When the Army moves out of the barracks and into the woods to practice being an Army, all the soldiers get to practice the skills that they need to live and work and fight in the woods or desert or mountains or wherever the working and living and fighting may take place.  Sometimes a company-sized unit (usually about 100 to 150 men) will go out and operate by themselves;  sometimes they will go out and operate as part of a larger unit, a battalion (600 to 1000 men) or even larger.  I have been on exercises that pitted one Corps against another, a mock war that involved over 60,000 men.  But most of the time you practice in smaller groups.  When your group arrives at its designated patch of woods, the first order of work is to establish security.  That means that the sergeants are assigned a section of the company's perimeter to defend.  The sergeants then figure out where the heavy weapons will be employed and where the "fighting positions" (foxholes) will be placed; then they assign the individual soldiers, or more often a pair of soldiers, to their particular fighting positions. 
One of the first things you have to do when you are assigned to a fighting position is to dig in;  prepare what is called a "hasty" position, just deep enough to lie in and be protected from enemy fire.  Whoever is in charge of the perimeter defense will assign you a "field of fire", the area in front of you that you are responsible for keeping the bad guys out of.  Once you know what you have to defend and you have prepared at least a little cover from enemy fire, you have to draw a diagram of the ground in front of you...this is called a range card.  You have to show the prominent terrain features and any notable obstacles or depressions, especially noting places where the bad guys could be protected from your fire.  If there are any "dead zones" in front of you, those are places you cannot reach with your own gunfire, like a ditch or depression or rock formation, etc.  You must carefully mark them on your diagram in case you boss might want to employ some form of indirect fire weapon like a claymore mine in the dead zone to discourage enemy soldiers from hiding there.  Once you have identified all the important features in front of you, you estimate the distance to each of them and make a note of it.  Then you put firing stakes in the ground, lined up in a row across the front of your foxhole.  Firing stakes are simple and ingenious...you just drive a stick into the ground to mark the features on your range card, the idea being that if you aim your rifle over that stick, it will be pointing at one of the important features.  You also drive a stick in to mark the left and right limits of your field of fire.  You may ask, "What do you need the stakes for?  You already know where those things are."  Good question.  Easy answer:  It is a rare enemy who attacks in daylight.  When it gets dark out, you may not be able to see the features at all, but you will have a reference point to aim over, engaging some of the handy hidey places the bad guys might try to use in the dark.  Aaaannnnnddddd...should you get incapacitated, the next guy into the hole will have a ready reference to what is in front of him.  So, once the range card is complete and you have made contact with the guys on your right and left sides and agreed on where your fields of fire overlap, then you begin the process of "improving your fighting position" (adding more camoflage, piling more dirt for protection, adding overhead cover, adding more camoflage, adding more cover...you get the idea.)  This process continues until you leave the hole for good.  Always gotta make it better.  Told you all that so I could tell you this:
I was pretty good at making range cards when I was in Basic Training.  It's good to be good at something.  On one of the first field maneuvers I participated in after arriving in Germany, a very cold two-week-long exercise in January of 1965, I was assigned to a guard position protecting the supply operation.  My platoon sergeant told me to make a hasty position since we wouldn't be there long enough to really dig in.  I asked about a range card.  He told me to go ahead;  it would be good practice.  I was a brand new Private, what did I know?  I started drawing my range card.  I was well into it when a sergeant I didn't know came up from behind me and asked to see how I was doing.  I proudly showed him my card thinking, "It is good to be good at something".  He looked it over carefully, checked on my estimations of distances to features, and even moved left and right to make sure I hadn't missed any dead zones.  Then he gave it back and asked me if I was satisfied with it.  I said I was about done and I was about satisfied.  Then he did a strange thing...in my eyes, anyway. He lay right down on his belly, next to me, patted the ground and invited me to join him.  Now, I am from California and in spite of the reputation the state has for "funny" people, I was not of a mind to join him down on the snowy ground.  Especially when he told me he wanted me to see something.  But he insisted that it was important to understanding what I was doing there...so I lay down next to him.  He handed me my range card and asked me to identify all the features I had carefully drawn, estimated and staked.  I couldn't see half of them.  In fact, most of what I saw from gound level was so different from what I had drawn that I would never have recognized it from the card.  
He smiled and explained that what I had done was a very common mistake.  Just a short five-foot drop in eye level changed the whole world in front of me.  He helped me draw a new card, and then, after it was completed, we stood up and added the really important things that you couldn't see from ground level.  He taught me that you needed to see the whole area from both perspectives.  There were things you just couldn't see from the ground, but you could not really see what you had to deal with from a standing position, either.  You wouldn't think that five feet would make that much difference, but it does.  
Over the years I have watched many other NCOs give range card training classes.  I have seen very few who made their students get down to ground level to see what they would actually see from a well-dug foxhole.  When I had been around long enough to be in charge of some things, I made sure that training included looking at things from many perspectives.  When a soldier completed a range card, I would move him away from his position and give the card to another soldier and see if he could make any sense out of it.  
In my unit, it was not enough to complete a task in a classroom.  We strove to put the tasks into a real environment.  For example, one of the skills our drivers had to master was coupling and uncoupling a semi-trailer.  They learned the basic task in the motor park, on asphalt.  When they could do it there, they were moved out to the woods and did it in the mud.  When they could do it in the mud, we dressed them in their chemical protective suits and masks and they did it again.  When they could do it in the woods in chem suits, they had to do it in the dark.  When they could do all that, they could do it anywhere. We worked on things like that from all angles.  We did it because when the poo-poo gets in the propeller, we don't have time for explanations and training classes...you gotta dodge the poo and do the job. 
One of the best parts of being a First Sergeant was being in charge of the training program for the company.  I had direct input into the quality of the instruction and the realism of the training.  I think I owe any successes I may have had in that department to that sergeant out in Wildflecken, that cold January day, when we lay down in the snow to get a better perspective of what was in front of us.
I think that it would be a good thing to have a sergeant grab some of our civic leaders and politicians...the ones who claim to "feel our pain", the ones who claim that they have "been there", the ones who would have you believe that they understand the trials and hardships we face because they once faced them, too.  Walking down a tarball-covered beach and then climbing back onto your big jet and then flying back to DC by cocktail time does not qualify you to say, "I have walked those shores, I know..."  I have heard elected officials telling us how well they understand our troubles and then listened to them on their TV interviews so full of compassion for the working man...most of them have been "working" on their own re-election much harder than anything they have done for you.  They spout so much manure about principles and integrity and then use their "office" to line their pockets and help their friends who will then help them right back.  How is it that most congressmen go to DC having never earned more than most folks and after a few years they are millionaires?  It isn't from their salaries.  We need to have someone grab them by the stacking swivel and pull them down to street level...get down and see the woods from the foxhole...that is where the real fighting gets done.