Every Man Needs a Battle Buddy

Topic: Perspective

In some of my previous pieces, I have touched on my lack of athletic prowess and confidence as a teenager.  I couldn’t make the minimum run time (7-minute mile) to qualify for a spot on our school’s baseball team, which was nationally ranked, a no-go even if I would have been a good pitcher or hitter.  I got by on the offensive line as a pass blocker because of my size alone, but was an ineffective run blocker thanks to poor agility, high center of gravity, and lack of lower body strength.

While my persistent inner ear troubles certainly diminished my gracefulness, most of those shortcomings had to do with lack of a disciplined diet and lack of persistence in hitting the weights.  Perhaps most importantly, my lack of self-confidence kept me locked in a state of believing I was not able to match the performance of my peers on or off the field, or in athletic or social settings.  Had I not been blessed with a “Rain Man” brain, I may have struggled in the classroom, as well.

I went from chunky and awkward in middle school, coming in around 200 pounds by 7^th grade, to long and lanky in 9^th and 10^th grade, when I soared toward the 6’5” mark, and bloated as my senior year approached, when our new football coach made his linemen eat six meals per day.  Yes, I was the kid who wore a jacket when it was hot outside, and a shirt at the pool because I didn’t want to engage the physical fitness problem head-on.

Things began to change for me as I entered college.  I could have boozed it up with my brothers on the patio growing up if I wanted to, so the Ole Miss party scene didn’t tempt me like it did many of my classmates, often the children of rigid fundamentalists who forbade many experiences that, if kept under control, could provide meaningful training.  There was a lot of walking to do, and with a fresh start, I decided to get fit.  The weight flew off, and modest muscles appeared.  I began working with the baseball team and decided I wanted to fit in with my more athletic friends, so I often took part in working out with the coaches and team.  My weight went below 220 pounds, where it would stay for many years.

Army ROTC offered a class called “Ranger Challenge,” which was designed not only to position a school’s cadet battalion for accolades, but to boost recruiting and offer a commitment-free preview of Army life.  With my newfound confidence and military family history, I gave it a shot.  After all, it was physical fitness focused, and I wanted to scratch that itch.  I failed my first PT test miserably, catching a strict grader for the pushups and failing that event, narrowly passing the sit-ups (which became my best event as an officer), and bombing the 2-mile run with a time of 18:12, when I need to come in at 15:54 or faster to pass with a bare minimum score.  Perhaps only because one of my best friends was in the class with me, I didn’t quit, and I wound up scraping my way to a passing run-time, average push-ups performance, and ho-hum overall passing score that wouldn’t have helped the actual Ranger Challenge team that competed with rival college programs for the gold.

I wound up giving Air Force ROTC a shot in early 2006, but that service branch was rolling back its officer ranks, cutting captains and majors for any reason they could find.  Such a reduction in force was not present in the Army, which needed young officers to fill billets for the conflicts raging in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I was a square peg in a round hole on the first floor of Barnard Hall, but met another young man who remains one of my best friends to this very day.  His name is Kyle McElhaney, and he was the Air Force detachment’s number one cadet.

Some folks are known for a particular skill and perform it with tremendous expertise when called upon.  Others are jacks of all trades and do many things competently, but nothing with renown.  On rare occasion, you meet someone who excels at everything he does.  Kyle was and is one of those guys.  6’1”, strong as a bull, fast as a cheetah, accepted for the fighter pilot training program, a hit with the ladies, and, if that were not enough, pursuing a degree in Accounting, while many officers-to-be picked the easiest layup of a degree possible just to check the box.  He also managed to keep all these good things going while partying like the boys you see in Top Gun.

We became acquainted, but I viewed him as a far superior cadet and treaded lightly, hoping to earn his respect, or at least his basic approval.  He was harsh to cadets he detected were weaklings, almost like a guard dog that smells fear, but only in the training environment, and I would pick his brain in those few short months we were Air Force ROTC cadets together.  Unfortunately for Kyle, he and a few other cadets got rolled into some investigations caused by a breakdown in cadre leadership, and he was pushed out of the program and sent looking for a place to land.

Kyle and I joined the Army ROTC at the same time, that August of 2006.  I simply didn’t know what to do with myself, seeing no career in baseball on the horizon, and utterly bored with the thought of a business career at that point, coupled with my Cs and Ds in Accounting and Economics, earned mostly out of apathy at that point, and not a lack of competency.  I was bored.  It didn’t hurt that my family has a proud tradition of Army officers stretching back to November 6, 1963, which continues to this day, without a single disruption.  Kyle’s approach was more along the lines of come home with your shield, or upon it, with a mean streak bent on showing the Air Force how badly they had screwed up by dismissing him from their program.

One day, out of the blue, I asked him if he needed a place to live.  Within a week, he became my roommate at the condominium my Dad had bought in Oxford the year before.  I caught a few lucky breaks early on, receiving a waiver for my severe hearing loss, which allowed me to contract with the ROTC for a scholarship, putting me on path to receive a commission in 2008; however, thanks to my delayed entry into the program, I would need to take the long route to my gold bars and attend a special camp, the Leadership Training Course at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and attend the Leader Development Assessment Course (LDAC) at Fort Lewis Washington in Summer 2008, after all my friends graduated, and receive an end of camp commission, an anti-climactic way to commence your career as an officer, with likely only one’s parents present to see the ceremony.

There was only one way around this tedious, drinking from the firehose 24-month path – to kick ass.  Kicking ass would prompt my battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Shaver, to recommend a waiver for me to skip the rudimentary course and run right into LDAC with my classmates, but such a request comes with reputational risk.  Had I showed up and bombed in Washington, it would be a black eye for the battalion, and reflect poorly upon my commander’s judgment.  My spirit in those days was willing, but my flesh was weak.  2006-era Cadet Seth Keshel was a long way from kicking ass.

I punished myself with mile after mile in the intense Southern summer sun and never failed a PT test after the one I had botched the year before, but my run times were slow, especially when I was still subject to the 17-21 year group standards, which kept me in the 65-70 point range for two-mile times I couldn’t consistently get below 15:30.  I had an average push-up and sit-up score, and thanks to the subpar run time, typically scored in the 230s overall (out of 300), a tepid passing score that would not convince my commander to rush my path to commissioning along.  The serious cadets consistently scored more than 270 points out of a possible 300.  60 points were needed to pass each event – two minutes of push-ups for maximum repetitions, the same for sit-ups, and a two-mile run.  Two maxed-out events and 59 points on the third would result in a failed PT test, and we had a cadet who made 259 and failed more than once on account of the run and his enjoyment of Jack Daniels.

Leaders know the phrase, “when in charge, take charge.” That is exactly what my new roommate did.  One day, I saw him getting ready to go out on a run, and I told him I could really use his help getting my PT score up.  I had gotten away from the fringe in which I could possibly fail a PT test, but again, I wasn’t kicking ass.  Kyle made perfect 300s, running two miles in the low 12-minute range, and maxing out the two muscle events to the point that his score climbed past the 300 maximum score when the extended scale was applied, as it was for the Ranger Challenge team Kyle was anchoring.  He came back in from that run, drenched in a nasty Southern sweat, carrying a deck of cards.

You asked for my help.  I’m not here to f*** around, so you better understand that, too.

Talent only goes so far, and when talent doesn’t work hard, hard work beats talent. Kyle put them both together.  From that little box of cards came a 52-part plunge into physical agony.  A spade meant regular push-ups, and a club meant close-hand pushups.  A heart was the signal for regular sit-ups, and the diamonds were for twisting “Rocky” sit-ups, with both sit-up variants using the living room coffee table as an anchor.  A two of any suit would mean two repetitions of the corresponding exercise.  Things got ugly for the face cards – jacks, queens, kings, and aces would mean 15, 20, 25, and 30 repetitions each, respectively.

One full deck dished out 144 grueling attempts at each exercise, a total of 576 push-up or sit-up variant repetitions.  Right there on the carpet floor of my Dad’s condo, Kyle pushed me to the point of utter collapse, often twice per day.  As if that weren’t enough, the entire apartment property we lived at became a cross country course, with different routes prescribed for different run time hacks and for interval training.  We pounded the pavement for miles, and then scrambled through the otherwise peaceful living areas for sprint speed – all under the unforgiving summer sun, and in addition to the already challenging PT happening within the ranks of the cadet battalion at 0600 hours.  Only four years prior, I had weighed over 250 pounds and couldn’t run a 9-minute mile.  At this point, I was a lean and mean 205 pounds, getting to where I could now expect to score over 250 points on a PT test, with plenty of buffer room on the run, preventing me from being in danger of failing, even if sick or running in inclement weather conditions.

The ultimate physical fitness windfall for us came when we discovered Max Out the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Physical Fitness Test, by former Army Captain Lee Kind.  Captain Kind has now become a personal friend of mine, and his handbook is a must own for any officer or enlisted man who wants to blow away the PT test of his service branch.  We went from stout to utterly ridiculous in weeks.  Kyle’s already maxed out PT test went into the stratosphere as his push-up and sit-up scores soared, and while I could never match him in the run, I went into the 14-minute range for two-miles and could match Kyle rep for rep on the other two events.  At my peak, I could do roughly 100 push-ups and 100 sit-ups on the PT test, with roughly 75 needed for a maximum score.  When we were recovering, we would hit the woods and practice land navigation, and ultimately became two of the best cadets at Ole Miss at that craft.

So, hard work does pay off.  The kicker is that sometimes you need a boot in your ass to get about the business of the hard work, which is what I’ve been busy administering for over two years, urging people to get plugged in to the things they care about the most.  I did wind up kicking ass that year and was ranked in the top quarter of my cadet class.  I punched my ticket for the special waiver to the assessment camp that year, and upon passing that, was able to join my classmates for our group commissioning in May 2008.

Kyle wound up commissioning early, in December 2007.  A distinguished military graduate, he became an Apache pilot, served with me in Afghanistan as part of the same task force (Task Force Iron Eagle), made Captain, and ultimately left the service to return to the Memphis area, where he grew up.  Today, he is a successful businessman and entrepreneur, and a father of four I’m still great friends with. 

I would not have gotten there without Kyle’s constant push for me to better myself.  He had every reason not to work with me or potentially drag himself down while trying to boost me.  After all, I was good enough to graduate, even with a tepid PT score; however, Dad always said, “Nothing in life worth doing should be done half-assed.”

The Bible also has this to say:

Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17 – Revised Standard Version)

Every warrior needs a battle buddy.  It is easy to get lost in the mission of self and lose sight of the positive impact on a team that occurs when leaders pour into those who lag them in various areas of competency.  I have long said I find this mission most fulfilling when others come to me with stories about how they’d lost a sense of purpose, or were considering suicide, until they saw other patriots busy about the work of restoring this Republic and engaging in the process of redress of grievances.

I don’t want this mission, or even this journal, to be merely about me.  I am just a man, but if I make it my purpose to let God move through me and to invest in others, with proper boundaries, my impact is multiplied far beyond what I could do on my own strength.  I am blessed to walk alongside not only prominent patriots that you may already know, but lesser known ones who are waiting in the wings to make a bigger impact, like my battle buddy, James Tesauro (“Captain T”), or Alexander Stone, a 19-year old making waves for his stance on integrating faith into the public square, who I am proud to mentor.

Tearing others down will never have the effect of elevating oneself.  Building others up builds up the person being invested in, and the character of the one doing the investing.  We will multiply our effectiveness when we see the potential in our fellow battle buddies and take the necessary strides of fortifying them where our own strengths fit in.

Author’s Note: This personal reflection is intended to motivate you to better yourself, find others who will challenge you, and to invest in those who need your mentorship or leadership skill in their lives.  I will never limit an article like this to paid subscribers; however, I am an independent voice in this battle for freedom and if you feel so inclined, I would greatly appreciate your subscription as a paid member of this journal.  Thank you!