As another former
Cadet, here are mine:
- Know when to fall back. If you aren't equipped to fight, aliens, arachnids or main battle tanks, the best thing you can do for your unit (not to mention your society or even your species) is to leave the battlefield as expediently as possible and report what you have seen to headquarters. It is their responsibility to re-arm you before sending you to deal with the situation personally, or to call in air support or an artillery time-on-target.
- Don't take off your boots unless half your unit is ready to start shooting. The enemy always attacks when you take your boots off, it's just one of those things.
- Assaulting downhill on a frozen Winter day trapping the opposing force between you and a lake sounds like a good idea, but it isn't. Trust me on this.
- Before setting out, pick 3 locations at random, and make sure all the team leaders know where they are. Give directions as "310 degrees, 5 miles from point A". Don't give out coordinates on the Clansman radio, it's not encrypted.
- Drink plenty of water and wear a hat. I once participated in an exercise in which 35 out of 42 people in my platoon suffered from dehydration, sunburn or something more serious. If you can't stand, run, think or wear webbing on your shoulders, you're no use to your unit.
- Protect your machine gunner. The gunner is 70% of the firepower of a 12-person patrol. Don't give the job to a gung-ho Blaine-from-Predator-wannabe. And don't deploy your unit without looking at a contour map and thinking about where the gunner should be first.
More when I think of them...