The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education Read online

  “Oh, my stars,” she exclaimed, smiling. “You know that song?”

  “Yes, Auntie.”

  “I love that song,” she said and began singing it herself. Her voice was light and beautiful.

  Meena’s father was more difficult, however. The two of us sat on the couch, and he clicked through television channels in total silence. I read the same edition of Time three times, cover to cover.

  Later in the week I took Meena’s family on a tour of West Point. I thought this would be a great way to highlight the ideals and principles that drew me to the military. Meena’s father had applied to the Indian Military Academy when he was younger. He read Tom Clancy compulsively. How could he not love the Army after seeing West Point? Instead, as Plebes marched past us with rucksacks and rifles, the trip only reinforced his fear that I would leave his daughter behind while I risked my life. That night I cooked a three-course meal featuring recipes from different regions of India. They complimented me on my cooking, but the loudest noise around the table was the cracking sound of papadum crackers.

  Meena had never been south of the Mason-Dixon line before our drive to Georgia. We sipped sweet tea in South Carolina and shared a plate of Waffle House grits outside Atlanta. During the drive, she told me the concerns her parents had relayed to her about our relationship.

  “Don’t worry, Craig,” she told me. “I still want to make this work, even if it takes five years to be together.”

  “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?” I said.

  While Meena slept in the passenger seat, I questioned how long her commitment would endure. The books she had given me when we first started dating had increased relevance now. Hadn’t the young woman in A Suitable Boy married the suitor her parents chose for her? The Ramayana, the Hindu epic Meena had given me to read in Italy, was all about filial duty. Rama, the hero, suffered exile rather than disobey his father. “As long as our parents are alive,” he said, “it is our duty to obey them. If I fail in this primary duty, I can gain no satisfaction or good name through any amount of wealth or power.” In all those films we had watched, almost every Bollywood heroine had chosen duty when pulled between duty and love.

  In India I had read the “matrimonial” advertisements, a section of the newspaper some twelve pages long. It was like a classified section for spouse shopping: “Hindu parents invite correspondence for their cultured, beautiful, slim medical student daughter, 25/5’2”; from a suitable, cultured MD/ professional boy with a similar background. Please send recent photo and bio-data.” I hadn’t seen any advertisements asking for an alliance with “Caucasian, 5’9”, Catholic, military officer, prospects unclear.”

  Eventually, we reached Fort Benning, and I moved into the barracks that housed all the new officers. I drove Meena around Airborne School and out to the Ranger School compound at Camp Rogers. Stepping out of the car for a photo, I immediately began sweating. Four months of Benning’s heat was going to be unbearable. We stopped at Ranger Joe’s, and Meena watched with shock as I shed my floppy mop of long hair for an infantry high-and-tight (also known, with good reason, as a high-and-stupid). With a newly air-conditioned scalp, I tried on the camouflage uniform that the seamstress had upgraded with first lieutenant rank. Meena looked at me as if I were from Mars.

  As we drove toward the airport, I wanted to know what would become of our relationship. I was as determined to keep her as I had been to get her to accept a date in the first place. Surrender, after all, is not a Ranger word. What I lacked in hairstyle, I would make up for in persistence. Meena was worth every effort. Before she boarded the plane for Philadelphia, I waved an airline itinerary at her.

  “See you in three weeks,” I said. Later I began crossing off the dates on my desk blotter like a Plebe counting the days until Christmas.

  THE INFANTRY OFFICER BASIC COURSE was the one Bill Parsons and my other classmates had attended while I had been in Ranger School. Sixteen weeks long, it was a time-consuming box to check before reporting to Fort Drum to take command of a rifle platoon. The basic course couldn’t have been more different from Oxford. The aimless days wandering through cafés and bookstores were a distant memory within a week. Oxford had been like a chairlift station, where the chair came off the high-speed gear and moved at a glacial pace so that the skiers could board. At Benning my life was back in high gear, moving uphill. A busy week at Oxford might include two classes, usually optional. Here the word “optional” didn’t exist. My self-sovereignty was replaced with the dictates of a training schedule that began at 5:30 a.m. and finished at 7:00 p.m. Three months before at a Rhodes dinner, I had eaten next to English lords. Now I was a lowly lieutenant again, eating spoonfuls of MRE #7. My first night I spent two hours with a black magic marker conforming my backpack to Benning’s all-black standard. Although I wore lieutenant rank, it was as if I were back at Camp Buckner.

  Two years in England had made me soft. When we took the first PT test, at 4:15 a.m., I flopped. I hoped I wasn’t going to prove the old joke that a Rhodes scholar was someone with a great future behind him. It took two months before I could match my old scores and hang with the front-runners in the company. Marksmanship was even worse. I hit barely half of the targets when I made my first return to the range. “Too much reading at ‘Oggs-ford,’ Mullaney?” taunted the course commander. If there was one thing I had to do well, it was shoot. No infantry commander worth his salt could command a platoon’s respect without an expert marksman rating. With the help of classmates who had spent more time hunting than studying, I eventually scored high enough to earn the grudging respect of the commander.

  Adjusting to the infantry mentality from Oxford was a harder target. The thick field manual we studied minced no words. The primary role of the infantry was close combat, “characterized by extreme violence and physiological shock.” It would be “callous and unforgiving.” And unlike anything at Oxford, “its consequences are final.” Reading this on page one of the manual, my new “Bible,” made me wonder how much Oxford had prepared me for anything involving violence or shock. I had to revert to a vocabulary I had intentionally suppressed at Oxford. Deadlines were “suspenses,” classes were “blocks of instruction,” and “accountability” replaced attendance. There was a long list of acronyms to memorize, ones I hadn’t used since Ranger School. It was a language designed for efficient commands over a radio, but there was another, more serious reason for stripping sentences. The real purpose was to reduce the sensations of panic and fear, to transform confusion into procedural formulas. Reporting “three Friendly KIAs” was meant to be less visceral than detailing that Jones, Smith, and Reed were dead and beyond help. Casualties were triaged at the CCP, a “Casualty Collection Point,” a designation suggesting a tidy hospital ward. In training, when I radioed for a helicopter to pick up the dead or wounded, I followed a laminated “9-Line Medevac” card in my pocket, supposedly making it harder to forget a logistics detail and easier to work past the horror of a soldier hemorrhaging blood by the pint. I wondered whether this would work in practice. Since none of our instructors had combat experience, there was no one to ask.

  Meena described how doctors followed a similar logic in the hospital. When a patient nose-dived toward death, the preferred term was “decompensating,” not dying. In the operating room, every surface of the body was covered except the “field” where the surgeon operated. High-risk surgeries went awry all the time, but the best surgeons barely raised their voices or paused when their efforts failed. Where people confront chaos and death as situation normal, the ability to constrain panic by procedure and sanitized language was critical to survival and success. For the military it was just more pronounced. Unlike surgeons, our own lives were at risk while we operated.

  During our nightly phone calls, I must have learned as much from Meena’s descriptions of medicine as she did about plastic explosives.

  “How was your day?” I asked Meena one night.

  “It was awesome! I removed
a bullet from a guy’s neck.”

  “Wow.”

  “What did you learn today?”

  “We had two classes. The first was on how to conduct a drug test. They showed us what a fake penis looked like.”

  “Do people really use those?”

  “If they know their urine’s going to be hot, they might.”

  “What else?”

  “We had a lecture, ‘A Short History of the American Rifle: 1600 to Present.’ It was engrossing.”

  Then there was the day that began with presentations from two Afghanistan veterans. They had fought in Operation Anaconda, the large mountain battle against al-Qaeda in 2002, and recounted the fight for our class. It was the only moment in the course where reality intruded on Fort Benning’s isolation. A gaggle of students remained after class to ask the questions we were dying to know. What was it like? Were you ready? How would you have prepared differently? We could have asked questions all day but for the fact that our next class shared the same auditorium. The two veteran officers (a precious and rare commodity in the Army of 2002) were replaced by a pudgy Army historian who spent the remainder of the afternoon instructing us on the close order drill practiced by units in the Civil War. He brought us outside to practice the formations and commands, as if we would fix bayonets and charge al-Qaeda like Joshua Chamberlain at Gettysburg.

  Although a year had passed since combat operations began in Afghanistan and less than six months remained before American forces invaded Iraq, nothing in the course specifically addressed those challenges. Benning was a training center caught between the Cold War and the new Global War on Terror. Instructors and students alike wanted to prepare for the latter, but resources and doctrine remained rooted firmly in the former. The oversized parade fields were as antiquated for the fight we faced as horse cavalry was at the start of World War II. The entire experience was a time-consuming diversion from the platoon I was anxious to lead at Fort Drum.

  Before I knew it, my class was graduating. Some students had already been pulled from their Ranger School slots and sent immediately to units deploying to Kuwait. The rest girded themselves for a winter debut at Ranger School, one of the least pleasant ways to spend January. Despite my rusty start, I had been named the platoon honor graduate, an unexpected confidence boost before reporting to the 10th Mountain Division. I hopped in my car and drove as fast as I could north from Fort Benning. After Airborne School, Ranger School, and the basic course, I was eager never to return.

  I KNEW FORT DRUM would be cold, but this was ridiculous. A few weeks after graduating from the basic course, I drove north from Philadelphia on I-81 past Wilkes-Barre, Binghamton, and Syracuse, and finally through a whirling blizzard before arriving at the home of the 10th Mountain Division. Four steps outside were all it took before I began shivering, despite wearing long underwear, a wool sweater, and a ski jacket. My lips instantly chapped in the frigid air, and five minutes of exposing an un-gloved hand was enough to open up bleeding cracks on my knuckles. Driving was treacherous; snowdrifts fifteen feet high had turned the roads on post into icy tunnels.

  When the weatherman reported a high of 20 degrees Fahrenheit, I didn’t realize that he meant negative 20. That day, Watertown, New York, an old mill town thirty miles south of the Canadian border and just east of Lake Ontario, was the coldest place in the continental United States. Only later would I realize that -20 degrees was relatively balmy. Temperatures that winter routinely dropped below -40 degrees with the wind chill. It quickly became apparent why the 10th Mountain Division led the fighting in Afghanistan. Compared to Fort Drum, Afghanistan’s climate was temperate.

  Driving around Fort Drum was a lesson in the 10th Mountain Division’s storied history, with each road bearing the name of a different battle fought or hero remembered. The division’s story began with the successful assault by Norwegians equipped with cross-country skis against a much larger German force. The head of the National Ski Patrol proposed to General George Marshall that the United States create its own ski-borne mountain division for the anticipated fight in the Alps. Marshall agreed, and the 10th Mountain Division coalesced at Camp Hale, Colorado, around a nucleus of New England skiers.

  The 10th Mountain saw its first combat in Italy in 1945 against Hitler’s defensive Gothic Line south of the Po River valley. In a daring night assault, two battalions climbed fifteen hundred vertical feet and dislodged a much-surprised German force at the Battle of Riva Ridge. Shortly thereafter, they managed to capture Mount Belvedere with a bayonet attack. The division fought several other important battles in Italy, but it was the assaults on Riva Ridge and Belvedere that defined the 10th Mountain’s character. If a mission demanded a mobile force ready to assault impossible odds in the toughest terrain, the 10th Mountain Division stood ready.

  I made a careful study of the division’s recent history before reporting to the 1st Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment. The battalion had been busy. One company had been in the rescue force at Mogadishu in 1993. Another had occupied Port-au-Prince airport during 1994’s Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti. Then there was Bosnia, Kosovo, and, most recently, Afghanistan. Just about every soldier at battalion headquarters who passed by me wore a combat patch on his right shoulder. Nearly three-quarters of the soldiers remaining in the battalion had fought in Operation Anaconda, the marquee battle of the Afghanistan campaign. The trophy case was filled to capacity with ski poles, captured weapons, black-and-white photographs, and maps of the mountainous terrain. Its Latin motto, Vires Montesque Vincimus, was apt. We conquer men and mountains.

  The battalion adjutant announced my arrival to the battalion commander. I stood patiently outside the office of Lieutenant Colonel Paul LaCamera, a name I knew well from the reports I had read about Anaconda. He was a West Point graduate, a Ranger Regiment alumnus, and the recipient of a Silver Star, the military’s third highest award for heroism.

  When he called me in, I stepped up to his desk and snapped the sharpest salute I had given anyone since Plebe year. Behind him were framed guidon flags, engraved bayonets, and a dozen other mementos from a career commanding warriors. LaCamera had the look of a grizzled football coach: prematurely gray, rugged, and gruff. He ordered me to sit down, asked a few questions about my background, and then dove into what I imagined was a stock speech delivered to every new lieutenant showing up to command one of his platoons. LaCamera spoke in cryptic one-liners like Yoda in camouflage.

  “Skill and will,” he told me, “win battles.” I wrote it down dutifully in my green notebook.

  “Any knucklehead with sufficient practice can shoot a rifle straight,” he said. “Will, on the other hand, is different. Will takes character.

  “In our profession,” he continued, “mustering will in bad conditions is every bit as important as knowing how to kill.”

  Unlike some of the senior officers I had interacted with at Benning, LaCamera congratulated me on graduating near the top of my class at West Point and earning a scholarship to Oxford. He saw no contradiction between intellectual ability and the iron will that he suggested was necessary for warriors.

  “Officers are paid to think,” he emphasized. “Your educational pedigree matters only to the degree that it helps you train your men and make better decisions under fire. Stupid platoon leaders,” he added with a preemptive scowl, “get my soldiers killed.”

  As if to underline the importance of his advice, he told me that he expected the battalion to deploy in less than six months, back to Afghanistan, or perhaps, if the diplomats failed, to Iraq. I saluted and moved out smartly.

  The most important person I met that first day was my platoon sergeant. Platoon sergeants run the Army. As the senior enlisted man in a platoon, a platoon sergeant is technically subordinate to the platoon leader, always a junior lieutenant like me. The literal translation of lieutenant, a French word, gives a sense of the position I found myself in—“place holder.” I had half a day of experience in the real Army. My platoon sergeant had eleve
n years. Without a doubt, platoon sergeants make or break platoon leaders. A good one—experienced, competent, and patient—can teach a lieutenant everything he needs to know to train and deploy a platoon to fight in combat. A bad platoon sergeant, on the other hand, can wreck a lieutenant, land him on the commander’s carpet at the position of attention, and impress bad habits resistant to change. For months I had said the same prayer every night before sleeping: “Please, God, give me a good platoon sergeant.”

  I lucked out. My platoon sergeant was one of the most talented non-commissioned officers in the company, perhaps even the battalion. I had expected a cold reception from a sergeant ten years older than me, who had already become a sergeant by the time I graduated high school. I had imagined being eaten for lunch. Fortunately, he wasn’t that type of platoon sergeant. It wasn’t that he cared two bits about me. His only concern was his men. He had brought them through combat in Afghanistan without any casualties. He wasn’t about to let some rookie lieutenant hurt his men on the next deployment. To him, my success meant the platoon’s success.

  There were a thousand things about being a platoon leader that no one had taught me at West Point. My platoon sergeant helped make up much of the difference. Planning any training at Fort Drum involved a maze of agencies like something out of a Kafka novel. He taught me how to grease the wheels like a pro, repeatedly urging me to “find the guy who will say yes.” Whether it was making small talk about bass fishing with the sergeant at Range Control or promising marksmanship time to the cooks in order to secure more field rations, my platoon sergeant had the golden touch. With his help the training plans I submitted to the company commander survived intense scrutiny, earning the all-important mark of approval: “squared away.”