Second Lt. Dan Carpenter poses for a portrait at the Forrest Hills Climbing Complex. Photo by Sammy Jo Hester/LTC PAO
By Caitlin VanOverberghe
Staff writer
Second Lt. Daniel Carpenter remembers being a child, sitting at barbeques at his family’s home in Italy and listening to stories told by his father and his fellow Soldiers.
It was those accounts of things they had done and experienced in the military that led Carpenter to consider an Army career himself.
“I wanted to be like my dad,” he said. “I wanted to have these cool stories.”
Carpenter is beginning to collect his own stories as a staff member of the Leader’s Training Course Leadership Development Committee this summer. The committee is charged with training company cadre on assessing Cadet performance.
After Carpenter’s family returned to the States from overseas, he completed high school in Maryland, where his father was stationed at Fort Meade. At his father’s urging after graduation, Carpenter started taking classes at a community college and later transferred to the University of Maryland to study criminal justice.
One day, he stopped by the ROTC office.
After a couple questions and a high score on a physical fitness test, he was soon on his way to the Leader’s Training Course — and the beginning of his military life.
Excited and apprehensive, Carpenter gathered some of his father’s old gear, ordered a pair of boots off eBay and started training on his own at home. He filled an old rucksack with a plastic bag of dirt – later realizing it was close to 70 pounds when it should’ve only been 35 pounds – and started marching.
“I thought it would be easy – no big deal,” he said. “I made it like a mile before my feet turned into hamburger because the boots weren’t broken in.”
The extra practice did give him a leg up on the other Cadets, he said.
Carpenter’s father was able to give him a few tips about life in the barracks – roll your clothes to save space and wake up early to shave so you aren’t fighting for space in the bathroom.
While LTC was his first military experience, Carpenter stood out. But not always for the right reasons.
He remembers doing countless push-ups for being sarcastic and for once falling asleep on a dryer in the barracks during fire guard duty. Despite that, he was also placed into a few leadership positions, such as squad leader.
“Daniel, like all extraverts, displays great confidence and openness,” said 2nd Lt. Alan Chang, who met Carpenter at LTC two years ago. The two continued their friendship at the University of Maryland in ROTC.
“If you need someone’s honest opinion or answer on a subject at hand, he will tell you without regrets — even to a colonel. If he gets called on and does not know the answer, he will say so.”
Overcoming physical challenges came naturally to Carpenter, who described his experience at the course as a 29-day summer camp.
“It’s designed for people who like this kind of stuff. People who want to go places, people who are ambitious,” he said. “I was doing things that some people never get to do in their lives. It was awesome.”
The hardest thing for Carpenter at LTC, besides the classes – he and a friend used to punch each other to stay awake – was dealing with his fear of heights. The 51-foot tall rappel tower scared him the most. In his mind, if something went wrong, he had no time to correct before hitting the ground.
“Once I did it, it was the most fun I had in all of LTC,” he said. “I went up there so many times that they actually told me that I couldn’t go up anymore. You’re only supposed to do it twice, and I did it six or seven times. Conquering your fears is something that they make you do here.”
Carpenter returned to school and decided to commission. At the commissioning ceremony this spring, his father administered the oath of office. Some of the Soldiers who swapped stories with his father back in Italy gifted Carpenter his dad’s old Calvary saber.
“I asked him one time why he wanted to be a officer in the military,” Chang said. “He answered, ‘To lead and care for my Soldiers.’ Working with him in ROTC, I get to see many of his discussions involved in caring for our fellow Cadets. Daniel, although an officer, instead of watching his platoon doing PT in the rain and cold, will be pushing it out with them.”