Problems with units joining a group

One thing I attempted was to create the following situation:

A group of soldiers sit around a campfire, one of them being me, the player. An officer arrives, tells the soldiers to join him. They get up, follow him and walk to a truck. They enter the truck, drive for a few minutes, get out and attack an enemy position.

So each soldier got a waypoint with 'soldierX action ["sitDown", soldierX]' in the "On Activation" field.

The officer (ofcr) got a waypoint "MOVE" near the soldiers; in the "On activation" field I wrote '[soldierX, SoldierY, etc] join ofcr'. I assumed this would make the soldiers (corporals) follow the officer (a lieutenant).

The officer then got a waypoint "GET IN" on a truck, "GET OUT" further on with "Aware" and "Wedge", and "SEEK AND DESTROY" near the enemy position.

What happened was this:

The soldiers sat down nicely, and remained seated. The officer came and ordered the soldiers to follow and to board the truck. The soldiers got up and boarded the truck. When the group got out of the truck, the officer gave command to move to the enemy position. However, the soldiers would form a wedge on ME, not the officer, even though the officer gave the orders. I could run away far from the waypoint with all the soldiers following me, not the officer. Also, the officer would remain in "SAFE" mode and never switch to "AWARE", even though I later added an 'ofcr setBehaviour "aware"' command.

Later I removed the entire truck thing and just had the group attack on foot. This worked fine: The soldiers followed the officer, not me.

This is very odd indeed. In the original Operation Flashpoint, I did extensive editing and never came across such problems. Any idea what went wrong?