 My name is Sergeant Major Christopher McDougal and I am the officer major with 759th MP Battalion here on Fort Carson. Today started our best squad competition for the 89th MP Brigade. We'll run from today through Thursday where we'll determine of the four battalions a winner. So we have a pretty jam-packed schedule of events that we'll do throughout the week. Started this morning with a mass PT event, moved on to the obstacle course from there. We came out to the range. We're conducting our M17 and M4 qualifications. From here we'll move out to one of the training areas and conducts day and night land nap along with some ESB testing. We have several written tests that competitors will undergo over the next couple of days. Tomorrow we'll have a 12-mile foot march followed by a maintenance event back at the motor pool. Then a combatives tournament. We'll wake them up Thursday morning and then close out with a formal board. I don't think I can tell you that there's one event that's more important than the other. I think all of them are kind of testing the whole soldier concept out here. So I think they're all fairly important. Best squad competitions or soldier of the month, soldier of the quarter, any type of competition that you can get soldiers to do makes them better, makes those around them better. I don't necessarily think that the competition itself is all-telling. I think it's the work that leads up to the competition, the training, the studying, the preparation, the hands-on testing, things of that nature that make soldiers better. And then it makes the soldiers around them want to be better as well. This training is important for soldiers, number one, because it brings back the warrior task skills and battle drills, skill level one, and also incorporates non-commissioned officers that are in those squads in order to lead those soldiers and actually test their troop leading abilities and make sure that they're actually squared away and know what to do and accomplish a task. Best squads are important because, number one, it identifies our gaps and weaknesses and, number two, it also identifies our strengths, shows our commanders and NCOs and non-commissioned officers what we need to do to train more in order to make sure our soldiers are skilled, adaptable, and lethal. This event brings camaraderie number one because you're in it to win it. No matter what it is, we're bringing the best of the best in the soldiers and if you're out here doing what you've got to do, it's easy to bring that camaraderie. It builds out a spirit of core, not only within ourselves but within the team and also within our brigade. I think if you look at cohesion within the 89th and what a competition like this does is the interaction between not just the command teams that are here but the soldiers themselves hearing about how their units do something, what's important to their leadership back home, some of the best practices, what they did maybe to train to get here, things like that and they can share some of those ideas, share some of those practices and then they make contact so every few years we PCS or we move around the world and you run into these people again and I think that's important. So I think competitions like this do bring soldiers together, builds cohesion. I think if you spend any time around any of the four teams are out here and just see how they talk to each other, see how they interact with each other, it's deeper than maybe working in the motor pool together or something like that. They've been through some pretty rigorous events so far and I think all of that brings a team closer together.