Put in the Work
I went on a somewhat short ruck march with my son’s Junior ROTC program on Saturday. The 6.3 miles was a little longer for them than it was for me, but they don’t have the hundreds (or maybe thousands) of miles of carrying a heavy pack on their resume like I do. They are young, of course, and this was a very admirable effort by them. The collected a bunch of donations for homeless veterans and decided to carry a portion of those donations, on their backs, to the drop off point. I commend them. It was a good event for them. Frankly, it was good for me, too. Good for my soul.
I mentioned in my podcast that when I was a Company Commander at the 82nd Airborne Division that my infantry company walked A LOT. We walked everywhere. To the range. Back from the range. Back from the drop zone. In and out of the field. I knew that once a Paratrooper hit the ground, all they had was their weapon and what was in their rucksack, and there weren’t going to be many trucks around to move from Point A to Point B. We had to carry it and we had to be able to carry it a long way. So, in training, we walked all the time.
As you can imagine, there were complaints. But soldiers also like to talk trash, too. My guys would complain in private but talk shit to the other units in public. They both hated and enjoyed the fact that we walked everywhere. What they didn’t understand at the time, at least most of them didn’t, was “why” we were walking everywhere when the other units were taking trucks.
In August of 2002, that same infantry company was in Afghanistan participating in Operation Mountain Sweep. We rode helicopters to our first objective and then had to walk to our second objective. Admittedly, the distance we walked has grown over the years. I’ve heard from other people that we walked 20 miles that night. I can tell you it was less than that but, we walked with combat loads, under night vision goggles, at somewhere around 7,500 feet elevation, in August in Afghanistan. To say it was easy would be a lie.
Two of my guys went down for heat. One of them very early and we were able to get him onto one of the anti-tank Humvees from another company before they headed off. The other went down a number of miles in. The medics (God love them) stuck an IV in his arm using only night vision and got him up and moving again. He toughed it out like I would have expected him to. We had another injury that night. One Paratrooper injured his knee pretty bad. He couldn’t walk. His platoon loaded him onto a medical evacuation sled and DRUG him for about six miles, while passing his gear around.
We made it to the battalion link up point on time. We drank and refilled water. We rested for an hour or so, shoved some chow down our throats, changed socks and we headed out to our next objective. That was Day 1 of a 7 day operation. It was the only really long foot movement during Operation Mountain Sweep but it was significant.
When it was over, we were back at Kandahar Airfield and a couple of my enlisted guys who LOVED to complain about walking everywhere during training stopped me and said, “Hey, Sir, we get it. Now we get why you made us walk everywhere. We needed to put the work in before we got here.”
It’s a lesson for combat, but it is a lesson for life too. We used to say it is better to bleed in training so you don’t bleed in combat. No matter your line of work or whatever goal you are trying to achieve, the bottom line is; you have to put the work in before you need it if you want to succeed in the end.