My Drill Sergeant Gave Me One Rule and It Saved My Life Downrange

In basic training I was convinced Drill Sergeant Colby existed only to ruin my life. He was a lean, quiet man who almost never yelled, which somehow made him scarier than the ones who did. He had one line he repeated until it lost all meaning. Take care of your feet, and your feet will take care of you.

We thought it was a joke. Boot socks. Foot powder. Draining a blister the right way instead of ripping the skin. He would make us sit in a circle and inspect our own feet like it was the most important mission in the Army. Guys who let their socks bunch up got smoked. Guys with wet feet got smoked harder. I rolled my eyes so many times I am surprised they did not fall out.

I graduated, forgot most of what I learned, and remembered almost nothing about Colby except that one line, which stuck in my head like a jingle you cannot shake.

Fast forward two years. I was overseas, in a mountainous place I am not going to name, attached to a unit doing long foot patrols at altitude. The cold up there was a living thing. It got into the seams of everything. Guys were tough, guys were fit, but the mountains do not care how many push-ups you can do.

On the third day of a long movement, our timeline fell apart. What was supposed to be one night out turned into three. The weather turned. We were wet, we were high up, and we were not going anywhere fast. That is when I watched fitness stop mattering and small habits start deciding everything.

I had two of the strongest guys in the platoon start limping by the second night. One of them, a former college wrestler, could barely put weight on his left foot by morning. When the docs finally got his boot off, the skin was in bad shape. Cold, wet, neglected. It was the kind of injury that ends up on a medical board, the kind that follows you home.

And there I was, average at best, no wrestler, no marathon man, still walking. Because somewhere in the back of my skull a quiet man was saying, take care of your feet. I had changed my socks in the dark under a poncho with my hands shaking. I had dried my feet against my own stomach because it was the only warm thing available, which is a trick nobody tells you about in the brochures. I had powdered, I had rotated, I had babied those feet like they were the last two I would ever get.

We got extracted eventually. Everyone lived. But two good men came off that mountain in worse shape than they went up, and it had nothing to do with courage. It had to do with a thirty second habit drilled into me by a man I once wished would fall down a flight of stairs.

When I got back stateside I tried to find Colby. I wanted to tell him. I never did track him down -- he had moved on to another post, and the Army is a big place. But I tell every new soldier I meet the same thing now, in the same flat voice he used.

Take care of your feet, and your feet will take care of you. They laugh. They roll their eyes. I let them. One day, somewhere cold and far from home, one of them will remember, and it will mean the difference between walking out and being carried.