101st soldiers win back-to-back Best Sapper titles

Two captains from the 101st Airborne Division have now become the first two Soldiers to win the Army’s Best Sapper competition two years in a row.

Captains. Matthew Cushing and Joseph Palazini, both company commanders of the 21st Brigade Engineer Battalion, 3rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team at Fort Campbell, outlasted teams from the 3rd Ranger Battalion and two cadets from West Point to win the four-day competition at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. Each of the three teams topped the Sapper leaderboard during the competition, but Cushing and Palazini took over the top spot during a ruck march late Sunday night and remained on top during a final 3-mile capstone physical fitness event.

Teams started the final event with a helicopter flight to the starting line and then began the run, with eight stations along the way, including rope climbing, tire changing, trash carrying and sledding. The participants ended the run and the competition by running through the gate of a castle, the symbol of army combat engineers.

Over the course of the competition, teams competed in both general infantry skills such as mountaineering, marksmanship, land navigation and reconnaissance as well as Sapper-specific events such as cutting steel beams with welding tools, breaking a wire obstacle, sawing wood, searching for landmines and a Breach of Bangalore.

For Cushing and Palazine, the repeat victory came after a very different preparation. The two were able to train together in 2023, but both soldiers were deployed for much of the lead-up to this year’s competition.

“This year was very different. He was in Romania. I was in Germany. So we talked on the phone a few times and we talked about goals for what we should be doing physically, and then we executed on our own for a few months,” Cushing told Task & Purpose. “For the most part, we’ve tried to stick to it. It got quite busy, at least on the German side of the house.”

Despite their distance training, the two were able to spend a week together in Germany, where they began studying for the technical aspects of the competition. The captains spent time contacting their battalion’s subject matter experts, “whether it was the field artillery guys for the call to fire, the medics for E3B medical training, the heavy weapons first sergeant for marksmanship,” Cushing said.

The most difficult technical task was the mine detector event, the captains said.

“It’s something that we as a whole don’t practice that much and especially as officers we certainly don’t get the training in it,” Cushing said. “How to do noise cancellation when there are several in the same area, how to search properly and what each sound means – it took a second to understand.”

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A sapper or combat engineer belongs to the army’s technical expertise used to perform tasks such as breaching fortifications, demolition work, building bridges, laying or clearing minefields, preparing field defenses and building roads and airports.

“It’s the military’s multi-tool. A problem comes up, everyone looks to the sapper to fix it and solve it,” Cushing said. “We can’t let someone else do it. It’s just us.”

The three-day competition originally began in 2005 and is open to teams of two to compete each year – a departure from other Army-wide competitions.

The physical portion of the competition includes nine exercises that soldiers must complete as a team while carrying a 40-pound crater load canister without touching the ground. It includes 50 front squats, nine burpees, 50 hex bar deadlifts, seven log cradles, 10 crater can-ups, 50-meter walking lunges, 50 thrusters, a 200-meter carry and a three-mile run without the bus.

Another team involving two female sappers – including half of an Army Sapper and Ranger pair – also took part in the competition, but were eliminated before the final round.

“One of the outcomes of last year’s competition is that we realized that we are not the strongest team, just as we are not the most physically fit team. There are some absolute animals here, so we’ve been trying to improve our physical fitness for this year,” Cushing said, adding that their goal was to run 26 miles in boots and uniform at an eight-minute pace.

The team enhanced their long-distance cardio with high-intensity interval training, or HIIT, workouts every other day followed by long runs and CrossFit-style workouts with full-body barbell exercises “to move a lot of weight a lot of distance in a short time,” said Palazini.

“If you can do that for anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes at maximum heart rate, you’ll know when it’s time for the race, where your body is when you have that high heart rate,” Palazini said.

The first day during the non-standard physical fitness test, the team ran three miles and later that evening ran four miles before embarking on a land navigation exercise “where we covered 15 miles on foot,” Palazini said.

“All those physical events happened long before we got to the technical aspects of it,” Palazini said. “What was important was that you are in shape, that you can get through those physical events, and once you are tired, once you are fatigued, how can you perform in those technical events. That was probably the hardest thing for us.”

Cushing — who is related to a Civil War Medal of Honor recipient during the Battle of Gettysburg — was born at what was then Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and grew up outside Portland, Maine before attending the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He currently commands Alpha Company, 21 Brigade Engineer Battalion, which is currently on a rotational basis in Germany.

Palazini, from Massachusetts, studied mechanical engineering at the University of New Hampshire. He will assume command of the Third Brigade Combat Team headquarters next week.

The two said it was unlikely they would compete again, but would coach future competitors.

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