All of us got into groups of people who could run as fast as we could, and sometimes a little faster, to pace each other.� The whistle blew and we were off.� The course was not a hard one, a start line, one turn, and finish where you started.� Just as quickly as we were on the course I could see the groups form.� The fast, the not-so fast, and the slow, I was in the not-so fast group.� We were all doing well, as long as we remembered to breathe and keep running.� We finally got to the turn around which had seemed so far away, but came faster than we thought.� There were people there handing out little glasses of water, like we were in a marathon or something.� When we finished, we had to grab a little tongue depressor that had a number on it, to tell where we placed.� When someone came down the line, who looked like he just ran from the devil himself, he had bad news.� A guy from our platoon was running past the turn around, had gone to turn, and his right leg rolled at his ankle and collapsed under his body.� Five people, including myself, having run all that way and were tired and sore, suddenly found something inside us and sprinted as fast as we could to help out our team mate.� My heart was racing. �I never had run that fast in my life.� We all got there and saw him on the ground crumpled up in a ball, his leg under him, crying in pain.� Well, he was partly crying from pain, but he repeatedly said "Don't want to go home!"� I was scared, it was heard to think. �We didn?t know what to do, so we picked him up, all two hundred thirty pounds of him, two on each side and one in the back.� We carried with him; we had to get him there in less than thirteen minutes; we had thirty seconds.� Three hundred meters in twenty-nine seconds; he graduated.
We learned a valuable lesson that day.� The power of friendship and teamwork can conquer just about anything.� Trusting others is always a better way to go; and life has its ways of pulling people together, even if it has to throw a curve at you. |
