The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education Read online

  After calisthenics we scattered into herds organized by running ability. My qualifying time had put me at the slow end of the fast group, guaranteeing that I would have to kill myself just to keep up. The pace was brutally fast, well under seven minutes a mile. The course hit every steep hill on campus, culminating in a mile-long climb from the Hudson River all the way up to the football stadium. Near the top my lungs verged on the edge of collapse. In the center of the formation, I had no choice but to push on. Had I stopped, a hundred feet would have stomped me into the asphalt mercilessly. Cadence calling replaced oxygen inhalation. We sang, over and over again, the same cadences—“A is for ‘Airborne,’ I is for ‘In the sky,’ R is for ‘Rough and tough,’ B is for ‘Born to die,’ O is for ‘On the go,’ R is for ‘Ranger,’ N is for ‘Never quit,’ E is for ‘Every day.’ I wanna be an Airborne Ranger. Live a life of guts and danger.” The permutations were endless—wanting to be a paramedic “shooting funky anesthetic,” a scuba diver “swimming in that murky water,” and so on. By the end of the run, gasping for oxygen, I wanted to be an Airborne Ranger just so I could stop singing the damn cadence.

  Later in the week our cadre released us to join new cadets in other companies for team sports. I followed several dozen classmates to the wrestling mats inside Arvin Gymnasium. Black and gold mats covered the floor and walls, and an odor of dried sweat permeated everything. It was a smell I loved. My one ambition apart from surviving Beast was to walk onto the wrestling team. The odds were long. Although I had been wrestling since age eight and had a respectable record in high school, my competition, Trent Moore, had swept his division in taking the Iowa state title. By September I would have to beat Trent to secure a spot.

  Trent Moore was a mean son of a bitch. We had exactly the same build, but he had at least six visible scars and a bent nose that looked as if it had been broken and manually reset at a locker room mirror.

  “Craig Mullaney.” I held out my hand and introduced myself.

  Trent just grunted and leaned over into his stance.

  At the coach’s whistle, five dozen cadets began sparring. Trent rattled my head as we locked up. His wrestling style clearly matched his personality. Before I knew it, he had popped my shoulder to knock me off balance, ducked under my hips, and lifted me off the mat with a textbook double-leg takedown. After smashing my body prone on the mat, he ground my head into the mat with his forearm so hard it bloodied my nose. The whistle blew again.

  “Trent Moore. Nice to meet you.”

  We shook hands, beginning a friendship that endured bloody noses and eventually led to Trent’s standing by my side as a groomsman at my wedding.

  Between the wrestling bouts and sadistic runs, by the end of the summer we were running so fast that even the cadre stopped calling cadence, and we took one final graded PT test. The two-mile course ran straight along the railroad tracks and looped twice past an odious sewage treatment plant. I burned a blistering first mile split before turning and heading back past the smell of rotting waste. I closed on a cross-country recruit, and just as I pulled even with him, I sprayed vomit all over his shirt. He curled his lip in a scowl and surged ahead. I willed my legs to continue running despite the alternating dry heaves and goose bumps on my arms. This was the only chance I had to run for myself, not as part of a group. It was a chance to lengthen my strides and breathe at my own pace.

  I crossed the finish line and collapsed in a lump by the road. A cadre member tapped me and handed me a sticky note with my time—11:36. It was the second-fastest time in the company, but on the cadet grading scale it was just fast enough for a B. I could still taste the bile in my mouth. Not fast enough.

  MEALS DURING BEAST WERE an exercise in targeted torture. Eating at West Point was a purely functional enterprise, meant to be as efficient as calisthenics, marching, and shooting. This was industrial engineering. Food was the input; academic, physical, and military activities were the output.

  The mess hall is a six-story secular cathedral. Inside the heavy oak doors that face the parade field, the entire four-thousand-person Corps of Cadets eats under the gaze of weathered flags and dead generals. Stained glass windows refract light through the outlines of armored knights and dough-boys kneeling in prayer. Where the hall’s six cavernous wings converge, a stone tower bulges to the ceiling forty feet above. All commands emanate from this central pulpit, known bizarrely by naval terminology as the “Poop Deck.”

  On any given day in Beast, we marched in, splintered by squad, and racewalked to our assigned tables. Standing at attention was the last opportunity to catch my breath.

  “Take seats!” boomed a voice from the Poop Deck.

  A thousand wooden chairs scratched across the floor, and our squad sprung into action. Even meals were leadership opportunities. Bellinger was the Table Commandant, responsible for good order and discipline. The rest of us rotated through the remaining duties in a cacophony of clattering plates, shouts, and the occasional clang of an overturned pitcher. One of us scurried to the head of the table and checked that eleven condiments had reported for duty and were prepared for action. A jar of “Beat Navy”- brand peanut butter retained its tinfoil seal. Conforming with protocol, the cadet unscrewed the cap and popped the seal by slamming the peanut butter jar into his forehead like a redneck crushing a can of beer. Another cadet skimmed gravy and announced it to the squad leader: “The scum-skimmed gravy is ready for inspection, sir.”

  The Cold Beverage Corporal and his sidekick by the ice bowl rapidly distributed ice water and sweet tea around the table. As new cadets we were obliged to know the specific tastes of everyone at the table, including the number of ice cubes Bellinger preferred in his cup (two). As waiters delivered food to a hundred tables nearly simultaneously, they handed off their heaping platters of food at the foot of the table. After the mouth-watering tray (even mess hall food looks good to the famished) rotated around the table, a cadet held it up by his right ear at a 45-degree angle and announced the remaining number of portions.

  “Five and a butt servings of mashed potatoes remaining, sir.” West Point refers to the incomplete portion of anything—food, beverage, and time—as a “butt,” conjuring images of smoldering cigarette nubs.

  Only after all the table duties were complete could we begin eating. Since every mistake during table duties cost precious time, we ate very little those first few weeks. A particularly egregious error, like the time I forgot to split the pile of salad bowls into two equally sized towers, could result in having to “touch the mural,” a command that evoked as much dread as being told to reach one’s hand into a python’s nest. After gathering courage, I shot toward the southeast wing of the mess hall, eyes locked straight ahead on a one-thousand-square-foot mural celebrating military history. And just when I was close enough to touch George Washington, a cadre member snagged my shirt, held me hostage, and grilled me to discover whatever alleged offense had sent me into his lair. The next time, I split the salad bowls like a pro.

  When we did eat, it was anything but natural. We sat through hour-long “blocks of instruction” on etiquette (“cadetiquette,” as it is known at West Point) and practiced the nineteenth-century manners we were taught. We sat exactly one fist’s distance from the table, plate one thumb joint away from the edge, eyes focused on the West Point crest at the plate’s twelve o’clock. We never spoke unless addressed by the squad leader. Collective punishment was the law of the table; an error by one cadet stopped everyone else from eating. Even when there was a pause to eat, it took forever to get anything into my stomach. Eating required its own entry in the little book of cadet knowledge we carried with us everywhere like a pass-book from Hell. The tone was set with the chapter’s epigraph: “Tomorrow’s battles are won during today’s training.” Then, point by point, were instructions for eating as detailed as a field manual. First, pick up your fork. Second, pick up your knife. Cut just one piece. Replace knife. Switch fork to the other hand. Stab, lift, and insert food in mouth.
Replace fork. Chew no more than three times. Start again. Bellinger’s well-trained eye looked for exactly three bobs of the jaw. Pity the new cadet who attempted four or five “big bites.” It might cost the table the remainder of the meal. By the end of the first week we were starving.

  In the rare event that we made it to dessert, an elaborate ritual ensued. First, the designated pie cutter had to ask who was eating dessert. A number of eight or six was a relatively easy slicing job. More challenging were the missions requiring seven or nine perfectly equal portions. We kept pie-cutting templates in our gray service caps to aid our geometry, marking off the pie perimeter with guide marks. The slices had to be crisp; a muddled pie could mean a trip to the mural or suspended dessert privileges. The technique of choice involved dipping the knife in water and cutting the pie like a surgeon with a scalpel. Over time, we ate earlier and faster. It was us against them, and the only way to win was to “cooperate and graduate,” the first principle of cadet life.

  On the face of it, cutting a pie with a template was as ridiculous as calling a jumping jack a “side straddle hop” or having to memorize the number of gallons in Lusk Reservoir. In our room, after the lights were off and we were sure the cadre were gone, we laughed ourselves to sleep.

  For my friends heading to normal colleges, the dorm room represented freedom from parents, a space to make their own, and a lair for dates. At West Point my barracks room was the last place I went for refuge. The obsessive-compulsive requirements of the mess hall extended to the barracks, where the standard of cleanliness exceeded that of an antiseptic operating room. Every morning involved a hundred cleaning tasks, from polishing the basin mirror and faucets with old newspaper to dusting every horizontal surface of the room, including the lip of the nameplate on the door and the upper surface of the fire alarm ten feet off the floor. My roommates and I specialized: I was the bed guy. Every morning I stretched the wool blankets over the mattress tight enough to bounce a quarter. The crease at the foot of the bed required an exact 45-degree angle. Over time we discovered that sleeping on top of the bed shaved a minute off the drill. Sometimes it was so hot in our sixth-floor room that I slept on top of my desk or on the floor. Whenever we had a question about organization, a three-inch-thick Barracks Arrangement Guide provided the answers. Even underwear had specified folding instructions: folded in three along the longitudinal axis, then once latitudinally. The only mark of personality in the room was a framed collage of high school friends and my family and two books: Catch-22 and The Brothers Karamazov. I had somehow convinced myself there would be time to read during basic training. The two books were arranged, per regulation, in height order.

  Only perfection was acceptable. Attention to detail was beat into my head with the regularity of a jackhammer. A loose belt buckle, an undone shoelace, dust on the brim of my service cap, all resulted in the same ominous rebuke: You just killed your platoon.

  During those first few months, the connection between battlefield leadership and attention to detail was hard to make. Seven years later the link would be obvious. Military command, perhaps unlike any other profession, demands that its practitioners see with absolute clarity both the forest and the trees. Any number of missed details could compromise a mission, from forgetting to bring an extra battery for the tactical radio to skipping the maintenance for the one tiny piece of a machine gun that fails in a firefight. Miss a digit on a GPS coordinate, and an artillery round could land on friendly troops. One mistake really could kill your platoon.

  THE FIRST THREE WEEKS of Beast focused almost entirely on teaching teamwork, building physical stamina, and adapting to West Point’s peculiar traditions. The last three weeks of Beast, however, was about learning to soldier. We began by breaking in our combat boots.

  “Outside in the hallway. Five minutes. Boots and swim trunks.”

  Our looks of incredulity only made Bellinger madder, and he repeated the uniform to make sure we understood.

  “All right, New Cadets, lace up your boots. We’re going marching.”

  He called cadence as he led us into an unoccupied wing of the barracks.

  “Column left, march.”

  He turned us into the men’s latrine and then into the shower room.

  “Prepare to shower.”

  I reached up and grabbed the shower handle.

  “Shower.”

  On cue we doused ourselves with ice-cold water.

  “Forward, march.”

  We began to march around the shower in our sodden boots as Bellinger called out lefts and rights. As the showers warmed up, steam obscured the smile I had been trying in vain to restrain. Apart from submission, the only authorized emotional expression was false enthusiasm. Smiles were a sign of weakness.

  “I can still see you, Mullaney. Smirk off.”

  “No excuse, sir.”

  The days blended into weeks as our shower-molded boots accumulated mileage tramping through West Point’s wooded hills. At first Army field training was like an Outward Bound excursion. One day we got to rappel down a cliff and practice mountain climbing at a training area that was part of West Point but miles away from the barracks and classrooms. Near the top of the ridge the sun was bright, the morning air crisp, and the surrounding woods green and inviting. At the bottom of the valley, Route 6 snaked back toward West Point. I checked the knots in my Swiss seat for the fifth time and looked down to make sure the rope was routed through the carabiner clip. I tested my weight on the rope by leaning back, still yards from the precipice.

  “Banish your inner weakness, New Cadet,” encouraged a sergeant from the 10th Mountain Division sent to train cadets. He had both of the marks we had sung about in our repetitive running cadences: Airborne wings and the Ranger tab.

  I walked backward slowly, a death grip on the rope. At the lip of the cliff I leaned back on the rope and stepped behind me. My boots were now perpendicular to the vertical rock face, toes pointed unnaturally toward the blue cloudless sky. There was nothing between my back and the ground except a vertical column of air. I turned my head, made ungainly by an oversized helmet, and saw my shadow fifty feet below.

  “New Cadet, I’m not here to watch you philosophize.” He stared down at my cantilevered body. “Get off my cliff.”

  And off I went. I pushed away with my eyes closed and bounced back onto the cliff face fifteen feet lower. This is cool, I thought, and bounded three more times until I was safely on a horizontal surface again.

  Other training events were pure misery, such as the day we “built confidence” in the effectiveness of our gas masks. After a morning spent donning gas masks on command and sweating through charcoal chemical suits, our squad entered a concrete pillbox. Light entered through a small, dirty window near the low ceiling. We huddled together by necessity in the confined space. At the instructor’s command of “gas, gas, gas!” I snatched my mask out of its case like John Wayne in a pistol draw. In less than eight seconds I had the mask over my head with straps tightened. A deep breath sucked the rubber into my cheeks, confirming that I had a good seal. Through my mask’s eye portals, my squad mates looked like aliens from another planet. The door opened just long enough for someone to roll in a large can steaming from its side. The room quickly fogged up with a mysterious gas, and it became hard to see. Unconsciously, I held my breath. At last, with no alternative but suffocation, I breathed in through my filter. The tear gas, sucked through the mask, was harmless. Under the rubber mask, I relaxed. Our collective breaths rose and fell like hospital patients on life support.

  “Take off your masks,” the instructor commanded through his filter like Darth Vader.

  Off came the mask and in came the gas. The first sensation was like someone pouring Tabasco sauce in my eyes. Then my nose began to run uncontrollably. Next to me, my roommate had a trail of snot stretching three feet from his oversized nose.

  “Good drool, New Cadet. Keep it up.”

  Just as it became unbearable, the door opened wide, and we ru
shed for the exit. Outside in the bright light, a cadet corralled us and directed us to wave our arms at our sides like enthusiastic ostriches ignorant of the fact they can’t fly.

  “Under no circumstances,” he added, “should you touch your eyes.”

  One of my classmates did, screaming bloody murder at a sensation equivalent to rubbing chili peppers on his cornea. My eyes clouded with tears, and my own trail of mucus dripped onto the dusty ground. Every inch of exposed skin was on fire. Eventually, the effects wore off, but not before our squad leader had snapped photos at this, our most vulnerable moment of Beast.

  “You will never forget your first teargassing,” he noted wistfully. “Anyone want to go again?”