 I'm Lieutenant Colonel Will Carrigan with 1st Battalion, 8th Marines. So the squad comp's been around for a few decades. It's been around ever since I was a lieutenant. It's actually been around when my old man was a 2nd lieutenant. It sort of teetered off a little bit during the war period during OIF and OEF, and now it's coming back in strong effect. And so it's one of those legacy things we have in the Marine Corps. It's awesome. Yeah, so the squad competition is so unique, and the badge itself that gets presented to each squad leader and each squad member that wins the squad competition, it's an incredible piece of legacy from the Marine Corps, specifically the infantry, because it's a badge they get to, not only wear on their uniform for the rest of their time in the Marine Corps career, but it's a badge they have for life. And it's serialized to them because they earned it through that competition, and it's something meaningful. So when they're older and they're drinking their bourbon, they're looking back at their time in the Marine Corps career, they can go back and look at this badge and go, I earned this thing, and it's serialized to me. It's amazing. Yeah, so what it takes to earn a badge of this caliber. So the squad competition, by and large, across all the divisions is very similar, but it's a lot of physical fitness events. It's a lot of infantry, basic skills in the defense, in the offense, patrolling, live fire, how you shoot, how you move, how you communicate, how you save people through combat life-saving skills, and we roll it off into about a 72-hour exercise where we're really mentally and physically putting you through the ring, or not giving you much sleep, sort of food-depriving you. And at the end of it, the last squad, which was 1-8, was the last one standing, so that's kind of what it looks like, yeah. So what it took for 1-8, honest, I think I could have put any squad from every single company, and they would have competed well. I think really what it takes is the right culture, the right climate of every single Marine or sailor in the battalion that just wants to win, and they want to do it together. They want to help the Marine to their left and the right, and I think we had that in 1-8, and that's why Sergeant Jay, he was just a representation of every single Marine or sailor we have in 1-8. He just went out there and competed, wanted to win, and that's what it took for 1-8. So 1-8 trains to fight and win battles through a very simple recipe. It's really three things. First and foremost, we focus on making sure that the Marine or sailor to our left and right knows that we're gonna do whatever we possibly can to not let them down. If we take care of one another, there's no question we're gonna succeed. Number two, honest to God truth, we try to put the most rigorous standards on every piece of training that we do, whether it's going to shoot a rifle, whether it's setting up a defense, there's a time associated to it, there's a standard that's associated to it, and if you don't make it, there's a consequence. If you do make and you exceed that standard, there's a reward, and so we really try to put a standard-based approach to every single thing that we do. The really last one is we really like to work hard, but we like to play hard as well, and so we recognize that for our mental health, for our ability to just break bread with one another, the downtime as often as we can to be around one another and really celebrate the little victories, that's the recipe, the final piece to success for one eight. I served in First Marine Division for glorious years with Second Battalion, Seventh Marines, and I remember leaving 2-7 thinking, man, First Marine Division, it's the greatest division in the history of the Marine Corps, Seventh Marines, it's the greatest regiment, and I probably felt that way of leaving 29 Palms, but there's something special about Second Marine Division. There's something special about Sixth Marine Regiment right now, and it's made, that sort of charisma has made its way all the way down to First Battalion Eighth Marines, and I think what it comes down to is the culture here. Everybody recognizes in the Carolina Magtaf and Second Marine Division that if you work your tail off, if you really care about the Marine or Sailor to your left and your right, and honest to God truth, if you have the mindset that at any given moment, I will die for one of my Marines or Sailors before I let anything happen to them, that's the recipe for success, and that's what we have in the Follow Me Division, that's certainly what we have in the Bella Wood Regiment, and that's what we have in 1-8. I think that if you don't adapt as a leader, as a commander, as a fire team leader, squad leader, then you're probably not doing right by the people that you're going to lead, and I think social media is one extra way to reach down to the lowest level and let them know, here's the latest piece of information, here's stuff that I'm very proud of you, highlighting the different Marines and Sailors that are doing exceptional things in your units every single day, and it's an opportunity for me just to talk to every single Marine or Sailor, because I don't get to spend the time with them like I'd like to, I wish I could spend every waking moment, if it's not with my family, it's with every single Marine or Sailor in 1-8, but that's not gonna happen, I won't be able to do that, and so one way of doing this, bypassing all that, and just talking to them through social media, engaging with them, telling them I'm proud of them, and I may not be out in the field with them all the time, I may not be deployed with them all the time, but I'm always thinking about them, and I'm gonna do whatever I possibly can to put their interest before mine, always. My name is Sergeant Genesia, I'm with Victor 1-8, I'm a squad leader in Route 311. My role was being the infantry squad leader for Victor 1-8, representing our unit, and any time we were tasked out with anything, sort of objective-based mission-based task and purpose, it was my job to make sure that the squad did what they needed to do and accomplished the mission. I just told them, this is what we're here for, this is what's gonna validate you as an infantryman, if you are essentially titled as the best infantry squad in the division, it's one of those things where you can walk around with your chest up high and say, all the training, all the long days, the hard nights, it's worth it. What motivated me was my family, my wife, my father, the teachers and mentors, prior to me arriving here, all the time and effort they spent in trying to develop me as an infantryman as a man, you just don't want them to feel like what they did was in vain, and then making sure that the name tape on your chest is you can wear it proudly and say that you did everything you could. Memorable experience, I would have to say, probably when one of my Marines dislocated his hip and I said, hey man, are you good? Do you need to get picked up? And he kept telling me, no, Sergeant, I'm good. He just kept moving with the dislocated hip. And at that moment I knew I was like, okay, I got this. We got this. If I have Marines like this in the squad, what more can I ask for? Pushing past the pain, the mental fortitude, deciding that the success of the mission of the Marines around him was more important and seeing how everybody had that same mentality, that was a pretty good memory. Definitely that was something that motivated me for sure. So prior to the squad comp, to train my Marines, we did a lot of basic fundamentals and as cliche as it sounds, but brilliance in the basics and doing the fundamentals correctly is what will set you apart from most people, simply for the fact that everything is based and founded upon those fundamentals, off those basics, off those baby steps, you know, the building blocks. And we just kept hitting that over and over and over again to the point where we just kind of said, all right, are we gonna do this until we can't get it wrong? And if we are, then we're gonna stay here another hour and another hour and another hour until eventually we were satisfied with the result we had. How I'm gonna prepare my squad for the Marine Corps-wide squad comp is pretty similar. We hit the fundamentals again. There's always room for improvement. Hit the things that we noticed during the division squad comp where we lacked. Emphasize that. And then anything else that the more senior leadership says, hey, you might need to work on this, we're gonna hit it, we're gonna keep going. So my past experiences as far as I've gained in Haiti, I wasn't there for Afghan, but a lot of the Marines that were in my squad were. I was there for Haiti, but pulling from the experience, from the guys that came from HKIA, from Kabul, and how they were able to essentially thrive in the chaos. Be able to think on their feet when everything was going wrong, or if anything went wrong, being able to handle themselves and the Marines around and keep a calm, cool, collected demeanor, that was very beneficial. And then for Haiti, same thing, you know, at that point then I could experience what chaos was, what real chaos was, and kind of just pull from those experiences. And then for the junior guys who didn't experience either of those things, they saw the leadership kind of stay calm, and that just set the tone. So for the other Marines that rose above the challenge, I think waking up every day, every night, from the one to two hours of sleep you would get, and thinking to yourself, I gotta get up, I gotta keep moving, I gotta get ready for the next task. Seeing Marines quickly throw down some food, throw their head back with some water, wipe their mouth, get their hand on their gun, and say, all right, let's go, ready, move. I think that was one of the things that mentally, the guys were rising above. It was more mental than it was physical, but it's that constant grind where it really starts to wear you down, but seeing your junior Marines, especially your junior Marines, look at you and in their eyes, you can tell that they're gonna keep pushing. So some of the events that we did for the squad comp was we inserted to our defensive area, and then from there, we had to dig into a defense. We were given timelines on how deep we had to dig, and then in the middle of all that, we were getting fragmentary orders where essentially higher would say, hey, I need you to go patrol in an urban environment and root out some enemy resistance or provide help to the locals and then come back to the defense, and then we'd get another fragmentary order, all right, you need to do an ambush, and then we'd come back. All the while, we still have to make the timelines and the defense of digging our holes, setting in our sectors, making sure our sandbags are good, making sure our claymores are set, and then we keep more fragmentary orders. All right, now you gotta do a squad attack, and now you gotta make movement here, make movement there, come back to the defense, no sleep. So one of the more difficult events we personally was towards the end. At this point, we're about four days in. I haven't slept for the majority of that I think I'm running about three or four hours of sleep total throughout those four days, and then I have to write out an entire squad attack order for my Marines, brief it to a gunner, not make any mistakes, and then execute, and still make it back in time to finish the timelines that we had. And then for the squad, I think one of the hardest things was when that Marine dislocated his hip, it became a moment of like, all right, this is gonna be one of those adversity types where we're gonna probably have to carry his pack, carry his gear, carry his EDL, and we had to start mentally preparing that we're gonna have more weight. It's not his fault, but it's always the mental that will stop you, and then I think that was probably one of the more harder times for the guys. So why is the training that we did for the squad comp important in retrospect and context to current events? Well, when the call comes, and I'm not gonna speak to specific events that's happening around the world, but at any moment, the Marine Corps specifically could get the call. We're an expeditionary force by nature. We're supposed to be able to deploy, and we will deploy within 24 hours of getting that call. And doing training events like this really hammers home that it's not just I'm here to pull a trigger. It's a whole world of other tasks that we need to be tactically and technically proficient at. And I think that this kind of training not only makes us tactically and technically proficient, but it really sets the standard of what the rest of the Marine Corps should be training to. You don't have to be a grunt to want to win. I think that that's more than just a grunt effort. Every unit, no matter what MOS you have, you should be training to win the fight because look at history. How many times were the infantry getting mowed down and guess who had to step in? Non-infantry MOSes. So it could be anybody. Anybody should be able to do this job.