54 ARMY July 2009

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ARMY ■ July 2009
Photographs and Text
By Dennis Steele
Senior Staff Writer
lipped onto mountaineering ropes at the
top of the cliff—a sheared-off slab of
dolomite rock situated in the Fort
Leonard Wood, Mo., training area and
with a 90-degree, 90-foot drop to the creek bank
below—each of the 34 two-soldier teams competing in this year’s Best Sapper Competition had a
third partner for a few minutes—a 150-pound casualty dummy called Rescue Randy that was
strapped into an orange plastic Skedco litter
folded around the victim like a sawed-off taco
shell.
The challenge was straightforward: Secure
Randy in the Skedco correctly and get him down
the precipice as quickly as possible after SSG Raymond Helvig said “Go!” and clicked a stopwatch.
A cadre instructor from the Sapper Leader
Course (Company E, 554th Engineer Battalion, the
Best Sapper Competition’s sponsoring unit), SSG
Helvig nimbly patrolled the boxing ring-sized
clearing at the top and served as judge, jury and
chief executioner of the competition’s “Skedco/
Jumar assault lane.” (A Jumar is a mountaineering
device that assists in climbing back up a cliff,
which was the second part of the event.)
SSG Helvig judged the teams’ skill in lashing
Randy to the litter, performed safety checks and
choreographed the rough-hewn ballet to position
competitors dangling over the cliff’s edge and set
the litter into the ready position. He leaned over
the ledge as each team went down, observing its
progress in nursing (some, admittedly, more strugJuly 2009 ■ ARMY
55
Competitors perform pull-ups as part of the modified physical fitness test conducted
during the predawn hours of the opening day of the Best Sapper Competition.
gling and cussing than nursing) Randy down the cliff
while barking orders to the rope team manning the brake
lines at the top.
It was suggested that the cliff, which lacks a proper
name, be named for SSG Helvig: Helvig’s Cliff—a notion
embraced enthusiastically by SSG Helvig and unopposed
by anyone else, as everyone working for him just wanted
to get off the cliff without getting on his bad side, and thus
kept their mouths shut.
SSG Helvig has been involved in planning and conducting the Best Sapper Competition since
he joined the Sapper Leader Course
cadre.
“As soon as last year’s competition
ended, we started planning this one,”
he said. “About three months out, we
really get hot, and one month out we
validate [the event lanes]—all of that
for one day, one event, but it’s really
worth it to stage this competition.
SSG Boulina Rasavong and SGT Alan
Forester—representing the 20th Engineer
Battalion, 36th Engineer Brigade, Fort
Hood, Texas—carry their poncho raft to
the helicopter pickup zone.
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ARMY ■ July 2009
These guys get a lot out of it.”
The annual Best Sapper Competition started five years
ago with six teams competing, all of which were stationed
at Fort Leonard Wood. This year, 34 teams representing
units from around the Army came to participate, a benchmark that allows sponsors to believe that the Best Sapper
Competition has achieved the strategic goals that drove its
inception—establishing a world-class event that is unique,
testing sapper and basic military engineer skills, and serving as a source of pride for the entire Engineer Regiment.
A team leaps from a CH-47D
helicopter into the water during the
helocast/swim event.
“Word has gotten out,” said one
cadre member.
The Best Sapper Competition spans
four days—one administrative day
and 52 hours for the physical competition, followed by a small get-together
and the award ceremony.
Aside from the skill sets tested, the
competition is different from others in
the Army in that there is no leader
board. No team knows its ranking as
the competition progresses. The field
is cut, however, at the end of the first
day to 20 teams and at the end of the
second to 10 teams, which continue to
the final round.
The first day of competition started
at 3:45 A.M. with a nonstandard physical fitness test. Sit-ups, push-ups and
pull-ups were counted in the dim illumination of fluorescent lamps in a
semirigid, hangar-like building, followed by a 3-mile run in the dark
with participants wearing headlamps—a moving cluster of bobbing
light specks.
That was followed by the helocast/poncho raft event, arguably the
most spectacular event and the one
most accessible to the public, a crowdpleaser in every respect. With their
rucksacks tied into a poncho raft,
teams jump from the ramp of a Chinook helicopter into a lake, line up
and swim to shore as fast as they can.
Following was a round-robin series
of events that tested basic soldier
skills such as marksmanship and engineer skills such as specialized demolition—all of which are sapper skill
sets.
After that, teams had the opportunity to sleep for four hours (optimally,
but probably less) and then went on a
rucksack road-march of 151/2 miles
A competitor gives it his all to shave
seconds off his team’s swim time.
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ARMY ■ July 2009
Soldiers struggle
ashore after completing the swim.
1LT Michael Leak from the 31st Engineer
Battalion, 1st Engineer Brigade (31st Eng.
Bn., 1st Eng. Bde.), Fort Leonard Wood,
Mo., fires an M9 pistol during the
stress-fire marksmanship event.
A soldier unpacks demolition material
to prepare breaching charges.
Under strobe lights and while
enduring other stress effects,
a team evaluates and treats
simulated victims during the first
aid portion of the competition.
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ARMY ■ July 2009
with a four-hour cutoff time. Whittled down by the road
march to 20 teams, the continuing teams were allowed 21/2
hours of rest before heading to the second day’s events, revolving around the “sapper stakes,” which interlace specialized engineer events with physical fitness events such
as an obstacle course, after which teams must road-march
to each testing lane.
After two more hours of rest, teams
compete on a night land-navigation course.
Cut to 10 teams by their land-navigation times, and after a minimum rest time
of an hour and a half, the final (and
butt-kicking) phase begins: the X-Mile
Run, which involves running but is better described as a physical beat-down.
This is the X-Run task menu: Run the
first half-mile wearing protective masks; remove masks and
continue running to the log cut-and-carry event—saw
through a log with a two-man crosscut saw, then pick up a
150-pound log section and run to the next event, the Bangalore crate carry—run to the next event carrying a full
rope-handled Bangalore torpedo
crate. Then teams move a pile of
dummy M-15 antitank mines through
a short obstacle course (carrying one
or two mines at a time) and continue
running after completion. Next is a
truck-tire flip and a run to the picketpounding station (where teams hammer pickets into the ground). Teams
run on to the dummy carry, run on to
a sandbag carry and run to the final
event, door breaching—breaching two
doors by hand—followed by a short
sprint to the finish line. The fastest
time was 80 minutes flat. The total
distance was 9 miles.
From beginning to end, the 2009 Best
Sapper Competition covered more than
MAJ Stephen Peterson, 31st Eng. Bn.,
1st Eng. Bde., crawls under the
water-hazard log on the physical
endurance course.
CPT Joshua Eggar and 1LT
Christopher Williammee,
representing the 72nd Engineer
Company, Fort Riley, Kan.,
traverse the three-rope bridge on
the physical endurance course.
40 miles (running or road-marching) and more than 30 separate events.
The winning team, earning the 2009 Best Sapper title,
was 1LT Shawn Hogan and MSG Michael Behkendorf, representing the 7th Engineer Battalion, 20th Engineer Brigade,
Fort Drum, N.Y.
Placing second were CPT Mark Gillman and SSG Gordon Paulson, representing the 66th Engineer Company, 25th Infantry Division, Schofield Barracks, Hawaii.
To the surprise and delight of the
crowd attending the award ceremony, a
team of West Point cadets placed third:
CDT Jonathan Kralick and CDT Dominic Senteno, representing, of course,
the U.S. Military Academy, West Point,
N.Y., and intending to branch as Engineer officers.
Pointing to MSG Behkendorf, 1LT Hogan said the toughest part of the competition was “keeping up with him.”
MSG Behkendorf has competed in the last three Best Sapper Competitions, placing in the top-10 finishers the first
A team loads a mock casualty aboard a
Chinook helicopter during the casualty
evacuation portion of the competition.
July 2009 ■ ARMY
61
Top left, representing the U.S. Military
Academy, West Point, N.Y., CDT Dominic
Senteno swings a grappling hook for a distance throw while his teammate, CDT
Jonathan Kralick, observes. Center, a
team performs calculations for a demolition event. Right, 2LT William Toft, from the
72nd Engineer Company, 1st Engineer
Battalion, Fort Riley, measures an I-beam
on the steel-cutting lane.
time with another partner, and placing second with 1LT Hogan last year.
“Placing second left a bad taste in
my mouth,” MSG Behkendorf said,
“and I had to try again.”
Both men said it was their last
chance to try for the title as a team;
both were weeks away from deploying to Iraq at the time of the competition. (They likely will be deployed by
the time this issue prints.) MSG Behkendorf also was leaning on the rhetorical crutch of advancing age—the
time-honored “getting-too-old” excuse from a man who probably can
pitch an anvil for distance and roadmarch until next Christmas … maybe
dragging that anvil.
MSG Behkendorf said they had
planned to tweak some finer points of
strategy, based on last year’s experience. “During the rucksack march, we
thought we’d just hang with the team
setting the pace, then pass them and
see how they reacted. Last year, we
passed them, and those guys passed
us back. This year, we just ran a little
faster.”
A team saws through a log during the
X-mile run.
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ARMY ■ July 2009
The top 10 teams begin the final event in the Best
Sapper Competition, the X-mile run (9 miles this
year), wearing protective masks as basic and
advanced individual training soldiers from the
Maneuver Support Center and Engineer School,
Fort Leonard Wood, cheer for them.
“The toughest part was on day one,
the helocast/poncho raft swim,” he continued. “I’m not an Olympic swimmer,
and it was pretty tough.”
The final X-Mile Run was difficult,
said 1LT Hogan. “By that time, it’s just
hard to keep moving.”
The lieutenant said that competing is
a reward in itself. “It’s good to be
around all the best and the brightest,”
he said. “It’s a chance to see how our
peers are doing and what they are doing. We can just sit down and talk. It’s a
competition, but everybody tries to help
each other.”
CPT Douglas Solan, Sapper Leader
Course company commander and selfdescribed chief execution coordinator
for the 2009 Best Sapper Competition,
said the event “has grown in popularity
and respect … to be the premier event
for the Engineer Regiment. Next year, it
will be at least as large [in terms of the
number of teams], if not twice as large,
and it will be the 25th anniversary of
the Sapper Leader Course—a significant milestone for a course that was
A competitor carries inert
antitank mines during a
relay stage of the X-mile run.
A soldier slams a bar into a doorframe
during the final event of the X-mile run.
The X-mile run winners—who also
won the competition—cross the
finish line in 80 minutes.
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ARMY ■ July 2009
The 2009 winning team: 1LT Shawn Hogan and MSG Michael Behkendorf from the 7th Engineer
Battalion, 20th Engineer Brigade, Fort Drum, N.Y., hold aloft the Best Sapper Competition Trophy.
Above left, the second-place team, CPT Mark Gillman and SSG Gordon Paulson, representing the 66th Engineer Company, 25th Infantry Division, Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, and above right, the third-place team, CDT
Kralick and CDT Senteno, representing the U.S. Military Academy, receive honors from COL Bryan Watson,
commandant of the U.S. Army Engineer School, and CSM Robert Wells, the school’s command sergeant major.
originally supposed to be around for a few months. Its
original purpose was to bring in company leadership and
train them on nonstandard engineer tasks above the level
they were getting to better serve our infantry counterparts.”
The need for nonstandard engineer skills didn’t disappear, and neither did the Sapper Leader Course, open now
to the range of NCO ranks and students from outside the
Engineer branch, and to sister services and foreign allies.
Last year, the course awarded the Sapper tab—authorized
by the Army for graduates about four years ago—to 433
personnel.
Observing the Best Sapper events, MG Gregg F. Martin,
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ARMY ■ July 2009
commanding general of the U.S. Army Maneuver Support
Center and Fort Leonard Wood, said, “These skills are critical for full spectrum operations.”
“We are trying to run a world-class event, and at the
same time keep it relevant to what they are being exposed
to downrange,” said MSG James Watnes, chief instructor
for the Sapper Leader Course.
COL Bryan Watson, commandant of the U.S. Army Engineer School, said at the Best Sapper Competition award
ceremony, “The reason we have sappers is because the
force needs them … The sapper says to the infantry and to
the Army, ‘I will lead the way,’ and when you are in a
pinch, you will follow them.”
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