“It’s really a whole-body workout. I mean it’s a Stair-Stepper from hell. You work your calves, arms, thighs, I mean everything. You’re climbing completely vertical, lifting your own body weight. If you put on thirty pounds of safety equipment, plus the weight of the tools, and the different parts you have to carry, it may add two hundred extra pounds slung all over your body. So yeah, we get our workout.”

The pirate is former Texas Tech football coach Mike Leach, the soldiers are the members of the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M, and the fat little girlfriends—well, we’ll let Leach explain that one. “I worked with a guy from Louisiana in a camp one time—he used to say at the end of drills—he used to say—‘All right, that was a good job, man.’