F
or most people today the image that comes to mind when they hear the word “soldier” is of a robust young man or woman in camouflage Battle Dress Uniform, the epitome of physical fitness and mental alertness. Indeed, the Army has been developing programs for decades to make that image a reality for all soldiers, no matter their rank or age.
And it has been my own experience that fitness is an essential attribute of effective leadership, that physical and mental fitness are intertwined, and that what I call spiritual fitness provides successful leaders an added dimension of character from which they can draw strength at times of stress and crisis.
Physical fitness is probably the best known of these three attributes. Some of the first newsreels of soldiers taken at training bases during World War I showed them doing calisthenics on the parade ground, an aspect of military training that has not changed much since the days of Sparta. Millennia later when the United States sent its soldiers into combat during the Persian Gulf War, they were probably the fittest troops ever engaged on the battlefield.
When I was a company commander at Fort McClellan, our post commander, Major General Joseph Kingston, who believed strongly in the value of physical fitness to restore discipline among the soldiers of the “hollow Army” of the mid-1970s, reflected one day as we stood in my company area on the connection between physical fitness and morale. Units running together in formation—headed by their platoon leaders or company commanders—enhanced that intangible but essential psychological factor known as esprit de corps.
“Captain,” he said, “you need to make sure your soldiers have a physical training program.”
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
But when I later discussed the issue with First Sergeant Benson, she raised some pragmatic concerns. “When would we do this, ma'am? Will the Training Center release our people for PT? And where will we get the equipment and the trainers?”
In short, she correctly indicated that the Army then placed little emphasis on physical fitness. But for the last twenty-five years, physical training and fitness have become an Army priority.
Recent Army programs have included the Fit to Win and Fit to Fight campaigns, under which individual soldiers and units train for and maintain their fitness. The two main aspects of the effort are weight control and physical conditioning achieved through physical training. Soldiers must now maintain their weight within a certain range based on gender, height, and age. For example, a thirty-five-year-old woman soldier who is five feet five inches must weigh less than 146 pounds, while a man the same age who is five feet eleven inches must weigh less than 195 pounds. Soldiers who exceed these limits are put on remedial programs to learn about diet and to exercise more frequently. The Army takes this effort seriously: Soldiers' height and weight appear on their Efficiency Reports, and those who are unable to meet their weight standards within a certain period of time are discharged.
This was not always the case, especially for so-called garrison troops, the kind of soldiers General Kingston was concerned about. The mess halls of the past were not the place for a soldier trying to lose weight. The typical chow line at breakfast included creamed beef on toast, sausage patties, and grits dripping in butter. The main course at lunch was often pot roast and mashed potatoes swimming in gravy. Fresh vegetables were hard to find. Salad bars were unknown.
In the past, the problem of being fat and being in poor physical condition became serious when soldiers were no longer either in demanding training or assigned to units with a physically active mission. That was the main reason the Army revamped its nutritional program and modernized its mess halls, which are now called “dining facilities.” Today the Army feeds its soldiers wisely, always providing lower-fat alternatives to traditional high-calorie meals. Fruits, vegetables, and whole grains are plentiful. And every year, the Army holds competitions among its cooks to recognize those who can provide the most nutritious and appealing dishes. The old saw about the mess sergeant having his taste buds shot off in the last war simply no longer applies.
In 1982, when I was a major on the staff of the Military Intelligence brigade at Field Station Augsburg, I became involved in competitive running almost by chance. I had enjoyed running individually about twice a week since arriving in Germany. My apartment in downtown Augsburg overlooked Jakobertor, one of the five standing Romanesque gates of the ancient walled city. I was lucky to have a two-bedroom flat in a new building with a grocery on the ground floor and a basement garage. By German standards, I lived well.
Most weekends, I ran along the inside perimeter of the wall, alternating from path to sidewalk. This kept me safely out of the warren of narrow streets, through which the local burghers careered in their Mercedes and Audis like so many Panzer-grenadiers at the battle of Kursk. (According to GI lore, Augsburg was one-hour driving time west of Munich, unless the driver was German, in which case the trip took twenty minutes.)
The weather was cool; the dirt paths were soft from the frequent Bavarian rain. But I didn't consider myself a serious competitor. Running was just an avocation that kept me fit and cleared my head after a busy day at the office. I began that tour at Field Station Augsburg as assistant operations officer and later became the station operations officer. The assignment perfectly matched the intensive specialized training I had undergone during the three-year Junior Officer Cryptologic Career Program at NSA. My work kept me in a huge windowless building all day. Soldiers doing shift work—” on trick”—came and went in large groups every eight hours. If there were a crisis, and the need to meet a “surge” requirement, everyone was so absorbed with their mission that they wanted to remain on the operations floor to observe and help out. The NCOs had to send soldiers home to get their rest to be prepared for their next shift.
For at least six months of the year, I would arrive at the immense gray building before the cold dawn and leave after the sunset. For many of us, skiing in the Alps on holidays and weekends gave us the one occasion to climb above the clouds and see the sun. But just getting outdoors and running provided a physical outlet I could tap into whenever I wanted.
Many soldiers, however, considered running just an irksome requirement on the semiannual PT test. Most still ran in their combat boots, and only changed to running shoes in the early 1980s. When one warrant officer went to the PX to buy his running shoes, the clerk asked him how often he ran. “Maybe twice a year,” he replied, “if I can't get out of it.”
“These will last you a lifetime,” she said, handing him a pair of Nikes over the counter.
Then one day a captain named Dodson came into my office to announce he was forming a cross-country team to participate in the VII Corps championship. The competition would take place near Munich in a few weeks. The five-kilometer run required each team to field both men and women of a variety of ages.
“We can't do it without a senior woman runner,” he said. “And we don't have one. Can you help us out?”
I was hesitant, having never run cross-country competitively before. What if my slow speed hurt the team's performance? But I had been successfully accomplishing the two-mile run on the Army Physical Fitness Test well within my age and gender standards. And the 5-K run was not that much longer. Besides, I tended to perform better on runs requiring more endurance than speed. This might prove interesting.
“Yes,” I told him. “I'll run.”
The day of the run was cold and misty after recent heavy rains. I ran in a field of women soldiers, most of them younger than me, including an enlisted woman who was considered the favorite based on her past record of unchallenged victories. After the start, I fell into a steady, dogged pace. The ground was so soaked and chewed up by earlier competitors that the backs of my legs and my shirt were soon slick with liquid mud thrown up from the soles of my shoes. The young woman soldier ahead was obviously concerned about being beaten by a runner she could hear gasping close behind her. But I didn't have the breath to reassure her that I was in the older, masters category and thus not a competitive threat to her.
To my great amazement, I became the VII Corps women's masters champion for 1983. To my even greater amazement, I discovered there was a follow-on competition in a few weeks in which I also had to run. I won that event as well, and became that year's U.S. Army Europe (USAREUR) women's masters champion.
A year later, I was assigned as an action officer in the Training Directorate of the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans (ODCSOPS) in the Pentagon. When I reported for duty, my boss, Colonel Dennis Malcor (who retired as a major general), called me into his office for a brief introductory meeting.
At the conclusion of the serious discussion, he leaned back in his chair to point at a picture on the wall showing only a muscular forearm and hand. “Major,” he said with mock severity, “I wouldn't expect you to know this since you're so new here, but you are talking to the world's foremost handball player.”
“Sir,” I replied in the same tone, “you have no way of knowing it, but
you
are talking to USAREUR's women's master running champion.”
He grinned. “Good,” he said, his tone growing more serious. “In this directorate you will do physical training three times a week during duty hours. That is mandatory, two hours of PT, three times a week. You will work the rest of your schedule around that requirement.”
“Yes, sir.”
The other action officers, all of whom loved and respected Colonel Malcor, confirmed his prowess on the handball and racquetball courts. “But don't worry about him beating you on the PT test,” another major told me. “For the run, you'll need a calendar to time him, not a stopwatch.”
Colonel Malcor's edict was rooted in concern for his officers' well-being and for the success of the organization he led. In the previous eighteen months, four people in the ODCSOPS had died of heart attacks, one right at his desk. This was just the beginning of the Army's antismoking campaign and the emphasis on better nutrition. It was also the early days of the effort to clean up traditionally heavy drinking and to encourage running as a social event rather than the nearly obligatory happy hour at the officers club.
However, the conversion of the Army from hard drinking to hard running was not without resistance from a few traditional soldiers. I'll always remember a particular sergeant in the MI brigade I later commanded in Hawaii. He had been injured in an accident and a “line of duty” investigation was conducted. The investigating officer summarized the accident this way: “This NCO was bowling off duty. In the process of throwing the ball, he states that his ankle gave out, and he hit himself in the head with the bowling ball and also fell against the ball return, knocking himself out. He had a blood alcohol content of .31, which I believe contributed significantly to the accident, which I find is therefore not in the line of duty.”
As Colonel Malcor saw it, mandatory physical training three days a week during duty hours would accomplish several goals. It would by definition improve his officers' physical fitness, thus give them some protection against cardiovascular disease, and the required break from the office would relieve some of the inevitable stress inherent to work in the Pentagon.
And no one could deny there was plenty of stress. The Training Directorate of DCSOPS had to “build” detailed resource packages to justify funding for the Army's widespread and extremely varied training programs. These packages covered the coming five fiscal years with projections for Basic Training, Advanced Individual Training, Intelligence Training, and other programs. All of these packages—which included computer printouts dense with budget numbers—had to pass through multiple levels of review as they made their way up through the Army bureaucracy.
The work was very demanding. Mistakes at my level might jeopardize the future of an important program. For example, I might be given the package for a proposed multimillion-dollar field exercise area expansion at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, designed to increase the effectiveness of Combat Engineer Training. But every aspect of the package had to be thoroughly justified.
And we were always required to complete this work under brutal time pressure. In bureaucratese, the deadline for a requirement was known as a “suspense.” In other words, a red-tabbed file might be marked with a suspense of 1415 Hours 25 January, meaning the work had to be turned over to the Staff Action Control Office (SACO) by 2:15
p.m
. on that date.
Often, I'd arrive at my desk at 6:15
a.m
. to find at least one red-tabbed file some gnome had left the previous night marked with early morning suspenses clearly impossible to meet. My first task would be to pick up the phone and call SACO to get them to change the deadlines.
But during January and February, the period of most intense activity for Army action officers—due to the programming cycle in which the armed services sought to justify their funding requests—normal workplace stress grew fierce. People became short-tempered; patience among previously amicable colleagues became hard to find as we made our way from office to office in search of the precious “chops” indicating concurrence on a policy or resource change. Often this involved a lengthy discussion to provide information or persuade our counterparts on the finer points of complex policy.
Late one afternoon, I rushed a resource package to a lieutenant colonel's cubicle, only to stand in line almost to the point of my deadline. As he left the room before I could get him to initial my paper, I thrust the document forward.
“Colonel,” I said, “could you please give me a quick chop on this?”
“You can just wait, Major,” he snarled, his jaw rigid with tension. “This is the first damn break I've had all day, and I'm going to take it.”
I dashed off to collect some more chops, then returned to get his.