The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education Read online

  “It’s amazing how many lectures you go to when they’re optional, isn’t it?” said Liz.

  MOST OF THE TIME the Rhodes scholar label meant nothing at Oxford. With nearly two hundred of us from around the world, all hailing from former British colonies, we were a dime a dozen. In contrast with the mystique associated with the scholarship at home, admitting to the designation at Oxford was rarely advantageous. One too many Rhodes scholars had puked on a pristine lawn, snoozed through a lecture, or failed his exams. As at West Point, perception and reality were two different things.

  On occasion being a Rhodes scholar did open up some unique experiences at Oxford. When President Clinton came to speak at Oxford, I stood five feet away as he recounted to my Rhodes classmates the famous handshake he engineered between Yasir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin. At a conference a number of us were invited to, Mikhail Gorbachev shared a podium with Henry Kissinger. During lunch, at a table that also included General Wesley Clark, I asked Roger Bannister, the man who broke the four-minute mile on the same track where I decided to take my annual Army fitness test, how I could improve my time. (His advice: Drink less, run more.) Bono made an appearance in designer sunglasses, Chuck Berry played “Johnny B. Goode,” and James Earl Jones echoed the voice of Darth Vader. I took lots of pictures because I had no expectation of ever hobnobbing with the famous again, and certainly not after I traded my gown and fountain pen for camouflage and a rifle.

  Some of my most memorable evenings were spent at the Oxford Union. Barred by great iron gates, the Union looked like a haunted mansion. Its fame stemmed from its vaulted debating chamber and the dispatch boxes where five former prime ministers had cut their teeth.

  Hayden, Matt, and I waited in line outside for a much-heralded debate. In contention was the proposition: “This house believes in the right to hunt.”

  “Only at Oxford could you see a debate on fox hunting,” said Hayden.

  As we walked into the chamber, a tuxedoed student handed us the house rules.

  “Hayden, you’re going to have a hard time,” said Matt.

  “Why?”

  “Booing and hissing a speaker is both a grave and pointless discourtesy.”

  READING WAS A SERIOUS matter at Oxford. Students didn’t take majors; they “read for a degree.” It was up to us to figure out what was worth reading and how much. Founded in the early seventeenth century, the Bodleian Library held a copy of nearly every book published in the United Kingdom over the last four hundred years. There were so many books (more than eight million) that browsing more than 120 miles of shelves would have been inefficient, even for the uncommonly patient English. Instead, a veritable army of librarians fetched books for students from the caves extending beneath and beyond the original library foundation. Before being granted access to the library, I had to sign an oath:

  I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, nor to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document or other object belonging to it or in its custody; not to bring into the Library, or kindle therein, any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library; and I promise to obey all rules of the Library.

  After seeing the collection, I understood the damage an errant match could cause.

  With the advice of better-read colleagues, I made a prioritized list of all the books I wanted to read at Oxford. (Making lists was a habit I inherited from my mother. At Oxford I just changed the material from operational tasks to books to read, countries to visit, languages to learn, and beers to taste.) I spent my mornings reading for my ambiguous history assignment. In the afternoons I made my way to one of a half-dozen cafés to read the stuff that really captivated me. My book list kept lengthening, contrary to my nicely organized plan of attack. One book would prompt another, throwing the whole schedule out of whack. Much of my reading grappled with the role of the individual in society. I wanted to tackle the tension I first discovered when Bellinger, my Beast squad leader, made me repeat after him that I was not an individual. I had long ago dismissed this as an exaggeration designed to make a point about cooperation, but the larger question remained. What obligations did an individual owe his community? Where did I end and we begin?

  As a second-year cadet at Camp Buckner, I had had my copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four confiscated. Now I had a chance to finish where I’d left off. Reading Foucault’s Madness and Civilization alongside One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had me convinced for a period of weeks that West Point had much in common with an insane asylum (and not just because cadets routinely streaked nude during full moons). Oxford, in general, made me much more skeptical of authority. But then I would have a conversation with Liz, and she would point out that we had volunteered for the Army. She also reminded me that we would soon be the authority. She had a point.

  When my Rhodes class left Washington, not one us felt worthy of the opportunity we had been granted. Who could? Yet Oxford was such a unique environment that the self-consciousness soon evaporated. We momentarily stepped off the treadmill. The most important accomplishments at Oxford would never fit on our résumés. The list of goals I wrote in my journal when I first visited Oxford the year before changed. I added new objectives: “Make best friends for life. Slow down. Figure out how I will fight the world’s fight. Put people first. Read and think deeply.” At West Point I befriended a wrestler who had knocked me off the team and a Baptist who had beaten me out for valedictorian. At Oxford, for the first time, I befriended those with whom I was not competing.

  A group of my Rhodes classmates began meeting every Tuesday to chat over warm Guinness. We met in the back room of the Eagle and Child, and named ourselves the “Inklings” after the group J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis had congregated with in the same pub fifty years before. Our discussions were all over the place. One week the topic would be the Holocaust. The next, we would talk about stem cell research or health care reform. Paul, the triathlete mathematician; Susanna, the sailing neuroscientist; Newman, the Syrian Orthodox theologian; and Jason, a future doctor studying Beowulf were among the regulars. The two I became closest with were Rob Yablon and Brandon Dammerman.

  A Wisconsinite, Rob was working on a Ph.D. in inheritance taxation. Rob was also an amateur comedian and an ultimate Frisbee champion. At the Rhodes talent show, Rob had us all falling off our seats as he parodied an English grocery store.

  “I never thought I’d have to make a choice between regular and mushy peas.

  “Digestive biscuits. How is it possible for a cookie that weighs fifteen grams to have eighteen grams of fiber?

  “Let’s play a game: English dessert or venereal disease. Treacle? Spotted dick?”

  Brandon was a math scholar and squash fanatic from Columbia University who most closely resembled Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. For weeks Brandon would make an appearance at every party, a total socialite. Then he would disappear for a month to work on Fermat’s last theorem. I imagined him scribbling Greek in wax pencil on his mirror. For the Inklings, Brandon was the designated devil’s advocate. He could always be counted on to say something apparently ridiculous and then follow up with an insightful explanation. During one discussion, Brandon exclaimed that the death penalty was “a celebration of life.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Executing murderers shows how much we value the lives of innocent victims.”

  Between lectures, debates, and the pub, there was rarely a night at Oxford without some learning opportunity. Our group took advantage of our close proximity to London to expand our cultural horizons. We saw Copenhagen on stage in the West End, watched the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, and stopped in London’s many museums. Brandon and I spent one long day in the Tate Modern Art Gallery. I didn’t know what to make of the abstract pieces but enjoyed trying to puzzle through them with Brandon.

  “What’s this supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  We stared for another five minutes but remained unenlightened. On the bus ride home, B
randon read with a pen, continually scribbling in his book. When he finished, he branded the book with the date. Imitating his example proved to be a great way to track my own reading interests over time. As soon as I returned to my flat, I plotted where I would hang a half-dozen Rousseau and Van Gogh prints I had bought in London. In my cadet room there had been a prohibition against posters. At Oxford, without a “knickknack” quota, I could plaster posters on every vertical surface.

  Not every night was a cerebral experience. As a result of joining Bacchus, one of two Oxford wine societies, I spent at least a few nights every term quaffing Bordeaux and Riesling with Matt and Hayden. My tasting notes were always clear until the fifth glass in the flight. Susi, my West Point wine coach, would have been disappointed. One tasting was so exceptional that, as we left Magdalen College, Matt brought with him one of the lawn signs. As we walked back toward my flat for a nightcap, Matt sauntered with a five-foot wooden STAY OFF THE LAWN poised on his shoulder as if it were a baseball bat.

  A policeman stopped us two hundred yards from the gate.

  Matt turned and greeted him with an entirely innocent smile. “Good evening.”

  “What are you doing with that sign?”

  “What sign?”

  “The one over your shoulder, mate. That’s private property of Magdalen College.”

  “Right,” said Matt, examining the sign. “I see.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll just return it then.”

  “Please.”

  We stayed put while Matt obediently returned his souvenir. Nights like that reminded me of a scene I liked in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. When an older man approaches the narrator and his buddy in their car, the two assume he is a sheriff. “You boys going to get somewhere,” the sheriff asked, “or just going?” As Kerouac followed up, “It was a damned good question.” Most of my life up until Oxford I had been “going to get somewhere.” Now, with friends like Matt, Hayden, Rob, and Brandon, I was discovering that Oxford was about “just going,” with no particular destination in mind. Unlike a Ranger School patrol, getting lost was the objective.

  “CRAIG, HOW DOES THIS thing work?” asked my father, standing helplessly in front of a ticket machine at Oxford’s train station. “Is ‘return’ the same as ‘round-trip’?”

  “Dad, let me do it.” I stepped in and ordered our “return” fare to Chesterfield, a few hours north of Oxford. I had already spent a week intervening in similar crises of confidence for my father: showing him how to use the bizarre British washing machine, translating menus, and explaining to him how to convert prices to dollars in his head.

  The trip to England was my Father’s Day present. I had already visited a half-dozen countries, and my father, at twice my age, had never taken a transatlantic flight. His trip was the talk of the gas company before he left. His buddies took trips to Florida, not to Europe.

  “Craig,” he told me, “I can buy my own ticket. You don’t have to.”

  “No, Dad. It’s on me. I’m a lieutenant now. I can afford it.”

  “If you insist.”

  “I do.”

  As he nodded off to sleep on the train, snoring lightly with his head against the window, I opened my journal and began writing. My father’s visit was a strange role reversal. Normally, he had what John Updike attributed to Red Sox legend Ted Williams—an “intensity of competence.” This trip was the first time I saw him baffled by anything.

  Showing him around Oxford was like a shot of confidence in my arm. I pointed out the Oxford curiosities I thought he would find most interesting, such as the stuffed dodo and shrunken heads at the Pitt Rivers Museum and the private deer herd at Magdalen College. I found an extra gown for him to wear and took him to the dining hall for dinner. Like me, he didn’t know what to make of the food, but he enjoyed going down to Deep Hall after dinner and buying pints for Matt, Hayden, and me.

  “This is warm,” my father said, wrinkling his face. He never drank beer, let alone at room temperature.

  “That’s how they drink beer here, Dad.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “It’s an acquired taste.” He had told me the same thing when he bought me my first beer after high school graduation.

  West Point had been a halfway house to independence. There, I had still relied on my father to ferry Trent and me back to Rhode Island for holidays. While we slept twelve hours at a stretch, he would go right back to work shoveling snow or heading to the gas company for overtime. He had endless reserves of energy. On Saturdays in football season, I could count on him being at every game, grilling burgers for my friends. He didn’t even like football. When I was tight on cash, he would slip me a couple of fifties, no questions asked. Without my father I had had to make my own way in England, navigating a foreign culture, learning how to cook, and managing my own finances. I didn’t need him anymore, not in the same way I had before.

  Much of what I wanted to show my father at Oxford he couldn’t see. When I took him to Blackwell’s Bookstore, where I bought a month’s salary’s worth of used books, he remained at the door looking out at the bikes rattling past on Broad Street. When conversations at the pub with my friends shifted from small talk to philosophy, he would get up to bring the next round of beer.

  My father woke up as we arrived at our destination. There, an English family whom Bill Parsons had introduced me to during graduation week picked us up. June in the Peak District was stunning—stone walls, grazing cattle, and heather moors. We put our bags down in our hosts’ remodeled sixteenth-century barn. The tension evaporated from my father’s thick neck. He threw on a warm sweater and disappeared for an hour. Before we left three days later, my father had compared notes on building dry stone wall, fertilizing flower beds, and trimming hedges. He was in his element. I, on the other hand, opened a book, curled up by the Aga stove, and fixed myself a pot of tea. Outside the window, my father played fetch with the cocker spaniel.

  I HAD PLANNED MY father’s visit to coincide with the most exciting week of the Oxford calendar: Eights Week. For four days in May the Isis hosted a circuit of rowing races involving nearly 160 boats and as many as eighteen hundred rowers. The banks overflowed with crowds of drunken spectators cheering their college’s boats. Since the Isis was too narrow for head-to-head races down its sinuous course, the format was a “bumps” race.

  Our heat of thirteen boats lined up on the banks with a length and a half between crews. Eight of us wore identical polo shirts, giving us a professional appearance that our rowing didn’t merit. The ninth, our pace-making “stroke,” was a last-minute replacement for a chronically absent teammate. He wore the singlet of an Oxford Blue, the long-legged specimens that crewed Oxford’s varsity boats. He was our ringer. We sat in the boat coiled at the “catch,” ready at a command to call forth the strength of gods. The sun was bright, and a light breeze rippled the water around us.

  A pistol fired. Oar blades churned the Isis into thick foam as we bolted from the start position toward the boat in front of us. Winning a “bump” meant passing their bow and knocking them out of the race. If we did, we would start the next day’s heat with our order reversed. If we accomplished the rare feat of bumping four days in a row, advancing in the heat order each day, our boat would earn “blades,” entitling each of us to an antique oar with our names and the names of our victims gilded on the oar blade’s face.

  We weren’t able to pass the boat. Instead, our coxswain steered us right into it at ramming speed. No matter, it counted as a bump. We cheered from our seats and splashed water on the unlucky crew. We did the same on the next two days, ramping our excitement to fever pitch. In a show of solidarity, none of us washed our shirts or underwear. We smelled awful. I worked up the team with a locker room speech I stole from Vince Lombardi (not as big a legend in England, I found out). If we succeeded, the cox promised we could throw her in the Isis. Thousands crowded the docks and stood ten deep on boathouse roofs as we pushed off to our starting position a mile ups
tream. My father waved, and a smile broke white from the center of his beard.

  As we fidgeted in our seats, the crew in front of us, wearing Viking helmets with horns sticking out the sides, taunted us with a soccer chant to the tune of Handel’s Hallelujah chorus.

  “You’re all wankers. You’re all wankers. You’re all wankers, all wankers, all WA-AN-KERS.”

  I tightened the wing nuts on my footplate and gripped the oar. The smoke had barely cleared the pistol barrel before we lurched forward out of sync. It took several strokes before we were in tune again, and the Vikings were already a couple of lengths ahead. We settled into a rhythm and closed the gap slowly. We were still a half length back when we turned the corner and headed down the stretch past the first boathouse.

  “Give me a Power Ten!” shouted the cox, urging us to invest all our strength in ten superhuman pulls.

  “On three-two-one, let’s go!”

  We counted together on the exhalation, reaching farther back for the catch and putting extra relish on the finish. Lactic acid rushed through my legs and arms. My vision blurred as it became impossible to suck in enough oxygen to fuel my strokes. Cheers from the crowd kept me conscious, and then there was a louder cheer as we passed their bow. We won the race.