 You're pretty good at land nav, but also could look like that or look like that, you know, you might not know where you are. My name's First Lieutenant Burrell. I'm platoon commander, second platoon, Charlie Company, third LCT. Alright, so the Marines are out here doing land nav. It's a basic skill that every Marine should possess. They use this as a building block so that whenever they integrate into their squads and teams and we go out and we're doing field exercises, any Marine can be relied upon to go out there and land nav from, you know, his PB location to an observation point or if it's just a patrol going out, scanning the area. We're out here at Marine Corps Training Area, Bellos. The Marines are working on a basic skill set, land navigation. It's a skill set that they can use as they go out into field exercises. Use this skill set to be relied upon. Any Marine can pick up a map, protractor and compass and navigate their way to a PB or from a PB to an observation point, as well as just whenever they're out there conducting reconnaissance patrols or any type of patrol outside of a PB. Land navigation is one of the basic skill sets that Marines learn in IMC or IOC whenever they, whatever, you know, training pipeline they're going through, whether it's an officer or enlisted. And it's a skill set that continues to be revisited as they advance through their advanced A-Schools, whether it's advanced infantry marine course or infantry small unit leader's course or infantry unit leader's course. It's that skill set of land navigation. They're going to go back to those schools and be expected to land nav to an 8-digit grid with just a map protractor and a compass. So we really expect these Marines in the fleet to hone this skill set, to learn this skill set, so that whenever they do go to those courses, they're ready and they're prepared. Outside of just the advanced infantry training that these Marines will have the opportunity to go to, it's a crucial skill set for them to have as a Marine executing a field exercise, whether they're on deployment. It's just absolutely crucial whether you're a team leader, a squad leader, a platoon sergeant, a platoon commander. It's a skill set that is required for each and every single Marine. My favorite part of the training is watching really young Marines who have a basic understanding of land nav and their experience in land navigation up to this point has maybe been navigating with a team or a buddy, and now we send them out there alone by themselves with just the equipment that they need to navigate, map protractor and compass, and they come back and they're a little bit unsure if they found all their points. They come back and turns out they found all their points, four out of five, five out of five, and just for the Marines to walk away with that sense of understanding, sense of pride, like I understand how to get myself in and out of situations or in and around terrain while I'm out executing training. It's a good feeling from whether you're a team leader, a squad leader, a platoon commander, a platoon sergeant. It's a good feeling to be like these Marines have now honed this skill set and are better prepared to do whatever it is, their role, their job inside the squad. I think it's relevant to talk about with all the technology that the Marine Corps has available to them today, whether it be GPS devices or our daggers, there's all this technological reliance on navigation as well as just not only navigation but just reliance on technology for us to do our job. It's always good to understand how to do it when batteries die, when we cannot rely on that technology, the equipment breaks and all they need is simple pieces of equipment like a protractor, a compass and a map and they're able to break down to basic pieces of equipment, use that basic piece of equipment, rely upon it and have confidence in that and their skill set to be able to get them from point A to point B. It's something that's always been driven into me from my early days in the Marine Corps that you cannot rely on your equipment entirely, especially things that run off of power that require like recharge, batteries. It's good to have that secondary skill set that you can fall back on when and if your equipment does fail you. But as Marines, I think we all understand that no matter how good the gear is, the gear could still fail you, whether it's just getting banged up by just the nature of how rough our job is, following, breaking, things break, but basic pieces of equipment that are really, really durable do not break. And as long as we understand and know how to employ those pieces of equipment we're going to be just fine. It's just being able to rely and fall back on that skill set. Even with land nav, they've got five points that they've got to go out there and find. We give them six hours to do so. So it's essentially one hour per point with an hour kind of in-between time there, just kind of like, hey, messed up, got a little bit off track. So they have an hour to navigate from point to point and each point could be a thousand meters away from the next point. So it is a physical event. They're out there navigating with the rifle, their patrolling load, their day pack. Same thing that they would be out there patrolling with in a patrol or inside of a PB. So it is a physical event as well. They're out there probably running from point to point. You can look around. It's tall, reed grass all through here. Visibilities roughly about five to ten meters. It's a physical event like getting through there. Sometimes we could find ourselves in a situation where we're five kilometers out or ten kilometers out from a key piece of terrain or a location, and we get the call from our company commander, from our battalion commander that, hey, chaos too. I need you to move from the point that you're at right now, five kilometers east. We don't have any ground transportation. With the skill set, land navigation, as well as like the physical capacity to move on foot, under load, five kilometers, ten kilometers, fifteen kilometers, we are capable of achieving the intent of our company commander, our battalion commander, or whatever that mission set requires of us.