little extra warmth it provided.
I made a mental checklist of what I had left. Then I tried to stand. An act I normally took for granted was suddenly almost impossible. First, I was incredibly stiff from lying so long in the same position. Second, I had to move in superslow motion. It took me five minutes to push up my torso with my right hand, then pivot to a sitting position. Feeling every muscle in my body, and aching in most of them, I advanced to a squat and finally to my feet. Between each movement I stopped and listened for soldiers or civilians. The night was as quiet as a church. Picking up my survival rucksack as though it were a football, I baby-stepped out of the woods and into the grass.
It had taken me almost an entire hour to leave my hiding place. I was feeling weak and light-headed, and after a while I was trembling from the cold. Listening to my own rough breathing, I could see dim shapes eight or ten feet ahead of me. Everything was a fuzzy shade of gray, and I moved with caution.
I tried one direction, hit a dead end of dense trees, then took another route. It was almost like being blindfolded. Heading south from my landing site, I eventually found a narrow path that took me up an incline and into a grassy cove of tall, willowy trees. It was another dead end, but asgood a place as any to hide for the next twenty-four hours. In my state of exhaustion, I was ready to crash. I had been traveling for more than three hours and had probably covered less than half a mile.
I stepped into a nearby clearing and opened my rucksack to see what it contained. I might have lost my flashlight, but I had a penlight in the shoulder pocket of my flight suit. Its white beam seemed brighter than the sun. Afraid of being seen, I dared using the light only once or twice, and for the briefest of seconds. In my rucksack I found eight small containers, called flexipaks, of water. This was about a quart of water in total. I also had an empty plastic water pouch, a gray wool ski hood, a yellow sponge, a pair of green wool socks and a pair of wool mittens, a floppy orange hat, a tarp that was green on one side and silver on the other, a large square of camouflage netting, a silver-foil space blanket, sun goggles and sunblock lotion, a fire starter, a five-inch knife, and a 121-page booklet titled
Aircrew Survival.
If I found any humor in my situation, the thought of reading
Aircrew Survival
was it. When you’re trying to avoid being captured, you don’t have the time to sit around and read a book the way you would in a library. The other items in the rucksack had different degrees of usefulness to me. Since I was trying to hide from the enemy, I had serious doubts about the floppy orange hat and the sun-reflecting space blanket. Stuck in the dampcold of the mountains, however, I found the wool socks and mittens a godsend. Some items I had in my survival vest were also of value: a compass, a medical kit, iodine tablets to purify dirty water, rescue flares, camouflage paste, a tourniquet to stop the bleeding in case I got hurt, and most important, my battery-operated GPS navigational receiver. I had a 9-mm Beretta pistol in my holster, but it would have been foolish to use it. The enemy had had me outgunned from the moment they’d shot down my plane.
I donned the fresh pair of wool socks as well as the ski mask for warmth, and took out my GPS. Next to my radio, the GPS receiver was my most critical piece of equipment. It, too, operated on batteries, and I had to be careful not to run them down. The size of a Walkman, with a liquid crystal display screen, the GPS could calculate my longitude and latitude within 100 feet of my exact location. It did this by picking up the signals of at least three separate satellites, then triangulating, or fixing, my position on the ground.
Impatiently, I turned on my GPS receiver and waited. It seemed forever before the screen indicated that the first satellite had been found. After fifteen
I made a mental checklist of what I had left. Then I tried to stand. An act I normally took for granted was suddenly almost impossible. First, I was incredibly stiff from lying so long in the same position. Second, I had to move in superslow motion. It took me five minutes to push up my torso with my right hand, then pivot to a sitting position. Feeling every muscle in my body, and aching in most of them, I advanced to a squat and finally to my feet. Between each movement I stopped and listened for soldiers or civilians. The night was as quiet as a church. Picking up my survival rucksack as though it were a football, I baby-stepped out of the woods and into the grass.
It had taken me almost an entire hour to leave my hiding place. I was feeling weak and light-headed, and after a while I was trembling from the cold. Listening to my own rough breathing, I could see dim shapes eight or ten feet ahead of me. Everything was a fuzzy shade of gray, and I moved with caution.
I tried one direction, hit a dead end of dense trees, then took another route. It was almost like being blindfolded. Heading south from my landing site, I eventually found a narrow path that took me up an incline and into a grassy cove of tall, willowy trees. It was another dead end, but asgood a place as any to hide for the next twenty-four hours. In my state of exhaustion, I was ready to crash. I had been traveling for more than three hours and had probably covered less than half a mile.
I stepped into a nearby clearing and opened my rucksack to see what it contained. I might have lost my flashlight, but I had a penlight in the shoulder pocket of my flight suit. Its white beam seemed brighter than the sun. Afraid of being seen, I dared using the light only once or twice, and for the briefest of seconds. In my rucksack I found eight small containers, called flexipaks, of water. This was about a quart of water in total. I also had an empty plastic water pouch, a gray wool ski hood, a yellow sponge, a pair of green wool socks and a pair of wool mittens, a floppy orange hat, a tarp that was green on one side and silver on the other, a large square of camouflage netting, a silver-foil space blanket, sun goggles and sunblock lotion, a fire starter, a five-inch knife, and a 121-page booklet titled
Aircrew Survival.
If I found any humor in my situation, the thought of reading
Aircrew Survival
was it. When you’re trying to avoid being captured, you don’t have the time to sit around and read a book the way you would in a library. The other items in the rucksack had different degrees of usefulness to me. Since I was trying to hide from the enemy, I had serious doubts about the floppy orange hat and the sun-reflecting space blanket. Stuck in the dampcold of the mountains, however, I found the wool socks and mittens a godsend. Some items I had in my survival vest were also of value: a compass, a medical kit, iodine tablets to purify dirty water, rescue flares, camouflage paste, a tourniquet to stop the bleeding in case I got hurt, and most important, my battery-operated GPS navigational receiver. I had a 9-mm Beretta pistol in my holster, but it would have been foolish to use it. The enemy had had me outgunned from the moment they’d shot down my plane.
I donned the fresh pair of wool socks as well as the ski mask for warmth, and took out my GPS. Next to my radio, the GPS receiver was my most critical piece of equipment. It, too, operated on batteries, and I had to be careful not to run them down. The size of a Walkman, with a liquid crystal display screen, the GPS could calculate my longitude and latitude within 100 feet of my exact location. It did this by picking up the signals of at least three separate satellites, then triangulating, or fixing, my position on the ground.
Impatiently, I turned on my GPS receiver and waited. It seemed forever before the screen indicated that the first satellite had been found. After fifteen
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