INDIAN SUMMER HAD settled across Kentucky and Lieutenant Larry Kay’s running shoes pounded the pavement on Market Garden Road. Humidity leeched from the air, soaking the back of his gray Army T-shirt with sweat. Kay was one of the few men keeping pace with the run leader, a very young platoon sergeant. This was a six-mile company run and the platoon sergeant, a six-foot-five tower of muscle, was as usual intentionally running his soldiers into the ground.
Nothing wrong with tough training, Kay thought. But he didn’t care for the way the sergeant mocked the men who fell out of the run. Kay ran past a young corporal puking; an NCO with shrapnel wounds who’d stopped to stretch his injured leg; and Shon Haskins, a senior NCO who had just returned from Ramadi with a medal for valor.
Kay was a platoon leader, or PL, his first time in the post. As a former enlisted man, he knew the protocol: The platoon sergeant, not the PL, takes care of things like physical training. On the other hand, it was the PL’s job to make sure his soldiers were being developed.
Right now, the platoon sergeant is the only one being developed, Kay thought. And he’s developing into an asshole.
One by one, Kay ran past the roadside casualties until he jogged up beside the run leader. “Hey, Sergeant, I think it’s okay if the sergeant back there doesn’t run. I can see his leg bleeding where the shrapnel wounds are.”
The sergeant just pumped his arms, kept running. After a pause, he said, “Whatever, sir.”
In the infantry culture, a leader who falls out of a company run might as well not consider himself or herself a leader anymore. But Kay saw another side of the issue: People who had been in the Army for fifteen or eighteen years and been blown up half a dozen times—sometimes the value of their expertise and experience began to overtake their physical abilities. And while it was good to have a healthy serving of lithe, agile soldiers in your unit, Kay also saw the value in senior NCOs like Haskins and SFC Tim “Mo” Moriarty, whose legs had been spiderwebbed with stress fractures even before he went to Ramadi. Men who would stand tall in a firefight, handle themselves on the radio, and say to their soldiers, “Good job.”
Later, in the platoon office, Kay tried another tack. “Sergeant, I don’t think there’s any purpose in running like you do because everyone eventually falls out anyway. There’s no point to it. The platoon’s not even there with you.”
“Hey, Lieutenant, I’ve got this,” the platoon sergeant shot back. “You’re the PL, but I’m going to run this platoon the way I want to run it. And when you go to combat then you can tell me how to run PT.”
Kay carefully leveled his gaze. He did not raise his voice. “Sergeant, I’ll go to combat when I go to combat. Until then, you will run this platoon in a manner that develops soldiers, not in a way that degrades them. Any questions?”
The sergeant spun on his heel and stormed out.
A month later, Kay was standing near Market Garden Road stretching out for another run. The weather had turned the corner toward fall and he was wearing full sweats. Haskins had been transferred to Dog Company to become a platoon sergeant, and Mo, too. Too bad. He liked both men.
At twenty-two, Kay was on the fast track. After earning a boatload of college credits while still in high school, he graduated from the University of Florida in only two and a half years with a degree in Asian studies and a fluent command of Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. He would’ve finished school more quickly, but he fell in love with a blue-eyed microbiology major named Jill and slowed down to marry her before she could get away.
Kay was nearly finished stretching when the Battalion commander, LTC Anthony DeMartino, walked up and joined him. DeMartino bent to stretch his hamstrings as though he planned to run with the group.
“I’m thinking of making you XO of Delta Company,” DeMartino said. “What do you think?”
“Well, sir, to be honest, I’d really like to remain a platoon leader. But I’ll do whatever you ask me to do.”
“Great,” DeMartino said. He stopped stretching and walked away.
Kay was disappointed. Being named executive officer was a privilege, he knew. It meant that officers higher in the Battalion had confidence in him. On the downside, a big part of being an XO was tracking logistics, supplies, and equipment—making sure the company had plenty of so-called beans and bullets. Kay hadn’t signed up after 9/11 for that. He wanted to lead a platoon in combat.
He stood still for a moment and peered up into a cobalt Kentucky sky, letting inevitability sink in. He’d probably have to really screw up, he thought, like get arrested for DUI or something, to change this destiny. Kay sighed and took off running.