They say that there can be many paths to a single destination. So, when you’re given specific directions, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t others ways to get where you’re going.

So, when Staff Sgt. Robert McCain decided to take a different route to complete his mission, he was deemed a creative problem solver.

Even if it did draw a facepalm from some of his superiors. McCain was competing in the 2022 Best Ranger Competition, which uses mental and physical exercises to test the skill and grit of elite Airborne Rangers.

He and Sgt. 1st Class Ryan Peterson, who both serve as instructors with the Airborne and Ranger Training Brigade at Fort Benning, Georgia, competed with Team 41.

They finished 14th out of 51 teams who endured climbing, swimming, running and crawling events.

McCain had people talking about his performance in Saturday’s mystery event. The event had McCain and Peterson open a box by decoding a message from a Revolutionary War-era Culper Code, which would reveal the word used to open the lock on a box.

What McCain heard was “open the box.”

And his first instinct wasn’t to get cracking on that code.

It was to manhandle the box and see if that worked.

“Don’t break the box,” his instructor told him. “Don’t break the box.”

McCain was a bit confused.

“You mean I have to undo the lock? Because it doesn’t say that. It says open the locked ammo can,” McCain said.

His instructor just repeated herself,” “Don’t break the box. That’s the only box we have.”

McCain insisted that he wasn’t.

In the meantime, his partner was still working on the code while peeking over to see what McCain had going on.

“You do you, baby,” McCain told Peterson.

The video of McCain’s attempt to open the box ended up going viral.

He was deemed as an archetype of a non-commissioned officer in the military that finds creatives solutions to problems that are technically correct even if they are unconventional, according to Task & Purpose.

McCain’s mom Lou Ann says she wasn’t surprised by her son’s methods.

“That’s him,” she said.

Neither was Capt. Shawn Gardner who put the mystery event together.

“One thing I know escape room owners and managers would learn over time is, you have to plan for the worst thing to happen, right? So if you don’t give them specific instructions not to do that, they will probably have at least one — like him — that would try to do that,” Gardner said.

“And McCain too, I know him personally, we worked last year together. He has a very big personality and he is the kind of person that would go in and do that … It was really funny that he was the one to do that.”

Check out the hilarious video below.

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A *chef’s kiss* moment from today with Team 41 — during the mystery event, competitors were instructed to decode a message which would include the key to unlock the box.

*Technically* the instructions didn’t say you had to decode the key first… pic.twitter.com/99CVf7SQkJ

— Haley Britzky (@halbritz) April 9, 2022

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Haley Britzky

Task and Purpose

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By D.G. Sciortino

hi@sbly.com

Dina is a contributing writer in Shareably. She's based in Connecticut and can be reached at hi@shareably.net.