FORT SILL, Okla. (Jan. 29, 2015) -- Twenty Soldiers from 68th Headquarters Support Company (HSC) joined their battalion chaplain on a Warrior Adventure Quest (WAQ) to an indoor go-kart track in Oklahoma City.
The day's goals were to relieve stress, build camaraderie and develop leadership skills.
The WAQ is a program designed and run by the Directorate of Family and Morale, Welfare and Recreation for units to undertake high-adrenaline activities like rock climbing, skydiving or white-water rafting in a safe environment for the purposes of team building, and morale and stress relief in times of transition. Often taken by a unit following redeployment as a means of decompression and resiliency, the WAQ can also be used to retain esprit de corps and mission readiness.
Chaplain Eric Bey of the 168th HSC explained in the classroom portion of the event that great stressors in life must be minimized if a Soldier is to remain healthy and resilient. The most stressful event in a Soldier's career and life is often combat and deployment, a time when adrenaline runs high and is often interwoven with great boredom and heightened senses. These feelings and emotions do not simply disappear when the warrior comes home, so it is necessary to undertake actions to readjust to garrison and family life.
"Combat changes every Soldier," Bey explained to his Soldiers. "You adapt to your environment to accomplish your mission, and when you get home you must find healthy ways to blow off steam and mitigate high-risk behaviors. Life and resiliency is a process, never a destination, you must always work at it."
While this particular group of Soldiers is not recently home from overseas, the program is still beneficial for their training and mission readiness by developing leadership skills and unit morale. Though not as stressful as a deployment, the Soldiers of the 168th HSC are facing the stresses of an upcoming inactivation and the unknowns of future assignments and transitions.
"It's a crazy time in the Army with downsizing and reorganizations," said Pfc. Christopher Cummings. "But, something like this is a time to put all of that to the side, bond with my battle buddies and interact in a positive way. This really reminds me what the Army is: a team."
At the track, the Soldiers familiarized themselves with the layout and machines before being divided into racing teams where team leaders were charged with developing a race plan and inspiring the team to victory. Entering the competition, most racers believed that racing was an individual sport, but found that a strong team working together could speed up slower drivers and slow down the best drivers on the other team.
The winning team's leader, Spc. Sydni Stephens, did exactly that and explained it best.
"It seems like it's just you and the cart, and the teams that looked at it that way failed, but we raced as a team, helping our drivers and slowing down the others. At the end of the race, the score was calculated by averaging every driver's time, so the best score is made by helping the slower drivers, not the fastest one," said Stephens.
The success of programs like this one can be seen by studying trends, statistics and sociology, but the success of a single quest can best be seen in the faces of Soldiers.
The weary and furrowed brows seen in the morning were replaced with smiles. The clicks and beeps of camera-phones were drowned out by the laughing and joyous conversations of friends -- comrades ready to work and fight together to accomplish any mission, whether that call to action featured go-karts or convoys.
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