The following story is dedicated to MamaKat's little sister, the memory spurred by a comment MK made on JoeZ's thread.
In 1985 the truck driving school at Fort Leonard Wood found itself "critically short" of instructors.  Things like this still happen, even in the computer age, and the solution is usually drastic.  Someone up the chain tells the manpower people at Department of the Army to "fix it" and suddenly orders are cut and folks come flooding in from all over.  I think the magic number was fifty.  I was one of them.  We had just about two years at Fort Ord when I got pulled to go to Leonard Wood.  Within a few weeks that summer, all these E6s and E7s arrived.  Every day new folks were showing up and the first question everyone asked you was "What's your date-of-rank?"  Some because they were jockeying for a "boss" job, some because they weren't.  But that isn't what I wanted to tell ya; I'll save that whole mess for another time.  Tonight I want to tell you about Physical Training (PT) and competitiveness and attitudes.
Normally, PT belongs to the NCOs.  At the school at Leonard Wood we had a Captain for a Course Chief who felt that NCOs in a large group were not to be trusted.  The ratio is usually something like ten to forty junior soldiers to each senior NCO.  We had about sixty NCOs and maybe a dozen junior ranks.  So maybe he had a point;  I don't know.  I just know that he wanted to make sure we got a good workout for our money.  The problem was that many of us had come from serious units (I had been in the 7th Infantry Division at Fort Ord where physical training is more worshipped than anything) and our PT standards were a bit above the Captain's.  And of course, there was a lot of jesting and trash-talk among the sergeants over who was in best shape and all.  Now that the stage has been set, let me tell you about a cold winter morning in Missouri.
When the weather got extreme, we would move inside rather than cancel PT.  On this one morning it didn't seem that cold but we were told to go to the gym for PT.  We walked in and got formed up in a roughly correct PT formation.  The Captain told us we had a little treat this morning, a young buck sergeant from our Brigade was going to lead the PT.  He introduced us to this young blonde girl who looked to be about 15 years old and stood all of 5'2".  She was slender, kinda cute, dressed in a sparkly spandex outfit, and she carried a "boom box" up to the front with her.  The ponytail, the leg-warmers, and the boom box should have warned us...but instead of paying attention to the clues, the crowd began to make some comments about the size and appearance of our PT instructor, questioning her qualifications and announcing how we were gonna "smoke her butt".  Not too many of us had had any experience with aerobic exercise...MamaCharlie had been doing it in Germany for a while, but in my mind it was something girls did.  
So we started off with some standard stretching and warm-up exercises;  she had us running in place between the different events, and then she called out for us to stop and stretch.  We had been going at it for about twenty minutes and many thought we were done.  Nope.  The boom box cranked up some pretty movin' tunes, and the little buck sergeant called out to start running in place again and it began in earnest.  For the next forty minutes she smoked all us big boys...to the point that some had to stop and catch their breath to keep from puking.  We did all those silly dance moves;  we slid and shuffled and did the Hustle, and in between we started to "feel the burn".  It was almost comical to watch all those hard-core warriors brought to the point of exhaustion by a bouncy little blonde girl who ended by thanking us and announcing that she had to rush off because her regular class started in a few minutes and she wanted to be on time...she had to lead the group again.
After that morning, there was a lot less trash-talking about who had the hardest PT program.  And whenever PT was moved indoors, there was a lot of nervous glancing around until it was determined if there were any little blondes hanging around.  Sometimes she would be there, sometimes not...but the anticipation always was.  I have to admit, that first experience opened my eyes.  It changed my attitude about the value of the current PT program and I incorporated aerobics into the mix whenever I was in charge.  By the time I got to be a First Sergeant, I was a devotee of the aerobics.  But I never got close to that little blonde from Brigade...I couldn't hold the light for her to go by.