When we last left our heroes, they had just completed a grueling hump up to the Three Pipes area - highlighted by thickets of laurel and litanies of complaints - and a litter carry back down to a trail head. Then a quick walk back to Hawk Base and up into the camp area...

Capt Gibbons challenged us to build field-expedient shelters. That was just fine with Capt Stanford because he was planning on building a shelter the whole time and had only brought a tarp and poncho along. The exercise of building shelters meant that he'd have someone to share the work - and the misery - if things went wrong.

Maj Ninness, Capt Stanford and Mid Elliott teamed up to build a basha for the night. They dreamed of a nice, cozy A-frame that would sleep all three of them in relative comfort. Of course, when building an A-frame you need a frame (Get it?!) and it was here that Capt Stanford pulled out the single most useful piece of kit he had packed: the Wotta-Saw. In short order he had it assembled and, like a crazed beaver with the munchies, it made short work of every piece of wood that it faced. Mid Elliott was quite literally looking for excuses to saw things apart...

The A-frame and the two lean-to shelters all went together quickly and with very little guidance from Capt Gibbons. Again: the advantages of working with team of experienced people. All three shelters were occupied that night.

To make things just like home for Mid Elliott, a suitable pole was found and the Union Jack soon flew in the center of the campsite. Due to an unfortunate mix-up with a color guard of Marines and the Canadian flag at a baseball game a few years ago, Capt Stanford wasn't allowed to attach the flag to the pole. After the final guy line was tied and the flag hung limply in the breezeless evening air, Mid Elliott wiped back a tear and then danced a merry hornpipe in his underwear while humming "God Save the Queen" (British flag protocol is apparently somewhat different from ours).

"Bodies... There were bodies everywhere!" Brodsky said, a chill running up his spine. "All I could do was lay helpless in the tall grass. I saw my friend Pat laying next to me. He had only minor injuries, I was living the endless hell of 2nd and 3rd degree burns to the face and chest. The minutes seemed like hours... Finally, medics came to our rescue. We were loaded up and brought back to base for cookies and juice." He continues, lips trembling, "It was the worst Red Cross disaster training exercise I've ever been on. We had to play injured for at least twenty minutes..." Brodsky gently touches his chest, he can still feel the rubber burn moulage he had to wear. "The sun was so hot...so hot".

After evening chow and as it started to get dark, Maj Bowden and Maj Ninness headed down to Hawk Base to "tour the facilities" - if you take our meaning. They stumbled into camp about an hour later in full dark complaining of getting lost and being challenged every time they came within one hundred feet of a firewatch.

"HALT! Who goes there? HALT! Who goes there?" said Maj Ninness. "It was like the DMZ or something! And if it hadn't been for the Ranger eyes on the back of Ultimate Kirt's patrol cap, I'd still be out there!" He was clearly shaken, not stirred, by his experience.

That evening, Maj Ninness and Capt Stanford stood firewatch from 2300 until 2400. It proved to be an opportunity for an interesting meeting of the minds with Capt Gibbons.

Over cigars at the fire, Maj Ninness expressed that while the training wasn't easy and the staff wasn't playing games, he wasn't seeing the abuse or attitude that make Hawk Mountain infamous throughout CAP. His thinking was that most of the complaints were from those who simply couldn't handle the training environment. Capt Gibbons, who has been involved in Hawk Mountain and the PAWG Ranger Program since he was a Cadet twenty-odd years ago, spoke at length on why Hawk Mountain is the way it is.

"1981 Connecticut Wing encampment at Pease AFB. Our squadron commander wanted to do a 'Stripes' homage. He thought he had it all set up, but when he leaned into the microphone at the closing ceremonies in front of 300 people and said, 'Are you people telling me that you've completed your training', we didn't respond 'That's the fact, jack!'. Instead, there was complete and total silence. You could have heard a mouse break wind. 'You people are going to pay', he said before he stepped away from the microphone. We laughed, but he meant it. And on the six hour bus ride home? Not one stop. Not to eat, not to pee. And the constant vibration and sloshing. Sweet Lord, why did I drink all that Coke before we left? At the end, we were just praying to die..." Stanford's eyes focused on infinity and his bladder ached with the memory.

Capt Gibbons went to sleep shortly afterward, leaving Maj Ninness and Capt Stanford alone with the fire. It wasn't much later that the sharp-eyed pair spied a long line of flashlights threading through the forest toward their position. Mindful of the enthusiastic example set by the other firewatches when Majors Bowden and Ninness took their potty break, they stayed in their positions by the fire and as the intruders drew closer called out, "Hi! How's it going?"

"Hi! Who's that?" a voice called back.

"Echo Squadron", they volunteered.

"Okay. This is Alpha." Longtime Hawk Staffer Lieutenant Phipps emerged from the dark and stepped into the light. "I've been guiding off your fire."

"Great. Help yourself."

"Thanks," he turned as his flight started snaking through the campsite and shouted, "Go AROUND the campsite. Do not walk through."

"We're on a little night navigation," Lt Phipps explained as his flight continued to go by. "See you later."

"Have fun!" the Echo Squadron fire watchers called.

As he disappeared into the night they heard him say, "You people had better stay out of that campsite or we'll be walking around all night!"

Before long it was time for the relief and Ninness and Stanford settled in for the evening. Things were 'snug' in the basha; the three of them would certainly leave much better friends than they arrived!

The next day dawned bright, early and cold. To combat the effects of the morning chill, Echo slept in while the other teams were up and about. At nine-thirty the jundies came around with Breakfast Tea and crumpets to massage us awake. It was then we discovered that a mosquito had gotten through the netting and made off with Nin's leg. (According to the doc, he'll be right as rain in a few days..)

No, actually, Echo bounded to life at 0730 for a 0800 mount up. In that amount of time we ate, broke down and packed up. Once again, the benefits of a smaller, more experienced team. By the time we rolled out you'd never have known anyone was there. We covered our tracks and moved through the forest like jungle cats on the prowl...

During the walk out, Capt Gibbons paused at Hawk's mock crash site to cover crash find procedures and then it was on to the low-angle rope rescue class.

As Capt Gibbons prepared to familiarize the heroes of Echo Squadron with rigging and using a rope system for a low-angle extraction, he pulled an impressive amount of equipment out of various bags and packs, including carabiners, pulleys, several hundred feet of line, several shorter loops of line, etc. Again, the message is that you're going to be investing significant amounts of time and money if you're serious about SAR.

And if you're going to do SAR, you have to do it right!

Major Ninness stops mid-sentence. His face softens to a hollow expression, his jaw slackens as his eyes glaze. He blinks twice and shakes his head.. "It was at the Island in 1982.. They took 80 cadets to K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base. The dining facility was overwhelmed by our arrival. We were hungry. What did anyone expect? It was quick and without warning.. Eighty box lunches without chips or soda... Madness!"

One of the most interesting things Capt Gibbons talked about during the low-angle extraction rigging class was that the SAR community has moved away from using the bowline in favor of various forms of "Figure-of-Eight" knots. The reason being that the bowline places more stress on the fibers of the rope, resulting in a net loss of 35% of the strength of the rope at the knot. But the Figure-of-Eight only lowers the strength of the rope 15%.

In a remarkably short time, Capt Gibbons had strung a low-angle extraction system that featured a Figure 8 descender as the main control brake with a second line attached to the main line as a safety and "emergency brake". This safety used two Prusik knots which had to be actively worked as the litter descended in order to keep from binding and stopping the descent. Maj Kirt Bowden earned dozens of yards for his stare one at a time working the brake!

Another important consideration - and the cause for headaches among some of Echo Squadron - was the advanced calculus needed to determine the load on the rope. Obviously, the strength of the rope is very important when you're hanging gear and people off of it. The standard of measure seems to be 'firemen' and we were using a six fireman rope. One "fireman" is equal to 300 pounds, which confused us further because we'd always thought a cop was equal to 300 pounds; firemen eat fewer donuts and always seem a little slimmer...

There was a lot more information provided, much of which went in one ear and out the other without actually hitting anything in between. As confusing as it seems now, it was all perfectly clear at the time. The point is that anyone can learn rope techniques if they apply themselves; it's not rocket science!

Whilst sitting around the fire at Hawk, Mid Elliott's eyes focus on a distant point (about 904 yards away) as he relives the horrors of his life in the Air Training Corps: "RAF St. Mawgan, Cornwall, 1996, Sea King Operational Conversion Unit engineering section....two weeks of professional tea drinking and 'work' experience....they made me work for nearly two hours one day.......oh yes, two hours.....the effects still haunt me today...all that tea....". A single tear rolls down Mr. Midshipman Elliott's cheek, he wipes it away quickly hoping that the other hardened members of the Squadron haven't noticed. They have, but they respect the moment and say nothing.

After using the rig to control the descent of a litter, Capt Gibbons quickly converted it into a pulley system using two pulleys. This operation took less than five minutes and the two pulleys gave the pullers a four-to-one mechanical advantage. The four people pulling had no problem pulling the litter and the six people trying to hold the litter back up the hill. An important thing to keep in mind when using a pulley system is to make sure you don't have more people pulling than the strength of the rope; apparently it is very easy to overpower the rope with one of these rigs.

A short time after Echo completed their work with the rig, Alpha - the advanced group - showed up for a demonstration and a little hands-on. There were more than a few blank and glassy stares, last night's maneuvers apparently not having done them any favors in the sleep department. However, Alpha gamely hung in there and took their turns moving the litter up and down the incline using the rig.

The point of the demonstrations was to familiarize the two teams with the concepts, rather than to actually teach them how to do it. Actually learning the whole thing would take a great deal more time and - as mentioned - a fair amount of expensive equipment.

After Alpha flight finished trying out the rig, they trooped off and Echo packed up. By now it was late morning and it was time to start winding things up at Winter School. Echo Squadron loaded the rope gear onto a litter and carried it down the Hawk Base. After that there was a closing formation and sayonara until next year!

But that wasn't quite all...

Bowden drifts off as his canteen cup of hot chocolate begins to burn on his insy-stove...he begins mumbling as his eyes become fixed on the fire. "I was a soldier, I had a duty to my country and my commander, but I wanted to make the CAP meeting that night. Instead, I was told I had duty for the evening. I begged all my friends..."please, take my shift, I've got a meeting to attend". Finally, the new guy showed up. I paid him $25 to fill in for me for 4 hours while I went to the meeting. I was safe, no withdrawal symptoms to experience again. I arrive to the squadron, it was silent, there was an absence of CAP uniforms...The meeting was canceled, no one had called me.

After the formation officially ending Winter School there was a presentation by Maj Anne Gibbons and Capt Heather Weiss about becoming a member of Hawk Staff. Hawk Staff training takes place on a series of weekends and includes classroom and field training. About three dozen Cadets were listening intently and a lot of hands went up when the question, "Who's still interested in serving on Hawk staff?" was asked.

One of the things Capt Gibbons stressed during this talk was that Hawk Mountain needs to change its reputation as the Place Cadets Go To Get Beaten. This perception of Hawk is very troubling to Hawk Staff and to Pennsylvania Wing; and they're determined to do something about it. With that in mind, CadetStuff.org has arranged for updates throughout the Hawk Staff training cycle. More updates on this exciting future feature (nice alliteration, eh?) as they become available...

The CadetStuff.org team left Hawk Mountain a lot tireder and a little wiser. It was not the first cold-weather FTX for most of the participants, but it was the first at Hawk for almost everyone. Everyone was impressed with the professionalism of the staff and the rigorous tempo of the training. Maj Bowden, E.S. Director for NATCAP Wing and former commandant of NGSAR, even went so far as to point out that the rope training was very rare in CAP.

As Capt Stanford again lead the charge through the narrow, winding and exciting back roads around Hawk Mountain, the first order of business was getting Maj Bowden on his way back south and to get a little chow. You know what that means: McDonald's! A McDonald's was located at the point the convoy had to split and everyone settled down for a feed.

As they ate contemplatively, each was lost in his own thoughts and the stares in the restaurant stretched toward infinity: they had done it, the Thousand Yard Stares were once again theirs!

Good-byes were said in the parking lot and hands were shook; the members of the team would miss each other in a manly sort of way. But they were haunted by Maj Bowden's final statement before he drove off into the sunset: "Y'know, you lose 250 yards if you stop at McDonald's after an activity."

The realization that they'd made it only to be thwarted by their own stomachs froze their blood and Stanford spoke for all of them when he said, "Crikey! Next year, then..."