Chris Landry, 28, the middle son of Dale and Tina Landry, has been giving his mother grey hair for the last two and a half decades. He started young. Very young. In fact, he can remember his exact age when he recognized – and embraced – a daredevil spirit that is with him to this day.
By all accounts, he was blissfully unbothered about putting himself in jeopardy, or, for that matter, worrying his patient mom who witnessed his antics as he continually tested his limits.
At a mere 4 years of age, he remembers, he climbed to the very top of a 70-foot pecan tree in the family’s backyard where his mother caught him dangling riotously in between the branches, shouting at him to get down. That, he laughed, was the first time he startled her. But most certainly not the last.
Not even a year later, he says, she caught him on the roof of the family’s two-story guesthouse when – after they had locked eyes – he took a defiant running start, jumping off, and sliding down a trampoline leaning against an exterior wall.
Shortly thereafter, his preoccupation with high places literally accelerated to include the need for speed. By 11, he took to riding the family four-wheeler. Faster, he thought. I need to make it go faster.
Pedal to the proverbial metal, he did, in fact, make it go faster, he said. Speed, he learned, requires foresight. And sometimes swerving before racing headlong into a fence. He walked away without a scratch, he remembered. No spankings even from the ever-patient mom. No broken bones, either, he says. Those came later.
To meet Landry when he is content to sit still and momentarily tethered to a chair reveals the young man steadily in control of the breakneck pace of his life. Dressed in casual cowboy garb, he tips the brim of his black felt cattleman’s style cowboy hat before removing it politely.
He looks up from a strong chiseled chin, slightly lowered and his raised eyes seem curiously alert, and his manners seem borrowed from another time, replete with a slow, soft drawl, a dab of shyness, and a slight sense of hesitation for conversation that is punctuated with more “ma’ams” than an entire Larry McMurtry novel.
At 5’6, he is somewhat on the slightly built side but make no doubt about it. He is muscular, as if years of physical discipline have molded him into a multidimensional man: part speed demon and part adrenaline junky, all born from the heart of a soldier and risk-taker – he has spent the better part of his youth defying gravity, most of the laws of physics, and – well – boundaries in general.
But, those qualities aside, he is who he is and he does what he does for a reason more significant than the rush that comes from all of it.
Those who know Landry know something else about him: when not in head to toe cowboy gear, he wears a completely different kind of uniform as a cadet in the A&M-Central Texas ROTC program.
He is more than any one thing it seems: part dutiful if not oblivious son. Part daredevil and part rule follower. A military man with focused ambition and a desire to serve. A student and scholar and, if all goes well, an officer in the making. And in between all of those obligations, there is yet another side: an experienced competitive bull rider.
Even at his relatively young age, Landry has a decade of increasingly impressive military service under his belt. After graduating high school in 2015, he entered the Army as a 68Whiskey: in layman’s terms, a combat medic. It suited him, he said, naturally combining his desire to help those in the most need with his appetite for adrenaline.
He excelled over the first years, moving quickly through the ranks from E-2 to E-3 – the only one to do so in a platoon of 60 other soldiers. He made E-5 while at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, then Fort Carson and Evans Army Community Hospital, and eventually, an E-6 while serving as a medical advisor at the Security Forces Assistance Brigade and deployed to the United Arab Emirates and Jordan.
Not very much stops Landry. Neither hair raising high places or shot from a cannon speed. It is not impulsive, he explains. It is just who he is. No more no less. And it isn’t like he hasn’t known obstacles because he has.
As he moved from one duty assignment to another, he had decided to pursue his degree, enrolling in Purdue Global where he held down a perfect 4.0 grade point average and earned an associate’s degree in health sciences after having originally stopped out after the first semester.
That’s right. This young man – straight as an arrow moving at mach speed – got slowed down after first starting his coursework by a significant life event. But his reason for stopping wasn’t the balancing of military duties and academic work.
The pause he took from college was made necessary by something much more personal than work: the birth of his daughter, he said, quickly adding that she was both the reason he paused and the reason he went back and completed the degree without further interruption.
Reassigned to Fort Hood, now Fort Cavazos, he had been promoted before he even got there – this time to E-6. He had heard about the Army’s Green to Gold program. Heard about how stiff the competition for it was.
Competition never bothered him, but he isn’t big-headed about it. In fact, his brand of competitiveness is on the stealthy side of quiet. It is as much a part of him as his other traits, brought out by his military service and something altogether unexpected: competitive bull riding.
Yes. The same young man who rose from combat medic to health services advisor to a cadet for commissioning via the U.S. Army’s Green to Gold Program is the same man who climbs voluntarily into a chute, his lower body both spread eagle across the back of a 2,000-pound angry bull, arms and sometimes legs mostly akimbo – all while holding on for dear life to the count of eight.
He had just been promoted to E-7, he says, when he learned that he had been selected to join the A&M-Central Texas ROTC program. And he took the news about like anyone would have predicted: no bravado. No bragging. Just a simple determination won a spot been accepted, and he took the news quietly and without bravado, determined to make those who endorsed him glad that they did.
“Almost 3,000 applicants were in the same pool I was in,” Landry said, again demonstrating command of his cool, absent any whiff of nonchalance. “There’s competition in anything that is worthwhile, of course. But this,” he paused, “this was next level for sure.”
Now, both an ROTC cadet and an undergraduate student in business administration with a minor in military science, Landry is proud to say that he is one of only two cadets in the program to hold a perfect 4.0 grade point average.
And it is not all about the classroom – as important as that is. Physical training before sunrise on most days, and then timed runs through the obstacle course on campus or off and running on a multi-mile run somewhere through the university’s 672-acre campus.
Captain Abraham Orozco, assistant professor of military science, says that the training cadets are required to master is rigorous – for a reason.
“These cadets are going to be a leader of enlisted men and women who deserve the very best we can train,” he said. “And there is also an element of legacy to what they are doing.
“Our program has commissioned 261 second lieutenants in the 15 years, and in all of those years, our cadets have ranked in the top 10% of national competitions for physical and intellectual and leadership abilities.”
But even Captain Orozco has to admit that he holds his breath a little bit when Landry tells him about the next competition he’s training for – or, for that matter, the number of bones he has broken by putting himself between God and the business end of a bull: Two broken arms, a broken foot, and three ribs.
For himself, Landry begrudges none of it. In the last three years, he says, he has won second place at a veteran’s bull riding event in Decatur and fourth place at the jackpot in Marion in 2022. And belt buckles the size of license plates. Sterling silver with engravings and gold etchings.
It doesn’t sound like a very fair trade for broken bones, but Landry is as proud of the breaks as he is the buckles. Nothing of any real value ever comes without some kind of competition, he muses. Some kind of competition. That and a whole lot of discipline.
He can’t say if any of his forefathers and mothers ever scaled ridiculously high places or lusted after eye watering mach speed. Probably not.But what he does know is that his sister has traced their family’s roots, discovering great great grandfathers who fought in the Revolutionary War. And their offspring in forthcoming generations, moving from Canada to Maine. Maine to the Southeastern Coast. And from there to Louisiana.
Landry is moving through similar stages of life, he muses. Perhaps fulfilling, before he even knew about them, a lineage inspired by previous generations of daredevils and officers.
This time next year, he hopes, he will be matching with a duty assignment, accepting second lieutenant’s rank, completing his undergraduate degree, and stepping into the rest of his life. And, for the record, he has no intention of foregoing the bull riding anytime soon.