Flying picnic tables and learning how lucky I am
Friday at 2100 I was lined up with about 70 other individuals from around florida in what I guess could have been called a formation. Those who had done a go ruck challenge before took charge in getting us ready for the Cadres to show up. I felt out of my place right away when they keep asking do you have this or this? I for once had not done all my homework and I did not have everything I needed. The team stepped up and took care of us newbies. I saw Cadre Jesse (at least I had made sure to know how the Cadres were) try to push his way into formation and then giggle when people did not know who he was. I will say the introduction to Go Ruck had less yelling then when I went to basic 13 years prior but somethings were very much the same. Nothing you did was ever good enough and punishment was very physical. To start off with we had to get in the front leaning rest position with our full rucks about 40lbs and stay there through roll call. Once they called your name you were to stand up and hold your ruck over your head until all names were called. Once roll call was over they gave us the brief of what this event was going to be for and why we were doing it. This was in memory of those brave souls that gave all Somalia.
From there we moved to the starting point but of course we moved to slowly and ended up bear crawling, crab walking and any other crazy thing they could think of. Once we got there i found out just how out of shape and untrained for this event I was. We started to first part of the march moving from a construction site to a park. the whole time everyone was under some form of load. Either it was helping move the heavy logs, moving a smaller log or some other form of equipment. Starting I had a full ruck which must have weighed over 60 pounds plus my own ruck. When asked to go to the litter or the log I gladly went. I also found out that nothing about this challenge was going to be easy. Right off the bat the first hour or two was insanely tough everything was burning and just killing me.
The whole march from point A to point B the Cadres were walking with us telling us just how horrible we are and just how badly we were doing. Again punishment came in the form of physical pain. I know at one point we were moving to slow to make the "extraction point" so we had to stop and do flutter kicks on the side of the road. I for once enjoyed doing flutter kicks. They were not easy but on the ground my pack was off my back and there was no load on me. Again up and moving pushing through the pain and getting it done as much as we could.
Once we got to the park we got to unload at least the heavy things we were carrying and play with picnic tables. I will never look at a picnic table again in the same light. They became an instrument of torture and pain unlike I have ever seen. Imagine if you can six or seven people on one picnic table pushing it up in the air and holding it while they get told how week they are. Then after lifting the table five or six times having them say we are going to lift this table fifty more times. Then you get to about 3 or for good lifts took about ten to get to three and they tell you are not doing good enough so everyone on the table. We had to sit back to back on top of the table and try and do flutter kicks. Harder than it seems. Then the cadre start to tell us about how hard it was get the men in to the transports and how uncomfortable the must have been. Again it puts life in perspective and just how lucky we are. Once we had screwed that up enough we got to lifting the tables again this time with 4 rucks on the table about an extra 200 pounds. So for the next hour or so we pushed tables up and down with rucks or with water bottles (trying not to knock them over). Through all of this we were becoming a team.
After we pushed the table up and down what seemed like 100 times or more we had to line them up. We were about to fly our Black Hawks into the fight. Five people lifting and one person flying (sitting on) the table and we flew through the night making the appropriate chopper and gun sounds. This was actually pretty fun. After that we got to sit and listen to some of the history of the event from the three Cadres who were either still active duty special duty or were at one point specops. I think it meant so much more sitting in that park at around 0130 learning about what they had done. At this time in the night the group had already gotten smaller by about ten. As we prepared to move on the Cadres looked at us and said just because you have lost some does not mean your load gets any lighter. So know with less people we begin to move the heavy load again. We found that if you left a person to far behind or the group got to spilt up you lost people and someone had to carry that person and someone else had to carry their ruck. About half way down this leg they let us drop some weight but again we did not move fast enough.
So we got to do some running with are rucks on the front of our bodies. I forgot to mention that during the first push a girl was carrying one of the smaller logs and dropped it on her foot. There is a pretty good chance that she broke her toe however, she was one of the finishers. Not only was she a finisher but she always carried a load or helped out. Very impressed by her resolve to finish this event. Pushing through the night we got to a park just about an hour before dawn. Once again we got to hear more about that event. They had giving us a time hack to make and we no where near made it. So they used that to tell us more about the events of that day. We were finally giving the chance to eat a little and drink as much as we could. It was a beautiful night the and the Tampa sky was prefect over the nice lake behind us. Ok the lake was beautiful but I think it was swamp water and smelled just like it. The reason I know this is because after our nice little break we got to go jump in the lake to cool off. So we had at this point covered all three aspects of war fare Land, Air and Water. I am glad they were Army and did not think of some way to through in space and cyber space.
So now began the final push to the exit point. At this point I was almost useless and I felt horrible because I was not able to help out nearly as much as I wanted. To add salt to a wound the last push anyone with long hair i.e girls had to stay on the logs. Everyone was just smoked but there some very impressive people on this ruck and they all stepped up and did so much. The last push was no different from the first couple except at this point we were all destroyed and every punishment they dished out we failed at. Finally we made it back to the point that we had started with all this weight. The Cadres got up and got out the patches that we had worked so hard for and starting acting like they were going to end the event. Then they said a helicopter is down and there are causalities we need to get to the crash site. Grabbing small logs and liter we started the Mogadishu mile. I think this was almost the hardest part of the whole night. We thought we were done and yet there was still more work to do. At about the half way point we picked up two more causalities i.e actually special forces guys that came out to play with us. We added two more litters and two bodies. Through out the next hour we pushed and moved and had people killed off left and right again when they were shot someone had to carry the person and the other person had to carry there gear. Put we pushed and we moved and we did every crazy thing they could think.
At the end I ended up being a causality and was dragged by a guy for about four hundred feet because he was to tired to put me on his shoulders. Then three other guys came by to help him out and help get me to safety. I tried to swap with someone because being carried is something I am not used to. I found out at the very end that one of the larger tattooed gentlemen that carried me the last four hundred meters was actually in Somalia when this all went down. I have to say it was an honor to be carried by a hero like that.
I know this is a very long post and if you have made it to this point I will leave you with some parting wisdom and thoughts. I have always had a huge respect for those that Serve in Special Forces but reading about their trials is much different than experiencing their training. I can say right now that no accomplishment is better earned than those that have served in Special Forces. These men train to the point that their bodies quit and then find the resolve to push on. Once they are done training then they take those lessons learned and they push Freedom where ever it needs to be pushed. There was no gun fire last night or any real harm to us just a lot of heavy work. The doubt the fear and the pain that we felt was nothing compared to what this guys go through on a daily basis. I will tell you that there was not an hour that went by that I did not think about quitting. Having that cell phone in my bag was an easy out and I knew it was there. These guys have no easy out in the field and that is what I had to think about. In Somalia they couldn't just say this is to hard I need to leave. Some even fought to get in the fight and were told no again and again until giving the green light. These are true heroes. I learned so much about myself and about life on this event. To get to know yourself better you need to put yourself in a place that you never thought you could crawl out of then find a way to make it out. Thank you Go Ruck, the three Cadres, and the whole team for putting me through hell and helping me make it.
From there we moved to the starting point but of course we moved to slowly and ended up bear crawling, crab walking and any other crazy thing they could think of. Once we got there i found out just how out of shape and untrained for this event I was. We started to first part of the march moving from a construction site to a park. the whole time everyone was under some form of load. Either it was helping move the heavy logs, moving a smaller log or some other form of equipment. Starting I had a full ruck which must have weighed over 60 pounds plus my own ruck. When asked to go to the litter or the log I gladly went. I also found out that nothing about this challenge was going to be easy. Right off the bat the first hour or two was insanely tough everything was burning and just killing me.
The whole march from point A to point B the Cadres were walking with us telling us just how horrible we are and just how badly we were doing. Again punishment came in the form of physical pain. I know at one point we were moving to slow to make the "extraction point" so we had to stop and do flutter kicks on the side of the road. I for once enjoyed doing flutter kicks. They were not easy but on the ground my pack was off my back and there was no load on me. Again up and moving pushing through the pain and getting it done as much as we could.
Once we got to the park we got to unload at least the heavy things we were carrying and play with picnic tables. I will never look at a picnic table again in the same light. They became an instrument of torture and pain unlike I have ever seen. Imagine if you can six or seven people on one picnic table pushing it up in the air and holding it while they get told how week they are. Then after lifting the table five or six times having them say we are going to lift this table fifty more times. Then you get to about 3 or for good lifts took about ten to get to three and they tell you are not doing good enough so everyone on the table. We had to sit back to back on top of the table and try and do flutter kicks. Harder than it seems. Then the cadre start to tell us about how hard it was get the men in to the transports and how uncomfortable the must have been. Again it puts life in perspective and just how lucky we are. Once we had screwed that up enough we got to lifting the tables again this time with 4 rucks on the table about an extra 200 pounds. So for the next hour or so we pushed tables up and down with rucks or with water bottles (trying not to knock them over). Through all of this we were becoming a team.
After we pushed the table up and down what seemed like 100 times or more we had to line them up. We were about to fly our Black Hawks into the fight. Five people lifting and one person flying (sitting on) the table and we flew through the night making the appropriate chopper and gun sounds. This was actually pretty fun. After that we got to sit and listen to some of the history of the event from the three Cadres who were either still active duty special duty or were at one point specops. I think it meant so much more sitting in that park at around 0130 learning about what they had done. At this time in the night the group had already gotten smaller by about ten. As we prepared to move on the Cadres looked at us and said just because you have lost some does not mean your load gets any lighter. So know with less people we begin to move the heavy load again. We found that if you left a person to far behind or the group got to spilt up you lost people and someone had to carry that person and someone else had to carry their ruck. About half way down this leg they let us drop some weight but again we did not move fast enough.
So we got to do some running with are rucks on the front of our bodies. I forgot to mention that during the first push a girl was carrying one of the smaller logs and dropped it on her foot. There is a pretty good chance that she broke her toe however, she was one of the finishers. Not only was she a finisher but she always carried a load or helped out. Very impressed by her resolve to finish this event. Pushing through the night we got to a park just about an hour before dawn. Once again we got to hear more about that event. They had giving us a time hack to make and we no where near made it. So they used that to tell us more about the events of that day. We were finally giving the chance to eat a little and drink as much as we could. It was a beautiful night the and the Tampa sky was prefect over the nice lake behind us. Ok the lake was beautiful but I think it was swamp water and smelled just like it. The reason I know this is because after our nice little break we got to go jump in the lake to cool off. So we had at this point covered all three aspects of war fare Land, Air and Water. I am glad they were Army and did not think of some way to through in space and cyber space.
So now began the final push to the exit point. At this point I was almost useless and I felt horrible because I was not able to help out nearly as much as I wanted. To add salt to a wound the last push anyone with long hair i.e girls had to stay on the logs. Everyone was just smoked but there some very impressive people on this ruck and they all stepped up and did so much. The last push was no different from the first couple except at this point we were all destroyed and every punishment they dished out we failed at. Finally we made it back to the point that we had started with all this weight. The Cadres got up and got out the patches that we had worked so hard for and starting acting like they were going to end the event. Then they said a helicopter is down and there are causalities we need to get to the crash site. Grabbing small logs and liter we started the Mogadishu mile. I think this was almost the hardest part of the whole night. We thought we were done and yet there was still more work to do. At about the half way point we picked up two more causalities i.e actually special forces guys that came out to play with us. We added two more litters and two bodies. Through out the next hour we pushed and moved and had people killed off left and right again when they were shot someone had to carry the person and the other person had to carry there gear. Put we pushed and we moved and we did every crazy thing they could think.
At the end I ended up being a causality and was dragged by a guy for about four hundred feet because he was to tired to put me on his shoulders. Then three other guys came by to help him out and help get me to safety. I tried to swap with someone because being carried is something I am not used to. I found out at the very end that one of the larger tattooed gentlemen that carried me the last four hundred meters was actually in Somalia when this all went down. I have to say it was an honor to be carried by a hero like that.
I know this is a very long post and if you have made it to this point I will leave you with some parting wisdom and thoughts. I have always had a huge respect for those that Serve in Special Forces but reading about their trials is much different than experiencing their training. I can say right now that no accomplishment is better earned than those that have served in Special Forces. These men train to the point that their bodies quit and then find the resolve to push on. Once they are done training then they take those lessons learned and they push Freedom where ever it needs to be pushed. There was no gun fire last night or any real harm to us just a lot of heavy work. The doubt the fear and the pain that we felt was nothing compared to what this guys go through on a daily basis. I will tell you that there was not an hour that went by that I did not think about quitting. Having that cell phone in my bag was an easy out and I knew it was there. These guys have no easy out in the field and that is what I had to think about. In Somalia they couldn't just say this is to hard I need to leave. Some even fought to get in the fight and were told no again and again until giving the green light. These are true heroes. I learned so much about myself and about life on this event. To get to know yourself better you need to put yourself in a place that you never thought you could crawl out of then find a way to make it out. Thank you Go Ruck, the three Cadres, and the whole team for putting me through hell and helping me make it.
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