Duty First (10 page)

“We didn’t really come together as a team, and it showed in our performance.”

Jett steps into the relative cool of wide hallway.

“Teamwork is the only way to make it through this place. The whole Army is a big team,” he says, precisely echoing the Army’s leadership manual. The team identity he’s determined to create extends even to how the new cadets put on their uniforms.

“I make them get in a room together and check each other off. When we first started it was clear that they worried more about themselves. I want them to come out together; even if they know something is wrong, they’re all wrong together. The first time I saw that they were working together was when one came out in the hallway with his shirttail untucked. I corrected him and dropped him [for push-ups], and the whole squad dropped.”

The minute attention to uniforms and military courtesy is exaggerated in the barracks, where life is much more formal than in the field. It was in the barracks, in private and mostly out of sight of the officers, where the most vicious hazing used to take place. So it is here that the differences between plebe life then and now become most apparent.

Out in the hallway, new cadets walk briskly, but they do not “ping” (an exaggerated walk, like race-walking, that made plebes look like windup toys and led to shinsplints). When they look for a room number, they look around the hallway; twenty years earlier, such movements would have elicited screams of,
“Why are you gazing around my hallway? You want to
buy
this place, beanhead?”

Of course it’s easier to find things—like numbered rooms in a long hallway of identical doors—by looking around. But back then, it just wasn’t allowed. Period.

Under the old system upperclass cadets frequently appointed themselves unofficial “gatekeepers.” They even went so far as to mount campaigns to “run out” certain new cadets, singling out for extra hazing the ones who—in the opinions of these nineteen-and twenty-year-olds—didn’t quite make the grade. They kept up the pressure until the new cadet quit. And if a plebe sometimes got run out because his voice was too high or he smiled too much or he didn’t have what it takes—whatever that is—well, that was the price of doing business.

Now the cadre’s job is to train the new cadets and make sure they perform the tasks to army standard. So Jett gives his squad instructions, then leaves them alone to do the work. Because he has to
return to Central Guard Room, he has asked another cadre member, Alisha Bryan, to keep an eye on his squad.

Bryan is the Alpha Company counselor. Her job is to talk to new cadets about what’s troubling them, to give them a sounding board, a place to vent without having to involve their squad leaders. Bryan seems older than her twenty years, with a calm, confident air that suits her job. She has wide, dark eyes and wears her short hair pulled back in a ponytail. Tonight she wears the yellow physical training shirt of the Beast cadre and shower shoes on her feet.

Kevin Bradley, Alpha Company’s commander, thinks the counselors, who are not in the direct chain of command, are part of the problem.

“They’re not much help,” he says. “It’s better than last year, when the counselors used to write reports on the cadre. Now they live with the company. But she can’t tell us what goes on in counseling, because of confidentiality. The new cadets see her as someone they can talk to without having to call her ‘ma’am.’ Everyone calls her the ‘milk and cookies lady’”

Bradley’s comments are not just a knee-jerk reaction to what some people see as an invasion of political correctness and sensitivity training.

“It should be the squad leader’s job to counsel the new cadet,” Bradley says. “We have to learn that. Besides, she’s no more qualified to deal with new-cadet problems than are any other members of the chain of command.”

More than that, Bradley sees some of his cadre becoming lazy. “Some of them are getting into the habit of telling the new cadet, ‘Well, go talk to the counselor.’ They think it lets them off the hook.”

Inside the room where Jett’s squad works, Jacque Messel sits with a brand-new pair of dress shoes on her lap. She checks her sports watch every few minutes, waiting for her 9:30 appointment to meet Bryan. Messel, whose father played such a big role in her entering Beast, has been thinking about leaving.

Bryan and Jett shake their heads at parents who push West Point
on sons and daughters. As they stand in the hallway, Lange, the recruited hurdler from Minnesota, is in the Tac’s office, on the phone with his father.

“He wanted to go to the University of Minnesota,” Bryan says. “His father basically told him don’t come home [from West Point].”

Major Rob Olson is also standing by in the hallway outside his own office in order to give Lange a little privacy. Olson says that Lange has an older brother in the Class of 2000; the two haven’t spoken in a year.

“
That’s
a sign of a healthy relationship,” Olson says sarcastically.

Lange finishes his end of the conversation but doesn’t hang up; his father wants to talk to his son’s Tac. Olson gets on the phone, delivers a couple of polite “yes, sirs” and hangs up.

“The guy is a dentist,” Olson said. “And he gets on the phone with me and says, ‘This is what needs to happen out there, Major’”

Olson seems mildly surprised that Dr. Lange felt qualified to tell him how to run his unit. “The guy’s a prick,” he says. But the Tac is more upset at the cost to New Cadet Lange, who is isolated and unhappy and now embarrassed.

Back outside Grady Jett’s room, New Cadet Daveltshin, from Kyrgyzstan, passes Jett and Bryan, his face intent. He says something in a thick accent that sounds like “Engo don, tsir.”

Jett explains that the squad motto is, “Ain’t goin’ down, sir,” which is from a Garth Brooks song. Jett says Daveltshin had a hard time with the idiom.

“He was at attention against the wall and he kept leaning forward to catch everything I was saying.” Jett demonstrates the pose—head cocked to the side, bent over at the waist—that Daveltshin used to try to grasp the strange words that probably weren’t in any textbook he’d ever studied. “I told him, ‘You’re at
attention!
’”

Jett and Bryan laugh, but they admire the guts it takes to come to a foreign country and an alien culture to try something so difficult. The second class cadets talk about finding someone—a professor, an upperclass cadet—who speaks Russian so Daveltshin can talk to someone in his native tongue. When the new cadets were allowed
their weekly ten-minute call, Jett loaned his own telephone calling card to help Daveltshin phone home half a world away.

A new cadet from another squad appears, his hand full of laundry tags. He squeezes himself between Jett and Bryan and the room full of his classmates. He is clearly lost. In the past the hallways were always a free-fire zone, and a second’s hesitation or hint that you didn’t know exactly where you were going or what you were doing invited all sorts of unpleasant attention. The new cadet, whose shaved head and oversize, government-issue glasses make him look even more helpless, stands at awkward attention.

“What are you doing?” Jett asks.

“Sir, I’m trying to deliver these laundry tags to the upperclass cadet rooms.”

“But you don’t know where my room is. You just thought you’d come down here because I was standing here.”

Inexplicably, the new cadet breaks into a wide smile. It’s the wrong response.

“Smirk off,” Jett snaps. “Did I say something funny?”

This is the kind of response that, in the past, would have drawn a half dozen cadre members into the hallway for the fun and yelling. But that doesn’t happen. Instead, Bryan turns to the new cadet; he’s huge, six four or five, and towers over her.

“Tell me what your mission was when you left your room,” she says, leaning comfortably against the wall, her arms folded over her chest.

The new cadet gives a reasonably clear statement of his mission. Then she asks, “What was your plan?”

He didn’t have a plan, so she talks him through what he should have done before venturing into the hallway. The new cadet stands at rigid attention, a giant tree. Inside his enormous running shoes, his toes wiggle furiously.

This is the point at which, many old grads would argue, the new cadet should learn a hard lesson, with lots of screaming to reinforce the learning point: Plan ahead. The new approach at West Point is this: He’ll learn the lesson if he processes what is happening, if he
thinks about it. And whether or not he thinks about it has always been up to the individual.

For her part, Alisha Bryan is learning how to teach someone a lesson—one all lieutenants should master. And she
isn’t
practicing techniques she’ll have to unlearn as a junior officer.

Fifteen minutes later Clint Knox enters the crowded room with instructions from the platoon sergeant on how to send out laundry (this will be their first time). When he shares these with his squad-mates, they respond with questions.

“Do we separate dark and light in those little mesh bags?”

“Do we fill out a tag for each little bag?”

“How many sets of BDUs should we send out and how many should we keep?” Tom Lamb asks. “How long does it take to get them back and how many uniforms do we need between now and then?”

They don’t know enough about the upcoming training to predict what they will need. Knox screws up his face and swears. Greg Stitt, the platoon sergeant, gave him about 70 percent of the information he needs.

When Jett and Greg Stitt reappear, the new cadets ask about the training schedule, about how long it takes to get uniforms back, about where to drop off the bags of dirty laundry and where to recover the clean stuff when it returns. Jett and Stitt are surprised by the questions. They didn’t think through just how much information the new cadets would need; they forgot they have to walk trainees through everything.

Stitt shakes his head; he’ll have to go around to all the squads again because his first instructions weren’t clear. He explains the process, then shuffles out of the room, one lesson closer to being a lieutenant.

At 5:30 the next morning the new cadets of Alpha Company gather for their first instruction in Close Quarters Combat, the modern incarnation of hand-to-hand combat. The Tac officers and NCOs stand twenty yards behind the formation. The company first sergeant,
second class cadet Josh Gilliam, runs by, papers fluttering in his hand. Gilliam is still moving at top speed, just as he was two nights earlier as he tried to organize the bivouac and get used to the idea that the platoon sergeants had to report to him.

“First Sergeant,” Major Olson calls. Gilliam skids to a halt.

“How many sets of BDUs do the new cadets have left now that we’ve sent out laundry?”

Gilliam does a fair imitation of a deer caught in headlights. He glances left and right in the middle of the open field, as if the answer might be lying on the dewy grass.

“Sir, I don’t know.”

Olson chuckles. He could have warned the cadre about this last night, of course. But Rob Olson doesn’t want to be the First Sergeant; he wants to teach Gilliam to be the first sergeant. Besides, if he stepped in, he would have violated one of his rules: Let the leaders do their jobs. That means taking a chance that, now and then, things will get screwed up.

“That’s not quite the answer I was looking for,” Olson says gently.

“Sir, I’ll find out,” Gilliam says, then races off.

Twenty yards away, someone is finally yelling at the new cadets.

“Welcome to Close Quarters Combat!” the instructors bellow.

“Hoo-ah,” the new cadets yell back.

As the first weeks of Beast slip past, the Hudson Valley becomes more inhospitable. By this mid-July morning near the end of the first detail, it is as hot and sticky as the Deep South. Although it is only 8:00
A.M.
the air is thick with moisture and annoying clouds of insects as the sixteen squads of Alpha Company move to a training site for a day called Squad Competition. More than a dozen stations are spread around an open area the size of three football fields. At each the new cadets will have to do some sort of event that involves teamwork and athleticism: running, lifting, climbing, carrying, jumping. The cadre members keep score, and all the numbers are posted on a big tote board in the middle of the field where everyone can see them. These are not, strictly speaking, military skills. This is more of a very athletic version
of the kind of team-building exercises some corporations put their employees through.

Major Rob Olson stands with Kevin Bradley, the Alpha Company commander, who will turn twenty-one tomorrow. Since Bradley and his cadre are on-duty, working with the new cadets twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, there’ll be no time for a celebration. This day, as with every other in CBT, training started at 5:30 and will end, for the new cadets, at 10
P.M.
; the cadre will stay up longer.

“Kevin,” Rob Olson calls; Bradley comes jogging over. He wears his BDU cap pulled low over his eyes. The insects swarm around his eyes, ears and mouth, but he tries to ignore them as he listens to Olson.

“What are you going to do for the squads that win the competition?” he asks.

Olson’s accent is not Minnesota, but the almost-Southern drawl that can be heard among career NCOs and officers from any part of the country. A staff sergeant from New Jersey sounds a good deal like a lieutenant from California. Delivered this way, Olson’s questions never sound like a challenge. Whether or not it’s an affectation, the result is clear: Cadets open up to him.

“Sir, we’re going to let the squad leader buy them pizza to eat in the barracks.”

This is a big deal. The new cadets gulp their meals down in the mess hall—while sitting at attention—or while sitting on the ground in the field. A little relaxed junk-food orgy will be a real treat.

“That sounds great,” Olson says. “How about the squads that bomb? What are you going to do for them?”

Bradley, who stands with his hands clasped in the small of his back, shifts his weight slightly, then finally swats at a bug near his ear. Another long second or two later, he says, “Sir?”