Duty First (24 page)

“I guess I felt it more plebe year. Like, in class, if we were talking about rap music, the P would say, ‘Cadet Bryan, what do you think?” Like, ‘Let’s get the black woman’s perspective.’”

She laughs, then gets serious.

“I haven’t felt any discrimination here at West Point.”

Two drummers beat a cadence, which echoes off the stone walls as the companies of fourth regiment march to the big Mess Hall doors. The plebes walk like robots, head and eyes rigidly to the front. During lunch Bryan talks about her involvement with the Contemporary Affairs Seminar, a black cadets’ group. The group does community outreach programs and hosts a conference in the spring to which they invite inner-city high school students for discussions about college and other opportunities. The conference serves a purpose for the cadets, too, Bryan says, “So we don’t forget where we came from.”

“We’re ground-breakers. It’s good to remember how far we’ve
come. I mean, I talk about having
only
fourteen black women in my class—well—Henry O. Flipper was the only black cadet at West Point.”

Henry O. Flipper, born in slavery, endured racism and a lonely existence to become West Point’s first black graduate in 1877. Bryan and her friends know that they are carrying on in the tradition of Flipper, of the drive for civil rights. She is stirred by this being part of something forward-looking. In her world view, the future is better than the past.

On the way out of the Mess Hall after lunch she passes a firstie, and Bryan says hello. When he is out of hearing she points out that this black cadet is the deputy brigade commander.

“I heard there was even a black first captain once,” she says.

Vince Brooks, ‘80, was the first black cadet to wear the six stripes and gold star of the first captain. Brooks, who became the youngest colonel in his class, later had lunch with the Contemporary Affairs Seminar. He told them, bluntly, that they had to be able to handle the visibility that comes with being a minority.

“It’s an extra responsibility,” he told them. “So what? Ruck up [strap on your rucksack, i.e., shoulder the burden], or find something else to do.”

Outside, Bryan joins the fast-moving throng headed for the academic buildings. She talks about race as unself-consciously as she might discuss the weather. But not everyone at West Point is so relaxed. Bryan heard one white cadet comment, “You see a bunch of white guys sitting at a table after dinner, you think: lacrosse team. See a bunch of black guys sitting around a table after dinner, you think: coup.”

“That’s probably true,” she says. “But it’s really pretty simple. You want to talk to people with similar backgrounds, similar interests. It’s like New York City with its Italian neighborhoods, or like when an American overseas wants to talk to other Americans, just for something familiar.”

Bryan is consistently cheerful, and, like Kevin Bradley, is able to put her cadet experience in a larger context. Rather than complain
about her lack of freedom, she chooses to focus on the advantages of living in this tight community.

“My friends at regular colleges have a hard time with money. They have to work at a job or two, go to school and study. They have it harder than I do. At West Point, if you just follow what they set out for you, you don’t have to worry too much. I don’t have to worry about eating Cup-O-Soup for days at a time.”

Her friendships are a big part of what she values about West Point. She knows she has more men friends than she would someplace else, but that doesn’t mean she’s ready to date cadets. Many of those couples wind up at the altar immediately after graduation, something that Bryan pronounces “stupid.”

“I’ll only be twenty-one. What if I want to go to Germany or take advantage of other opportunities? A lot of people are in a rush to get married. It’s convenient, because you’re both here, you have so much in common already. But then you head off to different assignments and you say, ‘What was I thinking?’”

“Once I have a family that’ll be my main priority. The army is what I chose for this part of my life; I’ll only be twenty-six when my commitment is up. There’s lots of time—if I decide to get out—to do whatever I want.”

“I think it’s important to have a positive attitude, to be pleasant. It’s still going to be stupid stuff whether you’re bitching about it or not. Why punish everyone around you who has to listen to you?”

Bryan tends to look at things from this human relations point of view; she is glad she spent her summer counseling new cadets. For her, West Point is about the lives she touches and the lives that touch hers.

“This place is about service. I wanted something more than a regular college experience. I wanted to learn about myself and be challenged. I’ve come to like the leadership aspect of this place; it suits me,” she says. “Like being platoon sergeant. I get to decide how I want to do things, how to run inspections. The platoon leader gives me autonomy. And when he asks a question and I can say, ‘Already thought of that; got it covered.’ That’s really cool.”

C
adets call the period between Christmas leave and spring leave “the gloom period.” Everything at West Point is gray: the uniforms, the buildings, the sky, the somber mood. Unlike the fall, there are no home football games, with their invasions of visitors. There is just the relentless cold: cold floors in the barracks, cold wind blowing through the big doors of the Mess Hall so that the cadets nearest the entrance huddle in their coats until long after the meal has started. There is a long stretch of work before Spring Break.

On this bitter morning in January the temperature hovers at about twenty degrees, though the wind rocketing down the river valley makes it feel worse. It snowed most of the night, three or four inches on top of a layer of ice left over from a previous storm. A few lonely cars sit in the parking lots, and most of the civilian workers have been told to stay home.

But the cadets are out. In their woodland camouflage BDUs, with their shoulders hunched up against the weather, from a distance they look like a herd of two-footed animals looking for cover. They stream
out of the barracks by the hundreds, by the thousands. Most of them head for Thayer Hall, the four-story former riding hall turned academic building that sits perched on the edge of the flat ground. Inside, the fourth class cadets of Company F-2—The Zoo—prepare a defensive plan to close the border of the fictitious republic of “Magapa” from a hostile mounted force.

A young woman, seven months out of high school, stands in front of the classroom, her map overlay projected on the big screen beside her. A river cuts across the small-scale map from northwest to southeast; a small town lies at the center where a bridge, carrying a north-south road, crosses the river. Low hills squat beside the blue water where she has placed her infantry squads to control the river crossing. She gestures at the map, unsure of herself.

“The La Costan forces,” she says, naming the fictitious enemy, “probably won’t use the road.” She points to another route from the north. “They’ll … uhm … come this way?”

It comes out like a question. The other plebes in the room, who are also completely new to this, offer no encouragement.

With her finger she traces a route that will keep the approaching enemy hidden behind a ridgeline until they are up to the bridge, almost directly across from the American position where this platoon leader-in-training has positioned her meager force.

“We’ve … uhm … we’ve plotted artillery fire back there,” she says, “because we won’t be able to see them if they move up that way?”

There are small crosses on the map overlay marked “TRP,” for target reference point, pre-planned targets for the artillery. The platoon leader on the hill south of the river might not be able to see the enemy, but with a good plot and a radio, she’d be able to rain artillery fire on anybody stirring around back there.

The plan is a good one. It lets the Americans control the river crossing without sitting right on top of it; they won’t get pinned down in the low ground around the bridge. But the delivery isn’t inspiring.

Sergeant First Class Jonathan Brown, the Tac NCO for F-2, tells her so.

“What’s with that timid little voice you’re using?” he asks.

“I have a cold.”

“Too bad. You’re out in the field; I’m out in the field. You’re cold and wet; guess what? So am I.”

Brown, who has been a field soldier for most of his fifteen years in the army, sits in a chair in the middle of the room. He looks around the room, where the cadet desks are arranged in fours and fives. This is a teaching point about conditions in the field, not an attack on a sniffly cadet.

“You’ve got to put that information out there,” he says. “You’ve got three squad leaders, three type-A personalities; all of them want to get out on that hill and start getting ready. Tell them what they need to know, then let them do their jobs, right?”

The young woman nods. She is already moving back to her seat, ready to be out of the spotlight. The next plebe who briefs, using the same slice of map and same scenario, tries to sound more confident. In addition to the squad positions, he has also indicated where the platoon’s critical anti-tank weapons will be positioned.

“You probably don’t want to stick your CP right on top of that hill,” Captain Brian Turner, F-2’s Tac, says from the doorway. “Why is that?”

The briefer turns to the screen. Sure enough, he has put the little symbol for the platoon command post smack on top of the high ground.

“They’ll see you from a mile away,” another cadet says.

“Right,” Turner says.

Turner, who was the associate Tac of Alpha Company during Beast Barracks, is a tanker. He knows how tank commanders scan the terrain in front of them, looking for the obvious: a lookout on the high ground, spotters near the hilltops.

“What else?”

“Artillery?” a cadet attempts.

Turner nods encouragement. The cadet goes on.

“They’re going to plot artillery on the hilltops, too,” the plebe finishes. “Just like we do.”

For almost fifty years, U.S. Army training exercises were plotted on maps of Europe; everyone knew who was coming over the hill. The generic replacement for the Soviet army—the motorized rifle and infantry regiments of La Costa—is a notional enemy. Today’s plebe tacticians could call it a “fill-in-the-blank enemy”: Somali warlords, Serbian police forces, Haitian mutineers.

The cadets do not ask about the scenario; after all, this isn’t a class on world politics. This preparing to fight fill-in-the-blank enemies will create an Army that can deploy anywhere and, on command, shoot up whoever happens to be coming down the road to the river.

“Firehose learning,” Turner says during a break. Cadets pass in the hallway. The background music is shuffling boots, winter-cold sneezes and coughs. This is military intersession, a two-week mini-semester during which cadets take only classes in military subjects.

“The team leaders shoot a lot at them [the plebes]. They’ve come a long way in a short amount of time as far as their knowledge goes.”

“Team leaders work with the plebes on the capabilities of a specific branch,” Sergeant First Class Brown adds. They cover a different one each month. For instance, when they were working on their knowledge of the infantry, they had to learn all the weapons, their ranges, what they could do. Here, we’re starting to put all that knowledge together.”

Brown is a big man with coffee-colored skin and large hands. He looks like he could be Eddie Murphy’s big brother. “This summer, they’ll get out on the ground at Camp Buckner and see that there’s a lot more to it than drawing some symbols on a map. But this is a good start.”

Turner and Brown are in the front rank when it comes to both teaching cadets the skills they’ll need, and to setting the example of how officers and non-commissioned officers should act. Turner works with the first class cadets, who are closest to becoming lieutenants. He also spends time with the plebes, so he can get a sense of what the company looks like from the bottom up. Brown, the “real”
non-commissioned officer, works with the yearlings [sophomores] and cows [juniors], who hold NCO rank in the corps.

Like most of the officers at West Point, Turner believes that the strong presence of senior NCOs like Brown has added immeasurably to the cadets’ preparation. They leave the Academy with a clear understanding of how lieutenants and NCOs should work together. But working with senior NCOs can only accomplish so much.

“Cadets are a little isolated,” Brown says. “They don’t know how to talk to privates, because they haven’t been around privates. They’ve been around cadets; they just see officers and NCOs.”

Graduates of the Army’s ROTC program aren’t as isolated. In fact, they often spend their summers and time out of class working at jobs—like flipping burgers—that put them right next to the kind of young man or young woman who comes into the Army as a private.

Turner walks out into the storm and heads back to Bradley Barracks, the same building Alpha Company occupied during Beast. The blowing snow is channeled by the buildings, and Turner pulls his hat low to cover his eyes and returns the salutes of cadets coming in the opposite direction. His greetings are informal:
How ya doin? Hey, how are you? Hi, there.
He is the friendly lord of the manor.

The barracks are warm compared to the storm outside. They are also scrupulously clean. One of the two hallways in the company area is crowded: Old desks stand along the walls, replaced by new desks with computer platforms. Cardboard and pieces of packing crate are stacked haphazardly.

“All this stuff has to go,” Turner says aloud to some cadets.

Nearly every doorway in the company is decorated with a photocopied flyer. At the top, it says “F2 Zoo” above a photo of an adult and baby gorilla. Beneath the photo, lest a visitor think this was a college dorm, is the company’s mission: “To conduct operations that promote academic, military, physical and moral/ethical excellence to prepare its soldiers for future leadership roles in the Corps of Cadets and the United States Army.”