I see two amazing things here.
1) These people are, like, descendants of the Donner party. Seriously. Wierd.
2) As dumb as they might have been for getting themselves in a situation like this, the military can be even dumber. I won't bore you with war stories about PSN-11's and BlueForceTracker systems, but trust me, they can be worse.
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I stole this sig from Task Force 
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