Officer Candidate School (OCS) was (and still is) a microcosm of West Point in some respects. Many activities occurred during the week long field training exercise at the end of the basic phase or the first seven weeks of training. The first part of the week focused on defensive maneuvers or defensive training. The second part of the week focused on offensive maneuvers, the obstacle course, and Victory Pond. We had packed up our gear and moved back to Garrison after the second day in the field. We were given time to clean up and prepare our gear for deployment the following day. We received a warning order to prepare for movement to the obstacle course. The temperature had dropped below freezing overnight, so we had to wait until the ambient temperature reached at least 34 degrees before we could move out. At 7:00 AM on the third day, we were given the order to move to the cattle trucks. Apparently the ambient temperature had reached 34 degrees. It sure as hell didn’t feel like it. But I didn’t have a thermometer, so who was I to argue? Besides, I seriously doubt that the Teaching, Advising, and Counseling (TAC) officers would have given me the time of day. Oh, I’m sure that those bastards would have gladly entertained the idea of having me perform some push-ups. But to prove to me that the ambient temperature was above freezing? Yeah, right. It would be a cold day in hell before that happened. Wait. We were already in hell, and it was freezing cold. When we got to the obstacle course, we learned that virtually every obstacle had water as a part of the obstacle. Of course, it did. And Our Wonderful TAC officers informed us that the reason they had to wait until the ambient temperature reached 34 degrees was because the water temperature was only 28 degrees. Great! It was just getting better and better. This was turning into one helluva shit show. The first obstacle was a low crawl underneath barb wire. Of course, we had to crawl through water. Naturally, since my platoon was known as the Junkyard Dogs, we got to go first. Yay. That 28-degree water had a thin layer of ice on it and lots of mud below it. And let me tell you, that shit was cold. That shit was freezing ass cold. I couldn’t feel my fingers and my toes when I got up after crawling through that mud. At one point, we had to go on an obstacle that was basically a series of platforms stacked up one on top of another like a tower. The object was to climb from one level to another using the buddy system. The bottom level had a lake underneath it. I call it a lake, but it was probably really just a pond. A really muddy pond. And that goddamn water was cold too. When I was coming down off of that tower, I decided to jump from the last platform rather than lower myself back into the mud puddle. That was a mistake too because I broke my third toe on my right foot when I landed. I didn’t report it to anybody because I would have probably been recycled if I had reported it. As a result, I lived with that broken toe throughout the rest of my training. My toes were so cold and numb that I really didn’t feel the pain from the broken toe until later. When we finished at the obstacle course. We loaded on the cattle trucks and went back to Garrison to clean up. Then, we deployed back out into the field to do patrolling. I don’t remember much about the patrolling except that they dropped us off in the evening and told us that our destination was Victory Pond. They told us that we had until 6:00 AM the next morning to get there. We divided into squad size elements and a patrol leader was assigned to each squad size element. Each patrol had a map and a compass. From where they dropped us, I knew where Victory Pond was without consulting a map. This whole area of post was my old stomping grounds when I had been stationed at Fort Benning previously. I told the patrol leader that I knew which way to go. The patrol leader informed me that we had an intermediate objective. The intermediate objective was to evade observation. I said that wouldn’t be a problem. The only other thing I remember about that night patrol was that we stopped sometime during the night and slept for a few hours underneath our ponchos on the ground. That worked out well. We basically froze our asses. The ambient temperature dropped below freezing again that night. The only place that didn’t have frost on the ground was where we slept. Go figure. But there was frost on our damn ponchos. I wonder who the genius was who came up with the idea of sleeping out in the freezing ass weather with just a poncho. That idiot obviously had shit for brains. When we got to Victory Pond, we had to wait until the ambient temperature warmed up to 34 degrees. Notice I said that we had to wait until it warmed up. I couldn’t imagine why we had to wait. Oh wait. We were at Victory Pond. Victory Pond was a big ass lake with a lot of cold ass water in it. Our wonderful TAC officers brought rubber M-16’s so that we could swim with load bearing equipment and a (rubber) M-16 in that cold ass water. I can’t remember if we had to swim 20 meters or 25 meters. I just know that we had to swim with simulated combat gear in that cold ass water. Did I mention that we got to do it in cold ass water? Swell. Next came the Slide for Life. If you Google ‘Victory Pond at Fort Benning’, you can watch a YouTube video of the Slide for Life. I’ll attempt to describe it here. We had to climb up this tower 40 or 50 feet into the air, walk across a 12-foot plank, climb up two stairs, and climb down the other side, walk across the rest of the 12-foot plank, sit down, scoot across a rope, and hang, and drop into the water. That was the Slide for Life. In the YouTube Video, the Slide for Life looks like it’s all new and impressive. It has obviously been rebuilt since I went on it. Another water event was the zip line. You had to climb up this tower and then hang onto a block and tackle and slide down the block and tackle on a line and drop into the water. Everything was about getting into that freezing ass water. But at least on the fourth day, the shit we did at Victory Pond was actually fun, it was not merely an exercise in futility like the previous evolutions.
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