The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education Page 6

  Despite the friendship we had begun to develop off the wrestling mat, he had no mercy in the ring. Technique I had in spades; the problem was my glass jaw. I went down like a sack of potatoes every single bout. Each time, Trent escorted me to the medic for smelling salts and an ice pack. I had a hard time trying to focus my anger at such a magnanimous opponent. Trent was that kind of friend: hard to like, harder to hate. Off I went to calculus with my head like cotton candy and a bruised chin that telegraphed to every classmate that I was another victim of morning Fight Club. In the end, I got a B in the class. I was surprised since I had gone 0-4 in graded bouts.

  “Sir, why didn’t you flunk me?”

  “Because you kept coming back for more,” he said, slapping me hard enough on the back to leave a palm imprint under my sweaty T-shirt. “That, and you fall gracefully.”

  Keeping in mind my boxing instructor’s backhanded compliment, I attended a briefing for Plebes interested in joining the parachute team. Around the Corps of Cadets, the hand-selected team members strutted about like the supermen they probably imagined they were, unbound by gravity. I wanted to share that confidence and competence. They talked about performance under conditions of sustained danger, in extremis. I imagined I would need that in combat. Without telling my mother, I submitted a written application. After ten new teammates stormed into my room to welcome me, I was ecstatic. I should have been nervous.

  “GO!” A FINGER POINTED menacingly at me as I crouched in the door of a helicopter. Tiny black specks, fifteen thousand feet below, scattered across the drop zone like ants on a cake crumb. At that height, reality approached the scale, and logic, of a map. I shivered under my jumpsuit.

  “Go!” The finger wagged again and gestured toward the void.

  I blinked hard and reached back one more time to touch the canvas pack on my back.

  We spent two months just learning how to pack our own parachutes. “If the parachute fails,” warned the coach, “you have no one to blame but yourself.” There was no need for motivation with a margin of error so slim. I packed and repacked parachutes for hours, squeezing three hundred square feet of slippery nylon into a pack the size of a shoebox. I would return to my room with raw, bloody knuckles from wrestling with the lines. Now, after a dozen static-line jumps, I was ready to pull my own rip cord.

  I leaped out and arched my back into the shape of a banana, as instructed . My eyes looked down toward the ground, and my body followed in a 120-mile-an-hour swan dive. I had never felt so alive—a million nerves dancing in the buffeting slipstream. Diving at the speed of a bullet train was the loudest silence imaginable, like a hurricane of emptiness. With every heartbeat I fell two hundred feet. The ground rushed toward me in a blur. One minute of free fall, sixty seconds alone to glide, to spin, to flip over and over and over, each rotation an insult to order. I smiled at the altimeter dial racing toward zero and pulled my rip cord. Imminent danger produces a bizarre clarity of purpose.

  One one-thousand, two one-thousand, whack. Before I could count to three, my shoulders pulled taut and an invisible force snapped my body back to the vertical. A gigantic canopy billowed out in a sail of black and gold. A minute later my feet touched the ground again.

  Plebe year was survival. Plebe year was endurance. Plebe year was obedience, discipline, and conformity. Every moment I spent above ground level was a refuge, a rebellion, a refutation. I needed to know I still owned part of who I was. Like Walt Whitman, I needed to “sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.” West Point deliberately trained my body and mind. Skydiving educated my soul.

  4

  Sleep Is for the Dead

  An object at rest will remain at rest and an object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an external and unbalanced force.

  ISAAC NEWTON, Principia Mathemetica

  “THE BEST SUMMER OF YOUR LIFE,” SNICKERED THE upperclassmen describing the two-month block of field training we began a month after finishing Plebe year and starting Yearling year. At the end of June I returned to West Point for Camp Buckner—a surreal combination of a lakeside wilderness retreat and guerrilla training camp. At first sight it looked as bucolic as the lake where my father and I used to catch bullfrogs. Dozens of Quonset huts nestled in the pine-clad hills and sandy shores surrounding Lake Popolopen. Fishing docks and picnic tables fought for space between tennis courts and horseshoe pits. But cadets walked around in camouflage with rifles. Buckner was summer camp with automatic weapons.

  Designed to expose us to the various branches of the Army—from military intelligence and aviation to infantry and artillery—Buckner packed a year’s worth of military training into forty days and forty nights of rain, mud, and sweat. To make matters worse, I had snapped my wrist on a bad parachute landing earlier in the summer and was wearing a shoulder-to-wrist cast. Unless I wanted to repeat the “best summer,” I needed to do everything my classmates did with 25 percent fewer limbs.

  My personal demon at Camp Buckner was land navigation. Armed with an eight-digit GPS coordinate, a map, and a compass, the objective was to maneuver over hill and dale, through fetid swamps and up vertical cliffs in order to capture the code letters on small orange triangles mischievously hidden behind bushes and boulders. The first time I looked at a military map, I couldn’t make heads or tails of the squiggly lines indicating altitude contours. Hence, the first few iterations saw me stumble through the woods as clueless as Hansel and Gretel without bread crumbs. Every tree looked the same. I returned to the course grader with an empty sheet of grid coordinates. The only comfort was comparing myself to the unfortunate cadets who wandered onto Interstate 87 by accident. Eventually I figured out how to read the contours and visualize hills and ridges without having to tramp to the top.

  Navigating at night made day navigation look easy. Without the aid of night vision goggles, I crashed through briars and bushes with the grace of a sumo wrestler. We navigated in pairs, and my partner was just as hapless as I was. Every two minutes one of us fell to the ground as we tripped over a log or hidden gorge.

  “Dammit!”

  “What?”

  “You snapped my face with another fucking branch.” Wet boots made my language less poetic.

  “I’m sorry,” he replied sheepishly.

  I could hear the cadre chuckling behind their night vision goggles. In order to protect my cast, I had to pirouette through the air in order to land safely on my left side. Fred Astaire meets Chuck Norris. We finished the course with half the points we needed and an hour over our time limit. “No-go” was the Army way of saying, “You failed. Try again.” The fourth time was our charm. As the rest of our class played beach volleyball in the moonlight, we trucked out to the course for one last chance. An hour and fifty-nine minutes later, we crossed the finish line in sweat-drenched uniforms. We had passed.

  Buckner’s unstated agenda was to turn every cadet into an infantry officer. That message had more importance to me now than it had a year earlier. I had given a lot of thought to what I had discussed with the priest, and I was glad he had convinced me to stick it out. After Beast, the bombast had been more muted. There had been much more discussion of duty and honor than blood and guts. In fact, I had discovered how rare bayonet attacks actually were—just a fraction of 1 percent of all combat wounds, a reflection of Homo sapiens’ natural aversion to intraspecies killing, especially at intimate distance. I might have to kill or order others to kill, but I was unlikely to find myself twisting a bayonet in someone else’s liver.

  Visceral concerns aside, there was still the matter of war’s legitimacy in the first place. Studying history was a good antidote to idealistic pacifism. According to Plato, only the dead had seen the end of war. The Church concurred. I agreed with Saint Augustine that war should be a last resort, but I also recognized that warriors were needed when diplomacy failed. Si vis pacem, para bellum. Who seeks peace must prepare for war. I could either accept that responsibility or pass the buck. The brothers at
Bishop Hendricken used to tell us: “To those to whom much is given, much is expected.” It was a principle with deep personal resonance. During one of Buckner’s lakeside Masses, we sang a refrain from Isaiah: “Here I am, Lord. . . . I have heard You calling in the night.” I was conscious for the first time of what was expected.

  As we spent nights marching through torrential thunderstorms, officers urged us on with motivational cheers. “Nothing but a little Ranger sunshine, cadets.” “If it ain’t raining, we ain’t training.” “You gotta love being cold, wet, and miserable. Love the Suck, men, love the Suck.” On the face of it, their cheers were silly. Who could love being miserable? I had to admit, though, that their mantras worked. Brushing my teeth in the morning after a tough march really was a “10 percent morale boost.” And it was hard to pity myself when I saw officers and other cadets smiling and laughing under the most adverse conditions. It wasn’t so bad, I thought, just mud and rain. When I looked at the uniforms of the most heroic officers marching with us, cheering on languid cadets with little encouragements—“Come on, cadet, you’ve got it in you,” “Keep pushing, we’re almost there,” “Don’t quit on me”—their shoulders always seemed to bear the half-moon badge that marked a Ranger. I saw that leadership involved compassion in measure with conviction.

  Their example pushed me through the last test of Buckner—Recondo, a full day of military skills tests, a grueling run under a heavy pack, a swim across the lake, and a series of scenarios designed to make us cooperate under the stress of time and fatigue. We gathered afterward by the lake at midnight, nearly twenty hours after our day had begun.

  “I think you might need a new cast,” offered a classmate, looking similarly ragged himself.

  My cast was indeed in poor shape, caked in mud and soaked through with dirty lake water. My uniform was torn in a half-dozen places, and the camouflage paint on my face was smeared with sweat. My boots looked as if they had stomped through a swamp, and every muscle in my body ached. I was cold, wet, and miserable. And I loved it.

  AFTER BUCKNER, LIFE AS a Yearling followed one of the laws we studied in physics: An object in motion stays in motion; an object at rest stays at rest. The cadets who stayed at rest, sleeping through long afternoons in their beds, had been liberated from the obligations and deprivations of Plebe year. If you slept half of every day, went their argument, West Point took only two years. Without the daily hazing, the only obstacle between Yearling year and graduation was maintaining a C average: “2.0 and go” was a frequent rejoinder to concerned instructors. Even the “Goat,” the last-ranked graduate in the class, got promoted to Second Lieutenant, they liked to add.

  For most of us, however, cadet life was a perpetual motion experiment. There wasn’t enough time to consider where we were heading or whether we even wanted to arrive there. As Plebes we weren’t allowed to look around in formation or while marching. Eyes front. The habit stuck. We each took as many as twenty credit hours a semester. Physics blurred into calculus in a mess of Greek letters. Morning workouts at the crack of dawn bookended the day with moonlit races to Thayer Gate and back. When I wasn’t learning economics or history, I was practicing martial arts in gym class, tutoring the Plebes I was charged with developing, or leaping from helicopters. Trent and I stole a line from Dr. Who as our motto: Sleep is for the dead.

  Yearling year was my first opportunity for upper-level electives. I registered for a two-semester sequence of French literature. If there wasn’t time to read for pleasure, I could at least read for credit. My attraction to literature grew out of the same love of stories that drew me to history. Adventure, romance, courage: It was all there. My professor, a Swiss civilian Ph.D., was a pleasant change from the typical locked-and-loaded military professor. Although just as disciplined in her approach to academics as the officers, she was creative in her approach to what could have easily been a lifeless trudge through seventeenth-century France. She brought us off post to act out Corneille or Molière at her home. (She managed to get permission for the Firsties in the class. I tagged along, breaking at least seventeen cadet regulations.) At the end of the course, when discussing the development of surrealism, we made found-object sculptures and wrote nonsensical “Dada” poems. This was not what I had expected at West Point.

  One author we read, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a daring pilot-intellectual, spoke of what I had been trying to articulate to my family about the draw of military service. Flying without instruments as a postal courier on the South American “Aéropostale,” Saint-Exupéry wrote of the camaraderie that developed between men engaged in dangerous enterprise for the benefit of mankind: “The grandeur of a profession is . . . above all, uniting men: there is only one true luxury, that of human relationships.” Danger was the great equalizer, the condition under which man was exposed, vulnerable, and ultimately heroic. I wondered at the time whether I would ever get the opportunity for danger and camaraderie, almost unique in the modern world to the profession of arms.

  Apart from the rare, illicit champagne soirée at our professor’s home, I didn’t have many distractions from the monastic life of a cadet. Unlike the campuses where my high school friends partied five nights a week, West Point ranked dead last on a college survey of party schools. Dragging us down were fifty pages of draconian regulations dating to the Prohibition era. Alcohol in the barracks was strictly forbidden. So much as a single can of beer hidden in a footlocker could mean a hundred hours marching back and forth across the quad in full parade dress uniform. The Firsties could drink, but only at one location on the academy, watched over by humorless officers. Parties were so rare that the singular exceptions earned lasting fame. One urban legend told of a secret keg party on the top floor of our barracks the year before. They had allegedly lifted the keg from the woods behind the barracks with a pulley system designed according to plans from a required civil engineering course.

  Besides beer, the other preoccupation of most college students is sex. The administration went out of its way to convince us that we were sexless initiates into a military monastery. We half-believed the rumor that the senior officers had placed an undetectable chemical in the “Beat Navy” milk cartons to hold down our libidos. Although there were nearly 150 women in my class of a thousand, they were never referred to as such by officers. The preferred language was biological, using “female” rather than “woman.” Sexual liaisons between cadets happened, of course, but well out of sight of the officers. Cadet regulations stipulated that no two cadets of opposite sex could occupy a room without the door open at least 90 degrees. Even with three cadets in a room, male and female cadets were prohibited from sitting on the same piece of furniture. Cadets who insisted on dating each other were left with no other option but to exercise together. This led in due course to the well-worn joke about a cadet “date”—running in tandem around post. Public displays of affection, PDAs to the acronym-obsessed at West Point, were unconscionable. Holding hands would send an observant officer into a tailspin of outrage. In the event that one’s hormones could not be restrained, there was only one outlet: “Flirty.” Flirtation Walk’s two square acres of wooded paths were roped off from the prying eyes of officers. At night they were free-fire zones of cadet fornication. Observing the lessons of Buckner, cadets were wise to bring flashlights, bug spray, and ponchos. Safely quarantined from forest romances, the rest of the campus carried on in celibate frustration.

  Yearling year sped by bullet fast. Friendships forged at the drop zone and in marathon study sessions provided the only consolation to months of tedious lectures, physics problem sets, and military duties. The highlight of my year was the Brigade Wrestling Championships. The idea came from Aram Donigian, the same disciplinarian who had drilled military bearing into me over countless hours standing at attention outside his office.

  “Mullaney, someone told me you were a state champion. Is that true?”

  “Yes,” I responded cautiously, “but in Rhode Island, not Iowa.”

  “Wh
y don’t you go for the Brigade title?” he asked, referring to the tournament open to any cadet who wasn’t on the varsity team. “I’ll coach you,” he offered.

  “Why not?” I said after thinking for a minute. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to wrestle again. Beginning the next morning, we woke at 5:15 every day, then climbed the football stadium’s stairs, power-lifted in the weight room, or drilled takedowns a hundred times in a row. After four months I was ready.

  The tournament was intense, drawing several dozen state title winners who had just missed the varsity cut. Aram coached me from the corner of the mat as I advanced through the first few brackets. In the semifinals, I managed to eke out a victory. The final match took place on a single mat surrounded by cadets who knew nothing about wrestling but relished the gladiatorial drama nonetheless. In the second of two periods, the tendons in my shoulder ripped with a painful dislocation. I grunted and tried to shake it loose as my opponent felled me with a low-ankle takedown. He turned me from my stomach repeatedly, running up the points until the score was tied. Finally, I managed to force my shoulder back into its socket. I burned the clock, and we paused before a sudden death period. With my arms above my head, my chest moved like an accordion with deep breaths as I tried to regain my wind.