Top of the Class

What Sergeant First Class Alexander Faba Spicer just pulled off at Fort Bliss.

Sergeant First Class Alexander Faba Spicer just graduated Master Leader Course at the Sergeants Major Academy. Fort Bliss, El Paso.

Top of his class. 99.265% GPA.

He also walked out with a coin from the Army for an innovation they're adopting course-wide. The civilian course developers, the people whose job is to teach this stuff, asked him to hand over his work so they could publish it Army-wide.

Alexander's a combat medic. Fourteen and a half years in. 68W. Platoon Sergeant for the 141st Medical Company, Connecticut Army National Guard.

He's also been wearing our gear for a long time. That's why we're writing this.

What he actually did

The Sergeants Major Academy at Fort Bliss is where the Army's senior enlisted leadership gets built. Master Leader Course is one of the courses it runs for Sergeants First Class. That's the rank that quietly holds most Army units together. It's the course where you stop thinking about your platoon, your company, your battalion, and start learning to lead at the institutional level.

People who go through it usually come back better at the job.

Some come back top of the class. Very few come back having designed something the Army decides to roll out across the entire force.

That's the part that matters most. He didn't just outscore everyone in the room. He built something inside the course good enough that the people who built the course want their name on it.

For a final three-day group exercise, they made him the commander. He built a tracking mechanism for it. His team crushed the exercise. The civilian course developers came up afterward and asked him to send it over. They're going to publish it Army-wide.

He got a coin for it. An Army recognition tradition. You don't get one of those for showing up.

Why this matters more than the GPA

Anyone can study harder than the rest of their class. Plenty of people do.

Not everyone walks into a Sergeants Major Academy course expecting to perform at the top. Fewer still build something inside the course good enough that the institution wants to keep it.

That's not test-taking. That's the difference between meeting the standard and raising it.

And here's the thing. Alexander is National Guard. That means he has a day job too. A life. A community. A regular Tuesday. While everyone else was living their Tuesday, he was training to save soldiers' lives. Then he went down to Fort Bliss on his own time, smashed a senior leadership course, and built something the Army is keeping.

That's the kind of person who wears our clothes. That's who we make them for.

The ones still doing the work

This piece is about the people still doing the work. The ones we don't usually thank because they're still here, still on shift, still getting up at 0500.

Combat medics carry a particular weight. They're the ones who run toward the worst moments. Their job is to keep someone else's son or daughter alive long enough to make it home.

Alexander has been doing that job for fourteen and a half years.

When we say Work Harder. Stay Humble. Raise The Standard, that's not something a marketing team came up with. It's what people like him already do. We just made the clothes to remind them somebody sees it.

To Alexander

Brother, we see you. Congratulations on MLC. Congratulations on the coin. Congratulations on the fact that some sergeant going through Fort Bliss next year is going to learn something better because of work you did this month.

We're honored you wore our gear through it.

To everyone reading this

You probably know someone like Alexander. Maybe they're in your family. Maybe they're someone you served with. Maybe they're the quiet person at your job who you know used to be in.

If they exist in your life, this weekend is a good time to tell them you see them.

Work Harder. Stay Humble. Raise The Standard.

— The RTS Team