Agreed (with Mrbb's now self-deleted post that was above this one). Many of us have served in the military and some made a career of it. Hint, your military background does not make you sound weird. Nor does your education. From what I can see, your stream of consciousness style of posting is off putting. You ask some questions, then quote some texts on the same subject and then offer advice on the same subject. And when people attempt to answer your questions, you tend to argue with them and sometimes offer subtle insults.

A lot of members here have advanced degrees in engineering, law and many other disciplines. Others on here may not have a degree from a college but have one in life experience. A college degree exposes one to lots of disciplines and teaches you how to learn. It's a start. The rest of your learning occurs after college and continues throughout life, your career and life experiences. Just like going to Jump school in the army. At some point, you begin jumping out of planes and the real learning begins. Not just the few jumps you make in school but the next several hundred. It's much the same in hunting. Each time you go out hunting gives you an opportunity to learn more. You can read books, magazine articles, watch videos, etc. but the real learning comes when you try to make that information work for you in the field. It's a fun challenge that never gets old.

Your comment about being an educated man and not a yokel implies that people on this website that think you sound odd are yokels is insulting and extremely inaccurate. The definition of a yokel includes people that are rustic, simple, naive, easily deceived and that fail to see through false pretenses. By their posts, it is obvious that members here are not yokels. It ought to be equally obvious that many of them are well educated, highly intelligent, have lots of life experience and are quite advanced on that learning curve called life.There's at least one game warden in the membership, several hunting guides and many ranch owners who observe game on a regular basis. Some members have hunted game on several continents, others have hunted in almost half of the states in our country and quite a few have completed one hunting slam or another. Some of them have hunted since they were young children and a lot have 40, 50 or even more years of hunting experience.

I guess my question to you is why you would want to offend this much experience in hunting when you could just as easily learn from it and advance exponentially in your stated quest of being a hunter? That doesn't make sense. You're off to a rough start but it's salvageable. That puts the ball back in your court. Best of luck.