How the Army’s cavalry scouts earn their spurs

The Army’s cavalry scouts are hard to miss. Cav scouts, as they’re often called, are the only soldiers who wear a black cowboy hat, aptly named a cav hat. The hats have a 3-inch curved brim, yellow-braided cord around the exterior bucket of the hat, and a black leather chin strap. It’s unique to cavalry scouts and one of the ways their uniforms pay homage to a heritage that dates back to America’s first horse soldiers. 

But for soldiers in this field, it’s not the hat that makes the cav scout, but the spurs. There are two kinds of spurs: Silver and gold. Silver spurs are awarded to cav scouts who pass a spur ride, while gold spurs are reserved for those who deploy to a combat zone.

Traditionally, cav scouts don’t get their silver spurs until they complete a spur ride, which is a grueling 24 to 48-hour evaluation of a new scout’s soldiering skills, similar to an Expert Infantryman Badge evaluation, but tailored to their mission as mechanized or heliborne reconaissance troops.

“You’re not full scout until you have them. That’s how I always looked at them,” said Matt Moorehead, who served as a cavalry scout for 20 years. 

From upstate New York, Moorehead joined the Army in 1998, deploying to both Iraq and Afghanistan. From day one, he was focused on earning his spurs.

“So, when I first joined in 1998, spurs were a huge selling point,” Moorehead said. “It was a discriminator that separated you from the rest of the Army. Like, that actually drove me on. Plus, I grew up on a farm where I had horses, so I was all about that shit.”

The spur ride

The tradition of earning one’s spurs, called the Order of the Spur, dates back to the Early 1800s, when President Andrew Jackson established a regiment of U.S. Dragoons, one of the earliest cavalry scout units in the Army. 

According to the Army, the Order of the Spur dictates that soldiers must be in good standing within their unit and have no disciplinary actions to participate in a spur ride, though some standards may vary.

“Veteran cavalry troopers may find some standards differing slightly from previous units, but the spirit and traditions embodied in this memorandum remain the same,” reads a Memorandum for Record from the 1st Cavalry Division, issued in 2021. 

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Moorehead’s first spur ride occurred in 1999 after arriving at 4th Squadron, 7th Cavalry Regiment, on Camp Gary Owen in South Korea. At that time, only sergeants and up were allowed to participate, he said. Moorehead’s first sergeant placed sign-up sheets on their hooches, but none of the unit’s noncommissioned officers chose to participate, so it was opened to junior soldiers, like Moorehead.

“Once you got told that you’re doing a spur ride, you’re no longer a soldier. You were a spur maggot,” Moorehead recalled. “So, you wore your uniform for the week, with PTs for the most part, and a black beanie to let everyone know we’re spur maggots.”

These days, the Army refers to “spur maggots” as “spur candidates.”

Thus began a week of training which ranged from ruck marches to PT and field exercises before culminating in a “spur board” where his knowledge was tested.

“They ask you, like, a million questions. But when I walked in there, I had one guy crouched underneath the desk saying he’s Batman and some other guy running around the room saying all sorts of stuff — it’s chaos,” Moorehead said. “It’s like a hazing, but I didn’t feel like I was getting hazed.”

His experience mirrored that of David Schlueter, another former Army cavalry scout who served 21 years in the Army and, like Moorehead, grew up in upstate New York and deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Push-ups, sit-ups, bear crawls, low crawl, high crawl, and stuff like that,” said Schlueter. “It’s supposed to be all in good fun. Nothing was too serious, nothing that would physically harm anybody. It’s just supposed to be all in good fun.”

After the spur ride, like so many things in the military, there’s a ball. In this case, it’s a spur ball where they all have drinks and are awarded their silver spurs at the night’s end.

“I always liked the traditions of the cavalrymen and the spurs. Getting the spurs is always super cool, too, because you finish and, like, holy shit, I finished this,” Moorehead said. 

As deployments picked up during the Global War on Terrorism era, spur rides became a way of testing a cav scout’s preparedness for combat, incorporating small unit tactics, live fire drills, weapons assembly and disassembly, ruck marches, first-aid training and other skills necessary for combat operations.

Silver and gold spurs

Cav scouts’ spurs come in two variations: Silver and gold, with the latter often referred to as “combat spurs.” Regardless of the color, the spur band is positioned around the heel of a cav scout’s boot and held in place by a black or tan strap that runs over the instep of the boot or footwear.

The most common design for spurs is the Prince of Wales spurs, which have a relatively simple appearance with a single metal point. (If a spur’s point is up, they are single; if they’re down, they are married.) While some cav scouts may don spurs more commonly seen in movies like “Tombstone,” which clink with every step, both Moorehead and Schlueter said it wasn’t the norm. 

While the spur ride is how cav scouts earn their silver spurs, the gold spurs are earned after deploying to a combat zone while assigned to the 1st Cavalry Division. A soldier or cav scout does not have to see combat to earn them, nor do they have to participate in a spur ride. 

“On my last deployment to Afghanistan, we were deployed way up north along the Uzbekistan border,” Schlueter said. “We didn’t see any combat, and when we got there, they gave out combat spurs.”

Schlueter has a few sets of spurs from his long career as a cav scout, but one stands out above them all — including his first set of silver spurs. Though he said his first deployment to Afghanistan was pretty tame, his second deployment was not, and his commanders had the foresight to make something special to commemorate the unit’s actions during that last trip overseas.

“They asked the units to save up any of the brass that was left over in the vehicles, whatever they could,” Schlueter said. “They had the brass that was saved up, melted it all down, and made it into spurs. So, that made it a little more meaningful to the guys in the units.”

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