0500. 

   My bleary eyes dimly make out the time on my cell phone.  Time to get up.  It is at this moment that I am thankful for my enlisted training, which makes my body sit up before my brain can make up some excuse to go back to sleep.  I would be bending the truth if I said that this action was not accompanied by muttered curses, followed by a quick succession of possible excuses for missing training.  That notwithstanding, I rise to greet the day, which usually greets me with a good dose of running for morning PT.

    Morning PT is my Achilles' Heel of ROTC.  It combines the two most annoying things in the world: waking up early and exercising.  And yet I continue to do it three, sometimes four, times a week.  Why?  This is a question that I usually ask myself as my alarm is going off.  Admittedly, it's a valid question.  Why would a college student volunteer to wake up before dawn three days a week  and then go punish their body with the Army's sadistic workout regimen? 

   The answer may be as prosaic as, "I'll get in trouble if I don't" or as profound as, "My physical fitness may someday save my life, or someone else's life."  Usually, the answer lies somewhere in between: "I don't want to disappoint my battle buddies."  So much of the time the catalyst that gets me out of the warm paradise that is my bed at 0500 is the idea that if I don't show at PT, I'm letting my buddies down.

   This simple thought is what has, historically, inspired men through the millennia in warfare.  When asked whether their spirits were stirred by thoughts of duty, honor, or country, most warfighters in tight situations said and do say that they stayed and fought for the guy next to them.  That idea in and of itself is more important than scoring a 300 on the APFT.  If ROTC can instill this idea into young college students, then it has more than repaid the taxpayers' investment, for it is creating a lifestyle that has protected this country from the very beginning.