The Coldest I've Ever Been

fig. 1-1 What I dug out of my boots later that week....

While walking back from the gym this morning, and feeling the wonderous cold breeze from Nordic hell, I remembered the one time I was the coldest in my life.

It was back while I was in Officer Basic Training, as a lowly Second Lieutenant at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. Naturally as I started the course in September, it was slated to complete mid January. Near the end of this course was a 10 day field exercise...which ironically landed in the middle of December.

Allow me to paint this picture first. If you're not familiar with the weather in southern Missouri, it is cold of a different sort. Not only is the wind more humid, but for some reason, the wind can also blow through pure steel it's that cold.

So on Day 1, as we're rolling out of the motor pool on the way to our bivouac (camping) site, it starts to rain. The temperature being one degree above freezing, obviously it felt like someone was holding a melting glacier over our heads. It continued to rain...hard, as in Missouri hard...as in if you looked up at the sky you'd drown hard. Despite the fact that everyone was wearing wet weather gear, we were all doomed to freezing. It initially started by my boots getting soaked after kneeling in a puddle while on a tactical halt (why I was dismounted, I still have no idea). Then the wetness crept up my legs and down my jacket sleeves while me and the other LT's fought to get giant, soaking wet canvas tents up in the pouring rain. Finally, after I had shivered to the point that I ran out of blood sugar (and ironically, it was lunch time), I just flat out sat down on the wet freaking ground and ate my cold beef stew MRE. I remember being so cold and so wet that I really didn't care any more. Most would call it good training, I would call it the first stage of hypothermia.

As the days rolled on, the rain bounced back in forth between heavy snow at night, and torrential down pours during the day. I vivdly remember at one point getting massive hail stones to boot. We experienced every type of weather pattern out there short of environmental disaster, and except for sunshine, it was all colder then balls. My other favorite memory was on the night of Day 7 or 8, when it was single digits, and the moon was taunting us from a clear sky (which as we all know makes the night colder). I can remember laying on freshly fallen snow at 2 am waiting to conduct an ambush. Subsequently, the group we were waiting to ambush got lost in the woods, and after 2 hours, we all just packed up and went back to camp. Fortunately my cot was next to the stove in the tent, unfortunately, my fingers were almost too frozen to get into bed.

Long story short, just remember that the Army goes to the extremes, and by that, I mean they go to the hottest or the coldest places on earth, and never the tween do they visit.