Land Nav aka Hell in the Forest

Land Nav is finally over, thank goodness. Although it's really only technically over because I still dreamt about it both Friday and Saturday nights. It was a nightmare, or as my friend more aptly put it, a "flaming disaster."
For your information, the land nav course is simply a large plot of land with posts stuck into the ground at various locations. The posts are about 4-6 feet high and have a number stuck on top of them. There's also a hole punch tied to the post. As a student, you're given the coordinates of various posts, from which you plot the position of the posts on your map. Then, you measure the angle and distances to the posts and head out to find them. When you find your post, you write down the number and punch your sheet with the hole punch from that post.
There are various difficulties with this, though. First, the posts are hard to see, since they're stuck in the middle of the forest, which amazingly has a lot of trees that tend to obscure the posts. This is even more true at night. Second, it's all guesswork. Your plot isn't exact since it's just you drawing a circle on a map. Your angle isn't exact since it's just you drawing a line on your map. The distance isn't exact since it's just you measuring your line against the scale in the legend. And the distance you've traveled isn't exact since it's just you counting your steps and estimating how many steps you take every 100 meters. Third, because of the inexactness, it's easy to go astray, which means you're likely to find a post that isn't the one you're looking for. But there's no way to tell since the posts are only marked with a 2-digit number. You can never be sure that the post you found is your post. And if it's not, the rest of your measurements are screwed up because you plot from point to point. So anyway, it's hard. To make it even harder, our cadre told us not to use the roads that traverse the course, but to take straight lines from point to point.
On Wednesday, we formed up at 0300 and started walking around the woods at 0500. Unfortunately, the sun doesn't come up here until about 0715. We had to find three points in the nighttime and had three hours to do it. I didn't find any. I shouldn't say that. I found two, but neither were what I was supposed to find. Then, we took an hour rest and started again in the daytime. This was easy. I found my three points in about an hour and spent the remaining two hours resting. I was fairly confident I would do okay for the qualification round on Thursday.
But then Thursday came around and turned into, as already mentioned, a flaming disaster. The land nav test course is fairly new and is huge. It's about 3 kilometers square or so, which means there's a long distance between the points. For the test, we were given 8 points and had to find at least 5 of them in 5 hours. It was such a flaming disaster that 82% of us failed (me included). Again, I found 5 points, but only 1 ended up being what I was actually supposed to find. There were two big problems on Thursday. First, the distance between the points was so large -- nearly all the points were 1000 meters apart, which, for all you measurement folks out there, is an entire kilometer -- that any minor deviation in angle or pace meant large deviations in location. Second, the area was an absolute jungle. It was dense. It was nearly impossible to take five steps in a straight line. And, as my same friend again noted, who knew so many plants had thorns? I always thought thorns were fairly rare, limited to roses and lemon trees, but it turns out nearly every plant has thorns. And vines. There were literally times were I was so entangled I wondered how I was going to get out. And we had to walk hundreds of meters in this stuff! Plus, much of it was in nighttime, so people fell into creeks, holes up to their shoulders, etc. Basically, there were two types of people who passed -- those who ignored our instructions and stuck to the roads as much as possible, and those who were significantly helped by cadre (which is limited to certain girls in our class, but that's a subject for another day). If you tried to do it on your own and in the way you were taught, you failed. I really can't explain the absolute frustration, despair, difficulty, and hellishness of Thursday, just let me say that I was struggling through places where not even animals had ever been.
On Friday, we had our re-test. Due to the horrifying experience of the previous day, cadre made some changes to the test procedures. First, we didn't start until 0600, so we only had to walk around in the dark for an hour or so. Second, we were told to use the roads. Third, we were allowed to talk to each other. Fourth, cadre drove around in trucks and would help us out. Fifth, and most importantly, they gave us a sheet of paper that listed all of the post numbers with their corresponding grid coordinates. Thus, when you came upon a post, you could figure out if it was yours, and if not, you could figure out where the freak you were. This time, most of us passed.
In the end, I'm really grateful it's over and glad I will probably never have to do land nav ever again (it's just not a high priority for JAGs). Although, I suppose if I'm ever told to go find a stick in the forest using nothing but a compass and a protractor, I can find the wrong stick.