Hey. I resemble that remark.... True story: I was always really good with a map and compass. Aced the land nav courses. But the first time I ever did mounted cross-country land nav, riding atop an M1, the speed threw me off. We arrived at our rally point long before I expected it, and before I knew it we had blown past it, through a tree line, and out into the open. Had there been any OPFOR, we would have been lit up like a Christmas tree. Our instructor was somewhat less than impressed....
I just recently had to do the ranger land nav course at benning. I hate that it's now graded on point value (per check point) rather than pass/fail.
Never did that course. Is it tougher than normal? I was Armor, so Ranger and Airborne slots were a bit hard to come by. When I was at Knox for AOBC, we had some classmates fail land nav the first time around. The retest was on a weekend. So a few of us decided to infiltrate the course, find our classmates, and help them out. We only found one of them. But while looking for the others we came across a stray puppy that was bumbling around the course. He followed us for the rest of the day. Two-thirds of the way through, he got exhausted, so we had to carry him. At the end of the day, we made quite a sight -- three guys in full camo, walking down the road back to base, one of us carrying a puppy. He was adopted by one of the women who worked reception at one of the on-base apartment buildings.
Ranger land nav course is tougher, but I'm not a ranger. The reason we did it was because I need to re-qual for rural land nav for a class I'm taking next month. So they sent anyone who hasn't been in over a year to the tough ranger course as punishment. They literally flew all of us back to the states for this lol.
They expanded the gutter gumbo mud patches throughout the tree lines from the start to finish. It's just graded stricter on time. Other than that, it's just as painful as the others.
