After they'd worked out from a world atlas [1] that this was not off the coast of Scotland but islands north of Australia and it would be a five day trip by Hercules to get there, they read the "enemy paragraph" (which was a new term to me) and it said something about the "rebel leader is <very British sounding name> and he has 30 or 40 insurgents armed with bows and arrows."

One of the soldiers said to the brigadier "I like those odds.”

In the movie version, said soldier was the first to drop dead from a silent arrow flying from somewhere out of the forest. The forest the insurgents know very well and have probably been hunting in with those bows and arrows their entire lives. Don’t even need those EvilGM Add-ons :-P

Hah, I thought.  Clearly you've not got a Traveller referee running things...

Bows and arrows yes, but the briefing didn't mention they have access to a downed Navy ship...

... Ancient device...

... psionically linked flying steeds

...

While I'm here:

He told another story about the introduction of tech bringing loads of info together from different sources on the wall of a bunker.   Young men adapted easily but they brought a general in who couldn't deal with the change from the horizontal way of looking at the situation to the vertical.  He wanted his 'bird box' back (another new expression for me but, he said, the kind of table you see in WWII films with markers being moved round by sticks).  Apparently they went off and came back with a large screen they could site horizontally so the general could relate.

The VP said you can relearn but it is a different mental conditioning.

I’ll lay great odds the derivation comes from the fact that it was very often female service members doing the pushing, or the fact they were tracking airplanes, or more likely, both.

But someone used to looking down at a tactical map might well have trouble adjusting; and this is NOT somewhere you want a person in command to mix up north and south! Also on a horizontal table one can move to any portion of the displayed map for a closer look; not possible with a vertical display (at least without a grav belt!) 

[1]  I might have been more tickled by the idea of the British Army using such 'tech' even way back.  But i once had to drive across Australia and did it with a very slender world atlas in which Oz was just one A4/US Letter page.  Not a problem! Head West out of Townsville and just keep going... automatic car too so I don't think I changed gear for 8 hours.

I know someone who navigated a multiple-destinations trip across the US (pre-cellphone and GPS) with nothing more than the teensy US map from the back of a gimme pocket calendar/planner. 

I’ll admit that our household navigator is quite partial to our big Rand McNally atlas over the iPhone or iPad maps; however it also resembles a multi file folder more than an atlas much of the time, since as we find newspaper or magazine articles about interesting destinations they get clipped and inserted into the appropriate state pages.