. Tomater follows in my wake. Once we’re both hunkered down behind our little screen of shrubs, though—thinly flecked with only a few dead leaves—I realize that we’re going to have to do better than this. We’re dressed in green, but the bushes are a lacy cross-hatch of browns and grays, and everything else around here is friggin’ radiant white!
I start squirming my way deeper into the snow, driving one way with my butt and gloved hands, and bulldozing the other way—up against the backs of the bushes—with my snowshoes, heaping up a low berm of pretty white snow to hide behind. Mater Man catches on quick, and is right there with me. We haven’t been at it for even thirty seconds though, when another much louder ‘authority voice’ suddenly booms through the dry acoustics, freezing us in mid-burrow.
“You two! Right there!”—uh-oh—“Walking beside the stream!”—oh… whew! Looks like we ducked low just in the nick of time.
I lay over on my right side—can’t duck any lower with this ridiculous improvised backpack draped across my shoulders like a deer carcass—and peek over my freshly piled battlements down to the creek below. Through the shield of bushes, I spot the two students in question, half-squatting as if they’d been caught in mid-duck themselves. They’re slowly rising though, both looking over their shoulders back up the creek bed. Then one of them points to his own chest, and with wide-eyed innocence, shouts, “Us?”
“Yes you!” the authority-voice barks in a jovial tone suited more for a game show pronouncement, sort of like Come on down! Only he says, “You… are… captured!”
Down to my extreme lower left, a squat barrel-chested figure, plumped even more by the parka he’s wearing, emerges from a clot of trees that lean steeply out over the creek—lordy, those two students must have practically walked right under him… and we above him, for that matter—and he skitters down the embankment to the creek’s edge. The students shuffle back toward him, resignedly.
“I guess you missed the part about not following streams and rivers, huh,” the instructor adds.
Their response is quieter and humbler, but even though I can’t get all the words, I get the gist of it easily enough. They ‘had’ been slogging along further up the slope, but the terrain conditions just kept corralling them lower and lower until, without really even noticing it, they’d wound up on the embankment just above the water’s edge.
Uh-huh. Yeh.
The instructor’s head nods constantly as they plod up to each other—he’s no doubt heard it all before.
“Yeh, well, see, that’s just one of the many reasons why hunters and capture teams concentrate on the streams when they’re lookin’ for ya’. They know it’s easier and faster for a fugitive to follow. Plus it’s a source of clean water, it provides noise cover, and it shows up on maps, so you know right where you’re going. Stuff like that.” They stop in front of each other. “So that’s why you don’t go there!” And he hands them a slip of yellow paper. “Give this to one of the instructors at the bus when you get there, and let ‘im know you were caught.”
The students slump dejectedly. Then one of them asks the instructor a question that I cannot hear from up here. Fortunately, the instructor doesn’t seem to believe in speaking quietly, and I have no trouble hearing his reply.
“Oh definitely. Keep on heading that way. You can even continue following the creek bed, if you want, since avoiding capture now is a bit of a moot point for you two. Go ahead—the buses are only about another two-hundred yards down that way.”
They exchange salutations, then the two trudge off down the stream’s edge.
In the meantime, the instructor makes a note on a piece of paper, and engages in a short dialogue over a walkie-talkie that be pulls out from under his parka. Then he turns and ambles back toward his little hide-out among the trees. Lt. Tomater and I remain immobile throughout the entire interaction, even breathing into our gloved hands to mask the steam coming from our mouths and noses…
Until that instructor suddenly looks up at us, and shouts, “You two guys up there behind the bushes! Nice work! Good cover! You can press on now too!”
Damn. He knew we were here the whole time. That’s disappointing. Not unforeseen, but disappointing nonetheless. I guess that applying the correct techniques though, however ineffectively, is all they’re really looking for here. And that should be good enough for me, I suppose. But it’s not. Dammit. I really thought we’d pulled it off.
We thrash our way back up onto our ‘tennis-racket feet’ again, pound the snow off ourselves, and forge ahead along the side of the ridgeline.

A little over a hundred yards further down the line, the “finger” that we’ve been tracking the whole way abruptly peters out. Its crest plunges down out of the clouds, and dwindles away to nothing right at the creek’s edge. It forces a bend into the water’s flow, but otherwise it just ends, as if cut off by the stream itself. The ridge on the other side of the creek continues on though, retreating off into the mists in both directions, with the brook hugging its base like a narrow moat.
But, as our ridgeline steadily shrivels down to nothing, its shrinkage forces us further and further down to the water’s edge, until now, well… here we are… hopping across to the other side, at a point where the water almost seems to disappear under the close-set roots and snow. And as we step off onto the opposite bank, we find ourselves standing in the middle of a well-traveled traffic route, apparently. Several trails converge here, snowshoe tracks coming down off the ridge, following the stream, and fording the little creek in several places close to where we crossed over.
We also hear voices, coming from just up ahead… convivial, lighthearted, and a little too loud for covert conversation, but definitely student voices.
Hmmm. Maybe we’ve finally reached the end of the gauntlet here.
Tomater and I pick our way along the well worn trail, wary of its deceptive ‘levelness’—a fiction composed of compacted snow squashed over rounded streambed rocks—and stabilize ourselves against our top-heavy backpacks by gripping every trunk and tree branch we pass. And no more than twenty meters further on, where we break out of the trees, the banks abruptly flatten and widen, and the trail veers away from the precarious rocks and onto more solid level ground. Aahhhh. That’s more like it.
Up ahead—maybe a hundred meters beyond and uphill of the stream that I see we’re going to have to recross again—atop an ugly and artificially leveled ‘plateau’ that’s barely visible through the bellies of the clouds, sits a ghostly pair of buses and three times that many pick-up trucks. The end of the line, fellas! Hoo-HOO! We made it!
Me and the Mater Man even did it without getting caught!
Officially.
The voices we’d heard from back there though, were apparently those of the four students we’re now approaching, all loudly engaged in trying to traverse the stream again, here at this much wider chokepoint. One of them is already on the far side—and I gather, from the tenor of their exchange, that his was a fairly hairy transition—and now he and the nearside folks are shouting and gesticulating back and forth, coaxing and balking, encouraging and harassing each other, trying to get the next person across.
I look up and down the waterway, and notice that, once free of the tree-cluttered gully, our little creek finally had the freedom to broaden and straighten. And accelerate.
So it did.
In fact, were it not for the downed tree bridging it over there at the five-foot-wide bottleneck, where those other students are still so vociferously haggling with each other, there would be nowhere to cross it at all. At least not within sight.
I don’t like the looks of it, and I turn to Lt. Tomater to see what he thinks.
“I don’t know about you,” I say, smearing my parka’s sleeve across my raw and running nose, “but I’m thinking seriously about backtracking to where we just crossed over—back there in the trees—then just picking our way along that other shore back to here. What do you think?”
He crunches to a stop beside me, sniffing and shrugging his backpack into a better alignment, and looks the scene over. And he doesn’t take long.
“Well, it looks to me like a bunch of snowshoe tracks all come together here. And over there, on the other side of the log, it’s looking pretty well-traveled as well. So I’m thinkin’ that, since a lot of other folks have already come this way and made it across right here, well… this will probably do just fine.”
I knew he was going to say that.
“Okay, then,” I sigh. “Your call.”
I heft the crumbling discombobulation of my ‘backpack’ higher up onto my shoulders, take another hit from my canteen, then turn towards the gaggle at the bridge-crossing… just in time to watch the next guy in the group heave himself up onto the log, and start his own traverse.
And several things happen in rapid succession.
First of all, I recognize the guy. It’s none other than Amn. Spiegelman himself—The Spazman. The same guy who didn’t possess the physical coordination necessary to hop into a pool of sawdust without hurting himself. That, all by itself, does not bode well.
Second, I notice that he’s still wearing his friggin’ snowshoes! He’s sidestepping along the rounded and snow-covered crest of a log, two feet in diameter, three feet above a fast-moving stream of freezing water—with tennis rackets on his feet!—and a wad of personal gear heaped on his back! And did I mention?—it’s Spazman Spiegelman!
What happens next is anything but a surprise. In fact, it’s absolutely pre-ordained.
Barely two steps after releasing his grip on the upturned roots of the tree, his arms begin to pinwheel—frantically. His feet attempt to backpedal, but in his snowshoes, he not only has no traction whatsoever, but they keep overlapping and stepping on each other. And after only a couple of clattering high-kicking dance steps, over he goes.
He smacks into the water, flat on his back, his feet in the air. And for the next several seconds, as the Mater Man and I hobble-trot in our own snowshoes towards the scene, all we can see of The Spazman are his thrashing feet beating against the side of the log, snowshoes still attached. The rest of him is apparently underwater, weighted down and anchored there by his backpack. He is drowning, in a foot-and-a-half of frigid water.
The two remaining guys on the nearside bank are stutter-stepping hesitantly along the creek’s edge, no doubt trying to figure out how to wade into a brisk current wearing their own snowshoes. But the lone guy on the far side of the stream—who at least had the common sense to remove his snowshoes before making the crossing—waffles only a moment or two among the snow-covered rocks of the shore before wading into the icy flow himself, and storming through the knee-deep water over to Spazman.
In parka and gloves then, he plunges his arms into the water. And after one failed heave that very nearly topples him face-first into the drink, on the second try he manages to haul The Spazman out by the improvised shoulder-straps of his backpack… one of which immediately breaks, and dumps him right back under the surface again. Spazman’s flailing hands seize on his rescuer’s sleeve though, and between the two of them—and a fistful of his lapels—they are able to drag him back upright once more, against the current, and despite both of his feet still sticking straight up into the air, the heels of his snowshoes hooked over the top of the log and unable to free themselves.
Lt. Tomater and I clomp up to the scene, and immediately join the two other guys on the bank who are furiously ripping off their snowshoes. I catch a flicker of movement off to my distant left, and look over to see an instructor hopping sideways down the snowy slope and shouting into a walkie-talkie. Seconds later, another one magically appears off to my right, leaving his cover to rush to the stream’s edge without snowshoes.
In the middle of the stream though, The Spazman and his rescuer are making just about as much noise as two humans can make—Spazman spluttering and shrieking about the freezing water, his buddy growling from the strain of holding him upright and barking at him to pull his legs down—Spazman screaming that he caaaan’t because the heels of his snowshoes are snagged on the log, his ‘buddy’ yelling “Then get your arm behind you and prop yourself up! I can’t hold you up like this much longer!”—more splashing and thrashing and roaring and yelping about the cold. Then his ‘buddy’ shouts out, “We could use a little help here!”
One of the original two guys on the bank finally frees his last snowshoe—he thinks—and leaps into the fray with it still dangling and flailing along behind him… until it comes off, falls in the water, and starts to float away with the current. He detours on his way to The Spazman to lunge after the drifting snowshoe, then flings it up on the shore. On the opposite bank, the first instructor on the scene charges straight into the little river, and now there’s four of them out there, frothing up the water as if they’d waded into a piranha feeding-frenzy.
And rising up above the rest of the tumult, I hear Spazman’s patented mantra, “Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!,” followed by, “You’re bending my legs too far!”
And that gives me an idea.
With my own stupid snowshoes still doggedly hanging on but flapping loose against the soles of my mukluks, I get up and sidestep around the root bole of the tree to the opposite side of the log from the others. Then, without actually stepping into the water, I lay across the top of the log and reach down its length to Spazman’s squirming feet. “Roll him on his side!” I shout. “Just for a second!”
The instructor looks back over his shoulder, sees what I’m going for, and repeats the command. “Roll him over… that way!”
“Wha’? Huh?” says Spazman. “But… wait! I…!”
Despite his spluttering protests—and a renewed shriek about the icy water—they force him to roll towards the near bank. Up on the ‘bridge,’ his snowshoes roll with him, and their tennis-racket-handgrip-heels swing up and very nearly over the log all by themselves. I reach across and finish the job, pushing his heels the rest of the way over. His legs drop into the water with a splash.
And Spazman says, “Ow!”
“Okay, let’s get him out of this damned water,” says the instructor, taking charge of the situation now. “Over here. On this side,” he adds, and he shrugs toward the shore with the trio of additional instructors bulling across it… the shore with the buses in the distance… the shore on the other side of the ‘bridge’ from me. “All of you guys that got wet, you need to get up to those buses too—ASAP—and see the medic there. Come on. You’ve finished the course already anyway.”
The foursome splashes their way across to the opposite shore, and manhandles The Spazman up onto dry land. He’s still wearing his friggin’ snowshoes though, and he’s making loud, jittery, whining noises, splintered by his chattering teeth. Two of the other instructors unfurl dark green horse blankets as they converge on the party, and swoop them over Spazman’s shoulders as the first instructor rips his sodden backpack off and dumps it on the ground with a soggy ‘splat!.’ And again, Spazman says, “Ow.”
He seems to say that a lot.
Somebody else wrestles his snowshoes off as well. Then they charge up the slope towards the buses, dragging the shivering Spazman between them.
I turn to Lt. Tom Maither—my survival buddy—and release a giddy sigh.
“That boy needs to seriously consider a career change… maybe to accounting or something.”
“Or folding bandages.”
I snort, and cock a “good one” finger at him.

Lt. Tomater: my kind of officer.

10
OUT OF THE BLIZZARD, AND INTO THE FRIDGE

Back on the bus again—gawbless the bus!—and chugging back downhill… out of the damned mountains, and back down to fabulous friggin’ Fairchild AFB again. Yeehah!
But despite all my hopes to the contrary, the inside of the bus turns out to be just as cold as it was outside. No heat… again. Dammit!
And for all the same reasons as those for our uphill trip.
As we descend through the clouds, winding our way down out of the mountains and snow-laden forests, and emerge onto the slushy highways surrounding Spokane, the universe closes down on us again. The sky is once again lidded off with that all too familiar dark, swollen and oozing overcast that seems to have decapitated Spokane’s tallest buildings. All color has been leached away, and suddenly the dark dirge-gray weather reminds me of just what’s waiting for me up ahead…
The last day-and-a-half of Survival School… POW School
It’s coming up on noon now—they’ll be closing the facility’s chow hall in another hour—so we need to be getting back there mui pronto. Because I am ravenous… hungry enough to “eat the south end of a northbound water buffalo,” as Mutt Siegel would say.
Unfortunately, even though we’ve finally finished running the outdoor survival gauntlet, this week—Week Two—is far from over. Even worse, this third day of the last week has only just begun. And the final thirty-two hours were designed to suck.
Once we’ve finished lunch, we’ll be headed right back into the classroom again—without having shat, showered or shaved, changed clothes, slept or brushed teeth—still with snarled and matted hair, wet mud up to our knees, and breaths smelling like a butcher shop with failed air conditioning. And there we’ll be spending the rest of the afternoon getting final instructions and counseling, in preparation for the course’s “grand finale,” the hellish twenty-four hours of POW School… which begins tonight at eight o’clock, and runs straight through to sunset tomorrow… Thursday night. And we’ll be starting it already scruffy, smelly, and ready to fall asleep on our feet.
Oy vey!
There is an up-side to all this though.
As it turns out—as it was just announced on this bus—this afternoon’s classroom sessions will not be taught by any of our regular course instructors. Instead, we will be entirely under the tutelage of real living-breathing former POWs, who will be sharing their real-life personal stories as well as their wisdom, worldly perspectives, and recommendations on how best to get through the home stretch of this school.
Now that I’m looking forward to.

11
VOICES OF EXPERIENCE

Colonel Oberlund, US Air Force Retired, slumps on his stool at the front of the auditorium like a bluesy bar singer, hand-held mike hanging limp between his legs whenever he’s not speaking. And when he is speaking, the mike rises only as high as his wrist alone can heft it. He lowers his head down to bring his lips within speaking range.
The years have not been kind to the former colonel—the years or his Vietnamese captors, apparently. His sedentary weight hangs from him in ‘bags’—under his eyes, under his jaw, under his ribs—and his psychological baggage hangs from every sentence. I can’t decide if he’s bored, boring, or just reluctant to be here. And if it’s the latter, is it because public speaking in general makes him uncomfortable, or because he’s just sick to death of re-opening these wounds every time a Survival School class enters its last days?
But he holds nothing back. After growling his way through a dreary—or maybe just a personally discomfiting—recitation of some of the horrific and agonizing ordeals to which he was subjected at the infamous Hanoi Hilton, he just as dully recounts the ‘weaknesses’ in his character that ultimately led to his being ‘broken’ by his captors.
If he really does consider his “capitulation” to be the result of some “weakness” in his character, though—rather than the inevitable conclusion of months and even years of beatings, starvation, broken bones and dislocated joints—then coming here every few weeks as a “guest” to profess that “weakness” over and over and over again, has got to be like returning to a never-ending AA meeting. The wounds would never heal, I’d think. And this lackluster performance could then be attributed to that torturous repetition.
Or maybe he’s just a really bad public speaker.
As he growls and mumbles his way through his ‘presentation’ though, a large black-and-white photo, left on the overhead projector by the previous lecturer, continues to illuminate the broad screen behind him. It was taken by an American reconnaissance jet in Vietnam as it hurtled over a Prisoner of War camp north of the DMZ. And in it—plainly, and amazingly—you can clearly see how, like a discreet halftime marching band, the American prisoners milling around in the yard somehow managed to form themselves up into “random clumps” that spelled out the letters P-O-W-S.
It’s an awesome picture, depicting not only the creativity, but the courage it must have taken for a hundred-or-so beaten, broken, starved and abused prisoners to defy their captors so brazenly—and right under the noses of the guards in their towers, no less, whose inability to read or recognize English letters had to have been a critical and desperate part of the plan for them—proclaiming to the world who they were, where they were, and perhaps most importantly, where not to bomb!
Awesome work, guys.
In the meantime, Colonel Oberlund’s tedious narrative finally reaches its point, and it turns out to be more than just a protracted admission of his own human frailty.
A lot more.
For when the never-ending torture at last reached the unbearable stage for him—as it does for most everyone at some point or another—after untold weeks and months of being blinded by battered eyes swollen shut, aching from electric shocks, his broken ankle still unset, his shoulders in agony from the days spent suspended by his arms which had been hoisted up behind him—when at long last he could simply take no more—he was still able to deny them their ultimate victory after all.
Two massive shadow-hands switch out the acetate on the overhead projector. The photo of the prisoners disappears, and in its place, a copy of a formal “confession” now fills the screen. His “confession,” apparently. He remains silent for a couple of minutes, allowing us the time to read it through from top to bottom… and it is remarkable… not to mention bizarre.
To think of the hideous and sadistic extremes to which his interrogators went just to coerce this “admission” from him—declarations of his supposed disbelief in the American cause, disgust with its leaders and their motivations, and his general revulsion over the “war crimes” his country had led him to commit against the innocent people of Vietnam—is to consider an alien sort of madness. Did they really think that such a “confession”—even if made public in the United States—would make any appreciable difference to the war effort at all? And even if it did, for Colonel Oberlund, was it really worth months of searing agony, crippling injuries, and possibly even death just to resist writing something as politically and militarily impotent as that? As that?
Musta’ been.
The Colonel’s amplified voice shatters the stillness.
“Did you notice anything unusual about that so-called ‘confession’?”
Huh? How the hell would I know? It’s not like I’ve seen a whole lot of other confessions to compare it to. Everything about it is unusual to me.
I give it another fast visual scan—and to me, it bears a striking resemblance to just about every piece of official military paperwork ever produced—then I join the rest of my fellow students in shrugging my shoulders.
A lone, unmiked, female voice, though—from somewhere down front—chimes in hesitantly. “Is it the address block?”
The Colonel smiles, for the first time. “Why, yes, it is.”
Okay. I look up to the top-left corner of the form, and read the name of the addressee. And it says, “TO: Gen. Garba Gefollows.” It takes me a second, but after a moment or two, I do finally get it… “General Garbage Follows.”
Awesome.
The rest of the room ‘gets it’ at the same time, apparently, because the phrase begins to ripple around the auditorium in hushed tones, then builds to an appreciative buzz… then to sporadic clapping, which in turn blurs into a crescendo of applause… then cheering… then a full-on standing ovation.
And by the time Colonel Oberlund leans down to his microphone to say “Thank-you,” he can hardly be heard at all.
Resistance in the guise of submission.
Victory in the wake of defeat.
Redemption from surrender.
You know, there’s probably a lesson in there somewhere.

It’s almost 6:00pm by the time they finally release us for a belated dinner… knowing full well that we’ll have to be on the bus to the POW School by 8:00. So, we have a choice: food, maybe a shower and a change of clothes, maybe even a quick ‘combat nap,’ but time for no more than two of the three.
I choose food and a short nap.
Involuntarily.
I eat. I sit down for a second. I pass out. Somebody bangs on my door at 7:45.