Editor’s Note: “The Cruelest Climb,” an article published in the current issue of GX Magazine, an Army National Guard official publication, chronicles one of the most grueling marches in modern military history. During World War II, National Guard Soldiers from Wisconsin and Michigan serving in the famed Red Arrow Division, endured a 130-mile trek through a steaming jungle and over the 10,000-foot-high Owen Stanley Mountains in New Guinea en route to intense combat with the Japanese. Col. Mike Rand, the commander of today’s Red Arrow Soldiers in the 32nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team, offers his thoughts on the meaning of the Red Arrow.The Red Arrow to me is a reminder. A symbol that focuses on remembering the Soldiers who gave everything for their fellow Soldiers, their communities, their state and nation. The 32nd Infantry Division was created during World War I, formed out of the tough and hardy men of the states of Wisconsin and Michigan who went overseas to the battlefields of Europe and fought as tenaciously and as fiercely as their state’s symbols, the badger and the wolverine.