Escape and Evasion: two journalist’s overnight escapade
Illuminated only by a waxing gibbous moon, the branches breaking beneath my boots were the only sound heard as we strategically trekked through where the sagebrush grows. My heartbeat drummed in my ears to the beat of my steps as I trudged through the night of this past Friday the 13th. My only thought: don’t get caught.
Weeks prior, in the early days of August, on a river rafting trip, I asked my colleague and friend Matt Richey about a post he had reshared on his Instagram story. I thought it looked like an intriguing event for a future article. Little did I know I would soon be gearing up with black and green face paint and headed into the darkness of Logan Canyon for a night of Escape and Evasion.
Escape and Evasion, or E&E, is an annual event held by the Air Force ROTC, or Detachment 860, at USU. It is different every year, but it always consists of six hours spent overnight in Temple Fork, up Logan Canyon. This year, cadets were split into groups of four to five, besides our group of six, considering us two reporters were paired with a team. We were given a set of objectives to accomplish throughout the night, and each objective was worth a point amount.
There were also upperclassmen, those who are enrolled in the Professional Officer Course, referred to by cadets as POCs — I quickly learned that the ROTC communicates in acronyms— looking for teams of GMC, or those enrolled in the General Military Course, which was us. If your group got caught, points would be subtracted from your total.
Each team was given a score sheet that they would turn in at the end of the night, and whoever had the most points out of roughly 60 cadet teams would win. There were teams from all over the Northwest Region detachments.
The two of us, Statesman reporter Aubrey Holdaway and myself, signed up for E&E the Tuesday beforehand. This gave us little time to mentally and physically prepare for an overnight experience from the hours of 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. Our only prior knowledge came from an article done by the Herald Journal years prior and brief descriptions from Matt Richey and the official ROTC leaders who helped us with the forms and sign-up.
Aubrey and I attended a safety briefing earlier in the day that all participants were required to go to. It became clear the moment we walked in that we stood out like zebras amidst a lion’s den. We were entering a world that was not our own, and it was about to give us the VIP experience. At the debrief, we went over rules of engagement, or ROEs. The most emphasized one was no running at all. This did not make sense to me at the time but became very clear later on.
After the ROEs were gone over, all the lights in the room went out and a man clad in uniform started yelling. He went over the night’s objectives and an overview of the area. It was this shock to the system that had me questioning if it was too late to turn back, but I knew I needed to stay. If not for myself, then for journalism’s sake.
We made our way up to Temple Fork by roughly 7:30 that evening. We arrived upon all the participants setting up camp. Cadets were asked to camp the night after the exercise is over to keep them off the roads at extraneous hours of the night.
Before arriving at base camp, Aubrey and I vlogged our prior thoughts. Our biggest concerns going in were being able to document the experience and being physically able to keep up with the cadets, while also learning and being respectful of the culture of Detachment 860.
At the campsite, we met our group, which consisted of three women, Cadet Gavle, Cadet Sears and Cadet Wallace, and one man, Cadet Lee. I did not know why, but I was surprised to be on a team that was majority consisting of women. This was the first of many military stereotypes that I, as an outsider, saw broken that evening.
As we walked to startex, the starting point of the exercise, Cadet Lee jokingly asked Aubrey and me if we were conditioned and ready to escape and evade. He also emphasized that he was not there to mess around and that we would be completing as many objectives as possible.
With his words and the shouts of the safety debrief still ringing in my ears, I was truly questioning if I could do this, but it was too late to turn back now. As they announced the exercise was beginning, all the groups began to take off in a speed walk, not run, into the 2,000 acres of land that would be our home for the next six hours.
The first 30 minutes of the exercise consisted of a walk-and-talk scenario. We were getting to know our group as well as introduce ourselves. I asked Cadet Gavle, the only member of our group who was not a first-timer, how similar this exercise was to the video game “Fortnite,” and she told me to think more of it like “The Walking Dead.” This left a pit in my stomach.
Eventually, we entered POC territory. Cadet Gavle told us we were now going to minimize noise and light pollution. Less than 30 seconds later, we were pulled down to the ground, stuck still making sure there were no POC around us. I had practically landed on top of Aubrey in my haste to get down. This is when I learned that our group was going to have to get very comfortable with each other very fast. Once we knew it was safe, we continued trekking on. It was this repeated process that would keep us safe throughout the night.
We ended the first hour of our night lying still in a row on an upward climb of a hill. This was our first situation where the POCs were so close we could make out their exact conversation and see the outline of where their flashlights passed by us. It had gotten dark enough at this point that my 18-dollar brown Walmart parachute pants, snow boots and jacket from Aubrey’s closet blended in with the dark surroundings.
As the footsteps and flashlights of the POCs faded, we made our way up the hill, steadily assessing what the tent at the top of the hill was. We quickly learned that it was the medical tent and used that to reorient ourselves and pinpoint where we were on the map.
Our group eventually fell into a comfortable routine. Lee would lead with Aubrey close behind, as she could not see without her glasses and often had to stay close to the person in front of her. They were followed by myself in the middle with Wallace and Sears behind me and Gavle keeping an eye on our tail.
These hours purely consisted of adrenaline. The temperature eventually dropped enough for us to all put gloves on, which eventually became very helpful when we had to quickly drop to the ground in uncomfortable positions.
We were roughly two hours in, walking on the edge of the road listening to nothing but the gravel being crushed beneath our feet, when a flashlight came out of nowhere. We all dropped to the ground, but it did not matter. We had been caught.
The rules when you got caught were you were not allowed to run away. If they saw you and stated that they saw you, you were caught. Gavle emphasized the importance of not self-identifying to us. If the POCs could only hear us and shouted at us to come out, we were not to move a muscle until they could see us themselves.
Once we were caught, Gavle immediately switched from the silent leader of the group to a chatty criminal defense attorney. She was ready to ask the POCs how their evening was if they needed any candy or hand warmers she had on hand. This was when a new key player in E&E was revealed to us — the art of bribery.
We later learned the bribery aspect is popular amongst E&E participants. We heard tales of cadets bringing Chick-fil-a and Redbulls to help them get out of the POCs’s grasp.
Unfortunately, Gavle’s bribery attempts failed, and the POCs were done marking we had been caught on our sheet. We continued on, back to the silence from before.
At this point, we were relatively far into the territory. We found ourselves close to objective four which was to locate a high value target, or HVT, who would be wearing a bright orange vest.
Trying to locate this HVT took at least the next two hours of our night. We found ourselves in a marsh, ankle-deep in mud. I found myself grateful for the white aspen trees that were illuminated by the moon because they were one of the few things I was able to see clearly in the darkness and use to study myself on uneven terrain.
Eventually, after getting wacked in the face by multiple branches, crab-walking and sliding down a mound of dirt and hiking the steep uphill around a fence, I heard shouting. The POCs were shouting, in varying accents, about the HVT they were guarding. Eventually, as we crept toward them, Lee was caught, followed by the rest of us, and we realized we were going to have to talk our way out of this one.
Aubrey and I knew us being reporters would partly handicap group — there was no way it could not. Our group was bigger, so it would be easier to get caught. Our group didn’t know each other prior, which created room for miscommunication. What we did not expect was our reporter-ness to actually help us.
Upon getting caught by the POCs guarding the HVT, Gavle, on-the-spot, told them that our group had two high-value reporters they were transporting to interview the HVT. We, as reporters, played along and immediately came up with three Statesman-worthy questions for the HVT. We were not allowed to record anything, but in exchange for our three questions, we were let go by the POCs, finally with points on our sheet.
Gavle later explained to us that a lot of Escape and Evasion is just “playing into the bit,” and if you do so, you’re often let off the hook.
It was after we located the HVT that we made our way to our next objective, which was called friendly forces. By now, the moon was truly the only light source we had, and we could clearly see stars above, including the Big Dipper. It was this part of our trek, out of the trees, that had the most stunning scenery.
This was also where the exhaustion started kicking in. We had roughly an hour left, so we pressed on but most definitely at a slower rate from when we started. We walked inside the tree line, just next to the road. We saw POCs walking up and down the road, and if just one had turned their flashlight in the right direction, we would have been caught. Once we eventually deemed there were no more POCs, we moved to the road, hoping to hit our objective in the next 100 steps.
All of a sudden, two POCs from the University of Utah lit up their flashlights and caught us. They said that in that spot, they had caught roughly 20 groups of GMCs in the past hour. They let us off easy and told us all we had to do is tell them what we wanted to do after college. After each person shared, including us two reporters, who as one can imagine, had very different after college plans than the rest of the group, another group of GMCs showed up, and we took that as our cue to leave before they changed their minds about catching us.
We soon hit friendly forces, which to my surprise, was a table of snacks, a speaker playing music and the light of some truck headlights. They told us the only thing we had to do for them was dance to their music Then we would get a password to go tell to those located in the friendly village. After loading up on candy and snacks, we set off for the final hour of our trek.
Our group was feeling more relaxed, and we knew were safely away from any POCs on this part of the map, so it was safe to talk. We all, in our exhaustion, reflected on the night. We chatted, getting to know each other, and laughed about the scenarios we had previously found ourselves in. We never found the friendly village, but we did make our way back to the road and started heading back to base camp. We eventually got picked up by a truck driven by POCs and ended up hearing about the night of other GMC groups.
We found out that a good sum of groups had self-eliminated before the six hours were up. Aubrey and I were pretty proud of ourselves for lasting the whole time considering we were the only two non-cadets that participated.
Once we arrived back and camp and said our goodbyes, we both acknowledged how sore and exhausted we were. With permission to not camp the night, we safely made our way out of the canyon and back to quiet Logan at about 2:30 a.m.
Another team from Detachment 860 with 80 points total took home the E&E trophy, making it a win on home turf. I find myself extremely proud and grateful for the experience. I never would have thought of myself as someone who could go rough it with the Air Force ROTC for six hours overnight, but I was pleasantly surprised by what Detachment 860 had to offer. Although I do not think I will be signing up for the draft anytime soon, I do now understand what the experience taught me not only about the nature of the armed forces, but about the importance of participatory journalism in those settings. I will move forward after this experience hoping I can open the door for more student journalists to be submerged in a world that is not their own and look at it from a new perspective.