The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education Read online

  Moving through the woods at night was comical. Our silhouettes bulged with ungainly buglike rucksacks. They weighed in excess of a hundred pounds at times, especially when wet. We were supposed to watch our flanks for an enemy attack, but the only thing we really cared about was finishing the night without breaking a leg. Our helmets tilted down toward the ground as we looked for deadfall and the wait-a-minute vines that lived up to their name. We smelled god-awful—a combination of dried sweat, bad breath, oily, matted hair, coffee, and tobacco spit. Stealth was impossible. Inevitably, one of us would crash through a bush after falling asleep standing up, poke a stick up his nostril, and curse the fucking Airborne Ranger in the Sky. Herds of elephants are quieter than a squad of Ranger students on a night patrol. Ranger School, in essence, was one long, miserable, loud, and uncoordinated movement to dawn.

  On one of these all-night suckfests, we pulled into our patrol base a few hours before dawn and spread out in a circle facing the night. We exchanged the coordinates of a rally point in case we were overrun, and a handful of Rangers took first watch while the rest of us passed out in impromptu fighting positions, so-called Ranger graves hacked out of the dirt to hide half our torsos from imaginary bullets. I fell asleep confident that I would get an hour of shut-eye.

  I awoke to machine-gun fire. Muzzle flashes sparked around the patrol base as sleeping Rangers lurched awake and fended off the attack. No one fired back. I couldn’t figure out why. When the dust settled, I realized what had happened. Our watch had fallen asleep, leaving no security against an enemy attack. The RI had made a point of our lapse by depressing the trigger of our machine gun. Our failure to stay awake was understandable; we had been operating continuously for well over forty hours without sleep.

  “Wake up, Rangers. If you can’t stay awake, I’m going to help you.” He had the authority of God issuing Moses the Ten Commandments.

  “Get on the road. Now. Move it, Rangers!” We lined up on a sandy road somewhere in Cortinia and awaited our punishment.

  “We’re going walking.” He bounded ahead at speed-walking pace, and we strained to keep up. “Let’s go, Rangers. We have a long walk.”

  We followed behind for miles. The moon cast our shadows along the road. We walked long enough to see the moon shadows lengthen. Eventually, he slowed down and faced our squad. He moved down the rank slowly, examining each face like a witness checking out a police lineup. He asked each of us one simple question: “Why are you here?” The answers were predictable, ranging from “For the challenge” to “My platoon sergeant made me.” I admitted with the other infantry officers that I hadn’t had a choice.

  “Wrong answer, Ranger,” he said to each person before addressing the group. “You are here for one reason.” He paused for effect. “You are here for the troops you are going to lead. You are responsible for keeping them alive and accomplishing whatever mission you’re given. I don’t care if you’re tired, hurt, or lonely. This is for them. And they deserve better. You owe them your Ranger tab.

  “Fuck self-pity,” he added with a hiss. “This isn’t about you.”

  9

  Mountain Men

  This is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origins—war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins; war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. . . . It requires . . . a new and wholly different kind of military training.

  JOHN F. KENNEDY, Graduation Address, West Point Class of 1962

  I USED TO LOVE MOUNTAINS. WHEN OUR BUS PULLED past the quiet college town of Dahlonega, Georgia, I looked out the windows and saw a virginal wilderness of astounding beauty. We were done with the first third of Ranger School. Nearly half the class we began with had washed out entirely or remained behind as “recycles” to repeat RAP Week and Darby with the next class. Ranger School was more of a marathon than a sprint. We had finished our warm-up and would start hitting the hills. Nevertheless, I was excited to have traded the sweltering plains of southwestern Georgia for the cool winds north of Atlanta. If God had forgotten Benning, it was in order to spend more time in this beautiful section of the Appalachian Mountains. As we stepped off the bus, turkey vultures wheeled in the sky above our heads. I would soon understand why they lingered.

  After a short “phase break” to consume as much junk food as we could find, shave our heads, and throw our nasty uniforms in the wash, we reassembled for inspection. We dumped our bags, and the RIs began combing through them for contraband. The RIs caught one Ranger who had attempted to subvert the tobacco quota by stuffing extra smokeless tobacco into several tins of Skoal. It was a clear violation of the orders we had received before the phase break. He was booted from the course on the spot. None of us thought the punishment out of proportion. Sneaking extra tobacco was almost as egregious an offense as stealing another Ranger’s food. Tobacco was the fifth food group—as important to survival as sugar and protein. On every patrol we left behind trails of tobacco spit. The nicotine was the only thing that could keep a man awake after two or three days without sleep.

  “Any more blue falcons in the class?” questioned an RI. Being called a “blue falcon” was one of the worst insults in the Ranger vocabulary. The phrase stood for “buddy fucker,” a Ranger who sought an unfair advantage over his peers.

  “No, Sergeant!” we belted out in unison.

  “Good,” he said. “Then we can get on with training. If any of you try any more games, you’ll be out of here faster than a bear with its ass on fire.”

  Training began with a short briefing on environmental hazards. The more I heard these, the more convinced I became that the Army had chosen the most inhospitable locations on the planet to put their training bases. Dahlonega, for example, hosted several varieties of poisonous snakes and spiders. On almost every patrol an RI would parade down the column with a copperhead he had killed by smashing it with his hiking staff. Each kill earned a notch on the staff. Later in the course, one of my classmates had the misfortune of being bitten by a brown recluse, a poisonous spider. He said nothing until the phase finished. As a result, the medics were forced to excise a softball-sized abscess from his ass. At every opportunity afterward he would moon the rest of us while showing off his cross-shaped scar.

  The flora was nearly as bad as the fauna. Poison ivy layered the ground everywhere, always at the precise coordinates where we planted our ambushes and patrol bases. Invasive kudzu vines hung in green curtains like giant topiary structures, and enormous clumps of mountain laurel formed dense, prickly barriers to movement. The mountains themselves were the last environmental hazard. Beware of unmarked cliffs, the RIs told us. A dozen Rangers every year fractured limbs falling off precipices, awakening from their catatonic states to wincing pain and the laughter of RIs.

  We spent the first week of the phase learning how to knot ropes, climb cliffs, and rappel back down. It was the only week in Ranger School when we slept and ate well. Long after Ranger School, most Rangers still reminisce about Dahlonega’s famous blueberry pancakes, fluffy pillows studded with fresh mountain blueberries. At night, falling asleep to a symphony of crickets and owls, I dreamed of pancakes dancing through showers of maple syrup.

  The reason for letting us rest had nothing to do with pity. We slept for the same reason airline pilots did: because climbing was a technical sport that required concentration in order to avoid disastrous errors. We spent days mastering knots because a bad knot could kill a climber. At the end of the week we had the opportunity to put our lessons to the test. The RIs bused us to the foot of Georgia’s tallest mountain, Mount Yonah, and marched us to the summit in less than an hour. The burn in my quadriceps gave me some inkling of the pain to come during the patrol segment of Mountain phase. Climbing the bald summit was nerve-racking but easier than sitting at the top belaying my partner. I was like a construction worker at the top floor of a skyscraper’s scaffolding. The only thing kee
ping me from tumbling to my death was a small snap link connected to a screw in the rock. After I got used to the vertigo, I appreciated the stunning view across north Georgia and the hawks wheeling through the sky at eye level.

  The second day at Yonah was less serene. I was climbing an eighty-foot cliff when halfway up the incline my shoulder dislocated. My belay man caught my fall before I did more than bang my knees on the rock. I bit my lip to avoid screaming in agony.

  “Get up my rock, Ranger. I haven’t got all day,” yelled an RI peering at me from above.

  I stared up the cliff face. Dear God, just get me up this rock. I reached up with my injured arm but couldn’t even get it over my head. I hung for an eternity on the fingers of my good left hand.

  “Ranger, get off your knees and start climbing. The only way off this cliff is from the top.”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” I replied.

  “Don’t ‘Yes, Sergeant’ me, just get up the damn mountain.”

  I planted my right toe a foot higher and reached for the next handhold with my left hand.

  “Good, Ranger. Keep going.”

  I pulled my left leg up and found another good toehold.

  “Excellent.”

  I repeated the three motions with my good limbs and faked the motion with my right arm. It worked. I got up to the top, and the RI slapped me on the back, a rare gesture of goodwill.

  “Just one more climb, Ranger.” I moved off and rested my arm before a last painful and, fortunately, successful climb. My arm was sore marching down Yonah, but still attached. So far the Mountain phase had lived up to its billing—getting to the fight really was half the battle.

  A FEW DAYS LATER it became apparent that the relative pampering of the first week had been an anomaly. They had just fattened us up for the slaughter. A fresh set of RIs began to train us in platoon tactics, optimized for mountainous terrain. The most memorable of the bunch was Gunnery Sergeant Oakes, a hard-nosed Marine who never raised his voice. I would learn more from him than any other instructor at Ranger School. When it was my time to lead a real combat patrol, it would be his advice I heard in the back of my head.

  “Rangers,” he intoned, almost at a whisper, “outwit their enemies.”

  Careful analysis of the terrain was critical, and the smart commander understood that the straight line between two coordinates was rarely the fastest. Oakes taught us how to avoid being silhouetted on ridgelines by traversing along the slopes.

  “Use the mountains,” he said, “or they will use you.”

  We spent hours in the planning bays before conducting practice missions. Oakes believed that deliberate planning saved lives. Before picking ambush sites, we pored over our maps. Oakes taught us to attack from the high ground along roads. He drew out the ambush kill zone like a geometry exercise, teaching us how to position and aim our various weapons in order to maximize their effects. And yet, he emphasized, we had to show the flexibility to deviate from the plan when conditions changed.

  “Sixty percent of command is anticipation. The rest is innovation.” Real roads would never look as they did on a map. “Expect it,” he warned. “Recon the objective and move the ambush as necessary.”

  Oakes also believed in drills. Like a football team running plays, an infantry platoon could practice combat. The platoon leader was the coach and quarterback, training, writing the game plan, and calling the plays. There were important differences, Oakes pointed out: Football teams didn’t bring body bags to games, and infantry platoons could practice a lifetime without playing a game. Fundamentally, though, winning a fight meant building the same discipline. False bravado wasn’t enough to prevail; competence and teamwork were the keys. Many Rangers talked a big game, said Oakes, but we would learn how to “walk the talk.” He emphasized calm amid chaos. Riffing on Clausewitz, Oakes noted that in the fog of war, the most basic actions had to be instinctive.

  “You need to be able to win with your eyes closed.”

  He was being literal. The next day we did our drills blindfolded. At first our platoon bumbled around like kids striking a piñata. After two days of practice, we could set a platoon of forty Rangers in a midnight patrol base in under thirty minutes.

  Most important, Oakes had us evacuate casualties. One afternoon we shuttled fake casualties up and down an abandoned airfield for hours. It was exhausting work, it was morbid, and it was invaluable. Every mission we planned in Ranger School had to include a plan for getting casualties triaged, bandaged, and moved. We couldn’t always expect to land a medevac helicopter on a “hot” landing zone. We might need to carry a comrade for miles to safety. Just a few casualties could consume the platoon’s effectiveness by requiring three or four men to carry each body. Oakes was teaching a lesson I didn’t understand until later—that bloodless battles were exceptional. Rangers expected casualties on both sides. To plan for less was irresponsible.

  The training fell short. No notional casualty evacuation could mimic real wounds. We didn’t learn how a stretcher got slippery with blood. We didn’t learn how to move at a crouch for fear of becoming casualties ourselves. We didn’t learn how to plug punctured lungs or how to clean viscera off gear after a fight. And we never carried dead weight because Cortinians only fired blanks.

  MOUNTAIN FIELD EXERCISES WERE twice as long as the ones in Darby and three times as complicated. On the first day the excitement of a helicopter air assault kept our adrenaline flowing through the first marches up and down the Tennessee Valley Divide. The thrill wore off quickly as day ran into night and back into day without rest or food. Longer patrols meant heavier packs stuffed with enough food and water to last several days. Carrying one hundred pounds or more up 60-degree inclines broke down whatever muscles remained on us. One of the RIs laughed as we stood panting on the slope. “We don’t need to kill you; the mountains will.” That explained the vultures.

  Ernest Hemingway claimed hunger was a discipline you learned from. Although we ate military “Meals, Ready-to-Eat” (MREs) twice a day, the calories were too few for backbreaking mountain treks. At West Point we had joked about MREs, calling them “Meals Rejected by the Enemy” and “Meals Rarely Enjoyed.” Back then if I had received the insalubrious ham slice or slimy beef frankfurters, I gave away the main entrée and subsisted on the packet of dry crackers. In the mountains, by contrast, we worshipped MREs. Soldiers would bury blank ammunition to lighten their packs, but no Ranger ever buried so much as a sugar packet from his MRE. If I could discipline my appetite or make strategic trades with a classmate, gourmet preparations were possible. Ranger pudding, for instance, combined the cocoa beverage powder with creamer and sugar. Mixing coffee with imagination turned the substance into a mochaccino.

  We slowly starved. Without a proper mirror, it was easiest to observe the changes in my classmates. The metamorphosis from healthy twenty-one-year-olds to gaunt POWs was dramatic. By the middle of the course, many had lost twenty or thirty pounds. Baby fat was the first to go. Stomachs tightened, muscles sharpened, and cheeks sank beneath the dark caves that used to be eyes. Then came ketoacidosis, a medical condition normally associated with acute starvation. The chemical by-products of metabolism under severe stress made us stink. I learned from the discipline of hunger that starving bodies smelled like paint thinner. Had Hemingway reached the same conclusion?

  Hunger and fatigue made a mockery of our best plans. On the first ambush we conducted, we waited in the dark patiently. There was no moonlight at all, and the stars were totally obscured by the thick canopy above us. The hum of cicadas muffled the small sounds we made shifting on our stomachs and bobbing our heads in a struggle to stay awake. Below us, a strip of gravel road curled around the mountain.

  A split second after the patrol leader’s signal shot, we opened up in an arpeggio of machine-gun fire, grenade simulators, and M16s. The flurry of flashing muzzles was the most exciting thing we had done in a day spent in a beleaguered march up nearly vertical mountain slopes. After a mad minute of firing, we a
ssaulted down the hill, tripping over our own boots in the brush, and stopped, breathless, on the other side of the road. I turned to look back at the kill zone. There was something wrong: There were no vehicles or dead Cortinians on the road.

  “For fuck’s sake, Rangers!” Our RI stood in the center of the road, took off his patrol cap, and flung it on the ground. “That was the wrong truck. You just scared the daylight out of a bunch of fucking civilians on their way to drinking beer and getting laid. At this rate you’ll be in Ranger School so long you’ll forget how.”

  He fired the entire chain of command on the spot and marched us until daylight. A few sleepless days later I got my chance. On my first patrol as the platoon leader, I took over after the RI fired my predecessor for being too slow in the planning process. I made the best of a bad plan and moved the platoon toward the objective. During our movement I lost radio contact with my platoon sergeant at the rear of our column. He drifted on a different course that cost me precious minutes as I struggled to reconsolidate. Just as we did, the RI grinned at me, pulled an artillery simulator out of his pocket, and triggered it.