The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education Page 22

  The platoon sergeant’s acceptance was easier than the rest of the platoon’s. The testing began the first morning after I arrived at Drum, before I had assumed official command of the platoon from my predecessor, a feisty Italian. I was lifting weights with him and the other lieutenants from the company, and he asked me if I wanted to observe one of the squads doing PT. I followed him to a corridor outside the gym’s racquetball courts. Inside one was a squad cheering two soldiers boxing each other.

  No sooner was I in the room than a soldier asked if I wanted to box. I took his invitation as a sign of goodwill (my first mistake) and agreed to fight (my second mistake).

  “Sergeant, you want the new lieutenant?”

  A cross between Rocky Balboa and a linebacker walked out to the center of the court and held his hands out for gloves. What was I thinking? I asked myself as another soldier taped gloves around my wrists.

  “Helmet, sir?” another soldier asked.

  “Of course not,” I replied, hoping my bravado would intimidate my much larger opponent. I was also hoping my boxing skills were less rusty than my rifle aim.

  We pounded gloves and began the fight. Given my uninspiring record, I would have been happy to survive two rounds of pounding without getting knocked out. My future soldiers clearly had a favorite, and it wasn’t me. To their raucous applause, the sergeant planted his third punch underneath my chin and lifted me a foot off the ground. I landed on my ass. Above me stood two opponents. A voice spoke to me, but it sounded like someone shouting underwater in a pool. “Two-three-four.” I stood up on “five” to face my opponent, who by now had resumed a single silhouette. I threw a few weak jabs that he easily dodged before planting a cross square on my mouth. Down I went again, this time for a full ten count. I came to as three soldiers lifted me to my feet and took me to find an ice pack for my swollen lips.

  “That was the platoon boxing champion,” said the lieutenant.

  “Oh,” I mumbled.

  “It could have been worse.”

  “Uh-huh.” I had been told sergeants taught lieutenants the ropes, but I hadn’t expected such a literal demonstration. Being knocked out wasn’t exactly the way I had imagined introducing myself to the platoon. The ringing in my head was the starkest indication of how far I had traveled from Oxford’s delicate refinements. As Charlie Hooker, the Green Beret banker, had warned me, returning to Sparta from Athens was much tougher than the other way around.

  “Look at the bright side,” one soldier smiled. “You lasted longer than most.”

  I hoped I had at least fallen gracefully.

  17

  Murphy’s Law

  Infantry platoons and squads rely on two truths:

  1. In combat, infantrymen who are moving are attacking.

  2. Infantrymen who are not attacking are preparing to attack.

  INFANTRY FIELD MANUAL (FM 3-2I.8)

  I PLUNGED THROUGH SNOW UP TO MY CHEST, TRYING to follow a straight magnetic heading through a blizzard to my first land navigation coordinate. I could barely see twenty yards ahead through the swirl of snow. Training at Drum was not going to be easy, but getting lost in a blizzard was nothing compared to the confusion of leading a new platoon.

  The supply depot issued me the same gear worn by scientists in Antarctica. I filled two duffel bags with “extreme cold weather” gear. Included in my new kit were giant lobster claw gloves and similarly oversized rubber boots guaranteed to keep my toes functional at -40 degrees. They gave me several sets of quarter-inch-thick long underwear and a balaclava, a warm hood that I mistook for a Greek dessert when I read it off my gear list.

  When my platoon sergeant advised me to dress warmly for PT, I threw on a sweatshirt under my jogging suit and added a wool beanie for my scalp. A few minutes outside made it clear that I should have worn the Greek dessert. At 6 a.m. we stepped off along with fifteen thousand other 10th Mountain soldiers starting their day in the most painful way possible. The pace I had planned was far too fast for the ice covering the roads, and my lungs soon ached from the superchilled air. It was like inhaling dry ice. Somewhere around mile three of the five-mile run, I realized that the thermometer at Drum was as far below 32 degrees as August temperatures in Fort Benning were above the freezing mark. When we returned to the office, my platoon sergeant couldn’t stop laughing. I immediately plunged my hands into my crotch to warm them up; my beanie was covered in a crust of salt crystals, and snot descended from my nose in fragile icicles. He unzipped his jogging suit and revealed two layers of long underwear beneath his sweatshirt.

  “Toasty, huh?” he smiled. “Next time, follow my lead.”

  My platoon sergeant taught me how to exercise my ears again, listening to a career’s worth of hard-won wisdom. His eleven years at Fort Drum made him something of an anomaly—like a Nepalese Sherpa volunteering to climb Mount Everest repeatedly. His tenure coincided with the 10th Mountain’s busiest decade and included tours in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and, most recently, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. As he joked, there weren’t many more blank pages left in his passport.

  The rest of “Spearhead” Platoon was a motley crew. The thirty-seven soldiers I inherited ranged in age from eighteen to thirty-four and hailed from every corner of the United States. I was most surprised at the number of soldiers with families of their own. Nearly half were married, and many were engaged. There were as many toddlers in the extended Spearhead family as there were soldiers in the platoon. As we deployed later that year, those families would weigh heavily on my shoulders. General Colin Powell had told my class at West Point to safeguard the lives of America’s “sons and daughters.” He had understated the responsibility demanded of twenty-three-year-old lieutenants; we also needed to protect America’s fathers and mothers, husbands and wives. Before we left, I wrote letters to spouses and parents promising to do everything I could to bring home their soldiers.

  The soldiers in the platoon were a cross section of America that most of my ivory tower peers would never have the privilege of meeting, let alone joining under arms. Their blue-collar pedigrees matched my father’s, and I felt immediately comfortable around them. And although I didn’t make a point of telling them that I had watched both of my parents join union picket lines, I did let on that I loved stock car races and grew up listening to country bands like Alabama and the Oak Ridge Boys. Recalling what my father taught me, I didn’t want my soldiers to assume from my diplomas that I thought I was any better than them. I wasn’t.

  At least six of my soldiers had joined the Army in the first weeks after 9/11, but most had joined for reasons ranging from college money to steady employment. They included a zero-handicap golfer, a graffiti artist from El Paso, and a pimpled rapper from Queens, New York. Kids from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas debated the merits of NASCAR drivers, bourbon brands, and Playboy playmates. They smoked by the carton, dipped tobacco when the cigarettes ran out, and greased their arteries with an endless supply of junk food. Their language was as profane as their diet was myopic. Much like the George Carlin routine, they employed “fuck” with surprising dexterity: “this fucking sucks” or “the fucking Army,” and often, just before morning formation, “Fuck...” The most articulate could string six or seven “fucks” in one sentence and still be understood.

  Such a cast came with the sorts of problems that consumed 90 percent of my attention in “garrison,” the time when we weren’t training or deployed overseas. Many of the problems were of the financial variety that one would expect from eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-olds. Every month I would receive notices for unwieldy credit card balances, delinquent child support payments, and bounced checks. Every bank was happy to lend money to soldiers—at high interest rates, of course—and they could count on Army units to do the collecting for them. I sat down with several soldiers to work out basic financial plans to dig them out of debt or to teach them how to balance a checkbook. Living on my own for two years in England had given me some experience managing limited finances.
Other issues were less easy to map solutions to: the occasional soldier who tested positive for drugs in his urine, one who went AWOL for two months, two suffering recurring nightmares from their first deployment to Afghanistan, and another who needed legal advice in order to divorce the stripper he had married on an impulse.

  On top of monitoring their body fat, allergies, and run times, it was enough to make me long for the simplicity of leading a Ranger School platoon. Leading a real platoon was far more complex than I had imagined, and it involved much more than the tactics, endurance, and analysis I had learned at West Point. It demanded the tact of a marriage counselor, the ear of a priest, and the skills of a social worker—and all this before anyone fired a shot in combat.

  UNCERTAIN WHETHER WE WOULD deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan, we trained for both. We began with basic rifle marksmanship. (LaCamera: “Soldier, you are either a marksman or a target.”) In temperatures well below zero, we dug in the snow and shot tens of thousands of rounds at targets. LaCamera was also insistent that we make the training as realistic as possible: “Men, Afghanistan is not a rifle range.” We practiced shooting moving targets and then began moving ourselves, firing at silhouettes from our knees, feet, and even squatting cross-legged. The subzero temperatures brought us closer together, quite literally, in order to stay warm as we huddled at the range. Fortunately, no one became a “cold casualty,” Army code for hypothermia, and I never had to test the approved response of zipping two naked soldiers into a sleeping bag together.

  I got a new boss in March. Captain Ryan Worthan took over command of the company and immediately made his presence felt. Worthan was shaped like a Humvee and was nearly as indestructible. He had a bald head as large as a bowling ball. At West Point a few years ahead of me, he had captained the rugby team, a collection of crazed athletes whose tenacity, grit, and hard-drinking reputation stood out even at a school that claimed no shortage of would-be Vikings. Like LaCamera, Worthan had also served in the Ranger Regiment.

  Within days of assuming command, Worthan took us to the field to practice maneuvers with live rounds. It was part of his planned “stress inoculation”—building up our tolerance for the effects of altitude, noise, and dark so that we would be ready for combat. As I rotated my squads through the lane he had designed to test a basic maneuver, Worthan followed along with a notebook. As soon as a squad looked as if they had mastered the drill, Worthan would pronounce a squad leader or team leader wounded or dead. Predictably, the attacks quickly foundered. In the postmortems that followed every exercise, Worthan pointed out to us that everyone needed to be able to do their boss’s job, and I needed to train my subordinates to do mine.

  “You have to assume you will be killed,” noted Worthan without skipping a beat, “or be ready to take over the company when I am. Make yourself dispensable.”

  As if he had cued a soldier to prove his point, both of us were nearly killed later that night during a warm-up run with blank ammunition. We were standing on the objective watching one of my fire teams arc around a bunker. All of a sudden, a light much brighter than a standard muzzle flash lit up his face, and a dull explosion erupted nearby.

  “Cease fire! Cease fire!” yelled Worthan.

  We began investigating what had happened. It turned out that one of my machine gunners had blown the small blank firing adapter off his gun. The only plausible explanation was that the ammunition was mixed up. He was firing live rounds. If he had managed another burst of fire in our direction, there would have been two practical examples to support a dead commander’s last lecture.

  After Worthan’s temper cooled (about three days later), he offered some “advice.”

  “One of the hardest things I had to learn as a lieutenant,” he told me, “was knowing the difference between things I’d never perfect, and things I had to. I’d never get my platoon to perfect even the simplest battle drill. No matter what,” he said, “some real-world condition would interfere with the X’s and O’s I chalked up on the board.

  “On the other hand,” he said, “there is zero margin of error with live rounds.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said in apology.

  “Do you know Murphy’s Law?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, there’s a Murphy’s Law for combat, too. Rule number eleven: Friendly fire isn’t.”

  I laughed, but not too much.

  “I don’t have many rules of my own.” He counted them on his hand. “Never lie. Never eat before your men. Never leave a man behind. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.” I saluted and returned to my men.

  WHILE WE MARCHED IN the snow, another group of soldiers marched across the Iraqi border. Our deployment schedule immediately accelerated. Although the date swung like a pendulum between October and May, it eventually settled on a mid-July deployment. We would relieve the 82nd Airborne in eastern Afghanistan and remain there for a six-month tour. As the 3rd Infantry Division made its famous “Thunder Run” to Baghdad in morning installments on the mess hall televisions, there was a subtle change in seriousness among my fellow officers and the men we led. Life accelerated as we compressed our training schedules and squeezed more hours into already busy weeks.

  Our platoon spent more and more days shooting at the range. Over time, I became increasingly assertive as a platoon leader and added my own twists to the standard training events. With a nod to Gunnery Sergeant Oakes’s training in Ranger School, I had my men practice changing ammunition magazines with their eyes closed. If they couldn’t do it blindfolded, then they weren’t ready to do it under pressure in a firefight. I ramped up the physical training routine, adding endurance marches, trail runs, and uphill sprints.

  Everywhere we ran, we carried a portable stretcher for casualty drills. One morning I tagged along with Sergeant Reggie Huber’s squad. Huber was a grizzly bear. He towered over the platoon at six feet two and a hefty 230 pounds. When his temper flared, soldiers scattered as far as they could from his curdling rage. But when Huber talked about his three kids, his face brightened, and he seemed as cuddly as a teddy bear. Huber was also one of my smartest soldiers and frequently reminded the platoon of that fact. Huber once told me that he planned to return to St. Louis and become mayor. After a few months with him, I had no doubt he would.

  I pointed at Huber, “You’ve been shot in the gut.” Curses echoed from his squad as I made them tug Huber up a 45-degree slope. They huffed and puffed for ten minutes, two steps forward and one step back, lugging Huber as he moaned in artificial agony. His men knew not to complain; Huber and the other Anaconda vets had been reminding the privates for months that everything would be twice as hard with bullets snapping around them.

  Before LaCamera relinquished command to his replacement, he made a concerted effort to train the officers and sergeants in the finer points of “violence management.” He began with a series of weekly conferences to analyze and learn from relevant historical battles. One afternoon, a lieutenant presented the 1993 battle in Mogadishu, made famous by Mark Bowden’s book Black Hawk Down. As that discussion proceeded, Sergeant Major Sean Watson, the battalion command sergeant major (the senior enlisted man in the battalion), became increasingly agitated. When the unlucky lieutenant briefing us botched his description of one of the Rangers’ landing teams, Sergeant Major Watson interrupted.

  “Excuse me, Lieutenant. Let me take it from there.”

  It turned out that Sergeant Major Watson had been there, in Somalia. He was the senior sergeant on one of the four helicopters that had surrounded the Olympic Hotel in Mogadishu. Watson’s hard-won wisdom would be invaluable once we got on the ground in Afghanistan. On an ambush, for example, he told us it was best to shoot for the enemy’s knees.

  “Why?” asked another lieutenant.

  “Because your enemy’s more likely to crouch in the kill zone than jump.”

  LaCamera then moved from the past to the present—the assortment of modern technologies that would be at our disposal in Afghanista
n. In the back of the auditorium he used for these briefings, someone had painted a quote from a Cormac McCarthy novel: “Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.” LaCamera stood in front of the quote and introduced the Air Force liaisons we had to work with on the ground in Afghanistan.

  “You are the musicians of Mars,” LaCamera said. Heads nodded as lieutenants figured out the mythological reference to the Greek god of war. Like a conductor managing an orchestra of woodwinds and brass, he expected us to know when and how to use a payload of Air Force bombs, a volley of artillery rounds, and an Apache helicopter’s chain gun. Each had its advantages and disadvantages. I had to know which type of munition to use for each target and how to synchronize multiple weapons in order to win. I had to know that a mortar’s high trajectory made it a better weapon than a howitzer for firing over a high ridge and how to balance that advantage against its comparatively smaller burst radius. Combat for all infantrymen is a test of will, endurance, and courage. For a leader, combat is also cognitive—the challenge of managing extraordinary complexity under extraordinary pressure.