Duty First (25 page)

Below that, the acronym “METL.” In the Regular Army, METL
stands for “Mission Essential Task List,” those things the unit must be able to do to fulfill its wartime mission. The METL for F-2 reads:

• Foster Academic Excellence
  

• Prepare Soldiers for immediate and future military leadership
  

• Instill a competitive spirit within the Zoo that demands physical fitness and athletic prowess
  

• Reinforce a moral and ethical climate based on the Seven Army Values
  

• Protect the force
  

“The cadets came up with this,” Turner says of the fliers. He steps up to one door and absentmindedly straightens a wrinkled corner of the paper. Turner got this process started and held the cadets responsible, but he doesn’t take credit.

His office is at the end of the long hall. Inside, he flops down on one of the two vinyl, government-issue couches. Like most other Tacs, he’s decorated in the “I-love-me” style: There’s a guidon from the tank company Turner commanded, a group photo of his Ranger school class, a framed certificate of completion of the Special Forces Selection Course at Fort Bragg. The walls are a kind of equivalent of the badges soldiers wear on their uniforms: here’s my military biography, my curriculum vitae.

“This company had a kind of bad track record for academics,” Turner says. “I picked a good firstie to be the academic officer, and I told him: ‘You’ll get graded on your performance. Make it work, you’ll get the A [in military aptitude].’ He set up a system to monitor people who were having problems. Like in physics and chemistry, he identified those yearlings who were doing well. Then he took them up to the Center for Enhanced Performance.”

The center is a laboratory, staffed by civilian educators, that uses the latest in psychology and pedagogy to help cadets boost performance in academics and even in sports. F-2’s academic officer got all of his tutors trained there, then posted a schedule of the exams in major
courses. He pushed the chain of command to get involved: Squad leaders and team leaders knew how their people were doing.

The year before Turner arrived, F-2 averaged thirteen or fourteen course failures a semester. In the semester just ended, there were seven. Turner is proud of the record and pleased that it was the cadet leadership that marshaled the company’s talent. The chain of command even did the unpopular stuff, enforcing study conditions in the barracks.

“When some yearlings are goofing off in the hallway and making noise, [the leaders] say, ‘You got something better to do?’ We had all these people worried that grades would fall off, you know, since the plebes had TV cards in their computers, phones in their rooms. Looks like we’re going to have forty-five or so on the Dean’s List.”

The door to the office is open; a cadet comes to the door, pauses.

“What’s up?” Turner asks.

When Turner greets cadets he often slides into Army-speak: The aphorisms and colorful metaphors that pour in a solid stream from some people as soon as they put on camouflage. When Rob Olson—white-bread son of suburban Minneapolis—lapses into this, it is mostly the common Army-Southern hybrid: lots of twang. Turner’s army-speak has a hint of black English. “What’s up?” comes out close to “
Waz-up?
”

The first class cadet enters the office and hands Turner a three ring binder that says “Pass Book.” This is how cadets request weekend passes and provide addresses and phone numbers of where they’ll be while away from West Point. Some of the entries are a little sloppy.

“I don’t want no Sanskrit in here,” Turner says, pointing to an illegible entry. He quizzes the firstie on the approved passes. Did he check on eligibility? Is the system he used fair? A big part of his job, as Turner sees it, is to help the cadets connect what they’re doing with what they’ll do in the Army. This is also a way to fight cynicism among cadets.

“They complain about having to do some stuff. They say, ‘How is this going to help me in the Army?’ And I tell them that lieutenants
have more than one job. You have your go-to-war stuff: are you technically and tactically proficient? Then you have all that other stuff. You’ve got to take care of soldiers, take care of families, keep track of equipment, help people plan their careers, all of the other stuff”

“Cadets respond to responsibility,” he says. “I put one of my more cynical cadets in as company XO [executive officer, second-in-command]. People said, ‘Whoa, you kiddin’ me?’ The guy’s even on the overweight program and might get launched out of here. But he’s stepping up to the plate.”

Turner’s job is to help all of his cadets learn how to succeed. His favorite tool is the one-on-one counseling session. He pulls open a drawer filled with neat folders, extracts one, and lets it fall open in his hand. It is a cadet performance record. Stapled to one side is a spreadsheet that shows the cadet’s academic and military grades, summer assignments, academic major, hometown. There is a small black-and-white photo in one corner, a counseling form on the opposite side. Just above a job description that lays out what the cadet is supposed to do in support of the company mission, there are two blocks filled with handwritten comments. One is labeled “Strengths,” the other is “Needs Improvement.” The handwriting is the cadet’s.

“I have them fill this out. Then I tell them what I see and we talk about what they need to do to improve. A lot of leaders … don’t keep their subordinates informed. I guess people think of it as a confrontation. But if you let them know the score right at the beginning, if you take the time to do that right, when snafus come along you just go back to the original and say, ‘This is what we agreed to, this is what you’re showing me.’ You can’t be afraid to confront people. You have to have the ability to look someone in the eye and say, ‘You’re not cutting it. You’re not making the standard and this is what you need to do to fix that.’ ”

Two cadets appear at the door, and Turner motions them in. First Class Murphy Caine, the cadet company commander, begins talking as soon as he steps in the office and, although he doesn’t interrupt, rarely stops. The other cadet is a junior, Company First Sergeant Cedric Bray. The two cadets, who hold two of the most important
leadership positions in the company, look like testimony to Turner’s broad reach in looking for leaders. Caine is small, with dark hair and fair skin, energetic, constantly moving. Bray, tall and black, speaks deliberately and watches everything around him.

Caine walks over to Turner’s chair behind the desk.

“Can I sit in the power seat, sir?” he asks. He sits and places the palms of his hands flat on the desktop. Turner asks about a meeting scheduled for that evening. Caine and the other upperclass cadets will brief the company on their plan for the semester: responsibilities and expectations for the chain of command and each class. They’ve culled the guidance given them by Turner and the higher echelons and have broken that down into a series of practical, usable steps.

“What’s your plan?”

“I’m going to talk about the company mission,” Caine says from behind Turner’s desk. “Then the company staff is going to get up and talk about all the pieces, about how we’re going to make that happen.”

“Give me an example,” Turner says.

“Well, the academic officer will talk about tutors, about how we’re going to run that program. The platoon leaders will talk about conditions in the barracks, study barracks, and about passes. We’ll show how we got input from the chain of command, how our goals fit into what came down from higher.”

The cadets used the Army manual for laying out the plan. Turner is pleased because the cadets have accomplished two missions: they have created a plan for running the company for the semester, and they have learned how to plan using the Army model. It’s not Desert Storm, but in eighteen months, some of these cadets wearing the black shields of the first class will be in Bosnia or the Sinai or wherever the current hot spot happens to be. They’ll be ready to contribute.

Turner leads the two cadets into the hallway as they talk about the state of the company area. The Tac speaks to every cadet he passes; he knows names, hometowns, what subjects they’re good in. In between chatting up passing cadets, Turner quizzes Caine and Bray on the new furniture: how many desks have come in? How many are
still missing? Bray, a good First Sergeant, knows what’s going on in his company and answers every question. Just as the cadets are learning some new skills, Turner has challenged himself as well. He is preparing to be a field grade officer (major and above), exerting his influence indirectly, leading through his subordinates and resisting the temptation to jump in and do everything himself.

Turner leads the cadets into one of the latrines that run down the center of the building. Each latrine is also a locker room, with several dozen gray metal lockers for athletic equipment, racks for drying wet clothing, showers.

“Why do you inspect?” he asks the cadets. “What are you looking for?”

“You want to make sure people have the equipment they need,” Caine responds. “That it’s in good shape, that they’re taking care of it.”

“Right. This isn’t about ‘You’re a dirtbag.’ ” Turner says.

The lockers do not have doors. Gym shorts are on one side of the shelf, athletic T-shirts on the other, socks rolled into tight little balls. Athletic shoes go on top of the locker, aligned and facing forward. Taped to one end of a set of lockers is a photocopied page from cadet regulations: Appendix D, Annex B, United States Corps of Cadets Standard Operating Procedure. The sheet has a line drawing of an athletic locker. The shirts and shorts in the illustration are drawn with a ruler; the real lockers are almost as neat and are arranged in exactly the same way.

The barracks PA system announces, “Third regiment lunch formation goes indoors.”

“Force protection,” Caine offers. “No sense in standing around in the wind and freezing cold, maybe have somebody slip on the ice and get hurt.”

The cadets don’t remember having any formations moved indoors last year. The year before that, one or two were moved indoors. Some cadets see this as wimping out. After all, wars aren’t cancelled because of weather. But leaders also must take care of soldiers and avoid unnecessary injuries. There is always a clash between
the “drive on” attitude—we’re tough, we don’t give in, we don’t give up—and common sense.

Back out in the hallway, the three men talk about bulletin boards. Caine is particularly proud of one labeled “community activities.” A banner reads “Support Breast Cancer Research,” just above a wrinkled piece of foil tacked to the center. It is the top of a yogurt container. The cadets learned that the yogurt company makes a donation for breast cancer research for every top sent in. Since the yogurt cups are served in the Mess Hall by the thousands, the cadets have made substantial donations.

Half of the bulletin boards are covered with candid photos of the cadets, along with printed biographies on three-by-five cards that state hometown, favorite sports, favorite quotation, branch the cadet wants to join. One cadet has put up a photo of a classic Ford Mustang; another has a close-up of himself at the helm of a sailboat. There are group shots: barracks birthday parties in which the celebrant is covered in shaving cream. One young woman has a picture of herself in an evening gown, long hair draped to her shoulders, Hollywood smile in place. Another board has two small snapshots. In each of them a plebe stands with his back to a wooden locker in a cadet room while two other cadets—upperclass, judging by their demeanor—stand on either side, one talking into each ear. The pose is a classic tableau of plebe year.

This is the posture plebes assumed when an upperclass cadet said “drive around to my room.” The unlucky plebe stood up against the locker (or the wall) and steeled himself for what was coming, which could be a simple demand for recitation of fourth class knowledge to a screaming match between two cadets—one on either side—that was meant to rattle, demean, and sometimes reduce to tears the plebe caught in the crossfire. One graduate in his early forties remembers being invited by upperclassmen to “come hang around my room and listen to music.” When he showed up, the cadets indicated the doors of the wardrobe, which opened out. The plebe draped one arm over the top of each swinging door and hung there—with
the sharp edges of the door biting into his armpits—while the upperclass cadets challenged him to see if he could last through an entire song.

But the upperclass cadets in this picture are smiling. It’s a game, meant to be ironic (“this is how it used to be”) and a threat (“and we could make it this way again”). The plebe, however, doesn’t look amused. The whole point of being a plebe is powerlessness. Things happen
to
plebes. The plebe in the picture has no control over whether this game turns nasty. Turner taps the photo. “That’s me,” he says.

The plebe has a full head of hair; Brian Turner keeps his head shaved. The plebe in the picture is thin; the officer standing in the hallway now has spent a lot of time in the weight room. But mostly the plebe looks scared; the captain is the picture of confidence.

“I was playing a little game with the cadets. I didn’t tell them much about myself. I sort of kept it a mystery, like the captain in
Saving Private Ryan.
And sure enough, they wanted to know more. Somehow they got my mom’s phone number back in Chicago, called her up and got some stories. Next thing I know they’re busting on me with dirt from when I was a kid. They got this,” he says, indicating the bulletin board photo. “They got another picture of me and superimposed my head on Mr. T’s body.”

“You have to laugh,” Turner says. He is smiling, but the amusement doesn’t run deep. “They [the cadets] look to see if you’re comfortable enough with yourself to have a sense of humor.”

“I didn’t have a lot of confidence in myself as a kid. That was one of the things I was looking for when I walked through the gate here.”

The other thing the young Brian Turner was looking for at West Point was a way out of his Chicago neighborhood. “The guys I went to high school with were punks. I didn’t know what I wanted to be, but I knew what I didn’t want to be.”