Military helicopters flew low as thousands of soldiers pushed through a wall of smoke and crested a hilltop in Colorado with the sounds of nearby machine gunfire. In one of the largest annual mass PT events in the military, the Army’s 4th Infantry Division finished its annual Ivy Week on June 14 with huge obstacle course and team fitness event in honor of the division’s mission in the Normandy landings.
Photographs of the annual event released by the division showed — as they do nearly every time the division does one of these — thousands of troops swarming, horde-like, over landscapes and obstacles, often through smoke and water cannons, a visual mix of good Army training and a zombie apocolypse.
The event caps Ivy Week — a play on the “IV” numerals of the division’s name — that honors the unit’s role in D-Day landings. Soldiers from the 4th ID landed on Utah Beach on D-Day, tasked with crossing two miles of terrain, facing both natural obstacles and enemy resistance, to seize German artillery. The division-wide obstacle course mimics those D-Day orders, with a 2.5 mile course and a wide range of team and individual challenges along the way.
“It serves as a powerful reminder of the dedication and determination that Soldiers within the 4th Infantry Division demonstrate every day,” said 4th Infantry Division spokesman Lt. Col. Joey Payton. “This year’s event was named in honor of Utah Beach, where more than 20,000 4th Infantry Division Soldiers embarked to help liberate Europe during World War II.”
The division holds the division-wide PT event to build morale and demonstrate unit readiness. The event kicked off at 6:30 a.m., with 20 elements of approximately 120 to 250 Soldiers from battalions across the division.
The soldiers were tasked with running 2.5 miles, with 1,000 feet of elevation gain, while carrying an assortment of fuel jugs, kettlebells, stretchers, and a 400-lb. sandbag a they navigated full-height trenches. They then had to low crawl under extensive barbed wire and concertina wire obstacles. Then, they traversed a wall of ocean containers as an AH-64 Apache flew low over their heads and water hoses soaked them.
“Through sweat and will, soldiers bonded as they pushed their limits together, fostering a sense of unity and shared purpose while striving for recognition as the division’s best battalion,” Payton said. “The annual event not only promotes physical fitness but reinforces the division’s commitment to readiness and resilience.”
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The training event drummed up enough noise that the 4th Infantry Division notified local neighborhoods that the training would create a large amount of noise and that people may see smoke drifting toward the neighborhoods downwind from the training event.
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