Five Days in Narnia

Good evening. With great misfortune I have found myself in the Pacific Northwest, Spokane to be exact. The Air Force has deemed it necessary that I learn how to survive, evade, resist, and escape from whatever gets thrown at me. Consequentially, it has also deemed it necessary to make completely sure I learned a thing or two and am actually be able to survive. How do they test that, you ask? BY DUMPING YOU IN THE FUCKING WOODS FOR FIVE DAYS WITH THREE MEALS.

I'm sorry. I shouldn't explode like that. It's not that I don't like being tested, especially mentally, it's just I'm not a fan of the cold. And it's fucking January...in the Colville National Forest. It is far too cold outside and cold is not for me.

So there I was [no shit!], snowshoes bound to my boots, 50-some-odd-fucking-pounds of survival shit in our little backpacks (HALF OF WHICH WE NEVER USED, AIRMEN MOORE [excuse me again]), and miles upon miles upon miles of walking. Walking in 10ft of snow I might add, in snowshoes (ahem, that makes walking harder).

When the temperature never gets above -5°C, you simply never get warm; until you have to climb some dumb fucking ridgeline, which makes you sweat through all your layers, and then within a few moments you're back to being frigid. The sweat will freeze. The warmth will never come; your food, your water, your clothes in the morning and a night, it's always cold. The only thing that isn't cold, is fire. But it's so cold beyond the fire, you tend to want to get up close to the fire, and that melts your glove. Your situation is now worse.

Or maybe it's at night, and you're sleeping on the snow in some mil-grade arctic sleeping bag. You think, "oy! Handwarmers will do the trick, warm up my core eh?" So you grab them, open them up, shake them out, and throw them to your chest. Then you think, "well, I'm up and moving and likely dehydrated, I should drink some colder-than-ice-water." You roll over, take a swig, roll back, and the handwarmers are gone. Where did they go? They must be in the sleeping bag, they couldnt' have gotten out, right? But you're feeling around and can't find them! Maybe they did slip out; now you're feeling around the snow, hands going numb, desperate to find those fucking handwarmers that you just opened up because you're already hypothermic. But alas, they are gone. You give up looking for them. You just burned two handwarmers, a ton of energy, and now your hands are wet and numb. Your situation is now worse.

Or maybe the sun has just set, and the group is around the fire drying all their shit. All you've had to eat was a fucking chicken pot pie MRE entree at 7:00 that morning. It is now 5:00 in the evening. You've spent the past 8 hours walking through the snowy peaks. You are hungry. But not the type of hunger that sets in a half hour before lunch. This is the type of hunger that sailors in the 1600s would experience when they drifted too far off the Cape of Good Hope. You can't focus. You're stomach is in pain. You're fantasizing about the simplest forms of food: a banana—oooh, a sandwich—oh man, a slice of cheese—even that would cut it. You're joking around with the guys in your group, maybe fifteen minutes goes by, and BOOM: hunger pang. You feel it, cramping, pissing itself, you feel it all the way up in your lungs. You remember reading once that nicotine is an appetite suppressant. Wait, we have cigarettes! You light it up and suck it down and all is well for the moment. Your feet and hands go numb from the carbon monoxide, and you cough a bit. Your situation now? Arguably worse, but you are no longer hungry. Strike it up as a W... for another 45 minutes.

When you're not sitting still thinking about how cold you are, you're walking with 50lbs on your back thinking about how cold you are. Every step is laborious. Two steps go by, "are we there yet?" No. Of course not.  It's only 8:15. Ten steps go by, "now?". Nope, still 8:15. Twelve steps go by and as you attempt to let your mind wander your snowshoe gets caught in a branch. "FUCK!" Face-plant. Buried in the snow to your hips. Are you able to get up? Let's find out. You push forward to propel yourself up. Your hands just fall through the deep, deep snow. Now you're even deeper. You try to roll over, but your pack won't let you. You think for a second, then use every muscle in your back and abdomen to snake yourself upright. You're out. You assess the damage. The obvious: snow inside your layers, that'll be a problem. And uh, oh... blood. Fucking branch. Where's it coming from? Who cares. Keep walking. Thirteen steps. 8:16. 

But the beautiful thing I found, is from where motivations stems: the end. Survival is paramount on the end. Whether it's a steep hill, a long day, a five day exercise in the woods, a month of training, or any misery for any amount of time; and ending to each exists. It is over at a certain point. It may not be twelve steps, it may be 5,300 steps. Each day I had a central idea to focus on: after 5,300 or however many steps, we will arrive at our camp. The end of a days walk. We will set up our shitty little poncho tents while Airmen Moore builds us a fire. Then we'll debrief for a bit as the sun sets and by nightfall we'll be on our own to dry our clothes, relax, and go to bed. 

This three hour period became a ritual of enjoyment. I can be warm. My clothes can be dry. We can all have a cigarette or two and not feel hungry. We can joke. We can sing. We can get to know each other. I'm an element leader, being a senior ranking officer and all (rank = privilege + responsibility + a hotel room - sleep). I tried to keep morale up, especially around the fire. "Boys, I think we're in Narnia.... and upon initial observation, Narnia's pretty shitty." Some call it 'embracing the suck'. I call it being honest about a situation with a dash of humor (WE'RE IN THE SHIT NOW BOYS, SMOKE 'EM IF YA GOT 'EM!) But to think that three hours out of every 24 being the only semblance of enjoyment... well, it's bleak. As is survival. 

So I'm done now. I got my boys out of there successfully without capture. I'm back at Fairchild enjoying a bourbon and a warm hotel room. I survived in the winter woods for 5 days. I woke up this morning and my piss was still brown, my knuckles still bloody, and I still get hungry if I don't eat a slice of pizza every hour. But I'm now where we talked about, the core of all motivation. I am there, existing, right now:

The End.