Back in the mid 90’s I was lucky enough to travel to a Mediterranean country for a little training exercise.  This was considered a treat since the weather would be warm and I was on a MAROPS (Maritime Operations) team and we would be doing our infiltration VIA Ch-53’s and Zodiacs.  Now I will only talk about a small incident during this exercise although there were plenty to laugh about. 

We had been in the mountains after a long hike from the beach landing site to our base camp a couple of days.  We had done our recon of our target and were about to leave for the mission.  It was a raid on a communication station located on the top of this remote mountainside.  Our foreign troops were leading this raid and we basically were just tagging along.  

I was pulling up the rear with our Warrant Officer in front of me.  We were moving down a road.  This is generally not the preferred method but the terrain was too steep for much else and by this time we had grown tired of suggesting actual tactics to your host captain.  So we said what the hell lets get this over with and get home. 

We moved out to the road and began our stroll.  After about five minutes we stopped.  Being in the rear I had no idea why.  But with these guys we seemed to stop a lot.  So I waited covering the teams’ rear area.  Finally we began moving again.  It was slow but at least this goat rope would be over soon. 

After a few more minutes my Chief (CW3) comes back to me quietly laughing, as quietly as he could anyway.  “You have to see this’, he says to me handing me his NVGs (Vight Vision goggles) “Look at the head of our line”.  I put the NVGs on and looked forward.  There in the front of our guys (both US and foreign) was their leader with a cut down tree holding it in front of him as he walked.  I couldn’t believe it.  Did he think that was good camouflage?  I guess he didn’t think a tree walking down a road with twenty guys behind would arouse suspicion.   

Chief and I pretty much quit being tactical from there on out and just enjoyed the ride.