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There I was. Age 20. The nearly newest member of the 123rd Attack Helicopter Battalion. An Army Reserve force. A cold weather battalion.
But we were tough. We were based in Minnesota. We could handle a little cold.
Our sister battalion (Regular Army) was based in Alaska.
One fateful January night, the colonel of our sister regiment bet our colonel that we wouldn’t make it through a two-week training exercise.
We hopped a lift on a C5 cargo plane. Talk about big. It can carry two Abrams battle tanks weighing 71 tons apiece. Or 6 Apache attack helicopters. You get the idea.
We arrived. We looked around. Hmmm. No colonel awaiting us. Guess he didn’t like the cold after all. Well, discretion can be the better part of valor. I suppose.
Let me be more precise about our location. 50 miles above the Arctic Circle. 50 degrees below zero.
Not that you want to waste precious time consulting a thermometer.
You just spit. And if it freezes before it hits the ground, you’re in the zone.
Where you’ve got about 6 hours and change of daylight. Except it isn’t like what we generally call daylight. It’s really dusk. And dusk is dark. And dark is dangerous when you’re flying helicopters.
Especially when you can’t use your wonderful gyroscopic compass. Because Magnetic North makes it useless. Instead, you have to use your back-up compass which looks like it came in a Cracker Jacks box. And it’s awkwardly mounted overhead. So you’re constantly flicking your eyes back and forth from the compass to the windshield. Where outside, it’s dusk. And dark. And dangerous.
So I spat. It froze. War games were on.
One of our missions was fairly standard – starting off with scouting the location of a supposed enemy position.
We flew Cobras and Kiowas. We checked it out. And then we flew back for a confab and a briefing.
We landed in this huge, snow-covered field. One man from each two-man helicopter had to attend the meeting. I flipped for it with my Captain and I won. So I stayed in the helicopter and he headed off to the briefing. Only it’s not that easy. First, there’s that minus 50 I mentioned. And then there’s the fact that you’re not on solid ground. You’re on top of 15 to 20 feet of loose snow. You have to kind of swim through it.
Human beings weren’t meant to swim through snow. It’s tough. If you don’t believe me, take some of your hard-earned money, book a vacation for Alaska in February, and check it out for yourself.
You know who’s good at it? Moose. That’s right. Bullwinkle and company. Maybe we should have got hooves. And of course, not a problem for the helicopters. They have skis.
But we completed that mission successfully.
And other ones. Like hiking out two miles into the wilderness on snowshoes. Creating a shelter using a ditch and two ponchos and hunkering down for the night in our sleeping bags. How unfortunate that the zipper on mine broke. So I lay shivering in the dark, listening to my partner snoring like a power saw.
Then we hiked back.
Never did learn whether our colonel collected on his debt. Didn’t care. Being out in the cold taught us he wasn’t cool.
For me, it was that if you have the right people in the right roles, and you can depend on them, you would be astonished by what you can accomplish under the most challenging of conditions.
As well, when you come out the other end of these very difficult circumstances, you’ll feel like you can do almost anything. And you’ll be right. Because you can.
And, of course, although all of us find the world of business a very cold place to be from time to time, it’s nothing like Alaska, in February, north of the Arctic Circle, when it’s minus 50.
