Everyone gets lost in the Quantico woods

By Christian Lowe / Times staff writer

I think it was my growling stomach that tipped me off. Or maybe it was my sore, sodden feet. It seemed like we’d been walking for a long time. Too long, really, not to have already reached landing zone Martin, just a few hundred yards away and our last checkpoint before lunch.

But the little grey cursor and those vexing digital numbers confirmed my suspicion that I had become a victim of the notorious wooded hills of Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va.

My GPS receiver knew what no one else wanted to admit.

“You’ll definitely get lost at TBS,” more than a few officers had told me when I was preparing to follow the recent Class 186 graduates of Officer Candidates School through their next six months of training, at The Basic School.

They were right, as my growling gut made painfully clear.

It happened on Nov. 30, during a squad-level patrol exercise. It was a pleasant day for the time of year. High 30s and a sky broken with a few grey clouds. The ground was firm with the freeze of the previous night, so the walking was easy. The leafless trees offered a clear view of the wooded contours — markers for the student lieutenants who had to navigate their way to a set of about a half-dozen checkpoints while leading a squad, as they would in a combat zone.

But the lieutenants don’t have the advantage of GPS; they have to navigate with just a compass and topographic map, counting every step to determine how far they’ve traveled, constantly watching terrain features to ensure they’re not going astray.

Not his best day

It started with an exciting ride in a CH-53D Sea Stallion helicopter to a desolate patch of grass dubbed landing zone Pigeon. We ran off the helo and spread ourselves through the tree line. Our patrol call sign was “Fox 2 Charlie.”

The squad moved to its first checkpoint without incident, but it was already clear 2nd Lt. Anthony Wimsatt wasn’t going to have his best day as a pathfinder. He consulted his map often and palmed his compass as he neared each slope and creek. But if he wasn’t sure of his location, he didn’t show that to his men.

I checked my GPS unit to see where we were — more to test my own sense of our location than to double check the young officer leading the squad.

The instructor accompanying us, Capt. Bobby Danzie, caught me looking and said in a low tone “they’re going to give you s--t for using that, you know.”

I didn’t care. After all, the lieutenants are the ones spending days in class and in the field practicing land navigation. I’ve got nothing to prove, I told him. He chuckled and shook his head.

I clicked my GPS off and stuffed it back in my pack, a bit embarrassed nevertheless.

About 30 minutes into our trek, we hit our first ambush. Another squad had reached the checkpoint just moments before and, playing the enemy, opened fire with blank-fed fury. Who knows which side won the engagement — it was awfully hard to tell through the gun smoke, and, after all, they were firing blanks.

After the smoke had cleared, our squad moved out once more. And that’s where the trouble began.

We reached a small rise tangled with fallen trees and thick with brambles. Wimsatt organized his squad into a column, with the 11 men and women spread out over more than 100 yards. When Wimsatt tried to rally his squad at the next checkpoint atop the hill, he realized five officers were missing and they had no radios.

‘We should be here’

Danzie told Wimsatt and the rest to hold in place while he searched for the wayward leathernecks — and I followed.

We walked around in what seemed like circles for about 15 minutes. He consulting his compass, I my GPS. We headed to where we thought we might run into the lost Marines, but they were nowhere to be seen.

“They’ll execute the ‘lost Marine plan’ and head south for the road,” Danzie said, pointing to MCB-1 on the plastic laminated map of the Quantico woods.

“Better them than me,” I thought.

As we trekked back the 100 or so yards to meet up with the rest of the squad, I got a taste of what we’d experience later in the day. Up a hill, down a small ridge, up another hill, around a finger of land — no Wimsatt, no Marines. Danzie stopped, looked at his compass, consulted his map, then pulled out his GPS. I grinned, feeling vindicated.

“I know where we are, I’m just double checking,” Danzie said seriously.

Uh huh.

Eventually we linked up with Wimsatt and moved out again. The officers chuckled at my dainty tip-toe through the Beaver Creek swamp as I tried to avoid plunging kneecap deep into the icy mud. It was about 1 p.m. when my stomach started to let me know lunch had better come soon — and we were nowhere near our final checkpoint.

We waded through another stream and trudged up another steep hill. Landing zone Martin, our lunch stop and rally point for the day before planning for and executing a night ambush, was little more than 1,000 meters away. Wimsatt said we just needed to head northwest as he pointed to the spot on the map.

I marked the spot on my map, turned on my GPS and waited a few seconds until it picked up enough satellites for a precise reading. What I saw made my heart, and stomach, drop.

Wimsatt had us a few degrees to the east of LZ Martin, but my GPS said we were to the west. He told the patrol to head northwest, I knew we had to head northeast. It was getting past 3 p.m. and darkness was coming soon. There was nothing I could do about it. We were lost and I couldn’t say a word.

We hiked for another 20 minutes in the wrong direction, my frustration growing by the second. Then, finally, Danzie broke the silence.

“Okay lieutenant, where are we?” he asked Wimsatt, who pointed to the map with a small stick and said, “We should be here.”

But we weren’t, and Danzie knew it.

“No, we’re here,” he said, marking a spot near “618 Road” about 500 yards from LZ Martin.

“Let’s get to the road and double time it to the LZ,” he said without a hint of frustration.

This must happen a lot, I thought, remembering the warnings of my Marine friends who knew that I’d get lost at least once. We hit the road and walked at a spirited clip, my feet barking and insides growling.