Duty First (29 page)

This is Grenada, 1983, and the American civilians are medical students. The cadets in the room were only a few years old when this combat action took place. John Abizaid was a captain, ten years out of West Point and commanding a company of about a hundred Army Rangers.

He speaks to the cadets as if they are in command of the men on the ground.

“You underestimated the enemy and what they could do to you,” he says, looking into the audience. “There’s no real plan for fire support. The BTR-60s [Soviet-made light armored vehicles] are much closer than you thought. You’re suddenly taking fire from this hill. What do you do?”

“Attack the hill,” several cadets respond. This may be natural aggressiveness, or they may be showing off for the Commandant. Perhaps a few of them learned this in a military science class.

“Of course,” Abizaid says. He shows how the company commander changed the plan. Two of the company’s three platoons now move up the hill to silence the powerful enemy guns, leaving one platoon to take on the police, secure the medical students, and protect the company’s flank from a mounted assault.

“Now, you’re this platoon leader,” he says, using a pointer to show
the soldiers moving off by themselves to the east, toward the expected counterattack. “What’s your first concern?”

There is a chorus this time. “Security,” the cadets answer. This is one of the principles of war, drilled into them in military science and military history and plebe knowledge. On the ground it translates to, “expect the unexpected.”

The platoon leader given this mission, Abizaid points out, has been with this unit only three months, has been in the Army less than a year and a half. He pauses to let that point sink in.

This is all much closer to you than you think.

“The whole United States of America is going to be watching him and what he does to protect these civilians.”

The cadets going into World War II probably never heard this admonition. But the young men and women in this room have grown up with twenty-four-hour news; they know that CNN might swoop down on them at any time, putting them—and their actions—on the world stage for everyone to judge.

The Commandant walks them through the battle, and the cadets are riveted. Abizaid, a natural storyteller, gives them the sights and sounds, the heat, and the worries of command. He has conveyed the shock of what happened that day: the GIs on the ground had been in their own barracks just hours before. Many of them know they’re on an island called Grenada, but because the maps they’ve been given show only the island, they don’t know where Grenada is.

The lieutenant and his platoon of forty-some men secure the buildings of the medical school and set up positions facing east, waiting for the mounted attack. On the hill, GIs are dying in the assault on the big guns.

“Now what do you do?”

They are not as quick to answer now, but one cadets ventures, “Send out OPs [observation posts].”

Abizaid taps the map with a pointer. A large hill to the east keeps the Americans from seeing what’s on the flank, so the lieutenant
sends a jeep, just landed off an aircraft, out along the road heading in that direction. Then he hears gunfire, and the jeep doesn’t return.

“The company commander tells the lieutenant to get over to this hill and find out what’s out there.”

The lieutenant spreads his platoon too thin, then compounds the problem by walking away from his other leaders; he is now out of contact with the unit he is supposed to command. When a GI destroys an approaching armored vehicle with an anti-tank weapon, the lieutenant—who is now farther east than any man in his platoon—goes out on the road to inspect the damage.

“Good idea?” Abizaid asks.

“Bad idea,” a cadet responds.

“Right. But let’s not forget that it’s easy for us to sit in a classroom and criticize this guy,” he reminds them.

“He got shot five times. One of his guys had to crawl out there and drag him back.”

The entire action took less than four hours. In that time, Abizaid points out, the lives of soldiers and civilians rode on decisions made by that lieutenant.

Abizaid points to a first class cadet in the front row and directs him to a white board in the front of the room.

“We could put these lessons in terms of the Principles of War, but for our discussion, let’s just do them this way.”

“Never underestimate the enemy,” he says. The firstie writes.

He shows them another map, a sketch of the battle at the Little Big Horn. George Custer, who took several companies of cavalry to their deaths along that river in Montana, lies buried in the West Point cemetery less than a mile from where these cadets sit.

With a little prodding, Abizaid extracts a few more lessons.

“Never send soldiers somewhere they can’t get help. Never plan for a fair fight.”

The cadets nod; some of them take notes.

“Now, here we are in Bosnia,” Abizaid continues, pulling the map of Grenada off the projector.

Many of the cadets in this room know recent graduates on duty with the peacekeeping force; some of the seniors expect to join that force within a year. And if that is not enough of a reality check: the day’s newspapers are filled with the story of American troops being sent to Kosovo on yet another peacekeeping mission.

“We have this Muslim village on the boundary established by the Dayton Peace Accords.”

Abizaid puts up another slide that he has prepared ahead of time.

“There are supposed to be no weapons in this village or in the boundary area. The Muslims who lived here before want to move back into the village. A report arrives at American headquarters that the former inhabitants want to go home and rebuild. There is also a Serbian complaint that the Muslims are moving weapons into the town, that they plan to use it as a staging area for ‘terrorist activities.’ ”

A young lieutenant, a recent West Point graduate, gets orders to check out the Serbian complaint and ensure that no weapons are coming into the village. This is exactly the kind of scenario Abizaid is preparing these cadets for: quick thinking, handling diverse cultures, with a mission that is anything but simple. Compared to this kind of mission, an order to storm the village and kill everyone inside would be easier to figure out, if more dangerous.

“You’re the lieutenant,” Abizaid says. “You’ve got forty-eight hours to prepare for this mission. You know that the roads are clear, because UN vehicles have been using them, but other than that there are lots of mines and unexploded munitions all over the area. You get a few translators. What do you do?”

Abizaid sits on the front edge of the instructor’s desk, dangling his feet and holding the pointer in two hands.

“Before you get out your Ranger handbook or start asking for checklists, let’s just spend a few minutes thinking about what kind of things you’d like to know.”

The cadets, eager to participate, begin to call out their concerns.

“Where are the nearest friendly units?” one asks.

“That’s right,” Abizaid says, referring to the note on the board.
“Don’t expect a fair fight. If they are terrorists and they start shooting at you, you’ve got to be ready.”

The cadets warm to the task.

Where are the nearest reinforcements, they want to know, and how long would it take them to get there? How do I get to them on the radio? Who’s in command? Can I talk to the commander? Can we do a reconnaissance? Can we get a helicopter to fly us over the area?

“Good, good,” Abizaid encourages them as they think through the problem.

“How many of you studied what happened in Mogadishu?” he asks, referring to the fierce battle, in October 1993, between elite American forces and Somali militias.

Twenty hands go up.

“Part of our problem was that we went in there thinking these were a bunch of dumb tribesmen. But they turned out to be a bunch of smart tribesmen. They sat around every day watching the Americans and thinking about how they could kill our men, how they could embarrass us in front of the whole world. Don’t you think the Serbs and Muslims, who’ve been killing each other for seven hundred years … don’t you think they’re thinking about how they can kill you?”

The problem isn’t that American forces don’t have the weapons or the training; the problem, Abizaid says, is a mental letdown. The problem is complacency.

“There are captains and lieutenant colonels and old generals who will tell you, ‘Lieutenant, it’s a routine mission, there’s no need to get all worked up about it.’ I’m telling you right now … that’s bullshit.”

There is a silent moment. The cadets sit in their rows, upright and attentive. In a year or two, some of them will be in this position, in Bosnia or Kosovo or some other country whose name they do not know today. The Commandant sits on the desk, pointer in his hand, feet swinging gently back and forth. Because he’s been there, he can picture them as they will be: K-pot crammed down, rifle slung over one shoulder, dirty notebook and GI pen in grubby fingers, looking for the answers that will accomplish the mission and keep their soldiers
safe. Abizaid is passionate about preparing these young men and women as well as he possibly can.

“So what happens?” Abizaid says, standing and picking up a marker. He draws a couple of rectangles on the road leading to the village.

“The platoon moves out in column …”

There are groans from the audience; the cadets know that vehicles in a tight line cannot protect themselves or each other.

“The lieutenant sets up a road block right in the middle of town, down here in the low ground.”

The roadblock is ineffective; the soldiers manning it cannot see more than a block in either direction. Their radios can’t reach over the surrounding hills, which means they can’t call for help if they need it. The other vehicles are set up in places where they couldn’t support one another if they came under fire. It’s Custer, splitting his column, the pieces too far apart to help one another. It’s his platoon leader in Grenada, wandering out in the road to inspect his kill, far beyond where he could control things.

“Turns out the Muslims were smuggling weapons in, and the Serbs were preparing to attack. But this platoon leader didn’t know it because he wasn’t set up properly. Fortunately his company commander came down and saw what was wrong and got everything straightened out and peace prevailed.”

Abizaid turns off the overhead projector and picks up a photocopied article from a professional journal.

“Leadership is the most dynamic aspect of combat power,” he reads. He looks up. “No technology can give you the advantage that good old-fashioned leadership can give you. You can have spy planes overhead and all kinds of information downloaded to the G-2 [the intelligence section]. If the lieutenant and sergeant on the ground don’t do their duty, we will fail.”

“When you hear stories like this, you should have a couple of reactions: First, you should think, ‘But for the grace of God, that could have been me.’ This lieutenant [in Bosnia] was lucky. His company commander was looking out for him.”

“Second, you should read about these disasters because you don’t want it to happen to you. You don’t want them writing a book about
your
big screwup.”

“Your job,” he tells them, “is to wargame, to think through what might happen. We want you to be tactical leaders, to avoid the mistakes of the Little Bighorn, of Grenada. If I had given that lieutenant [in Grenada] clearer instructions, maybe he wouldn’t have gotten shot. I have no excuse. I take responsibility.”

When the meeting is over, the cadets head back to their rooms. Abizaid rides the elevator to the first floor, then steps through the big front doors of Washington Hall and into bitter February cold. Big lights on the barracks paint the scene white and gray, making everything look colder.

“I’m passionate in the belief that we train lieutenants to fight our wars,” Abizaid says.

There are dozens of cadets, most of them in sweat suits, hustling by. They salute the Commandant.

“Are you staying out of trouble, Joe?” the Commandant calls to one cadet he recognizes.

“Sir, I’m out looking for it.”

“What did you wind up choosing, Joseph?” Abizaid asks. The cadet is a firstie; the Comm wants to know about his recent choice of a first duty assignment.

“The eighty-deuce, sir,” comes out of the night air.

Abizaid continues to walk, a small smile on his lips. He served two tours with the 82nd Airborne Division, including his first assignment out of West Point. “I’ll alert them that you’re coming,” he tells the cadet.

The six floors of MacArthur Barracks loom above him as he walks, the windows glowing brightly; it is the beginning of study barracks, and everything is quiet. No stereos playing, no music coming from the building. There is no rule forbidding music during evening study period, but each company is responsible for enforcing good study conditions.

“Preparing for war doesn’t just mean we do military stuff all the time,” Abizaid continues. “We need flexibility, people who can think. One criticism I have of West Point is that we turned out automatons. We were famous for our rigidity. That’s not good, not in Custer’s time, certainly not in the Bosnian situation I just described.”

He passes the statue of MacArthur and, in a few steps, is across the street from the Superintendent’s quarters; the big windows of the old house glow warmly.

“None of these changes would work without the Superintendent,” he says. “He inspires people. They
want
to do well for him.”

This is, of course, the attitude the cadets have about the Comm, the same attitude the new cadets of Alpha Company had toward Greg Stitt and Grady Jett. It is part of the formula. The other part is the team, and John Abizaid will address that in the morning.

At 6:25 the following morning, the sky above the eastern mountains is pearly with the cold. Ice covers the sidewalk leading to Arvin Gym. Out front, a sign notes the hours: it opens at 0515. There are already scores of people about, though the Corps of Cadets is at breakfast.

The chlorine smell points to Crandall Pool, the home of Army swimming. There is an Olympic-sized pool in one end of the huge room and a diving pool at the other. The floating bulkhead that divides the two has been lowered this morning. In an overheated, glassed-in room that overlooks the pool lay dozens of gym bags, towels, athletic shoes, and Army PT sweat suits. The owners of all this clothing—the staff of the United States Corps of Cadets, the nearly one hundred people who work for the Commandant—are in the pool.