Photo By Eric Durr | U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Dylan Delamarter and Sgt. Ethan Hart, 2nd Battalion, 108th...... read more read more
Subscribe
LATHAM, N.Y. -- Two New York Army National Guard medics from Syracuse, New York, assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 108th Infantry, were among 44 Soldiers competing to be the Army’s best medics at Fort Hood, Texas, January 24 to 28.
Staff Sgt. Dylan Delamarter, the Headquarters Company medical platoon sergeant, and Sgt. Ethan Hart, a medic in Delamarter’s platoon, were the only National Guard Soldiers vying for the title during the Command Sgt. Major Jack L. Clark Best Medic competition.
They didn’t win, but just being among the 21 two-Soldier teams to finish the Army Medical Command competition put them in a select category among the Army’s 82,149 medical personnel, said Lt. Gen. R. Scott Dingle, the Surgeon General of the Army.
“What you have right here, out of that 82,000 plus Army medicine Soldiers, are the world’s best medics,” Dingle said during remarks at the award ceremony.
Delamarter and Hart, Team 8 during the competition, went up against teams from the Army’s active duty divisions, medical commands and the Ranger Regiment.
It was physically and mentally demanding, the weather was rainy and cold, the ruck marches were long, the days were long, there was too little sleep and they felt like they fit right in, the two Guard Soldiers said.
“We were all in the same boat,” Delamarter said. “You look to the left and the right of you, everybody was under the same amount of stress.”
“Everybody there was super humble, whether they were coming from a special operations unit or any other unit in the Army,” Hart said. “There was a good comradery.”
The two wound up at Fort Hood because New York Army National Guard Command Sgt. Major David Piwowarski thought there should be a New York National Guard medic team in the Army competition.
The Army National Guard’s Command Sgt. Major John Sampa, put out a call for an Army Guard team to compete in the medic competition. This looked like a good chance for New York Soldiers, so he reached out to Command Sgt. Major Daniel Markle, the top enlisted leader in the 2nd Battalion, 108th Infantry for candidates, Piwowarski said.
To compete, candidates had to be either Expert Field Medic Bade or Combat Medic Badge qualified. “These two NCOs stepped up,” Markle said.
Delamarter, who also serves as the Headquarters Company training noncommissioned officer at the 108th Infantry’s Utica, New York armory, held the Combat Medic Badge from a 2012 Afghanistan deployment. Hart had recently earned the Expert Field Medic Badge in the fall during at Fort Drum.
Both men are in good shape, although Delamarter, at age 35, said he was older than most of the competitors.
Hart and Delamarter had two months to get ready for the competition. They focused on physical fitness. They live near enough to each other that they could work out at the same gym.
Hart, an amateur powerlifter who was training for a competition began working on his endurance.
“I would do some long distance runs and some ruck marches and I would still be in the gym lifting,” he said.
“Strength is never something that is going to count against you, as long as you can move,” Hart added.
“We knew it was going to be a marathon rather than a sprint,” Delamarter said. “We started doing more unorthodox things at the gym to build endurance.”
Thinking marathon, not sprint, was the right strategy the two discovered when the event kicked off.
“It was very endurance heavy,” Delamarter said. “As long as we could ruck and run—move patients from here to there—we were set up for success. It was just a matter of how long we could do it.”
“It ended up being three and a half, almost four days, of beating up our bodies,” he added.
While there were a lot of physical demands, there was also very little sleep, the two said. The most sleep they got was five hours one night, Delamarter said.
Competition events included a 13-mile march in the rain, M-4 rifle marksmanship, carrying simulated casualties using a two-man litter, and dragging a patient in a plastic “sked.”
At the same time, the Soldiers were carrying rucksacks weighing 65 or so pounds.
They were also wet…a lot, the two said.
It rained regularly during the competition. The 13-mile march carrying 65 pounds was done in the rain, so it was harder to move, Hart said.
A challenge for him was the water combat survival event, Hart said.
Each team jumped into a pool in full combat gear, ditched the gear at the bottom of the pool, surfaced and swam to the aid of a casualty. While one teammate conducted cardiopulmonary resuscitation, the other had to swim back, and retrieve the equipment.
They were also expected to tread water in combat boots for five minutes and make a float from their gear to stay up in the water, Hart said.
“It was pretty rough,” he recalled. “I didn’t think I could be so close to death for so long.”
Another task involved pulling a casualty out of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and moving him to an evacuation point.
That task required caring for the badly wounded Soldier for four hours while waiting for the medevac, Delamarter said.
Just making it through the course was an accomplishment, said Markle, who got the chance to be at the competition as an observer.
The Soldiers covered 30 miles of walking and running in 72 hours. “It was pretty much non-stop,” Markle said.
The Soldiers were also asked medical questions throughout the event, and had to be prepared for constantly changing tasks, Hart and Delamarter said
The Soldiers were given a field operations order at the start of the three-and-half days of competition and then the mission kept changing, they said.
“Even in the middle of a lane, they would throw a wrench into our plan and change something,” Delamarter said.
Despite the physical demands, lack of sleep, and being damp, getting the chance to compete was the best reward for being there, Hart and Delamarter said.
“It is not an opportunity that somebody gives you freely,” Hart said. “It is a once in a career opportunity.”
“I didn’t want to miss the challenge. I wanted to see where I stack up against the rest of the Army,” he added.
| Date Taken: | 02.02.2022 |
| Date Posted: | 02.03.2022 13:47 |
| Story ID: | 413931 |
| Location: | FORT HOOD , TEXAS, US |
| Web Views: | 86 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
This work, NY Soldiers represent Army Guard at Best Medic Competition, by Eric Durr, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
Army National Guard
