U.S. Army Soldiers conduct Norwegian Sports Federation Sports Badge testing at Pabradė Training Area

PABRADĖ, Lithuania — At five o’clock in the morning, the only sound on the long gravel road through Pabradė Training Area is that of boots.

Heel, toe. Heel, toe. Heel, toe. 233 Soldiers from the 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regiment, are moving in a thin column through the half-light, rucksacks rattling against their backs, their breath visible in the cold. The road runs flat through the middle of the base, bordered on both sides by pine forest. The air smells like pine and wet earth. The dew has not yet burned off. It will not for another hour.

Spc. Rosario Cundari is near the front of the column. He has been walking since five a.m.. Asked about his last long ruck, he doesn’t slow down.

“My feet were so beat up by the end I was walking backwards,” he says.

“Backwards?”

“I swear to God.”

He keeps moving.

The badge the Soldiers are working toward this morning is one they would not have been allowed to earn six months ago. The Norges Idrettsmerket — the Norwegian Sports Federation Sports Badge — was established in Norway in May 1915 to recognize sustained athletic achievement across five categories of fitness: speed, strength, endurance, flexibility and sustained physical activity. For 111 years it was administered almost exclusively by Norwegian sports clubs and the Norwegian Armed Forces. American service members were not eligible.

That changed in March, when the Norwegian Sports Federation extended testing authority worldwide to any member of the American uniformed services. No embassy coordination is required. No certified examiner has to be present. Any unit can run it.

Over three days at Pabradė — May 20 through May 22 — the Soldiers of 1-9 CAV worked through the four events 1st Lt. Nelson Ramsey, the officer in charge of the testing, designed for them: push-ups, a standing high jump, a sprint and a nine-mile ruck. The first three were on May 20. The ruck is this morning.

By the end of it, 196 will have earned the badge. 37 will not.

Ramsey, who is from Madison, Mississippi, expected about 75 Soldiers to sign up. He got nearly three times that.

“That is way more than I expected,” he said, standing off the road as the column moved past in the half-light.

He attributed the turnout to the badge’s recent authorization and to a general appetite among Soldiers for foreign awards earned during a deployment. Planning, he said, took about a week and a half — coordinating road clearance with host-nation authorities, medical coverage across multiple checkpoints and registration data formatted for two separate Norwegian record-keeping systems. He is already planning a second iteration for Soldiers who were away on temporary duty during the first.

The badge itself is awarded in bronze for a Soldier’s first through fourth time earning it, silver for the fifth through eighth, and gold on the ninth. Once earned, it is authorized for permanent wear on the U.S. Army dress uniform.

Pabradė Training Area sits about 35 miles from the Belarusian border. The 1st Cavalry Division has been rotating elements through Eastern Europe since the early days of the war in Ukraine, and the readiness of forces forward-deployed to NATO’s eastern flank is one of the defining military commitments of the current decade. The training is the readiness. The readiness is the deterrent. Deterrence is built one ruck at a time.

Around mile four, the sun broke through the trees on the eastern side of the road. By then the column had thinned. The fastest ruckers were far ahead, the slowest falling back. In the middle, where most of the work happens, 1st Sgt. James Stauffer was walking with his Soldiers. Stauffer is the senior enlisted leader of Apache Company, 1-9 CAV.

He moved past a water checkpoint slowly, scanning the faces of the Soldiers around him. A Soldier on the shoulder of the road was bent at the waist, hands on his knees. Stauffer stopped briefly, said something to him. The Soldier nodded, straightened and kept moving.

Asked about the value of an event like this for a deployed tank company, Stauffer talked about maintenance.

“We’re a tank company,” he said. “Tracks don’t always stay as optimal as we want them to. So we got to fix it. Breaking track ain’t a light job. You have to be physically prepared to lift it, put it back together and get back in the fight.”

He recited his company’s motto unprompted: “Apache on the warpath. From dismounted to mounted, Vietnam to now, any mission, no matter the line of effort, Apache Company One-Nine can and will stay fit, ready and on the warpath.”

A passing Soldier was slowing. “You good?” Stauffer asked him. “Stay with me. Keep stepping.” The Soldier picked up the pace.

Asked whether having to earn something gives it more value, Stauffer answered without pausing.

“Nothing worth anything is free.”

Around the fifth mile, Cundari was talking about the adversary when his pace shifted.

He had been moving the whole conversation at the same rate he started — steady, even, breathing through his nose. But somewhere on the long flat stretch past the second water point, his stride got shorter. He shifted the weight of his ruck higher on his back. He didn’t stop. He just absorbed the work.

“You just got to pull it in and just get after it,” he said. “It’s all in your mind. If you’re about it, you’re about it. You got it, you got it.”

He took a slow breath.

“Your life shouldn’t be easy as you’re serving this country. You have to do hard things to prepare to do hard things.”

He was asked what gets him through the worst of it.

“Look at the guy’s head in front of you,” he said. “And keep your head up. Keep breathing. That’s all it is.”

Eyes on the man in front of him: “If he goes down, I gotta carry him out of here. What am I gonna say? Sorry?”

Asked why he trains so hard he states “Our adversaries, here and everywhere else — the people that are enemies of this country — they’re training. They’re doing it for real.”

Asked what the unit meant to him, he paused once.

“Some of the best times in the Army are gonna be the worst times of your life,” he said. “But it’s with the people you’re doing it with that makes them the best of times.”

He looked over.

“You gotta take that one to heart.”

Cundari, an infantryman, already wears the Norwegian Foot March badge — a separate award requiring an 18.6-mile ruck with 25 pounds of equipment, completed within a time standard based on age and gender. He earned his first one earlier in the year, the one that left him walking backwards at the finish. On Tuesday he will attempt his second.

This morning’s nine-mile ruck, he said, was a warm-up.

“We’re Soldiers,” he said. “That’s Tuesday for us.”

By eight in the morning the column had come apart into clusters at the finish point. Soldiers stretched. Soldiers laughed. Soldiers compared finishing times.

Cundari pulled off his ruck. There was steam coming off his shoulders in the cold air. His face was flushed. His breath had evened out by the time he reached the finish line, but the dust on his uniform and the stiffness in his hands gave him away. He had worked for it.

Asked if there was anything else he wanted to say, he thought about it briefly.

“There’s a lot of stuff going on right now in the world,” he said. “But as Soldiers — you better be strong. You gotta realize what it is we do.”

Then he picked up his ruck and walked back toward his company.

V Corps is the U.S. Army's only forward-deployed corps, serving as the senior tactical headquarters for Army forces in Eastern Europe to deter conflict and provide combat-ready forces alongside our NATO allies. V Corps is operationalizing and expanding the Eastern Flank Deterrence Line with Allies, rapidly integrating emerging technologies into training and tactical plans.