Tyler Jewkes, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by John C. Worsencroft, December 14, 2009: Saving the Legacy tape no. IA-26

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Tyler Jewke 14 mb r 2009 JCW: Physically, you don 't exactly paint yourself as a big brawny guy but you wer in shape. You said you played sports in high school and stuff. T J: Right. But I would say in comparison to most of the other guys in the platoon, I was a little ways behind. I didn 't feel like I had a very good muscular structure and I probably was a good twenty pounds overweight, even for my size. It wasn't that I couldn't perform a lot of the responsibilities or duties. I mean you have guys in there ... we had one guy that he couldn't do a single pushup. I wasn't to that level. I could at least knock out twenty to thirty pushups, but it just wasn't anywhere near the level I thought I needed to be to be able to do well there. JCW: Did you feel like you were having to play catch-up a lot of the time? TJ: Not really. I felt like I was, like I developed and grew a lot quicker. I had, my battle buddy that I had there, Private Lamb, us two, we did pushups and sit-ups every single night. We worked out every night on top of being smoked all day and then do your PT in the morning that we did every day. So I started to see changes really fast as far as being able to increase my pushups, being able to increase my sit-ups, running the two mile faster, to where at the end of it I almost maxed the PT test. I didn 't really feel like I was playing catch up; it's just a matter that I feel like I really needed to try harder if I was going to be able to get in the top standard. JCW: Talk to me about battle buddies, that program. TJ: For me it was extremely beneficial because this was my first time away from home and I was pretty set on serving a LDS mission. So for me it, a lot of it was trying to maintain my mindset, not changing who I was to kind of appease other people to make friends, those sort of things. So when I was assigned to my battle buddy, he was pretty 8