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Have a physics/maths question

There is a column of soldiers 5 kms long. As it begins to march, the last soldier steps out, marches alongside the column at a higher speed, goes right till the front of the column, turns back and takes his place at the end of the column once again. At this point, the column has moved exactly 5 kms. What distance did the soldier cover?
By amazing coincidence I picked up Martin Gardner's 'My best mathematical and logic puzzles' from the library today and (metric units aside) this is identical to #35
Original post by nothepreacher
There is a column of soldiers 5 kms long. As it begins to march, the last soldier steps out, marches alongside the column at a higher speed, goes right till the front of the column, turns back and takes his place at the end of the column once again. At this point, the column has moved exactly 5 kms. What distance did the soldier cover?



One way of visualising this is to draw a displacement-time graph, showing the movement of the position of the front of the column, the back of the column, and the soldier.
The problem then become one of geometry with triangles.
There are other ways of doing it, of course.

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