Duty First (12 page)

Although her days are long (she got up at 4:30, a half hour before the new cadets), she says being a squad leader “is definitely the best job.”

“We’re with them constantly, from reveille to taps without letup. The new cadets are constantly asking questions, they constantly need corrections, they constantly need watching out for. ‘Have you changed your socks? Do you have water in your canteen? Button your chin-strap, fix this, fix that.’”

Part of her concept of leadership was formed this summer when
she had an unusual—for her—experience: She failed one of the phases of Airborne School.

Stein went to Fort Benning, Georgia with a large contingent of cadets for parachutist training. Airborne School is divided into three one-week sessions: ground week, in which the trainees do a lot of conditioning and practice landings; tower week, during which they practice exiting an aircraft from a thirty-four-foot tower, then practice landing after dropping (in a parachute) from a two-hundred-foot tower; and jump week.

Shannon Stein, recruited soccer star and self-described “PT stud,” washed out during the first week. She couldn’t perform a “PLF,” the parachute-landing fall jumpers do to lessen the impact of hitting the ground. A PLF takes a minimum amount of control and athleticism, and a jock like Stein shouldn’t have had a problem with it.

“I was just used to falling on the ground in soccer, I couldn’t learn to do it gracefully.”

Stein was disappointed in the reaction of her “blackhat,” her NCO trainer. (Cadre at airborne school wear black baseball caps.) “He just got disgusted with me and at one point said ‘I don’t even want to train you anymore’ and he left me. I would
never
do that to one of my people. Later I found him playing cards with the other blackhats. He could have been training me. But it was a good experience for me. I’d never failed at anything like that before, you know? And I told this story to my squad: Here’s this little athletic girl who goes down to Fort Benning and gets recycled through Airborne School—which isn’t even really that hard. I could have gone home and had three weeks of leave and come back without my wings, or I could stay an extra week [to go through ground training a second time]. I stayed. I feel like I really earned my airborne wings. It’s not like I got them out of a cereal box or anything.”

“I told my new cadets about this because they were real nervous about going to BRM [Basic Rifle Marksmanship], but I told them ‘You can get through this. If you put your mind to it, you can get through anything.”

Stein tried the message out on Jacque Messel, who didn’t qualify with her weapon the first time through.

“I told her, ‘You can do it.’ And she did. She was surprised, but I wasn’t.”

Messel, who is standing nearby, is disappointed that she has missed the morning’s training because she had to see a doctor. If she misses too much, Messel will have to repeat the training the following spring while her classmates enjoy spring leave. But she is obviously sick, with a pale and exhausted look, and has been throwing up for a couple of days.

According to Olson, very few new cadets will try to get out of training by feigning or exaggerating sickness. Instead, they’ll train when they’re hurt and make things worse. Zachary Lange, the Minnesota hurdler, spent the morning of the assault course hobbling around with an infected ingrown toenail.

“If I walk on my foot just a little bit sideways,” he says, demonstrating the angle with his hand, “I can make it [through the assault course].”

Lange is not alone. Stein’s squad has a collection of bruises and scrapes and cuts. The medic patches them up and they head back to the squad. They are afraid to be left behind, but not because of the threat of a lost spring leave. They have become a team.

The sun is low and the sky a washed-out blue as the rest of Alpha Company comes off the assault course. They are muddy, soaked with sweat and the scummy water of the trench; the moisture makes clay of the dust that had been clinging to them. At the bottom of the hill they get a resupply of blank ammunition. Stein reminds her squad to drink lots of water. As she speaks, she taps a loaded magazine on her helmet, a trick to make sure the rounds are properly seated in the aluminum magazine.

Pete Haglin, who can’t get enough, asks, “Ma’am, when do we get to do the cool laser-tag stuff?”

“That’s next,” Stein says.

The new cadets will learn how to wear and operate MILES
equipment, a set of sensors and low energy lasers that simulate firing and being hit by fire. The system is an electronic way of keeping score in a simulated battle. (The acronym means Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System.)

At dusk the new cadets move off to another hill, this one an infiltration course in which they will “attack” another squad. For those who stay in the Army, this is only the first of many night exercises. With practice, trained soldiers can move and drive and even fly in darkness almost as easily as in daylight, but that kind of sophistication is years away for West Point’s Class of 2002. For them, as for any soldier in the field for the first time at night, most of what goes on seems confusing and aimless. They wear themselves out thrashing around in circles through the thick underbrush until almost midnight. By the time they stop, they are soaked with perspiration; then the temperature drops as they stretch out on the ground to catch a few hours of sleep before the next day’s training.

They are practicing the basic skills of the foot soldier. Even though most of the men and all of the women will wind up in some other branch of the Army, they will all have at least a limited understanding of what the infantry does, and how difficult it can be. By the second morning, they are beginning to show signs of just how far the lesson is sinking in.

After a hot breakfast, trucked from the Cadet Mess at West Point and served out of insulated cans, Stein’s squad gathers in a sunny clearing for their first class of the day. They are all dirty; yesterday’s mud and sweat has congealed into black and brown streaks that decorate hair, faces, hands, and clothing. A night of sleeping on the ground has done nothing to help them look refreshed.

The instructor is Sergeant Brust of the 10th Mountain Division. Brust wears a combat patch—he’s a Gulf War veteran—and is not nearly as dirty as the cadets, though he has been on-site for days. He is not a big man, but he speaks with a calm authority as he stands before a portable easel. There are a couple of drawings illustrating how a squad of ten men moves under different conditions: when expecting enemy contact; when contact is possible; when contact is
not likely. Brust uses a lot of jargon, some of which the new cadets may have heard before, some they haven’t heard.

“Army doctrine is that we need a 3:1 ratio in the attack,” Brust says. The new cadets stare blankly.

As the class goes on the sun climbs, and soon it is uncomfortably hot and close; the humidity clings to trees, grass, skin. The NCO talks about dead space, about masking fires. Every once in a while he’ll explain one of the new terms, and there are others the new cadets can get from context. They sit in the sunlight, struggling to stay awake.

The eleven-man squad in the diagram is divided into two five-man wedges, with a squad leader in between. At the head of each wedge, the little circle is marked “TL,” for team leader.

“You must stay twenty meters apart here,” Brust says, touching the little black circles that indicate soldiers. “Here’s the team leader. He trains [his soldiers], gets them ammunition, checks their feet, and makes sure they have dry socks, makes sure things are OK at home.”

The new cadets blink slowly; none of this looks very difficult yet. You stand in a wedge. There is another squad at the site besides Stein’s. When Sergeant Brust tells them to get up and practice the formations he’s just talked about, they respond slowly. Suddenly Alpha Company’s cadet First Sergeant steps out from where he’s been watching and snarls at the new cadets to move quickly when an NCO gives them an order. There is a flurry of camouflaged arms and legs as the new cadets respond.

“That will not happen with us, do you understand?” Stein yells at her squad. She is embarrassed that the new cadets didn’t show Brust more respect, and she’s determined her squad won’t do the same. “When he says move, you
move.
How you act out here is a direct reflection on how much pride you have in yourself.”

When Stein talks to her new cadets, she has only one tone—harsh—and only one volume—loud. The approach is losing its effect. The new cadets respond with an unenthusiastic, “Hoo-ah.”

Insects buzz. It’s hot now, and the new cadets drink water in
hopes of staying awake. Brust unrolls a chart titled “Prepare for Combat.” There is nothing philosophical about it; the chart shows a list of equipment an infantry squad might carry. He reads it to them.

“Your grenadier carries forty rounds of 40-millimeter H-E-D-P,” he says.

No one is taking notes. No one asks what H-E-D-P is.

“Your M60 machine gun can lay down nine hundred to a thousand rounds a minute. It’s the most important weapon in the platoon.”

“V-S Seventeen panels,” he says, touching the chart. “Combat lifesaver bags.”

The cadets follow the motion of his hand, as if he is a conductor.

“In your pre-combat inspection, you check for stuff that’s going to make noise when you move, the water in your canteen, jangling equipment, that kind of stuff. You check their boots.”

The new cadets doze in the heat.

“One of you might be my lieutenant one day,” Brust says. “I might be your platoon sergeant.”

Brust gets the squad up and into a wedge formation. Once he has them moving again, Brust becomes animated. Pointing to the woods ahead of them, he says, “OK, now we start taking fire.”

The new cadets slowly go to ground and take up firing positions. They look out from under the brims of their helmets. Some of them lower their heads to the ground, as if sniffing the dust.

“Once we get fire superiority, we got to put some lead on em, then we can move.”

The front team simulates firing at the enemy position; the five-man team in the rear, responding to the team leader’s arm signals, starts to move to the enemy’s flank. Two new cadets cross in front of their own men.

“No, no, no!” Brust shouts. “You’re gonna get killed by your own guys if you step in front of them.”

He talks for a moment about fratricide, about how easy it is to get killed by what the Army calls “friendly fire.” In the Gulf War, friendly fire accounted for a whopping 26 percent of the 146 battle deaths.
Brust, in the age-old tradition of the NCO trainer, is trying to bring that lesson home to the next generation. But he doesn’t tell them about the charred tanks, about the bodies burned beyond recognition, about the boys incinerated by high explosives. Instead, he gives them a five-minute break while he goes off in the woods to smoke a cigarette. Someone has told him he is not allowed to smoke in front of the new cadets.

If any of these young people, most just a few weeks out of high school, are startled to find themselves carrying automatic rifles and sitting though a class entitled “Prepare for Combat,” it doesn’t show.

“I’m sore everywhere my bones stick out,” Barry DeGrazio says, rubbing his knees with open palms. All of the new cadets got beat up on the previous day’s assault course. Everyone is bruised and a little battered. This is why they call the infantry a “bloody knees business.”

“It’s like football,” Omar Bilal, the football player, offers. “The harder you do it, the less likely you are to get hurt.”

Clint Knox, the dark-eyed graduate of a military high school, muses that he turned down an ROTC scholarship at Tulane—and gave up his summer—to sit out here with Sergeant Brust.

“And
Playboy
rated Tulane one of the top two schools when it comes to good-looking women.” He says this seriously, as if quoting the
New England Journal of Medicine.

Tom Lamb, who attended the University of Portland for a year, is happy to report that he had his fun. “I got it out of my system,” he says, smiling at some memory.

When the talk turns to the first-aid training, Lamb surveys his squadmates, their faces thick with yesterday’s grime and another coat of green camouflage paint.

“If one of you guys was dying, I’d give you mouth-to-mouth to save you.” He pauses. “But you’d have to be dying.”

Lamb has the gentle demeanor of a scholar, in spite of his GI glasses and trench-knife haircut. He was in Army ROTC at Portland; he is twenty years old.

“When you’re twenty, you’re not a teenager anymore,” Bilal says. For these young people, twenty is old.

“Imagine Shakespeare,” Bilal continues. His squadmates know he’s referring to a classmate, not the Bard. New Cadet William Shakespeare, USMA 02, was an enlisted soldier in the Army and is several years older than his classmates, older than most of the cadre. “He’s getting yelled at by people younger than him.” Bilal shakes his head at the ignominy.

Barry DeGrazio talks about being in the fastest running group. New cadets are divided into black, gold, gray, and green running groups, based on their performance in an early physical fitness test, the first week of CBT. DeGrazio’s group runs a sub-six-minute-permile pace up the steep hill behind the football stadium. It is, everyone agrees, an insane standard.

Pete Lisowski says, “I’m proud to be in the slow group.”

They are all looking forward to school—and the end of Beast—and they are all nervous about college-level work. Clint Knox is concerned that high school was too easy and didn’t really prepare him. He asks if cadets can be commissioned in the Finance Corps and says that his ambition is to go to business school.

This is the kind of talk that makes some old grads howl. They say West Point is about preparing leaders for the Army; it is not a place to polish a resume for business school. The problem with that thinking is that “West Point” looks great on graduate school applications, and every candidate knows it.

The enthusiastic Pete Haglin says that he got into West Point because he had good SAT scores. “But my grades weren’t that great because I didn’t do any work.”