The marching orders were a little odd, Eli thought, but this was a seriously SNAFU anyway. The selection gave a relatively decent dispersal of fire, a balance of assault and overwatch, and kept their ass-end covered. A good tracker though could figure out how many survivors, and with a staggered unit, they doubled the chances of catching a mine or tripwire, but this deep in, it wasn't likely to set one off. Charlie didn't boobytrap his own back yard where one of their kids might catch a tin-can trap instead. 

Normally Dodgers had his own fireteam to lead, but it looked like they hadn't made it out of the crash. Already he missed the reliability of those guys. They were much more vulnerable, but at least this situation wasn't their problem anymore. Hefting Becca, his M16, he positioned himself to take a sector of fire different from the rest while they got their orders, but now, he was bringing up the rear as they formed up to move out to the east. Not only would he have to watch where he stepped, but where everybody else did as well, and keep an eye out behind. 

Once they were moving out of the clearing, he maintained a steady pace gained from years of walking in the rocky terrain around Borger, with it's red clay and red dirt hills, the sand bars around the Canadian River with the occasional patch of quicksand and more frequent slow sand (yes that's a thing), and then a couple years stomping around in the jungles here, he found the travel to be easier for him than a lot of the new guys. He could move without disturbing the vegetation as much, his eyes had learned how to sort out the visual junk of all the vines, bushes, twigs, branches, and trees. The humidity sucked, it made you hot, made you sweat, but you could never get dry, and so you never realized how much water you really lost. With the area he was from, it was a semi-arid region. Desert survival and water conservation he knew about as well. 

With the adrenaline crash that came after a fire fight, a sudden emergency... those kinds of things, he knew people were going to get dull soon. Stress, especially combat stress, was the greatest thing for causing mental and even physical fatigue, and with the guys starting to come down, it could lead to some bad mistakes. They were going to be heading into some mean bush too. Besides just VC there were snakes, tigers, wild boar (he thought), and a few other things that could make life... interesting.  Not to mention the traps and mines and all they could possibly run into. It was one reason Eli tried to stay emotionally detached... using his head for something besides a hat rack. 

Who knew how many miles they were going to have to hump it before they could get extracted? He knew that ounces were going to turn into pounds, in their gear, before the end of the day. Pounds would turn into tons. "Welcome to the suck," he muttered to borrow from a couple Marine buddies. Part of him hoped they wouldn't have to walk the whole way back. Maybe a friendly river patrol boat or huey could pick them up or something. 

Elijah paused once in a while to listen to the jungle around them, as well as for signs of pursuit, looking for movement behind them as well. His steps were designed to fall into the footfalls of the others to help at least partially conceal their numbers, and still he kept paying attention for signs of traps and mines, even though others had traveled in front of him, through the same space. Most of all though, he paid attention to his gut instincts, the hairs on the back of his neck, the kind of thing developed with a long time in the bush, and in country.