The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education Read online

  This worked better, but I still walked like a marionette with no control over my own limbs. In the distance a bass drum beat a steady thump, perhaps alerted that over a thousand novices were trying to will their natural strides into an unfamiliar gait. The tallest had to walk at funeral pace and the shortest legs overreached comically. Around and around we marched—column left, march, column left, march, mark time, march, forward, march, dum-dum-DUM-DUM-DUM.

  The sun began to sink behind the barracks as our newly constituted platoon streamed onto the parade field. Our families, having completed their own daylong indoctrination into military parenting, awaited us with cameras and binoculars. Our black shoes, peppered with fresh grass clippings, rooted us as firmly to the ground as the guidon flags planted in front of each company. We snapped to attention as the cadet commander introduced our class to the superintendent, Lieutenant General Daniel Christ-man, Class of 1965. In an address that was meant more for our families than us, he recounted the accomplishments of the nearly two hundred West Point classes that had preceded us. With hard work and perseverance, we, too, might join this Long Gray Line of distinguished alumni. The crowd applauded, and we raised our right hands at the command of our cadre. After swearing an oath to support the Constitution and obey the legal orders of superior officers, the band played the national anthem. A hum from our ranks grew louder as we sang along. In front of us, beyond the crowd, the American flag beat against the wind whipping between Storm King Mountain and Breakneck Ridge, down the Hudson River, and up the bluff where we stood—anxious, exhausted, and terrified. At the moment, joining the Long Gray Line seemed less important than surviving the first day.

  With identical uniforms and shaved heads, we were virtually indistinguishable from one another. The transformation was a testament to the efficiency of military indoctrination. As the parade concluded, we marched past proud and nervous parents. At the command of eyes right, I searched for my own parents in vain. We turned our backs to the stands as the wind whistled past Trophy Point’s cannons and drove us forward. We headed toward arched passageways marked with the names of hallowed battlefields. LEYTE GULF. CORREGIDOR. NORMANDY. Their chiseled letters faded into shadow. The ranks of white in front of me merged into gray stone, and a hail of terrifying commands grew louder with each perfectly measured step. The barracks, backlit by the setting sun, jutted out like boulders carved from the hill beyond. At its crest, two hundred feet above our uniforms of white and gray, stood the chapel—a mass of granite blocks soaring to a crenellated bell tower. It was impossible to imagine West Point built of anything other than granite and steel.

  2

  Beast

  “Weren’t you just ordered not to interrupt?” Major Metcalf inquired coldly.

  “But I didn’t interrupt, sir,” Clevinger protested.

  “No. And you didn’t say ‘sir,’ either. Add that to the charges against him,” Major Metcalf directed the corporal who could take shorthand. “Failure to say ‘sir’ to superior officers when not interrupting them.”

  JOSEPH HELLER, Catch-22

  “WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE!” AT 5:30 A.M., SPEAKERS in the hallway blasted Guns N’ Roses at concert volume. The door slammed open, and Bellinger flicked on our overhead lights. Temporarily blinded, I leaped out of bed. “Good morning! Outside. On the wall. Two minutes.” Bellinger disappeared, and five seconds later another door slammed open. Crashes rippled down the hallway in beat with the bass line. It was appropriate to begin a military career in chaos, noise, and dumbstruck terror. This was the first full day of Beast Barracks, our six-week indoctrination into the Army. The three of us blinked and hoped we were all in the same bad dream. Throwing on T-shirts, gym shorts, and sneakers, we sprinted out into the hallway. Down the three-hundred-yard length of linoleum a whirlwind of new cadets scrambled to the bathroom urinals and dodged marauding cadre.

  The other seven members of the squad joined us in the lineup. We pasted our backs to the wall as instructed and waited in complete silence. Around the corner came Bellinger, wearing a bright yellow gym shirt and honing in on me like a shark that smelled chum.

  “What is wrong with this picture?”

  I looked down at my shirt. Damn. I had put it on backward.

  “No excuse, sir.”

  “Goddam, Mullaney, it’s called a uniform because you are all supposed to look the same.” He continued slowly in order to emphasize each word, “You-are-not-an-individual.”

  “No, sir. I am not an individual,” I parroted back at Bellinger. I had never considered that being an individual was a bad thing. Was it?

  Bellinger turned to my roommate. “Did you check Mullaney before he left the room?”

  “No, sir,” he responded, unsure why he was being yelled at.

  “So you’re responsible for Mullaney walking out here with a case of uniform dyslexia.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This is a lesson for all of you. If there is something wrong with your uniform, if you don’t so much as rinse off your toothbrush, I will know. You cannot fool me. Your only chance of surviving the next six weeks is to work together. The only way to fail is to fail one another. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. I want you outside with a full canteen of water in three minutes. And Mullaney, you’d better fix that shirt. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  OUTSIDE, THE PLATOON SERGEANT addressed the platoon for the first time. “Raise your paw if you were the valedictorian of your high school.”

  A hand or two shot up.

  “Come on. Raise ’em high. Don’t be shy.”

  I raised my hand, and another five new cadets joined me.

  “Raise your paw if you were class president.”

  Another four hands joined the eight that were up already.

  “Varsity letter winners?”

  Another twenty hands shot up.

  “Look around, New Cadets. This is the last time I’ll give you that privilege.”

  Nearly everyone’s hand was in the air.

  “Put your paws down.” He continued, “If you came here thinking you were something special in high school, I have news—you’re not special here. You are not God’s gift to the United States Military Academy. West Point does not owe you anything. You have to earn it. Every single day. Remember that. By the end of this summer, five of you will wash out. The question is whether you will be one of those five.”

  WHAT AM I DOING HERE? I repeated to myself the well-rehearsed lines I had delivered to family, friends, and strangers. Are you sure you wouldn’t be happier somewhere else? they’d ask. My happiness wasn’t the point, I would respond; I wanted to serve my country. Are you sure you want to be an Army officer? Yes, I told them.

  I hadn’t come to that conclusion lightly. Like most of my high school classmates, I’d applied to a half-dozen universities. I’d gone with my parents to tour beautiful old colleges in New England. Admissions officers promised academic challenges and extracurricular fun.They promised well-paying jobs after graduation and powerful alumni networks. The hardest part, student tour guides confided to us, was getting in. I couldn’t explain at first why I felt so out of place. Afterward, flipping through their glossy brochures at home, I realized what was missing. They’d asked nothing of me.

  Growing up as the oldest of four kids in a working-class family, I’d been taught by my parents that responsibility preceded privilege. My father wore boots and a hard hat to his job at the gas company. Once a year he would bring me to work, and I’d watch him and his crew break up the sidewalk with jackhammers and backhoes. My mother’s father, the Army veteran, had brought my father into the gas company he’d joined after the war. Like him, my father was a crew leader: the boss and the expert. “Hard work is the only measure of success,” he would state conclusively. He was “on the line,” on call, all the time. He and his crew repaired ruptured gas mains all over Rhode Island. Name a street anywhere from Olneyville to Wakefield and my father could
get there without directions and rattle off the three closest diners and dive bars. When he met other fathers, he checked two things: their handshake and calluses. His own handshake was like the vice grips lining the enormous workshop in our basement. Marred with cuts from steel pipe, my father’s hands were stubby and perpetually calloused. He earned every cent he brought home, and I had no reason to believe it wasn’t a fortune. Every dollar went to give us what he didn’t have growing up as the son of a part-time barber who made him work to buy his own toothbrushes.

  We never lacked for any resource that my father thought would help us succeed in life, provided we were willing to work. He often labored around the clock, earning enough in overtime to have the satisfaction of outearning the managers, one of the few things I ever heard him brag about. When he wasn’t at the gas company, he was busy at home: chopping wood, shoveling snow, building a deck, or trimming every one of a hundred shrubs around the yard. “Why pay someone else to do something I can do just as well myself?” One summer, using just that rationale, he decided to build a dry wall one hundred yards long and three feet thick. I lugged stones half my weight up and down that wall while he looked for just the right placement. “It ain’t worth doing something if you aren’t gonna do it right.” He didn’t believe in half measures. When I asked for a tree house, he built one with a deck, insulated windows, and a shingled roof. We had a television at home, but he never watched it. A relaxing night for him was a tall glass of vodka and orange juice, a printing calculator, and the dinner table covered with a month’s accumulated bills. Hard drinking went with hard working. It took the edge off.

  Going to West Point was one way to connect with my father. As I grew older my interests diverged from his. As a kid there was no doubt that I was a chip off the old block, as my father’s friends told me. I tagged behind him everywhere he went. I had my own tiny work boots and gloves to match his. To the eyes of a child my father was Superman. He fried eggs without spilling the yolk. He split logs with an axe. He could swim across the bottom of the pool holding his breath the entire time. He parked eight-passenger vans in compact car spaces, always back end first. I was his “first-born,” a carbon copy of his dark hair, dark eyes, and stubby hands. At four I was kicked out of preschool for getting in fights with the other four-year-olds. At five it was more bad marks at the public kindergarten. This was well-worn territory for the Mullaneys. My father had barely made it out of high school and, by his own admission, lucked out by marrying his more intelligent high school sweetheart, a pediatric nurse who could love unconditionally in a way his parents couldn’t.

  My mother’s family had curiosity hardwired. My grandmother would enthrall me for hours with stories from any one of a dozen cross-country trips she had taken with my grandfather. The daughter of an Irish immigrant from County Cavan and a sailor from the Dutch Caribbean, my grandmother’s stories kept me dreaming through the night and waiting for more. And whereas my father never showed any emotion, my mother and grandmother were Irish in the extreme, incapable of stemming a tear and the first to laugh at the slightest trigger. I have my mother’s tear ducts.

  Not surprisingly, my mother was in charge of our education. She read enough for the whole family and never left home without a book in her purse. As a small kid I was embarrassed when she laughed so hard reading in line at the grocery store. Later I would find the same look on my fellow soldiers’ faces as I chuckled, nose in a book, waiting for helicopter flights in Afghanistan.

  My love of books began in competition. In first grade Sue Ortelt became the first kid in the class to read. I was livid that someone had bested me, and I was even angrier that everyone else befriended her as a result. We had just moved to a new town, and I was the odd kid out in class. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that they’re better than you, my father intoned. I redoubled my efforts and eventually learned how to read. Later my mother told me that I had worried her with my intensity. The focus that had helped my father succeed against the odds also threatened to drive everyone else away; it seemed that I shared his ability to tune out everyone else while I was on one of my quests.

  From the first time I picked out my own books at the library, I never stopped reading. I sensed early on that this wasn’t what my father had in mind by hard work. He had a lifetime habit of reading the newspaper, usually at 5:30 a.m. with a thermos of black coffee from the percolator he cleaned with religious ceremony. But I never saw him read a book—there wasn’t time to waste. Once when I went with him to his hometown barber, he woke up from his beard trimming to find me reading a calculus textbook. I was eleven.

  Something had changed that my father couldn’t grasp. I don’t think he ever understood how I could pick schoolwork over yard work. How could I choose books over time with him? Didn’t I want to work with him? He took out his frustration in his own way. No matter the success I had on report cards, I could always count on him to point out the one A-. When I did work outside, admittedly with reluctance, my work never passed his inspection. For five years I cut our two-acre lawn, and every single time my father would return home, take the lawn mower back out of the shed, and mow the lines straight where he had found mine bent. The absentmindedness transmitted from mother to son especially perturbed my father. Whether it was locking myself out of the car or flooding the house by leaving a faucet running, my father was constantly balling me out.

  Although my father never touched a rifle, he was my definition of a soldier: hardworking, competent, and indestructible. West Point was the only school I visited where a bookworm couldn’t possibly graduate. My father had convinced me that I possessed a deep-rooted, irreparable incompetence. How could I overcome my absentmindedness? What if I didn’t have the stomach for hard work? My father always claimed he was a graduate of the University of Hard Knocks. If West Point wouldn’t make him proud, I didn’t know what would.

  The adventures West Point promised attracted me like a moth to a flame. The glossy photos in the prospectus of helicopters, airborne parachutes, and rappelling captivated my attention. What was an Ivy League quad compared to a Ranger snaking through a swamp? A post in Europe or Asia was a world away from my home in North Kingstown, Rhode Island. We had a modest house outside of town where my childhood friends and I spent our days tramping through the woods and our nights racing under the giant sprinklers of local turf farms. The highlight of our year was the Quahog Festival, where Rhode Island’s signature shellfish comes in 217 different varieties. On summer vacations, when my parents escaped work, they used to pack the camper with my siblings and me and tramp across New England as far as their small budget would take us. We drove to the top of Mount Cadillac, and the wind pushed us backward with the force of a hurricane. We spent hours hiking on paths that my father blazed in front of me, and when we came across a lake or a cave, I felt like the explorers I had read about. There were long days building elaborate sand castles and riding the waves at Matunuck Beach or scouring the forest for branches we could use to roast marshmallows. The two of us would wake up before dawn and row quietly onto the lake, snagging bullfrogs from the reeds with a long-handled net that he had to help me with. As I grew older and my horizons expanded from books and friends and school, my appetite for adventure expanded. I wanted more. I wanted to see a desert, to scuba-dive, to walk on the banks of the Seine. In short, I wanted to blaze my own trail. The Army’s promise of overseas travel appealed to the wanderlust I had no outlet to satisfy in a small town in America’s smallest state.

  Perhaps the magnetic pull of West Point ultimately wasn’t rational but emotional. The history-laden rhythm of a military parade reverberated like the incense-scented rituals of Catholic mass. Walking around West Point, I was swept up in its call to “Duty, Honor, Country.” Self-sacrifice, integrity, and leadership echoed between the larger-than-life statues of Eisenhower and MacArthur. Cadets discussed courage and duty without a note of irony. They spoke without slouching, oozing confidence, projecting their chins, eyes fixed straight ahead. Around the
m my own spine stiffened with resolve. Whatever they had, I wanted. West Point offered more than an academic education. It offered an almost religious quest for perfection. I wanted to graduate a better man.

  STANDING OUTSIDE IN OUR gym shorts that first morning at West Point, we didn’t have to wait long to find out whether we would be one of those five in our platoon to drop out. Our cadre marched us to an exercise field, mounted an elevated wooden platform, and led the platoon through calisthenics. The squad leaders took turns on the stage, guaranteeing that they never got tired and that there were always a half-dozen eyes seeking out shirkers.

  Even exercise, now dubbed PT for “physical training,” had a purpose beyond fitness. PT is to the military what prayer is to a monastery—an opportunity to build cohesion and deepen obedience. West Point is a fitness cult, and every cult has its doctrine. Pain, we were told, is just weakness leaving the body. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war. Every session began with commands better fit for marching than exercise. “At double interval, extend to the left, march. From front to rear, count off.” Once arrayed in perfectly staggered ranks, we “executed” physical training. Most exercises were familiar: push-ups, sit-ups, bend and twists. Others were familiar but had strange names. For instance, a simple jumping jack was a “side straddle hop,” announced with dramatic modulation and echoed back by us with equally false enthusiasm. Other exercises had to have been devised by seventeenth-century sadomasochists. The “swimmer” was the worst. Lying facedown in wet grass, we balanced on our bellies while lifting our arms and legs in a rhythmic alternation that made us look more like we were drowning than swimming.