1st Cavalry Division Soldiers earn Norwegian Foot March badge during multinational event in Lithuania

PABRADĖ, Lithuania — By nine in the morning, the Norwegian flag was up at the start line as roughly 130 Soldiers from four countries were stepping off into the first of 11 laps around the camp.

They carried a minimum of 25 pounds in their rucks and had four hours and 30 minutes to walk 18.6 miles. The course was a paved loop that ran uphill and back down again on each pass. It was sunny and 66 degrees. The road was hot under their boots by the second lap.

Specialist Rosario Cundari was near the front of the column. He had done this once before — he earned his first Norwegian Foot March badge earlier in the deployment.

Five days earlier he had been asked about it on a different stretch of road, after a shorter ruck, and he had said the bigger one coming up was Tuesday.

Tuesday had come.

Beside him were four other men from his company. One of them was a private who had been on the fence about signing up. Cundari, his squad leader, had told him he would do it with him.

The badge the Soldiers were working toward is older than any of them.

The Norges Marsjmerket — the Norwegian Foot March — was established by the Norwegian Armed Forces in 1915 to test the endurance of soldiers required to move on foot under a heavy load. It is awarded in bronze on the first completion, silver on the second through fourth, and gold on the fifth. American Soldiers have been authorized to wear it on the U.S. Army uniform since the 1980s.

The Soldiers stepping off into the loop were Americans from five battalions of the 1st Cavalry Division and the 8th Brigade Engineer Battalion, U.S. Marines from the embassy in Vilnius, Lithuanian Soldiers from two of their own line units, German troops stationed at the camp, and a small Norwegian contingent that had organized the whole event.

They walked together in a single column for the first lap. By the second lap they had spread out across the road.

The Norwegians had hung their flag at the start line a few minutes before nine. They watched the column step off. Then they stayed.

Captain Garret, the commander of Cobra Company, 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regiment, was walking in the middle of the pack.

He had earned his first Foot March badge years before, as a specialist, and he remembered what it meant. On Tuesday, he had decided to ruck the course with his Soldiers rather than oversee it from the finish line.

A company commander who chooses to walk the full course gives up the things that ordinarily anchor him to his role. For four hours he is unreachable. He is also, for those four hours, simply another Soldier in the column, under the same load, on the same road, with the same blisters.

Garret was asked, before the march began, why he had decided to walk it instead of overseeing the event. "It's a lot easier to follow someone who does things that you do," he said. "If you're just telling them what to do and you're not helping them and guiding them through it, they're less likely to follow what you do."

He was asked what he hoped his Soldiers would take from the morning.

"If you want Soldiers to do hard things," he said, "you have to do the hard things with them."

He stepped off with the rest of the column. Around the eighth lap he was still in the middle of the pack, walking with two of his platoon sergeants. He finished in just under four hours, well within the standard.

At the finish line he pulled off his ruck and did not sit down. He stood and waited for the rest of his company to come in.

The first finishers crossed the line in around three hours.

They came in alone or in pairs, mostly running the last hundred meters, faces red, ruck straps biting into their shoulders. Some of them dropped their rucks the moment they crossed and walked off with their hands on their heads. Some of them found a piece of curb and sat down without speaking.

Cundari came in at four hours and five minutes.

He had expected to finish at four hours and 35 minutes — five minutes over the standard, which would have meant no badge. He had finished thirty minutes faster than that, and twenty-five minutes inside the standard, and he had brought four other men with him.

It earned him silver.

At the finish line he was asked what had been different this time.

"Mostly because of the guys I was with," he said. "Great pacing, all of that. The first time, I was barely crossing the line. I was younger back then. I wasn't as strong. But it was also because I had nobody. The two guys I paced with — they quit. This time, it was really just teamwork."

Five days earlier, in the same training area, he mentioned that he trained alone, five or six days a week. He had said being a Soldier meant doing hard things in order to be ready to do hard things. He had called the nine-mile ruck he had just finished a warm-up.

"I couldn't quit and be less than him," he said now of the private he had brought with him.

"If you got it, you got it. If you don't, you don't. Things are gonna be bad. But if you guys work together, you can make something good out of it. If you're not in the military, it doesn't make sense. But if you are, it makes perfect sense. Some of the best times in the Army will be the worst times in your life."

It was a sentence he had used five days earlier, almost word for word.

The Norwegians stayed for the last finishers. Their flag was still up when the slowest walkers crossed. Around noon, after the column had broken apart into clusters at the finish point, the Norwegians took it down.

There was no ceremony.

The Soldiers sat on curbs and on the edges of buildings, unlacing their boots. Some of them ate bananas. Some of them poured water over their heads.

Cundari sat on the curb with the men he had rucked with. He pulled off his ruck. His feet, he said, were beat up. His knees hurt. He was surprised he was still standing.

Most of the Soldiers on the road that morning would be back at work the next day.

Cundari would be among them. So would Garret.