Duty First (14 page)

The commanders gave something else to the soldiers, something that was perhaps the decisive factor on D Day. “We let the sergeants and lieutenants know, in every field exercise, in every sand table exercise, that they were the ones who were going to be making the decisions,” Norton says. He holds up his hand and counts the critical points on his fingers.

“You watch em, you coach em, you trust em.”

This gospel according to Norton is part of the Army’s doctrine, promulgated in a manual called, simply,
Leadership.

And there, as anyone involved in developing leaders knows, is the rub.

Taking risks and giving new leaders a chance means those charged with developing those leaders must be willing to underwrite their inevitable mistakes. This is difficult when units (and businesses)
are evaluated on numbers, when there isn’t a spot on the spreadsheet to footnote, “Sure, we’re off 5 percent, but we’ve built some leaders.”

For the military, D Day provides a clear lesson on the absolute importance of pushing authority down. For most of the morning of June 6, Allied commanders weren’t sure the invasion was going to work. At Omaha Beach in particular (the critical center sector of the beachhead) men and equipment piled up at the water’s edge. Nothing was moving inland. The men who hadn’t been killed or wounded huddled, wet and cold, in the lee of a rock shingle on the beach. Many of them had lost their weapons in the surf.

The generals were powerless, far removed. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, was in England, chain-smoking and pacing a hole in the floor. Omar Bradley, commanding the American forces, was on a ship in the channel; he couldn’t even see what was happening because of the smoke and dust raised by the fire and bombs. Jack Norton spent his first hours in France just trying to contact his subordinate units.

The battle turned because small unit leaders each took charge of their own little part of the war. A couple of dozen captains, a few score lieutenants, a hundred sergeants all decided—independently—to do something about the mess on the beach. For each of them, cut off in his own violent little circle of the war, it looked like this: Move from here to there; press the enemy; get to the next wrinkle in the ground, the next covered position. No one man did it alone, but because they were used to being in charge, because they had been taught that leaders make decisions, these young men made individual efforts which, multiplied all along the beach and the inland drop zones, saved the invasion.

When Rob Olson tells his cadets, “You’re in charge,” and then backs it up (by staying out of their way and underwriting their inevitable mistakes), he is trying to instill in his cadets the same confidence Jack Norton gave his D-Day soldiers. Olson wants his cadets thinking like those soldiers on the beach:
What can I do to get this mission accomplished?

A
week before the end of Cadet Basic Training, the entire class of new cadets goes into camp at Lake Frederick, establishing a huge city of pup tents on the side of a low ridge some twelve miles from main post. The training schedule is a little lighter, and there is even time for some fun: games and a talent show and a few extra hours of sleep. At times it resembles a scout jamboree, except that everyone is armed with automatic weapons.

The encampment at Lake Frederick is the most relaxed time of the whole summer; at the end of the week comes the most stressful time. When they break camp, they will walk some sixteen miles on a circuitous route back to West Point, on the final foot march of Beast Barracks. Just short of main post, they will stop on the ski slope, straighten their uniforms, shine their boots, and meet West Point’s band for the final two miles. They will be welcomed back by the post community, by visiting parents and, most significantly, by three times as many upperclass cadets as they’ve encountered all summer. For while the class of 02 camps at Lake Frederick, the yearlings, cows,
and firsties all return from their summer assignments to begin the school year.

That first week is called Re-orgy Week, for the reorganization of the corps for the academic year. For the new cadets, it means they’ll be transferred from their summer companies, from the squadmates and roommates they’ve come to know, from their squad leaders and platoon sergeants, and just about everything familiar. They’ll be tossed into a new barracks, a new company, with a new and expanded cast of upperclass cadets to deal with. Like so much of the West Point experience, cadets look forward to it and dread it at the same time.

The bivouac looks like a summer camp on steroids: There are softball and frisbee games on makeshift fields; a platoon of cadets drags a big military truck up a hill in competition with a sister platoon; other cadets lounge in the sun or stand in a long line at the “boodler’s,” a truck that sells snacks (“boodle” in cadet slang). Beside the softball game, where the first-base coach would stand, the players’ rifles are stacked in neat pyramids.

Shannon Stein’s squad has some downtime. The new cadets dry out their uniforms and equipment (it rained last night while they were out on an exercise), clean their weapons, relax in the sun.

In his olive drab T-shirt, the lanky Bob Friesema looks even thinner than he did at the beginning of the summer. He talks about his night in the woods, an exercise that went by the bellicose name “Warrior Forge.”

“We built a one-rope bridge about twenty hundred [8:00
P.M.
], crossed the stream, then got soaked in the rain. Then I just lay in the perimeter for four or five hours in the dark. Freezing. I had no clue [what it was about],” he says, more amazed than angry. “We were just thrashing around in the dark. I didn’t get to fire a round all night.”

Ben Steadman, who has hurt his ankle, is worried about having to ride in on the “gimp truck” instead of getting to march back with the squad. Usually one of the most talkative members of the squad, he is relatively subdued by his status as “walking wounded.”

No one wants to be left out; everyone wants to finish with the
team. But by this point in the summer, they are all nursing various injuries: twisted ankles, swollen knees, rashes and blisters and scrapes. Jacque Messel has been hospitalized over the summer for a case of viral pneumonia, but she is planning to march.

The squad gathers around, all except for football player Omar Bilal. The team has already begun practicing, and the plebe football players are absent from the encampment. Although their two-a-day practices are at least as difficult as the road march, probably more, many of their classmates are suspicious. There are few sins worse than “getting over” on your classmates, that is, failing to do your share of the work, finding an easier way, getting privileges others don’t have. This mind-set—and the fact that the football players miss out on the bonding experience of the road march—helps keep them separate from the rest of the corps.

Marat Daveltshin, the new cadet from Kyrgyzstan, is ready to talk about Beast in the past tense. “The training was tough, but only my English was the hardest thing.”

His squadmates laugh with him about upperclass cadets asking Daveltshin the same question over and over.

“‘Are you a spy?’ they ask me. ‘Are you going home to lead your country in a invasion?’ My army is only about ten thousand,” he says, shaking his blond head.

Born in 1977, in the former Soviet Union, Daveltshin was in on the joke about the little plastic soldiers—targets—everyone called Ivan. When a cadre member asked how he felt about Ivan, Daveltshin quoted a T-shirt popular among cadets: “Kill them all and let God sort them out.”

Behind the new cadets, a woman cadre member, a platoon sergeant named Lisa Landreth, is stretched out in front of her pup tent, head propped on her helmet. She wears BDU pants and a green T-shirt; her weapon is by her side, and she is reading
Mademoiselle
magazine. The model on the cover, all slinky dress and sultry pose, is from some other planet.

The new cadets are eager to talk and, for the first time all summer,
not in the same uniform. Some of them wear BDUs, some wear PT gear, a few of them have removed their BDU blouses and stand in their green T-shirts.

Clint Knox says the two squad leaders they had this summer had completely different leadership styles. “I guess it’s good to get used to different kinds of leaders,” he says. “[First detail squad leader Grady] Jett taught us step by step, showed us how to get things done. Cadet Stein enforced standards, but she let us figure out a lot of things on our own. Maybe she was taught that way.”

Pete Haglin adds, “I learned you should always keep your people informed.”

Some of the eagerness has gone from his voice. All the new cadets are concerned about the looming threat of Re-orgy Week, and Haglin carries additional fears about academics. But for him, there is something more: He has come to resent Shannon Stein.

“During the second detail,” Haglin continues, “half the time I didn’t know what was going on. Then they [the cadre] get frustrated and take it out on us. I liked Jett better. If something got messed up he’d be totally honest about it. Second detail we did what we were told and we were still screwed up.”

Lamb adds, “I liked Jett better, but Stein knew us better.”

“I learned never turn your back on your squad,” Knox says. “She turned her back on us. It’s one thing to have high standards, it’s another to tell someone, ‘You’re worthless.’”

The new cadets are on a roll, and they aren’t shy about voicing their complaints.

“When she didn’t like doing things she made me do them,” Steadman says.

Barry DeGrazio says that Steadman became the “assistant squad leader.” It’s not an official position, of course, but most of the squad leaders find a sharp new cadet to help things move smoothly.

“She didn’t like to get up before everyone so she’d yell at me to get everyone else up,” Steadman says. “I follow orders and all that, but it’s tough because your classmates get pissed off at you.”

He pauses for a moment, perhaps considering how he sounds, having said those things out loud. “I guess I’m learning to be a leader too,” he begrudges her.

“I know I won’t yell at my plebes or use profanity when I’m an upperclassman,” DeGrazio says. “When I messed up during first detail, I felt bad. When I messed up second detail Stein yelled at me all the time. After a while, it didn’t matter. It was like the boy who cried ‘Wolf!’”

Lamb hated the false motivation, “Whenever we went anywhere, we’d yell and have to say ‘Hoo-ah.’ It got stupid after a while.”

Pete Lisowski says the most important thing a leader can do is know and understand his people. “Jett came back to check on us before we came out to Frederick. [First detail platoon sergeant Greg] Stitt came out, too. They cared about us and wanted to know how we were doing.”

“Jett admitted it when he made a mistake,” DeGrazio says.

“Stein didn’t,” Haglin says. “She’d pretend she didn’t do anything wrong.”

Bob Friesema thinks before he speaks. The summer’s experiences are still so fresh that it’s hard for him to get a handle on what he’s seen. “The best leaders are unselfish,” he says. “They care more about their troops than they care about how they look to the people above them.”

“They make it tough because they want us to be tough,” DeGrazio says. “Basic is supposed to weed out people who can’t make it.” He all but parrots the Commandant when he adds, “We’ve learned a lot about being soldiers and a little about being cadets.”

Daveltshin thinks in Russian, then translates to English. It takes him a moment to join any conversation. “I saw many different styles; each cadre has his own.”

Stein, they agree, is all about authority. But she undercut herself because she bucked authority: when she flaunted Mess Hall rules, when she was in open disagreement with the platoon sergeant and platoon leader. First detail platoon sergeant Greg Stitt, the serious former helicopter crew chief, gets the highest marks.

“He was great,” they agree. DeGrazio elaborates. “It was based
on respect. If you made a mistake you felt bad because you let him down. He didn’t have to yell.”

DeGrazio recalls a time when Stitt dropped eight new cadets for push-ups over some infraction. When the whole platoon got down and started doing push-ups, the platoon sergeant was pleased. “That’s what he was looking for, but he didn’t cut us any slack. We did pushups and flutter kicks for a long time.”

“He helped me e-mail home,” Daveltshin says. Then he recalls Stitt in the gas chamber, mask off, doing jumping jacks and reciting plebe knowledge.

“He did what I cannot do,” Daveltshin says. “I would feel safe with him in combat. A soldier has to be tough because combat is the toughest situation in the world, the most stressful. He has to be able to handle that stress to save his life, to save his buddy’s life, to win the battle.”

“When the leader is good,” Steadman says, “you want to do well.”

Not every leader they encountered garnered this kind of respect. The new cadets complain about personal attacks, jokes at their expense. One claims that when Stein’s boyfriend, a second class cadre member from another company, visited her in the barracks, he and Stein amused themselves by teasing the new cadets.

“She called people homosexuals and assholes,” Lamb says.

Many new cadets are required to memorize, and recite on command, special “poop,” a little entertainment for the upperclass cadets. Often poop is dreamt up to go with a name, a hometown, a special talent. A new cadet named Springsteen had to know a repertoire of Bruce Springsteen’s songs that she could sing on command.

Lamb’s poop, which he bristles at now, is, “Ma’am, I am a product of my parents’ sick sexual fantasies about farm animals.”