BLACKFIVE

Training:

BlackFive has a story to tell about a fellow soldier who died right in front of him. He's also got some links.

Training is dangerous. There have been years in which we have lost no fighting men to hostile fire, but I doubt there's ever been a year that we haven't lost people to training accidents. Marches are conducted in the heat. "Confidence" courses involve obstacles that are sometimes genuinely dangerous. I remember very clearly the first time I negotiated one such: I was eighteen, a great distance from the ground, without a rope or harness, and leaping into the air to catch the next rung of a giant-sized "ladder" that went up into nothing. Get to the top, climb over the top rung, climb back down. You could have died; you didn't, and you never forget that you managed to do something that seemed outrageous.

Training in jujitsu with a Marine named Ken Caton -- who was a genuine master of the art, but it's a contact sport -- I was nearly hurt, and was rendered unconscious for (I'm told) quite a while. The geography of the hold he was applying at the time is hard to put into words, but it was a leglock around my neck, with him in such a position that neither he nor the witnesses could see my precise reaction, or be sure of how tight the hold was. I lost consciousness before I could tap out, and he held on thinking I might be bluffing.

(Actually, I have a clear memory of tapping out, but all the witnesses agree that I never did. The mind plays tricks when there's no oxygen left.)

Was all this stuff dangerous? You bet.

However, we were young men, full of fire. The stuff we did when we weren't under "adult supervision" was way more dangerous. A lot of training accidents involve machinery -- helicopters, APCs. These are being handled by professionals in a professional, if high-speed and precision, manner.

When we weren't being watched, we were handling other machines (say, automobiles) in a high-speed and precision manner that wasn't the least bit professional. I can remember one little drag race on I-575 (coming back from running the O-course at NAS Atlanta/Dobbins AFB, in fact) where we passed a guy in the emergency lane at a speed I won't bother to record, returning to the road in time to miss the concrete pillars of a bridge that rose out of said emergency lane. By, maybe, six inches.

And that wasn't the worst thing I can remember doing. Not at all. I remember my father telling me many times as a boy that he could never understand how he hadn't gotten himself killed when he was younger. I never understood -- he was always so upright, so responsible! -- until I got to be about twenty-eight. It was only then that the fire faded enough that I could look back on the train wreck of youth with clear, amazed eyes.

The military involves training and honing that natural madness. It is put to a positive rather than a destructive use, to protect the Republic, her citizens and traditions. Just remember that when you read about these things. Sometimes young men get killed doing this stuff... but some of them would have gotten themselves killed anyway, maybe faster, and with less chance of any good coming out of it.

That's what it's like to be a young man. One of any account, at least.