FORTFORT CARSON, Colo. – As Fort Carson’s soldiers dressed in their Army’s best and conducted payday activities, more than 350 senior leaders from the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division traded in their dress blues for sweat, grass and tear-stained PT uniforms during the brigade’s Senior Leader Organizational Day at the Wilderness Sports Complex, Sept. 6.
The leaders competed in teams, pitting battalion versus battalion, in flag football, horseshoes, a home run derby and tug-of-war.
Before the cavalry scouts could prove they could hit softballs farther than the tankers, or before the infantrymen could showcase themselves in the trenches of flag football, the leaders of each battalion had to come together.
Two leaders, Cpt. Luke Bowers, Company D, and 1st. Lt. David Myers, Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 67th Armor Regiment, “Death Dealers,” anchored their battalion’s dominance in the tug-of-war.
“We work together during the training cycle; we’ve recognized a lot of talent spread across the battalion, and we’re going to showcase it today,” said Bowers.
Five battalions stood in their way, and one-by-one they fell.
Cavalry scouts, medics, infantrymen and artillerymen succumbed to the rhythmic pulls of the tankers.
As the dust settled, only the alliance of soldiers from the 2nd Special Troops Battalion could derail the Death Dealer’s mission.
The two 10-man teams picked up their ends of the rope, each group standing on their side of the demarcation zone. The referee’s hand dropped, the rope tensed, and for an hour-long second, did not budge.
Then a pull, a budge, then another, a landslide, the 2nd Special Troops tumbled. The tankers won.
“That last pull we just came together, we jumped on the pull first, and whoever pulls in sync first, has the battle won,” said Bowers. “We had the battle won.”
Tug-of-war victory at hand, the pair of 1st Bn., 67th Armor Reg., leaders had no concern for the outcome of the other sporting events for the day.
“Mortus et Destructo,” Myers said, his battalion’s motto, Death and destruction. We violently execute everything we do.”