Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Land Navigation

Clearly I need more practice at finding my way in the woods. We went into a woods on a hillside singly and in pairs with a compass, a map, and four points to find in the a rock and fallen-tree strewn wood. We were looking for green target silhouettes. Luckily, my partner had better eyes than me for green objects in dark woods. He found our targets when I saw nothing. We walked about five miles over the rocks and trees and across streams for three hours. Later this summer I am supposed to be going to a two-week Warrior Leadership Course so I should get a lot more opportunity to practice map reading and land navigation in the woods. Tomorrow is squad tactics. We should be out in the woods until dark or later.

"Blindness" by Jose Saramago--terrifying look at society falling apart

  Blindness  reached out and grabbed me from the first page.  A very ordinary scene of cars waiting for a traffic introduces the horror to c...