Photo By Sgt. 1st Class Jason Alvarez | New York Army National Guard Staff Sgt. Matthew Ortiz, (right) who finished in first...... read more read more
Subscribe
JERICHO, Vermont-For the third time in three years, two New York Army National Guard Soldiers are the best Guard Soldiers in the northeast.
The two Soldiers won in both the junior enlisted and noncommissioned officer categories of the Army National Guard’s Northeast Region Best Warrior Competition.
Staff Sgt. Matthew Ortiz, and Corporal Troy Perez each bested seven Soldiers from the New England states and New Jersey during the August 13-16 competition run by the Vermont Army National Guard at Camp Ethan Allen in Jericho, Vermont.
They will now compete in the nationwide Army National Guard Best Warrior Competition set for Sept. 13-16 at Camp Shelby, Mississippi.
Ortiz and Perez are both members of the 1st Battalion, 69th Infantry, based in Manhattan. Ortiz is assigned to the Headquarters Company, while Perez is a member of Alpha Company.
They’re also both emergency medical technicians in the New York City Fire Department, who first met while training at the city’s Emergency Medical Services Academy.
Their experience as EMTs, and the bond they share outside of the National Guard, helped them do better at the Best Warrior events, Perez and Ortiz both said.
“Being an EMT, especially someplace like New York City, where the call volume and the work load is very high, it forces you to deal with extreme stress,” Perez said. “Other peoples’ lives are in your hands so you have to be prepared to come to work and be mentally agile and fit for duty.”
In 2019 New York Army National Guard Sgt. 1st Class Martin Cozens and Corporal Joseph Ryan, now a sergeant, won the Northeast Region Best Warrior Competition. Cozens is a member of the 2nd Battalion, 108th Infantry, while Ryan is assigned to the 1st Battalion, 69th Infantry.
In 2018, Specialist Ilya Titov, who is also now a sergeant, and Sgt. Quentin Davis, both members of the 1st Battalion, 69th Infantry, won the regional event.
“It’s a pretty big deal over at the unit right now,” Ortiz said.
“We are following in the footsteps of these guys who came before us. It means a lot to us to make them proud of us,” he added.
Their route to the national Best Warrior Competition began when they took first place at the New York State Best Warrior Competition held July 24-26 at Camp Smith Training Site near Peekskill, New York.
The event was postponed from May due to the COVID-19 pandemic and there was a chance it would be canceled, but the Joint Force Headquarters NCOs who run it figured out how to do a pandemic-sensitive contest, said New York Army National Guard Command Sgt. Major David Piwowarski.
“The contestants wore masks during events that were not highly physical,” Piwowarski said. “And the staff wore masks, disinfected surface areas, worked to maintain social distancing and thermometers were available.”
Four to five days of competition was crammed into 30 hours of activity to lessen exposure to each other and make up for the last minute scheduling, Piwowarski explained.
“This year‘s competition was limited in some ways by COVID-19 protocols, however there was no limit to the intensity of the competition or the contestants,” Piwowarski said.
Ortiz, from Bethpage, New York on Long Island, and Perez, who lives in Yorktown Heights in the Hudson Valley, trained together to get ready for the New York Best Warrior Competition and then to hone their technique for the regional event at Camp Ethan Allen.
“We stayed motivated and pushed each other every day,” Perez said,
They would also pick different places to run and train for the ruck march part of the competition. To keep things interesting, they said.
“We’d take the American flag and run it across the Brooklyn Bridge,” said Ortiz. “It helped keep our morale up.”
Both men credited Ryan, one of the regional winners in 2019, with helping them to prepare for the competition.
Ryan suggested ways to train and prepare, and worked with 1st Battalion, 69th Infantry Command Sgt. Major Shaun Butcher to get the resources they needed to compete, the two men said.
The regional competition, like the New York Best Warrior, included a fitness test, combat lane, day and night land navigation courses, an appearance board, Army warrior tasks, a written test, an essay and rifle and pistol course and a 12-mile road march with full pack.
The surprise event —held between the day and night land navigation courses— which Perez and Ortiz had not been able to train for, was axe throwing.
The event, Ortiz explained, was included as a salute to Vermont’s Green Mountain Boys, the state’s first militia who took Fort Ticonderoga from the British in 1775.
A tomahawk, or small axe, was part of their equipment and they were expected to keep it sharp and clean and be able to use it to start a fire or kill an enemy scout, he said.
The Soldiers were given a chance to practice, and then threw axes at silhouette targets. Surprisingly, both Ortiz and Perez excelled in axe throwing.
“That was fun,” Perez said. “I had never thrown an axe in my life.”
“It turned out Ortiz and I both placed first in the axe throwing,” he added.
Now, their emphasis will be on getting ready for the national Army Guard Best Warrior event at Camp Shelby and see if they can replicate their wins there, and go on to the Army-wide Best Warrior, the two said.
“Our goal is to find our weak points by looking back at the other competitions and knowing what we did and what we can improve on,” Perez said. “We need to look at the minor details now to really perfect our training.”
| Date Taken: | 08.19.2020 |
| Date Posted: | 08.19.2020 11:16 |
| Story ID: | 376325 |
| Location: | JERICHO, VT, US |
| Web Views: | 339 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, NY Army Guard Soldiers win Northeast Region Best Warrior for third time in three years, by Eric Durr, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
No keywords found.
LEAVE A COMMENT