SITUATIONAL QUESTIONS ARMY PROMOTION BOARD WITH CORRECT ANSWERS

You receive a phone call at 0200 on Saturday morning/Friday night. It is one of your Soldiers who says that he has been out drinking and needs a ride home. How do you respond? Correct Answers Ask the Soldier if he is okay. If the Soldier is okay and functioning, see if anyone else is with him. Soldiers should always be out as battle buddies and he may have friends that need assistance as well. Find out the Soldier's location and ensure that he understands he must not drive in any circumstances if he drove there. Is the Soldier capable of calling an uber or taxi ride? This is the time for you to make a judgment call, if the Soldier can do this and you are confident in it, you may ask him to call himself an uber and inform you when it arrives and when he is safely home. If the Soldier does not seem capable of doing this, you may need to drive yourself to his location and get him safely home or call someone capable of doing so. After the Soldier is safe and secure, the following day you should prepare a counseling documenting what happened. The counseling should be an event-oriented counseling which summarizes the decisions made by that Soldier. Areas of emphasis should be on the Soldier developing a better plan when drinking, identifying if the Soldier has a drinking problem and referring him to the appropriate resources, if the Soldier is under 21 taking appropriate action, emphasizing the Soldier did the right thing by notifying you before he got into trouble, and serving as documentation that this Soldier had an incident should a pattern develop or a future incident occur. One of your Soldiers just failed an APFT. Describe the steps you would take beginning after the failure. Correct Answers The first thing that needs to be done is the Soldier needs to be counseled (Sample APFT Failure Counseling). During that counseling it is important to explain to the Soldier the consequences they are facing in terms of their flag, possible separation, and career limitations. The Army assigns physical fitness as an individual responsibility, and it is. My responsibility as a leader is not to put so much effort into a Soldier that they can only pass a PT test with me riding them and doing remedial PT, but to transform them into a self-sufficient Soldier. I need to find out why this Soldier failed (out of shape, poor diet, illness, home issue, or just THS) and develop a plan of action to fix it. For some Soldiers yelling at them to be better will be effective, for some just extra PT will fix their issue, but for others a different plan of action is needed and that will depend on the Soldier. Not everyone is Army material, and as the SMA has made clear, physical fitness is essential to what we do. As I said earlier, PT is an individual responsibility, and my role is to figure out how to motivate this Soldier to achieve the standard, give them the proper tools and information to succeed, and then ensure that they are following the plan of action. If they do not want to be better, then I will personally initiate separation. I do not want a Soldier, with an identified lack of motivation, to serve in this Army. This is your Army, this is my Army, but most importantly this is America's Army. I want to do everything in my power to preserve this Army and this nation for the next generation-whether that means staying late to do remedial PT, showing my Soldier to the library to check out a nutrition book, ensuring they have a proper rest plan, or separating them from the military.