Ok I’ll play.
The summer of 1986 I was teaching in Aldershot, actually on Muskrat’s CLC but that’s another story. Prior to that I was instructing on the Block 4, 5, 6 MITCIP (Lt. qualifying) and knew the staff and students who were doing an FTX in the same area as we were (Aldershot really isn’t that big). We were on the last night of our FTX and I another instructor were moving down the main range road with a section of CLC from point A to B.
We were only a couple of hundred meters from the range control shack, which is all lit up and quite visible and the main camp is just beyond it. Ahead of on the road was a solitary figure walking away from the shack and towards us. As he came closer we could tell he had a weapon (FN) and a radio on his back.
The other instructor and myself walked forward to talk to talk to him and discovered he wasn’t staff. He was a 2/Lt student from the Block 5 and one we both knew. There was immediate relief on his face when he recognised us.
Out came his tale of woe. He was part of a platoon sized fighting patrol and he had become separated and lost from the patrol a couple of hours earlier. He’d been blundering around for a bit in the woods until he’d found the road. He actually come out on the road about 50 feet from the range control shack (all lit up) and turned in the opposite direction on the road and began walking back into the training area towards us.
He didn’t even see the shack behind him until we turned him around and pointed it out. The poor guy was literally stifling back the tears when he told us what had happened, and the expression on his face when we turned him around and he saw the shack that he’d practically walked past was priceless.
I realise that it’s possible to get detached from a patrol in the middle of the night, but this guy was the patrol rad op and in the very centre of the patrol. How he got lost is beyond me? The kicker was of course that the patrol commander couldn’t even report him missing as he had the only radio. Naturally he never thought to use it and call range control for help.
We took him home (well actually the range shack) expressing concern while trying to keep from laughing and trying to keep Muskrat and the rest of the CLC from laughing too, unsuccessfully.
Earned a couple of cold ones in the Sgt’s Mess over that one, mainly from the instructors on MITCIP Block 5.
The CSM of Leadership Company asked if we wanted to pursue the fact that this guy had got lost and
should be RTU’d. We figured he was a harmless Militia 2/Lt who would probably end up as Mess Secretary and eventually quit after a couple of years. He really wasn’t cut out for this.
My mistake, eight years later I was CSM of a rifle company in Toronto and guess who walked into the orderly room as a brand new Major and my new OC? :crybaby: :rage: