Sometimes you have to break the rules

 
 

I was raised by my grandmother to always follow the rules. It is so ingrained in my personality that even when driving through Iowa’s farm country, whenever I come to a rural stop sign (yeah, they got ‘em) at an intersection where I can see to the horizon in all directions and no other traffic is in sight, I stop. Not the California rolling stop where you just slow down and then blow past the sign, but a full stop.

     One thing life taught me, though, is that you sometimes have to break the rules. Rules are, after all, mostly guidelines for what you ought to do under ideal conditions. You need to learn to use your brain to decide what the right thing to do is under any situation.

     I encountered just such a dilemma in 1968 as the army was preparing me for my first tour in Vietnam. Among the two years of training I had to undergo before that first assignment (including nine months of intensive language training) was an assignment to the Jungle Operations Training Center (JOTC) in Fort Sherman, Panama (the school was closed in 1999) for the two-week course on jungle survival.

     Operated by the 8^th Special Forces Group during the time I was a student, the jungle school was considered the toughest training course in the whole of the US Army. Students were introduced to the dangers of operating in the jungle, from the venomous bushmaster snake to the terrain that could be just as deadly. We were taught practical things like the need to keep your boot laces securely tied at night when you’re sleeping in a hammock strung up between two needle palms. One of my classmates ignored this rule the first night we camped out in a jungle base and was awakened around midnight by one of his loose laces rolling across his leg. Thinking ‘bushmaster,’ he screamed and jumped from his hammock in the dark, making his second mistake, never try to move around a jungle full of needle palm trees in the dark. He ran full on into one, impaling himself on the sharp needles. They don’t go in deep, but the barbs on the needles cause them to embed themselves firmly in the skin. He had needles from his chin to his shins. It took the medics hours to pluck them all out before transporting him to the hospital for treatment.

     My own ‘rumble in the jungle’ didn’t happen until the next to the last day of training. The final three days were devoted to a land navigation exercise in the jungles bordering the Chagres River. Teams of students had to make their way from the starting point to the finish line on the banks of the river where they would then be transported across and back to Fort Sherman where the graduation exercise would be held. Students were told that if it became too much for them, they could make their way to the road that bordered the course and go to the river where boats would be waiting to take them back. If they quit before finishing the course, though, they would not officially graduate and would not be eligible for award of the coveted Jungle Expert Patch which was awarded to top performers. As a captain, I was in command of a team that included two naval academy cadets and an Air Force sergeant.

     We did well during the daytime phase at the start, but when night fell, it began to rain. Visibility in the jungle at night is extremely limited (in triple canopy jungle you can’t see your hand in front of your face), and when its raining, movement in the dark becomes a real problem. Disaster struck when we were less than a kilometer from the finish line, and ahead of all the other teams. Coming over a hill, the Air Force sergeant slipped on the slick ground, landed on his backside and began sliding down the hill in the dark. He made the mistake of not keeping his feet together and a tree halfway down the slope stopped him—he was going pretty fast and the tree, a two-inch sapling, made contact first with his groin. I’m pretty sure everyone in that jungle heard his scream of pain.

     We got him to level ground and built a fire. In the light of the fire, I saw that his testicles were swollen to the size of a softball and he was clearly in a lot of pain. There was no way that he could complete the course. At the same time, he was unable to walk. As the one in charge, I had to make a decision. He could not complete the course but he needed help getting to the road, meaning that whoever helped him would also be marked as ‘quitting.’

     I could not do that to the rest of the team, so I put one of the naval cadets in charge of the team and told them to go ahead and finish the course. I then put the sergeant on my back and carried him to the road. We waited for ten minutes but the promised jeep that would be patrolling the road never showed up, so I picked him up again and walked to the river where I found an old man and his son who were out for some pre-dawn fishing and talked them into taking us across.

     On the other side, I hiked over a mile to the fort with the sergeant on my back and took him to the clinic where they treated him. It was sunup by now, and too late to go back and rejoin my team, so I went to the barracks and went to sleep, thinking that I had just wasted two weeks of my life and would only have the experience to show for it.

     Imagine my surprise later that morning when, showered, shaved, and in clean uniforms, we stood in formation for graduation. The school commandant, announcing the recipients of the Jungle Expert Patch, called my name. When I walked up to get my patch, he also gave me one for the sergeant who was still in a hospital bed with an icepack between his legs. My team and I were singled out as the best in the entire class, not just in terms of the mechanics of jungle survival and operations, but also for leadership and teamwork.

     I broke the school’s rules, but for the right reason. Putting the welfare of those under my command ahead of my own was the right thing to do. It was a lesson I never forgot for the rest of a career in the military and government that lasted until my retirement in 2012.