Reply #17: I'm not sure you got my point.

[11 Bravo]

I have also been white-water rafting, including the occasional difficult portage, and have crewed on P-21s in the San Francisco Bay, WAY before I went into the army. Nobody was shooting at me on any of those occasions. (Trust me, it affects your balance.) But your response has nothing to do with combat, and it has even less to do with my original post. I was defending Jim Webb's 1979 article, and thought I had fairly framed my comments as such.
If you enjoy extreme sports, goodonya, but please don't attempt to place my post in a 2006 context; when any honest reading of that post would acknowledge that I was referring to jungle combat in the late 60s and early 70s. Anything I couldn't do by "brute force" didn't get done, and there was no "mechanical advantage" to be had. You either picked it up and carried it, or you left it in the field. That includes dead and wounded men.
Believe me, in the context of today's armed forces, I'm on your side. I tried to make that clear initially. If I didn't, I apologize.