Duty First (11 page)

“Well, what’s our objective out here?” Olson says in the same tone he might use to ask, “How’s that ol’ huntin’ dog?”

“Uh … build squad cohesion, sir.”

“Sure. You’ve got sixteen squads, and some of them aren’t going to do well. Somebody has to come in last place. So how are you going
to build cohesion in the squads that do poorly? You’re not just going to write them off, are you?”

Bradley knows the answer to this question. “No, sir.”

“Good,” Olson says. “Go figure it out and tell me what you come up with.”

Bradley moves to the shade of some trees near the middle of the field; he removes his canteen from his equipment and takes a drink.

“This is the hardest job I’ve ever had,” he says as he watches a squad of new cadets run an obstacle course.

“Major Olson doesn’t give us any answers. We have to figure it all out on our own.” Bradley isn’t complaining, just acknowledging that Olson is making him earn his pay.

A little while later Bradley trots back to Olson and briefs his plan. When he shoots off on some tangent, Olson doesn’t correct him. Instead, he asks a few questions that steer Bradley back on track. Olson doesn’t have just one answer in mind, something he wants Bradley to divine. He listens and makes a few comments on Bradley’s plan.

Olson, who has commanded hundreds of men from Korea to the Persian Gulf, could come up with an answer, probably a better answer than the twenty-year-old cadet in front of him. But as Olson has consistently maintained, he isn’t here to do the cadets’ jobs for them; he’s here to make sure they learn how to do what’s expected of them.

“The only way to do that is for me to get out of their way,” he says.

Not all of the Alpha Company cadre learn their lessons as well as Bradley.

At one site the juniors who are supposed to be in charge are disorganized. The cadet giving the opening briefing repeats himself two or three times. When they get out the score sheets they realize that they haven’t brought any pens to record the scores, and they have to borrow one from a new cadet. The new cadets are always being harassed about attention to detail and meticulous preparation, so it isn’t lost on them that the cadre screwed up.

Because Rob Olson lets his subordinate leaders lead, he takes a chance that they’ll “drop the ball” now and then. Olson is responsible
for everything that happens or fails to happen with these new cadets all summer long. If one of Olson’s superiors shows up and finds things aren’t to his satisfaction, Olson will hear about it. (Colonel Joe Adamczyk, the Brigade Tactical Officer and Olson’s boss, is famous—infamous among cadets—for nit-picking the details. And he is always on the prowl.)

But Olson has decided to live in that scary place between always doing things the safe way and taking a calculated risk to develop leaders. He accepts a bit of uncertainty as the norm. Olson’s questions, his Socratic method of challenging these young leaders is the flip side of what most people want in leadership training: checklists, foolproof methods, universal truisms, easy answers.

Throughout the summer, whenever one of his cadets says, “Sir, we’ve got a problem,” Olson never says, “Do this and this only.” He says, “OK, what are we going to do about it?”

To his way of thinking, whenever he throws it back at them, he is sending a couple of messages: “I think you’re smart enough to figure this out”, “I trust you to do this right”, and, “You’re worth my time and effort, good enough for me to bother getting you ready for bigger things.” Those messages, more than anything else, are at the root of “inspirational leadership.”

L
ess than two weeks later the new cadets of Alpha Company have moved from pseudo-athletic team-building exercises to a more serious business. It is early August, and the squads gather in groups at the bottom of a dusty hill at Lake Frederick, some thirteen miles from main post. These veterans of five weeks of Beast are here to learn ITT, for Individual Tactics and Techniques: Army-speak for how to move under fire without getting killed. On the slope before them they can see coiled concertina wire, ditches, and other obstacles amid trees and tall grass. There are worn places where others have gone ahead of them.

Specialist Fourth Class Stubblefield, a soldier from the 10th Mountain Division, is the instructor at this site. His face, covered with camouflage paint, is almost as dark as his uniform. There is a machine-gun simulator (powered by compressed gas) hammering away just a few yards from where he stands. Stubblefield has a powerful voice that he’s run ragged by screaming to be heard above the din. “Whenever you’re on my course, I want to see you carrying your
weapon at the ready position,” he tells the new cadets. Although he’s been in the Army just a couple of years, he speaks with the confidence and authority of a senior NCO. The new cadets, dressed in BDUs, load-bearing equipment, and helmets, their faces also painted dark green, listen intently. A couple respond with a low, “Hoo-ah.”

“Let me see your weapon, high-speed,” Stubblefield says to a new cadet.

He clears the weapon—every weapon is loaded until it’s cleared—then closes the bolt and the dustcover.

“This is the ready position,” he says, grasping the weapon firmly with both hands, one finger on the trigger.

“Why is this such a big deal? Why do we stress this?”

A new cadet speaks up, giving the obvious answer. “So we’re ready.”

“Right. Keep both hands on the weapon. This shows you’re ready. This says to the enemy, ‘Go ahead, give me a reason to waste you.’”

“This …”

He slouches, rests the butt of the rifle on his ammo pouch at his waist. “This says ‘I don’t care.’ And when you’re pulling guard duty in Bosnia or in the Sinai, this makes the enemy think, ‘I can get in there and plant a bomb.’”

Stubblefield hands the weapon back to its owner. In the rear of the gaggle of new cadets, two women stand side by side. One of them holds her rifle slung on her shoulder; it is almost as long as she is tall. “You know,” she says to the other woman, “we need to take this stuff seriously, because there’s no such thing as a front line anymore.”

All morning the new cadets have been practicing the skills they will use on this course. In the open space at the bottom of the hill they’ve learned how to crawl with a weapon, how to provide covering fire to one another, how to keep low as they move under fire. Now they face the day’s big test: an uphill course of several hundred yards that will have them crawling, climbing over obstacles, shooting, moving as a team, and covering one another’s movements. There are no
real bullets, but the course is rigorous, and plenty of people are watching.

When Stubblefield announces that it’s time to go, squad leader Shannon Stein jumps to the starting position, calling for her new cadets to line up behind her. Stein, a five-foot-four-inch, hundred-pound bundle of energy, replaced Grady Jett for the second detail of cadet basic training. (There are two complete sets of cadre for the summer, which maximizes the number of upperclass cadets getting leadership experience and brings in rested upperclass cadets halfway through the summer.) Stein has dark hair and eyes and, beneath the camouflage paint, is fair-skinned. She is also a star on the women’s soccer team, a recruited athlete whose heart was set on the Naval Academy until she visited West Point. The sleeves of her blouse are rolled into tiny cuffs just above the stock of her rifle; the smallest size is still too long in the arms for her.

At the start signal, Stein leaps forward, diving into the dirt behind a couple of piled logs. “Cover me, I’m moving,” she shouts to her partner, then presses the side of her face into the dust—not close to the dust or near the dust or just above the dust—but deep enough to move a small bow wave of dirt before her. Flat on her stomach, she pushes herself forward with one leg, her helmet burrowing a path. She grasps her rifle by the sling, keeping it out of the dirt by draping it over her arm. This is the low crawl. The new cadets in her squad watch intently as they wait their turn. A couple of them murmur the five-point checklist they learned this morning as Stein goes through it before every move: Check the weapon’s safety, the dustcover (which protects the bolt), check to the left, right, front.

When Stein reaches the first covered position, she rolls over and takes up a firing position, propped on her elbows, rifle forward, covering her partner as he moves. A few yards up the hill, the machine-gun simulator pounds the air like a string of car crashes. On the lane in front of them, a smoke grenade pops; the thick cloud hangs on the hillside in the heat. Once Stein and the other squad leader have moved forward, the first new cadets launch themselves on the hill.
The pairs zigzag through the dirt, moving from covered position to covered position, running in a crouch. The goal is to remain exposed for no more than three seconds, which makes the two-hundred-yard course a long one.

The noise level rises as each pair of soldiers begins moving. The ones covering fire blanks, and soon the lane NCOs are throwing hand-grenade simulators, which go off like enormous firecrackers. The attackers scream to each other over the din of firing.

“Cover me, I’m moving!”

“Safety, dustcover, left, right, front! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

Soon there are two squads spread out on the hill. Slowing down is not an option: There is relentless pressure from the rear as more people join the assault. They must keep some distance between them (“One grenade can get you all!”). There is some shade provided by a few scrubby trees and tall weeds, but mostly the course is dusty and hot. The new cadets approaching the top look as if they’ve been working in a flour mill; their faces are streaked with sweat and runny camouflage paint. The dust turns black around their mouths, and they breathe it in with great gulps of air.

Up the hill, Stein dives into a hole, then crawls into the maw of a dark concrete pipe, like a sewer drain; her partner covers her over the top. She is small enough to squeeze through the space, but scrambling on the concrete bites at her knees. Her helmet and equipment bang against the sides as she works her way through fifteen to twenty feet of tunnel. When she emerges in the sunlight, her helmet has slipped down over her eyes. She pushes it back and raises her weapon to the ready position.

When it is her turn to move again, she approaches a field of tanglefoot: criss-crossed barbed wire strung two feet off the ground. Stein flops onto her back, lays her rifle across her chest and churns her legs to push herself under the wire. Here the earth has been ground to a fine powder that rises in clouds over her shoulders. She blinks away the sweat and the dust and powers through with surprising speed.

After ten or twelve minutes of tremendous exertion, the lead
cadets are within a few yards of the “enemy” position, an eighty-foot trench near the top of the hill. It is deeper at one end than the other; the deep end is filled with green water. Stein and her partner plunge in, clear left and right, firing blanks at the plastic soldiers that occupy the trench. Once her buddy boosts her out, Stein checks in front of the trench for more enemy. Finished, she shoulders her weapon and turns back to watch her new cadets. She is muddy and soaked from the waist down, covered with white dust from the waist up; her face is a war mask of green camouflage and powder. Her breath comes in sharp spikes, but she manages to call encouragement to her charges.

“Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go,” she shouts, her voice high and surprisingly strong.

Allied cadet Marat Daveltshin thrashes beneath the tanglefoot, losing his way and getting hung up in the steel web. A soldier/instructor working the lane calmly coaches him.

“Open your eyes, Daveltshin!” Stein yells. “Look where you’re going!”

When Daveltshin reaches the trench, Stein yells at him again: “Kill Ivan!”

Ivan is the generic name for a Soviet soldier. The trench is manned by little plastic silhouettes of “enemy” soldiers left over from the Cold War years. Each three-foot-high figure wears a red star on the front of his helmet. Daveltshin, who might have wound up an “Ivan” if not for the collapse of the U.S.S.R. butt-strokes the enemy with his weapon as enthusiastically as anyone else.

Bob Friesema plunges into the trench at the deepest end, helps his partner out, then tries to pull himself clear. The top of the trench is a rounded pile of dirt; he jumps up, but there are no hand-holds and he slides back slowly in spite of his exertions. He jumps again, slides down again into the rank water. He should be exhausted, but he becomes more determined, jumping higher still.

“C’mon Friesema,” Stein yells. “You’re seven feet tall. If I can get out of that ditch, you can.”

Friesema’s partner, out of the trench and on top of the berm, reaches back with one arm. Friesema grabs the offered hand and
scrambles clear. He lays in the dirt, breathing like a beached whale, but remembers to scan his front, his weapon ready to meet more enemy.

Clearing the trench was supposed to be the high point of the exercise, the objective of the assault on the hill. Some of the new cadets become so engrossed in the idea of diving into the brackish water—and thus showing how “Hoo-ah” they are—that they forget to clear the trench; some pay no attention to the little plastic enemy. There are almost as many observers as there are new cadets in the trench—the lieutenant and NCOs from the 10th Mountain Division, a couple of Army medics, a dozen cadet cadre. The gallery of spectators defeats the effort to make the training realistic. Instead, the trench-clearing begins to resemble some fraternity initiation rite: Dive into the green water, run around, and shout.

When the last of her new cadets is through the course, Stein leads her squad off the hill and onto a paved road. The new cadets talk excitedly, trading war stories about how hard they ran or how deep the water was where they crossed the trench or how quickly they got up the hill.

At the bottom of the hill, they break off to fill canteens, check skinned knees and elbows as Stein watches them. “I’ve got this whole mother-father syndrome with them, you know?” she says, referring to her charges. “I’d do anything for them, but I’m hard on them, too, as they can tell by the number of push-ups and flutter kicks they do.” She smiles. “They love those flutter kicks.”