The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education Read online

  “That’s ‘Say-sha-money.’” She smiled. “Don’t worry. Everyone screws up my name. Just call me Meena.”

  Meena led me up to the landing and showed me the MCR. Dappled light from the quad entered through a large bay window. We sat down on a futon and chatted. I assumed from Meena’s striking complexion and unusual name that she was Indian. As we traded small talk, I learned that she had grown up in suburban New Jersey. When we stood to leave, Meena swung her book bag over her shoulder. It was the size of a Ranger School rucksack, but bright blue, with a large reflective strip and her initials. I had last seen a bag like that in high school. She pulled her hair back from her eyes and smiled. What an incongruous combination of beauty and bad fashion.

  LATER THAT SAME DAY I arrayed my new gown over a crisply ironed shirt and walked with Katie to dinner at Lincoln, my first taste of Oxford’s nightly ritual of formal sit-down meals. Three long wooden tables stretched the length of the hall toward an elevated dais reserved like an altar for the silver-haired dons. Above my head was a peaked ceiling thirty feet high, sewn together with dark beams of timber and iron tie-rods. Candles lit the room from sconces braced between gilded portrait frames of Lincoln’s founders.

  I sat down on the bench and introduced myself to the other Americans Katie had found in the hall. Although Americans made up a significant percentage of the graduate students at Oxford, most weren’t there on Rhodes Scholarships. Some paid their own way; others had small stipends from their departments or colleges; and many held other prestigious fellowships such as the Marshall, Rotary, or Fulbright. Meena, I had learned that afternoon, was a Marshall scholar. Matt and Hayden, sitting across the table from Katie and me, were Rotary scholars.

  Matt Humbaugh was a Harvard statistician studying Russian economic reforms. At six feet six inches, Matt was perhaps the tallest person I had ever met. He spoke in a string of mathematically conditioned superlatives. “On a scale of one to ten, one being a guy who just won a hotdog-eating competition and ten being a starving refugee”—dramatic pause—“my hunger is at a twelve.” Matt also ended up being the best dancer at any Oxford party, using his wingspan to power improbable twists, bends, and gesticulations.

  Hayden Hamilton was nearly as tall as Matt and dangerously prone to exaggerated finger snapping, especially after downing several of his trademark cocktails. Between college and starting Oxford’s MBA program, Hayden had spent a year “researching the effects of tourism on indigenous mountain communities in Nepal.” I had no idea what “indigenous” meant. Over the course of the year, Matt, Hayden, and I would become inseparable—listening to guest speakers, drinking at the pub, traveling—and usually engulfed in an argument on anything from politics to art to one of Hayden’s clever business schemes.

  As the bells outside clanged the seventh hour, the doors swung open, and students scrambled for their seats as gowned dons marched to their elevated positions of academic grace. Next, a nod triggered a student’s recitation of a Latin prayer. The only words I could decipher from the gibberish were Dominum nostrum—our Lord. After the prayer, dinner began. Waiters delivered plates of peas, mystery meat, and boiled potatoes. I plowed through my meal out of habit.

  “Craig,” Katie said, staring at my nearly empty plate, “slow down.”

  “Yeah, man. You’re not in Ranger School anymore,” said Hayden.

  Eating slower made the taste linger longer, though. To swallow, I had to tell myself that the food was better than an MRE. I should have counted myself lucky; Lincoln at least had an endowed chef. Before I had time to spear my last mushy pea, dessert arrived. It was an unidentifiable pastry. Was this treacle? Or Yorkshire pudding? Why didn’t the phrase book come with pictures?

  “Mmmm,” Matt murmured, smothering his in thick, gooey custard.

  “Want some?” he asked, stretching three feet across the table with the custard pitcher.

  “I’ll pass, thanks.”

  The other adjustment from a military mess hall was the caliber of conversation. It was as if I had landed on the planet Scrabble. Matt used words like “defenestrate” and “lachrymose.” Hayden was even stranger. He combined a Ranger’s command of curse words with Matt’s triple word scores. Dinners with them were verbal obstacle courses, but a complex vocabulary helped unlock complex ideas.

  Katie headed back after dinner, and Hayden, Matt, and I walked down into the cellar beneath the dining hall. This was the crypt bar known as Deep Hall. At one point in its history, Lincoln had even operated its own brewery. That tradition ended centuries before, but one interesting vestige remained. Every year on Ascension Day, Deep Hall served free beer to students from Brasenose College. This was no gesture of charity. It was repayment of a blood debt. In the Middle Ages, during one of the many riots between “town” and “gown,” a mob of townsmen chased a group of students to the front gate of Lincoln. The porter opened the sanctuary to only the Lincoln students he recognized. The Brasenose man who remained behind, pounding on the oak with his fists, was stoned to death by the mob. Every year since, Lincoln has attempted to expiate its sin with pints of beer flavored with medieval ground ivy.

  Three six-foot-wide stone pillars held up the hall above, and the low ceiling just barely accommodated Matt and Hayden’s height. The smell of spilled lager and salt-and-vinegar potato chips infused the cold and dim room. I slid into a vaulted booth with Hayden while Matt stooped over to the bar and ordered three imperial pints from the bartender. Before I knew it, there were nine empty glasses on the table, and we were locked in debate.

  “Who do you think has done more to change the world for the better,” asked Hayden, “Mother Teresa or Bill Gates?”

  “Mother Teresa,” I said. “She’s a saint.”

  “Is sainthood our yardstick for achievement?” asked Matt. “I completely disagree.”

  “Yeah,” Hayden chimed in, “Mother Teresa is probably a saint, but she’s only helped a few thousand people in one city. Look at Gates. Microsoft changed the way billions of people interact with one another through the computer.”

  “You don’t have to invent a new technology to have impact,” I said.

  “What about caring for the sick and destitute? Isn’t that worthwhile service?”

  “Of course it is,” said Hayden, “but that’s not the point. The point is scale. Who’s done more?”

  “If it’s just scale, then of course it’s Gates,” I conceded, “but you’re not saying making a billion dollars is service, are you?”

  “That’s exactly what Hayden is saying,” answered Matt.

  “If I make a billion dollars, that’s because millions of people value a product I’ve developed. I will have demonstrably improved their lives,” said Hayden.

  “Well, yeah, I guess. But millions of people value cigarettes, and I wouldn’t say Marlboro is a virtuous company.”

  “Okay, but Windows isn’t fucking tobacco,” replied Hayden.

  “Yeah,” joked Matt, “the government doesn’t make Microsoft put warning labels on Office.”

  “Maybe they should,” I said, thinking of the awful PowerPoint presentations I had sat through at West Point.

  Hayden had the last word.

  “If I’m Bill Gates, and I take that billion dollars and invest it in society, I could fund a thousand schools. I could do more to reform education than the federal government has done in fifty years. I could build a hundred hospitals in Africa.” He emptied his fourth beer. “I could fund ten Mother Teresas for the next century.” He snapped his fingers and slammed the glass back on the table.

  Over the months to come, Oxford’s best instruction would occur in dining halls and pubs. Perhaps that was the real reason Cecil Rhodes was so hesitant to choose bookworms. In any case, I would agree with the author Graham Greene by the end of two years: “Oxford had at least taught me to drink pint by pint with any man.”

  12

  The Gift of an Interval

  Be very careful not to underestimate the complexity involve
d in moving a boat with a pole between point A & B. Invariably, you will also visit points D, E, and Y, but you will have learned something along the way. . . .

  Look confident and don’t slouch.

  DAVID BRAMWELL, The Cheeky Guide to Oxford

  IN SOME WAYS, WEST POINT WAS THE PERFECT PREPARATION for Oxford. After four years with almost no freedom, Oxford’s was intoxicating. It was exactly what I needed after West Point, a chance to catch my breath. I heard other students express a different sentiment, that they were living in a cliché, that Oxford was antiquated and overrated. For them Oxford was a name on a degree. Period. It opened doors. I couldn’t understand that perspective. For me Oxford was the door Rhodes had opened. The gowns and gargoyles, the pubs and the spires, afternoons “punting” in an English gondola with strawberries and champagne: These weren’t clichés to me. Duncan Bush, a Welsh poet, called Oxford a place that believed in its own myth. So did I.

  ROWING WAS THE CLOSEST Oxford ever got to the militant obedience I was accustomed to. Every morning at 6:30 I joined seven undergraduate men and one small coxswain shivering together in a narrow rowing shell perched precipitously at Lincoln’s dock. If I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and leaned forward on my tiny wooden seat, it was just possible to see the crew on the next dock through the morning fog. Moving their shell from shoulders to hips to water, they looked like lumberjacks felling a redwood and floating it downstream.

  “From bow to stroke, count off!

  “On three, shove off.”

  My head snapped back to the center line of the boat as we pushed off from shore and glided down the Thames. Here in Oxford they called it the Isis, conferring upon it an almost mythological reverence. It was at its most beautiful in the moments before dawn, as the wooly mist absorbed the first light and hovered just above the glassy belt of obsidian winding its way along the banks. Our cast was less majestic than the setting. We ranged in height, weight (measured in “stones,” each equal to roughly fourteen pounds), and skill. Even our accents varied dramatically, from snooty Etonian to indecipherable Scottish to quirky Rhode Island-ese. Our outfits screamed amateur to anyone who had watched a proper crew before. There were striped woolen scarves, pom-pom hats, and button-down shirts. Unused to exercise outside a fenced enclosure, I wore Army exercise gear. A year before 9/11, this was less daring than it would become later. As the season progressed, the undergrads asked me to call cadence when we attempted to drop our oars in time with one another. The cadences helped our rhythm, and they sang along heartily, but I sincerely doubted any of them really wanted to be Airborne Rangers.

  They surprised me. One morning lightning cracked above us, and we turned at Folly Bridge to head back in. The rain slashed at us, and the cox ordered us into a choppy full sprint. We heaved like Roman slaves in a galley, grunting in unison while getting drenched. It was miserable. And yet I didn’t hear a single complaint as we left the boathouse. My pocket-size 1942 service members’ guide was correct; the Brits were tough: “The English language didn’t spread across the oceans and over the mountains and swamps of the world because these people were pantywaists.”

  The cultural transmission worked both ways. I began calling my sneakers “trainers,” which I had to concede was both accurate and motivational. I also learned that sport at Oxford was little more than a cover for postpractice drinking. An 11 a.m. Saturday row was usually followed by a couple of pints of English bitter in Deep Hall. This was carb-loading. It wasn’t just the rowers, either. With every student above the drinking age, nearly every event—athletic, academic, or extracurricular—featured at least a half-dozen cocktails. My knowledge of these concoctions was limited; I had spent my prime drinking years guzzling canteens of water.

  ALTHOUGH OXFORD’S FORMAL DEBATES, held in a building consciously modeled after Parliament, were as vociferous as any boxing match, my first year at Oxford was less contest than conversation. Like the crooked streets that took the least efficient paths between destinations, learning wandered like a playful discussion, with no predetermined course and no hint of a destination. Back at West Point, Major Yingling had said that conversation was an end in itself. At Oxford that was certainly true. Education there could hardly have been more different from West Point’s structured curriculum. Where the military academy had taught me how to answer questions, Oxford taught me what to ask.

  The first term was a shock to every academic instinct I had honed. I had no required classes, no syllabus of readings to complete, and no examinations to sit. This didn’t square with my expectations of Oxford. The way Nagl had described it, Oxford was like Survivor for smart people—the weakest minds got kicked off the island. Instead, students seemed to divide their time between sports, travel, and the pub. Studying was a distant fourth priority. I hadn’t discovered yet that a third of the student body, those within a year of their final examinations, practically lived in the library. Undergrads adhered to the British cult of the amateur. The ultimate success was to gain a first-class degree without anyone knowing you had studied. You were all the more brilliant for never being seen to have sweated.

  It took me five weeks to track down the supervisor notionally tasked with directing my research. When we finally met in his room at Brasenose College, I found his books before I found him. They were stacked like ammunition crates around a desk littered with notes and an antique typewriter.

  “Hullo. You must be Mullaney.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Quite.” He cleared his throat and adjusted his bifocals. “Interested in the Congo, are you?” I had emailed my intention to examine American involvement in a secessionist insurgency there in the 1960s.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why don’t you write something up before next term, and we’ll have another chat in February.”

  “In February?” It was three months away.

  “Seems about right.”

  “What should I write about? How long should it be? Where do I start?”

  “Let me think.” He rattled off a dozen books from memory, and I quickly wrote them in my notebook. He must have picked up my distress signals. “It’s easy, really.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes. Just find a question and then answer it.” This sounded like a bad college application essay. “Read and think.” He paused and swirled his tea. “Simultaneously if possible.”

  Quite. I walked out with my notebook, more confused than before. I returned to my flat and stared at the academic planner I had brought from home. There was more white space on it than I had ever seen on a calendar, and I wondered how I would fill my days. Unscheduled time did not happen in the Army. My roommate, Bill Parsons, had joked that if West Point had wanted spontaneity, someone would have scheduled it. I had excelled at the academy by figuring out how to juggle the demands of fifteen masters all vying for undivided attention. I had studied history notes during math class and done math homework during history. I had rehearsed French skits during runs and, in one absurd attempt at marathon training, worn calf weights to class. At the end of every week, every semester, and every year, there had been a grade point average calculated to the hundredths to measure one’s productivity: 3.98 was a 5 percent gain on a 3.79. At West Point education had been a matter of numeric calibration.

  At Oxford I reverted to habit. I filled in blocks of time for rowing, sleep, and exercise. Next, I downloaded the lecture schedules of every subject I was even remotely interested in, and I plugged lectures into my schedule—everything from nineteenth-century European diplomacy to twenty-first-century bioethics. I calculated milestones for each chapter of the dissertation I planned to write and blocked off hunks of time for research and outlining. After all that, I realized most of my days were still blank slates. Even assuming thirty-seven minutes a day for personal hygiene and seventy-eight minutes a day for meals, I counted something on the order of six hundred minutes unaccounted for.

  At West Point the challenge had been meeting the instructor’s expectations. At O
xford the challenge was to meet my own. There were no grades to measure success, against either an instructor’s standard or my peers. During that first term at Oxford, this ambiguity was completely disorienting. In essence I was handed a library card and told to make the most of two years. In retrospect, this was an important lesson to learn before commanding in Afghanistan, when I would almost always operate independently. Only in training did I get a distance and direction. In combat the mission would seldom be so clear.

  Curiosity overcame my dilemma. No sooner had the term begun than dozens of notices began filling my pigeonhole. There were lectures and guest speakers for all comers, and Matt, Hayden, and I made the rounds nearly every night after dinner. We heard Gary Hart speak about poverty and Charlton Heston about gun control. We met the director of UNESCO and attended panels on the Congo, HIV/AIDS, and patent law. One night Liz Young invited me to a security seminar with her international relations classmates.