Tag Archives: Infantry OCS

Google Earth is a neat piece of software built out of a mosaic of satellite images of the planet’s surface. It gives you the illusion of flying while using zoom lens vision to inspect the trees as well as the forests. So when an OCS classmate sent our class email list a guide to what he said was a Google Earth "tour of the route we walked/marched/ran one weekend early in the cycle" at Fort Benning in the winter of 1967-68, I went along for the ride.

I didn’t remember the walk/march/run, of course, and wonder how he did. He also didn’t stay in the army but became a civilian after the war, so has a lot of intervening non-army memories. But it’s a fairly scenic, memorable route. In the Google Earth program, he dubbed it "the river walk" because it mostly follows the Chattahoochee River in western Georgia–which has waterfalls above Columbus, where Benning is, but below it was getting steamboat traffic from the Gulf of Mexico as early as 1828. I could recreate our event with a generalized memory of the pain of trying to breathe after several miles of pounding asphalt in combat boots. But what a computer ride. It almost made me nauseated just watching it, because of the way the program made the frequent turns at the beginning of the route in a jerky helicopter motion. If one really flew that way all the passengers would have their faces in the paper bags.