So, to put to bed a mystery, I packed a rucksack that weighed 120 pounds one day. First of all, it was near impossible to get my ALICE-Large to that weight without shoving in either sand or pure Knox gold, the latter of which I had none of, so sand would have to do.
I was not a wimp in the day, that I positively did not fancy myself. With the weight of the ruck on my back, it was a chore to even stand, and took most of what I could muster to stroll across relatively even ground. Crossing a fence with it on was a near-miss impossibility. I took it off and shoved it under ahead of me or pulled it through behind me.
Once on the other side, I face the rude dilemma of the absence of the convenient waist-high shelf that I had in my garage to help me get the ruck on. Picking it up and slinging it like a grade school book bag was not on the menu, and I was without a bro for mutual aid. I got it on, but it was neither a swashbuckling nor debonair sight worth beholding by any stretch.
For that matter I didn’t even tote my vaunted sand pipe that day, for you see: ounces were sacrificed that day for the sake of longevity of joints below the waist.
I think, all-in-all, I covered between two and a half to three miles under that load. Conclusion: hear ye, hear ye, SF beer bellowers: those who would swill beer and bellow forth tall tales of flying bullets and impossibly heavy rucks… don’t ask for me to be on your A-Team because I can’t pole-vault with my 120-pounders! And it was not long thereafter, my friends, that I parted the pretense of bravado and left SF in my rear and side-view mirrors for good.
I took to wondering how I, who had not yet even left the Shao Lin temple, could attempt to try out for a “Delta Force” if there even was really such a thing as one. The answer lay best in a quote from a dear friend of mine: “Delta isn’t necessarily looking for the best man; it’s looking for the right man.”
Delta, as it turned out, wasn’t after the Gomer Pile who could heft the 120-pounder, or the 150-pounder, or the 200 hundred-pounder, or the sand pounder, or a Napoleon Six-Pounder; they wanted just the man who could carry a wisp of a sixty-ish-pound rucksack, and carry it chasing behind a Mortar Ring through the desert until his heart exploded. They were after perhaps the brother who was too stupid to quit, one that was alarmingly unsure of the procedure on how to quit, one who dreaded to death the aspect of trying to fill out the “quit” paperwork.
“Then that means we don’t have to be a physical Adonis to pass selection!” Yeah well, let me know how THAT works out for ya.
That I reckoned I could do, the running-forever-with-a-heavy-load part, though at five years old, the notion struck me as hellishly unsavory. The distinction all the while lay in the eventuality that the men carrying the sterling storybook 120 lb knapsacks all had to stop and rest–some time! I never needed to rest, and I never did rest on my 40-ish-mile blaze through West Virginia. Any thought of rest was just a thing I chose to replace with mental assessments of terrain states and physical position in space and time.
The second I set foot on my trek, my weight never came off my feet until 40+ miles later, where they lay next to a wood fire under southern stars. By the end of it all, more than eighteen hours had gone by. My feet and especially my heart had no idea what to make of their owner, but this is how it was to be from that point on. I apologized to them both in advance.
There’s a bond that Rangers share, one that SEALs share, the one that Marines and PJs share … and the one that Long Walkers share is no less revered. And even the Long Walk quickly became just a vestige of a stale tale that got swallowed up by much more significant accounts, never to come up again during storytelling; that is, until days like these.
I was born to carry a rifle and heavy load, to run ahead of a marauding pack and return with more than I left with.
“L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace! (Napoleon Bonaparte by way of George S. Patton)
“The heart wants what the heart wants, and will die to get it.” (geo)
By God and with honor,
Geo sends
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Disclaimer: SOFREP utilizes AI for image generation and article research. Occasionally, it’s like handing a chimpanzee the keys to your liquor cabinet. It’s not always perfect and if a mistake is made, we own up to it full stop. In a world where information comes at us in tidal waves, it is an important tool that helps us sift through the brass for live rounds.
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