I see a few differences here in our analogies. Yes, when you go into a field exercise you know that the bullets aren't real and that noone is really out to kill you.
When you go out for a day hike or an overnight camping trip though, you don't KNOW that a survival situation won't present itself, by some means,
foreseeable or not. That is where the awareness comes into play, in that you have to take the hints, notice the cues, read the subtleties.
Ah, but that's exactly the thing, friend. On that training exercise, a lot of things can go wrong, and what was just a training exercise can turn into a survival situation. You don't know that things won't go wrong. You don't know that someone won't flip out with a loaded assault rifle and start making the exercise a whole lot more realistic. You don't know that while you're digging yourself a nice little hole to hide in you won't find a lovely explosive relic from WW2 and set it off, losing some limbs in the process. You don't know that you won't get unpleasantly severe weather, get a couple of hundred feet off course while changing positions, and try to cross a half-frozen lake in the darkness that you mistook for just a small open field, and fall right through the thin ice, skis and all. You don't know that you won't fall off a cliff face hidden by banked up snow while quickly fleeing from pursuing "hostiles." That's just like things can go wrong on the day hike or the camping trip. Nasty stuff happens. People actually do die on military exercises (I should think more often than on day hikes, actually), from all manner of things - and most of those deaths could have been avoided by being more careful, just like most wilderness deaths could be avoided by being more careful. Awareness comes into play in everything we do.
The point: whether you go out on a military exercise or a hike in the woods, you do not
know that things will not go wrong, even lethally wrong, but you do
believe that things won't necessarily or even likely go wrong and put your life at great risk. This is as compared to going into a combat situation, where you
know right from the beginning that there are people out there trying to put an end to your existence right there and then, and you are already, with absolute certainty, in a survival situation that threatens your life. This is the difference - I've never met a man who was more on the "edge" and alert while hiking in the woods for personal enjoyment than when on a serious military exercise. Perhaps there is a man like that, but if so, then he's a pretty strange guy, and not all too bright.
To the best of my knowledge there is nothing that kills you "in a second". Not in the way that you seem to describe that some things are
instantaneous as far as reaction times go. There is always a chain of causation leading up to "that second". Be it a bullet fired from a gun, a lightning bolt striking you, a patch of ground collapsing beneath you, or what have you.
There are ALWAYS things leading up to that event, and there are always cues that said event will take place.
Whether or not you pick up on them, is a different matter entirely .
Certainly. But even if you know there's a storm coming, do you know where the next bolt of lightning will hit? Can you observe it? No, you cannot, because you're a human, and humans cannot observe such things. It's an undeniable fact that many of these "leading factors" you couldn't possibly detect and anticipate, so in effect the event appears instantaneous. People have died, struck by lightning out from a completely clear sky - how do you observe the leading factors to that? My point here is, no matter how observant you are, humans are physically incapable of observing some of the cues and leading factors, which makes the events themselves, in effect, appear instantaneous, leaving you absolutely no time to sense them coming. There's always a chain of events that leads into one dramatic event of great importance, but sometimes it is completely impossible to observe this chain of events - and sometimes it's impossible to observe the event itself, too.
If you are traversing a wilderness area you aren't familiar with, bring a map, bring a compass, note the terrain, observe the surroundings. You don't
HAVE to be there, but you WANT to. This is much different from a field exercise that prepares you for combat. Somewhere you don't want to be but
likely have to be.
I'm not sure if this is the kind of difference that makes a... uh, difference, in terms of how observational and alert a person can be in the situation. Personally, I would choose my alertness level based on what I know of the environment. I'm typically at my least alert when I'm going to my own bed to sleep, because experience in general tells me my bed is fairly safe a place. On the other end of the spectrum, going anywhere where there are lots of men with guns running around feels much more risky, and I will be far more alert. Considering the risks and environment, at least to me, the average military exercise is much more dangerous than any normal hike in the woods, and for that reason I will be more alert during the exercise than in the woods, where it's much less dangerous.
If a patrol sneaks up on a sentry and says "Bang, you're dead" that person knows. he gets to head back to base camp and get a nice warm meal
possibly a hot shower, and a place to lay up for the night that is usually better than the bivouac set up in the field exercise.
As for whether or not they would have died at 50 feet or 5 sneaking up behind them, that should have been a valuable lesson in the training.
Showing that you need numerous sentries posted to watch numerous positions attentively, that way, nobody would get within 50 feet, much less 5.
This would be an example of "group awareness", when one person simply cannot cover all of the things that need to be managed at once.
Nobody can observe 360 degrees, and I'm not claiming anything to the contrary, but all of use could observe a lot more than we do, I guarantee it. Even those guys that are "sharp", can improve on their ability...I know, I used to be one of them, and I'm STILL improving.
Indeed, situations like that are valuable lessons. And they show how what I've been talking about translates into reality: human senses are limited, we're, in many ways, SOL when it comes to observing things. There's only so much that we can observe. I mean, let's put some more guards observing the area in this example, so that I can't just sneak right in there and say hello. Now, what if I had a sniper rifle? Yes, that's right. That guard would, again, be dead, without ever noticing it. Of course, you could prevent that by putting out anti-sniper patrols and posting sentries in even larger an area around the guarded site. But then the dead guy wouldn't be that particular guard, it would just be one of those patrolling farther away from the camp. So the result again, is a dead guy who could never observe it coming. If this sounds stupid, that's because it is!
Human perception is severely limited, and the power of observation can only bring us so far.
What my ultimate point in repeating that fact is, is of course the following: be ready for surprises - don't expect that you will be able to observe them coming, because sooner or later, you won't, unless you're really lucky. The man who believes he can avoid all threats through situational awareness is going to get hurt sooner or later. It's important to be aware, but it's even more important to be armed to handle the situations that you may become aware of - awareness of threats without means to counter them just leads to knowing that you'll be dead soon, instead of biting it unexpectedly. If we move this into the urban self-defense environment, it will perhaps be more clear. Let's say you've a sharp eye for things that look suspicious, and while you're at a quiet ATM (that you hesitated to use, but decided to anyway, since no immediate threats seemed to be around and you really needed that cash right now), you spot a suspicious looking young man with his right hand in his pocket appearing from an alley and starting to walk slowly towards you. Good, you noticed that you're not alone anymore - you're aware. But what do you do now? Awareness won't take you further than this - you've identified a potential threat, but now you've got to deal with it. If you don't have the means to deal with it, then awareness did nothing good to you. Have a gun? Good feet for getting quickly out of dodge? And so on... this is the adaptation and improvisation part - now you have to do something, likely making an important decision very quickly.
As for the underground hideouts, a little observation, a little ingenuity, and perhaps the application of technology or better tools would have proved valuable in this regard. Scent dogs, sonar/metal detectors even hiking sticks or ski poles used effectively could have made a difference.
I know for a fact that you didn't construct those snow shelters, without some trace, however minute, there will always be tell-tale signs.
Be it broken branches, compacted snow surrounded by fluff, vegetation in a linear pattern(nature doesn't make straight lines) etc.
Indeed. People, though, are often surprised at how difficult spotting something like this can be in reality. In the context of the environment that we were in, at that time, anyone trying to notice our little hideout would have had to consider this:
- Scent dogs are a big no: they're immensely loud, and will give your position away to everyone within... well, anyone near enough to care that you're there. And you can kill their noses with certain chemicals that you might just want to plant in strategic locations if someone is pursuing you.
- Metal detectors and such need to be held in hand, which is pretty difficult when you're yourself skiing, both hands on poles (and guess whether the average FDF trooper ever even gets to see, much less use, such a tech toy). In addition, they like to freeze and die in cold weather.
- Poking around constantly with the skiing poles would be good, only that it would make your travel speed far too slow. And what if the hideout was three meters from your trail instead of right in the middle of it? That's right.
- Finally, the fun part about observational skills is that everyone can have them. As we can search for the traces left by the guys who built a hideout somewhere around here, so can they see their own traces and try to mask them. We don't leave broken branches around, or suspiciously lined vegetation. What traces cannot be completely covered physically, can often be hidden behind secondary cover: find the least likely direction the hostiles will come from (they probably won't be skiing right through that enormous thicket, or if they do, you'll certainly hear them), and hide your traces there in so much as you can (the entrance to our little hideout was hidden by trees growing very near each other, close to which you couldn't get on skiis, and then the refuse of our little digging operation was left there, too, where it was well hidden.)
The point here would be that if someone happened to ski around near there, observing the environment carefully and thinking "If there's someone around here, I'll notice", he would be very wrong.
We certainly agree on some points, but on others. I can't quite seem to see where you're coming from. I'm not saying that it's wrong at all, but I
just can't see it personally. By all means, I'm willing to learn new and more effective methods of things, but only if they are that...effective.
I'm pretty good at making myself sound more complicated (and tedious) than intended. Sorry about that - it's a natural talent of mine.
I would say that the heart of where I'm coming from is this: don't trust observational skills, alertness, and awareness, to actually save you. Sometimes they will, because you were careful. Sometimes they won't, because even though you were careful, you just physically couldn't observe the threat before it manifested itself. And when observational skills won't save you, you'll need what's really the most important survival skill (in my personal opinion, which isn't worth all that much), which is the skill of adapting to unexpected threats and events. Or to put it in perhaps clearer words: do not expect that you will not be surprised. Do not expect that you can be aware of all the real threats out there, wherever you are. Do expect something to get the jump on you, and do plan and train to adapt to such surprises (this has the added benefit of making you even more observational, at the point where you actually believe that things can go sideways at any point in time, anywhere).
Ok, that was a long post, and I'm still not sure if it was useful. Back to drinking it is.
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