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Here is the bottom line.
Again.
It isn't about you, what you want, or what you think you can do.
It is about the other guys on your team who will count on you and put their lives on the line for you.
What do you bring for them? What do you bring to the fight to help keep your brothers alive just another heartbeat, if need be?
A good SF soldier wants to be on a team till the day he dies. At the same time, he would rather die than to let his brothers down, or to have any one of them killed trying to drag him of the mountain.
Do some internet research into the SF guys who have been highly decorated in this fight. By and large, they have not been bodybuilders or PT nuts. Most of them have been older, a little heavier, maybe a little slower.
What did they have? Experience. Confidence. Determination. And most of all, love for their brothers.
They had been at this game long enough to be realistic about their capabilities, but feared letting their teammates down more than they feared death.
And they had been around long enough, they had the confidence of their teammates.
When an O-6 wins a DSC for leading HN forces in a desperate firefight, that is something.
Going through the pipeline to be the slowest guy on the team at anything, drags the team down a notch. You will take longer to recover. Things that you could have shaken off years before, will stop you.
When I was 43, I could still max the PT test, but I knew my team days were over. Because I could prep for an event, but I could not do the deal for months on end, and I would not let a brother down, much less a whole team of them.
This isn't about you. It is about them. And whether you are an asset, or a liability to them.
Do the right thing.
TR
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"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - President Theodore Roosevelt, 1910
De Oppresso Liber 01/20/2025
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