Seven University of Wyoming students competed in the Wyoming Army National Guard Best Warrior Competition last week, an event to test the limits of the guardsmen.
Samuel Buckwalter, Chet Slater, Jennifer Johnson, Luke Rhode, Leif Norskog, Kaiden Newman, Jackson Day, and Matthew Barrett trained for several months leading up to the competition. Corporal Samuel Buckwalter won the competition for Non-Commissioned Officers and will be competing next month in regionals.
“The culminating event was a 12 mile ruck with 40 to 45 pounds worth of gear on their backs,” Sergeant First Class (SFC) Katie Upton, one of the Non-commissioned Officers behind the operations and logistics of the event, said.
“It’s ugly, it’s exhausting. With not getting much sleep on top of that, their bodies are pretty exhausted.”
The competition was made up of volunteer participants and highlighted the dedication and conviction of each competitor to be the best guardsman and student they can be, each putting in hours of extra training to improve.
The Best Warrior Competition hosted one lower Enlisted soldier and one Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) from each unit of the Wyoming Army National Guard to face off in practical tests of physical fitness and combat skills.
Events included weapon system assembly and disassembly, tactical movement drills, daytime and nighttime land navigation, rifle and pistol qualifications, and numerous physical tests.
The competition spanned three days, and the soldiers got fewer than eight hours of sleep throughout the whole weekend. When they weren’t sleeping, the guardsmen were displaying the physical and mental ability they had accumulated over months of training.
“The competition was really just to test ourselves both physically and mentally. Test the knowledge that we know how to perform well under pressure, how well we perform with low sleep, basically all the tasks really needed to be a warrior or soldier in the army,” said SPC Leif Norskog, a junior at UW.
“It’s an opportunity to do a lot of the things that you don’t do anywhere else in the guard. That’s part of what drove me to volunteer. I wanted to learn some knowledge, and where I would be compared to the rest of the best soldiers in the state.”
SPC Kaiden Newman echoed similar sentiments.
“I wanted to push myself to the limits as a guardsman. I didn’t want to be your average soldier, just showing up for drill. I wanted to push my limit as a soldier. That’s why I went,.”Newman, a sophomore at UW, said,
A unique aspect of the competition was that every soldier volunteered to be a part of the event. This included an extra weekend of training every month for six months, starting in November last year.
“All of the soldiers volunteered to be a competitor for the Best Warrior. They came in on their own time to do the train ups,” Upton said. “They made it fit into their life schedule and they’ve worked around it so they could be here.”
Corporal Samuel Buckwalter explained it can become tricky for a guardsman to balance being a student and being in the guard, along with social aspects of life.
“In everything I do I try to be 100% all the time, even if it’s not the Guard or school,” Corporal Samuel Buckwalter said. “Because I have the honor of being a soldier, I’m going to try my best no matter what I feel.”
The soldier also stressed the importance of a good work ethic with respect to being a soldier and student.
“I put the work ethic into my schoolwork and that reflects on being a good soldier. You just have to have a good work ethic,” Newman said.
SPC Chet Slater noted the time commitment of the event, and while it was all consuming, he was glad to be a part of the experience.
“With this train up and all these extra weekends, these past four or five months have been tricky to find the time for everything, but it works out. Because it’s volunteer work, it’s something that I wanted to do and all the other competitors that were with me wanted to do too, for the extra training and the experience of it,” Slater said.
“There’s not a whole lot of time to also do homework or studying, but I made it work and my fellow competitors who were also at UW made it work too.”
With the competition now over, most of the guardsmen return to their normal training schedule. CPL Buckwalter, however, will represent Wyoming in the regional stage of the Best Warrior next month.
“I am well satisfied with what I’ve done so far, but if the opportunity comes to do more, I’ll always be there to do it,” CPL Buckwalter said about regionals.
