Rub-a-Dub-Dub Three Men in a Tub

We made it to the wood line. We paused for a moment in the prone position. We were all facing different directions with our feet touching. We had a small circular perimeter, or in our case a triangle. We were utterly still and listening for the sounds of movement. This was to verify that no one had seen us cross the field and had followed us. I heard Chad tap his thigh. I tapped mine in response. Then Mike tapped his. We were clear. No one was coming. It was time to get our packs back on and get up and moving.

 As I was standing up I lost my footing and fell face first. A sharp twig hit right under my left eye. An inch higher and I’d be blind. “Damn it!“ My Kevlar fell off of my head and rolled a few feet. I reached for it, but my pack was heavy and shifted my weight. Attempting to catch myself, I lost grip of my M-4 and it fell and smacked me square in the head. “FUCK“. I was almost knocked out. I sat there stunned. Chad came over and started laughing. He helped me up and we began to move again. Moving through the wooded area was tough. Mike struggled through thorns, fallen logs, and even two very deep ravines. He led us to our general site area without much further incident.

We were there, and it was time to start digging. We dug a hole deep enough, wide enough, and long enough for the three of us to lay in it and be mostly concealed. We were shoulder to shoulder. I was on the right, Chad was on the left, and Mike (the biggest guy) was stuck in the middle. The hole was covered with ponchos, dirt, leaves, twigs, and other debris to camouflage it. Walking by us you would have been more likely to trip on us than see us. It was a good site. It was like three over-sized men in a bathtub…two men too crowded. Ideally, we would have been lying in our sleeping bags pulling operations. One guy would be awake on the radios while another kept watch. The third guy would be sleeping. However, we didn’t have enough working batteries for all of our radios. We kept our communications radio running and shut down the others. With the radios down, two men could sleep and one could pull watch and monitor comms.

“Psssst! Cisco!”, it was Chad. He was on the other side of Mike but we were crammed so tight that it was like he was right next to me. “Cisco, are you awake?” I looked over and saw Chad’s red light (better than his previous choices). “What’s up?”, I asked. He handed me the communications radio and said, “Look at this.” The battery cover was taken off and the battery was out. I looked for a second before I saw what he meant. The cold had caused the plug that connects the battery to the radio to become brittle. While changing the battery Chad had inadvertently killed our radio by snapping the plug in half.

“What do you think we should do?”, he asked. Chad was in charge, but most of the time he was good about accepting advice from other people. “I don’t know, man, we have to have comms. It’s a non-negotiable.” He agreed with my statement and then sat there quietly for a moment. He pulled out the store bought Walkie Talkie that we were using to talk to Team 2. He said, “I have a plan. Team 2 cannot establish comms with the Tactical Operations Center (TOC). Yet they are only about a Kilometer from here. We’ll send someone to their site and bring their military radio back here. That way we can have comms with the TOC on VHF and with Team 2 through the Walkie Talkies.” I thought for a second and realized he was right, “That’s a good idea, but who’s going?”

…to be continued…