Thread by @chadgarland

She woke before dawn for rucks & runs on base in Africa.

Lifted daily. Did high-intensity training.

At the peak, she was doing 3 workouts a day.

But after 3 months of prep, Sgt. Liliana Munday was still nervous.

“I almost had an aneurysm, I was so scared,” she said.

🧵👇

Since about 1974, French troops in Djibouti have taken on the grueling 5-day desert commando course.

U.S. troops have done the course in recent years.

This go-round, 40 U.S. troops signed up, a military statement said.

Munday was among them.

Hosted by the French 5th Overseas Interarms Regiment at the Le Centre D'entraînement Au Combat de Djibouti, the course includes:

-night obstacle course.
-mountain confidence course.
-swimming course.
-combatives training.
-desert survival skills.

For Munday, it was daunting.

Day 1 involved a 5 kilometer ruck-run with a full kit.

Then a physical fitness test.

And rope climbs.

A weak spot for Munday.

“I was nervous because rope climbs are very hard for me and in training I could only do one,” she said.

Her training partner, Army Staff Sgt. Samuel Perez, could see she was nervous as they watched others struggle.

“I was there telling her she could do it. I knew she could,” Perez said.

He was not wrong.

She proved it.

The rope climb success gave her a boost of confidence.

“For some reason, after completing that first day, I was good,” she said.

“I started to feel like I could do this thing and I proved to my squad that I was here to work and I deserved to be here.”

But Munday had yet to face her most difficult challenge in the course…

...the mountain obstacle course.

It’s over 650 feet up.

Participants had to jump to 5 platforms, across wide gaps, to grab a steel pole and slide to the ground.

And day 3 nearly broke her.

She’d rucked nonstop from one training spot to another.

“Your joints just start to scream. It’s painful.”

She considered quitting.

“I kept thinking, ‘I cannot take this pain anymore. I’m almost done but I cannot do it anymore.’”

But she pushed on.

In the end, she earned the French Desert Commando badge.

It’s a black and gold pin featuring a scorpion over a silhouette of Djibouti.

“I’m now able to look back and say, ‘I did that. We did that,’” she said, smiling.

She credited her persistence to her forebears.

Specifically, two of the strongest people she knows.

Her mom and grandma.

“They’re such strong women and they never let me quit when I was younger,” she said.

Of course they were proud.

Now she's encouraging others to go for it.

“Someone I work with said he wanted to do the FDCC but he didn’t think he was ready,” she said. “I said, ‘Sir, you’re never going to be ready.’ I didn’t think I was ready. But I got ready.”

Source for quotes and photos of Munday:

Other photos also from various @DVIDSHub galleries.dvidshub.net/news/460289/us…

Oh, here are a couple more photos from the course, posted on the Facebook page of the 1st Battalion, 179th Infantry Regiment.