companies, was out doing their morning run in formation. For a two-mile stretch, from Cedar Creek Road in the west to Hood Avenue in the east, massed ranks of soldiers ran along Maintenance Row. In the lead, their unit commanders and regimental colors and guidons set the pace. On the flanks, sergeants counted cadence and made corrections as tired soldiers wavered and slowed, causing disruption and disorder of the ranks and files. In the rear of each formation, other sergeants ran, encouraging those who were lagging or had fallen out. The words used to encourage or threaten the offending soldiers varied, depending upon the soldier or the personality of the sergeant.
Those shouts and threats mixed and mingled with the cadence and the commands of officers and NCOs as well as with the panting, moaning, and griping of soldiers reaching their limits, real or imagined. The whole disjointed chorus echoed and reverberated off the buildings along the entire two-mile stretch of road, then drifted across the rolling ground into the distance to remind all those who heard that this was a military base.
From a side street, Captain Harold Cerro paused before entering the endless stream of running soldiers. The spectacle of soldiers training, whether it was on the range or simply doing PT, never failed to excite him. Cerro loved being a soldier and loved being with them doing, as his wife often referred to it, soldier things. That he happened to be where he was, watching the massed formations go by, was no accident. Cerro had learned early in his career that you could tell a lot about a unit by watching it during PT. Two units, passing to his front as he watched, provided him with a good idea of what the 16th Armored Division would be like.
The first unit to run past Cerro was an artillery unit. It was in the process of passing a slower-moving unit. There was no mistaking their vocation. The artillerymen, wearing Army-issue running shorts and red shirts decorated with yellow crossed cannons that symbolized their branch, looked like a unit. And they moved like a unit. To a man, they were in step, creating a strange muffled slapping noise as hundreds of pairs of sneakers hit the pavement in unison. In the front, their battalion commander, closely followed by the battalion colors, moved out with a purpose. Behind him came the companies, in solid formations of four men abreast and led by their young company commanders and company guidons. Each company was in step, every soldier gliding forward almost effortlessly as they repeated.the chants sung by their NCOs.
In stark contrast, the unit the artillerymen were passing showed little sign of either cohesion or pride. There was no guidon or flag to betray their branch of service or unit. No two soldiers were dressed alike. The shirts and running shorts they wore were a riot of colors and styles, ranging from the Army-issue brown T-shirt to shocking- orange designer sleeveless running shirts. From what Cerro could see, not only was no one in step, there appeared to be no effort on the part of the NCOs to get them in step. Nor was there anyone in the rear of the formation, a term Cerro loosely applied to the gaggle, to police up a line of stragglers that trailed behind. By ones and twos, the soldiers of the second unit were dropping out, unnoticed by their commander, who kept on running, oblivious to the disintegration of his unit. Rather than a unit, the second group was simply a collection of people moving in the same general direction.
Shaking his head in disgust, Cerro was about to move out when he saw an infantry battalion moving down the road. From the pace and the determined look of its commander's face, Cerro had no doubt they had but one goal in mind, to pass the artillery battalion that had just gone by.
The soldiers of the infantry battalion, like the artillery unit, were outfitted in matching T-shirts and running shorts, their T-shirts embossed with their unit crest and motto. A history buff, Cerro recognized the regimental crest as that of the 13th Infantry, although he couldn't place the battalion based on the motto, 'Forty Rounds, Sir.'
Deciding it woujd be unwise to jump out in front of the infantry battalion, Cerro waited for it to pass. With a measured pace that now bordered on a dead run, row after row of infantrymen passed by. In step and leaning forward as their commander picked up the pace, the troops, on cue from their sergeant major, began to clap their hands every time their left foot hit the ground. Like a locomotive, the infantrymen bore down, closed the gap separating them from the artillerymen. In their rush, they never noticed the rabble that the artillery unit had passed.
For a moment, Cerro felt a pang in his heart, knowing that he would not be able to join a unit such as this one. His assignment to the brigade staff condemned him to a unit that, when it ran as a unit, would no doubt resemble the rabble that the artillerymen had passed. The only reason Cerro had escaped the unit run that morning was because he was still inprocessing and new. This had saved him from that morning's run.
Nothing, however, would save him next week.
As he was silently bemoaning his fate, Cerro looked up just in time to see a female, dressed in the same T- shirt and shorts as the infantry battalion, go by. It took him a few seconds to recognize her as the same woman he had run into the day before while inprocessing. Her long auburn hair, pulled back and held by a clip, swung from side to side as she ran. That, coupled with a physique that was unmistakably female, set her apart from the rest of the formation. Her appearance caused Cerro to reconsider his own plight. As much as he knew he would be like a fish out of water on the brigade staff, his predicament, he thought, was nothing compared to what the female lieutenant faced.
When the infantry unit finished passing him, Cerro shook himself out one more time before stepping off and joining the flow of running soldiers, adding the sound of his pounding feet to that of a division on the move.
The pace, even when the battalion commander picked it up to pass an artillery unit, was easy for Second Lieutenant Nancy Kozak. At West Point she had earned three letters in track and field, and at the Infantry Officers Basic Course at Fort Benning she had maxed the standard physical fitness test, the same one the male officers in her class had been required to pass. Physically, she was ready. Mentally, however, she wasn't sure. While she had gone over in her mind, again and again, what she would do and how she would handle herself, no mental drill could prepare her for her introduction to the unit, in particular the men in the platoon she was expected to lead.
From the company commander down to the lowest private, everyone in the unit treated her with the respect and deference that was appropriate for her rank and position. Her conversation with her platoon sergeant, the only NCO in her platoon she had had any time to talk to, had been short, functional, and punctuated with many 'yes ma'ams' and 'no ma'ams.'
Throughout that conversation, she had been unable to gauge how the sergeant — Sergeant First Class Leon Rivera — felt about her. His manner, like his conversation, was functional and correct. Nothing in his tone of voice, in his expressions, even in his eyes, betrayed his feelings. The only thing she noted was that Rivera, like everyone else in the company, had a tendency to stare at her, and that the term ma'am did not come easily to him. More than once, Rivera, used to operating in an almost exclusively male world, had responded with 'Sir.'
The staring, more than anything else, affected Kozak. As hard as she might want to, she could not blend in. Through a simple biological function, started at the moment of conception, Nancy Kozak had become a woman. While that was not a curse, it would definitely be a handicap in her efforts to become an effective combat leader. That thought, and a thousand others, tumbled through her head as she ran beside her platoon, her long auburn hair gently.swaying from side to side.
6
Promptness contributes a great deal to success in marches and even more in battles.
From the edge of the runway's apron, Lieutenant Rafael Blasio watched the young infantry lieutenant supervise the loading of his men into Blasio's Bell 212 helicopter. With quick, nervous jerks, Blasio alternated between puffing the half-smoked cigarette in his left hand and drinking cold coffee from a paper cup in his right. The rest of his crew, a copilot and crew chief, were scurrying about the helicopter, performing whatever preflight checks on the aircraft they could in five minutes while simultaneously helping the infantrymen strap themselves in. Blasio was already on edge, and caffeine was the last thing he needed. Caffeine, however, was the only thing he had to keep him going.
