The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education Page 7

  “Go for the headlock, Craig,” Aram urged. “He’s tired and hanging his head.”

  “It’s too risky,” I argued. “If I slip, it’s done. He’ll have two points.”

  “Don’t slip.”

  I walked back out onto the mat a different person. A surge of energy flooded my muscles, and I focused on my opponent’s neck. At the referee’s whistle we butted heads in a wrestler’s tie-up. I slipped my left arm under my opponent’s armpit and behind his neck. Simultaneously, I shot my other hand behind his head, swiveled my hips beneath his, and lifted his body off the mat. His feet flew over his head as we landed with a thump on the mat. The impact knocked the wind out of him, and the referee slammed his palm onto the mat.

  I leaped up, and the crowd erupted in applause as I lifted just one arm high in the air. My father smiled from the stands. From the corner of the mat, Aram ran to me and gave me a bear hug that my compressed lungs could hardly endure.

  “You didn’t slip,” he whispered in my ear.

  5

  The Price of a Salute

  It is as if a surgeon had to practice throughout his life on dummies for one real operation.

  SIR MICHAEL HOWARD

  THE FIRST LIVING THING I KILLED WAS A RACCOON. On a warm June night atop a Mississippi River bluff near Dubuque, Iowa, the coonhound bayed incessantly, wagging its tail with the satisfaction of having treed the raccoon we had been chasing for hours. I lifted the rifle to my shoulder and squeezed the trigger just as I had on the firing range with an M16. The raccoon fell to the ground, its fur a bloody mess. Entrails leaked out in pink streams.

  “It’s a she coon.” Trent punched me in the arm.

  “Oh . . . damn,” I said, looking down at the thing I had hunted so fervently.

  “Well, Daniel Boone, pick ’er up. She’s yours now.”

  “How?”

  Trent looked bewildered by my naïveté.

  “By the tail, of course.”

  I lifted the mass of fur and blood by its bony tail and followed Trent toward the pickup truck. The raccoon’s blood smeared my jeans and left a trail of red through the wheat. I had expected more of a Hemingway moment when I had accepted Trent’s offer to fly home with him from West Point on our first block of leave after Yearling year. I had hoped by hunting to connect with a primeval tradition. Now I understood why hunting societies traditionally followed their hunts with ritualistic ablutions. Maybe killing was just something you get used to? We skinned the raccoon at Trent’s farm, and I preserved the tail to bring back to my father. This was a tangible conquest he could understand. I pinned the tail to a large walking staff I crafted from a birch branch. I sanded it down and preserved it with linseed oil. Near the top I curled rawhide to make a handle. On its side, I carved ARMY DAD, burning each letter into the wood. When I returned home, my father replaced his Irish shillelagh with the staff I had carved. On his daily walks the raccoon tail drove our Labrador into a frothed frenzy.

  AFTER A BRIEF THREE weeks of vacation, I returned to West Point for more summer training at Camp Buckner. Every cadet had to spend a month during his third or fourth cadet summer training underclassmen. It had been an illusion as a Plebe and Yearling to think the training was focused on us. In fact, West Point placed far more emphasis on the cadets leading the training. Can they build a team? Do they have what it takes to lead soldiers in the “real Army” beyond West Point’s perimeter? My role, typical for a Cow, was to train a squad of twelve new Yearlings just one year younger than me. What limited authority I had stemmed from a combination of having gone through Buckner once myself and an enamel pin signifying my rank.

  Leading was at once both simple and difficult. I made obvious rookie mistakes, taking shortcuts that I believed would preserve morale. One night after a long day shooting in the rain, I tried to get my squad some extra sleep by having them turn in their rifles to the arms room without cleaning them thoroughly. Predictably, the carbon left over from firing blank ammunition fossilized in the barrels, making the next day’s cleaning five times more difficult. I had always criticized my leaders for being obsessed with details and tried the opposite tack with my squad. On one foot march, I failed to give them a packing list. The result: Half of them overpacked and struggled under the heavy load while the other half threw out items they didn’t think they would need. One cadet glared at me as a thunderstorm drenched him.

  “You didn’t tell us to pack our ponchos.”

  “Here,” I said, “take mine.” I handed it over. “My mistake.”

  An officer marched up alongside me. Now, sans poncho, I was sopping wet.

  “Another lesson for the kit bag,” he said. “Trust, but verify.”

  In the military, I learned, details matter. I never failed to check my men before a mission again. Other lessons were subtler. For one, leading from the front was much harder than the slogan suggested. I had always thought my leaders had it easier than me. Being a leader changed my mind. General Eisenhower used to describe leadership as a piece of string. Push it, he would tell a young officer, and the string would bunch up in failure. Instead, he said, you had to pull. There is a chain of command, but there is also a chain of influence. To really get my squad to do anything, yelling was counterproductive. They might return to practicing knots, but as soon as I turned away, they would stop. Instead, I had to lead by example. If I wanted them to march faster, I had to march twice as fast with a smile on my face. If I wanted them to extend their threshold of pain, I had to push myself even harder, and under no circumstances could I afford to whine. I woke up earlier and went to sleep later than the squad every night. I said nothing, but they soon stopped complaining about fatigue.

  The only way to gain my squad’s loyalty was to show loyalty to them. I served them, not the other way around. They needed to know that I put their welfare above my own. In that sense, I imitated what I had seen my father do with his crews, making sure they had the equipment and training they needed, asking after their families, and covering for them during family emergencies. At the end of a long march along one of the ridges above Buckner, and before setting up my own tent, I first went around the squad and checked their feet one by one for blisters and swelling, doling out foot powder and moleskin as necessary. After sweating through thick socks, what their feet needed most was deodorant. Leadership smelled like blue cheese.

  With fresh socks on our feet, and rucksacks comfortably off our shoulders and on the ground, we shot the bull, spit salty sunflower seeds into the tree line, and played hands of hearts as evening approached. A hum of crickets rose around us like an orchestra warming up, and mosquitoes began testing our bug spray defenses. Moments like these, in camp at the end of a hard day, were priceless. At the arrival of coffee and hot food trucked in by Humvee, a line formed in seconds. I was just as famished as my men, but the important principle—“Officers eat last”—placed me at the end of the line. A full stomach, a canteen cup of coffee, and the camaraderie of shared hardship—these were the tangible rewards of leadership.

  I knew from my own struggles in Beast and Buckner that morale dropped quickest when I was alone. It was then that my focus shifted from completing a mission to escaping my own inner misery—a rock grinding inside my boot heel, a gnawing hunger in my gut, a shooting pain under the rucksack shoulder straps. The best antidote was a cohesive team. When someone else depended on me, I couldn’t quit. As a Buckner squad leader, I spent much of my effort on building a strong team. I emphasized team successes over individual achievements and nudged the strong performers to help the weak. We developed nicknames, mascots, and inside jokes. I knew they had coalesced when they invited me along on a daring midnight raid to steal canoes from under the noses of the guards and paint our company logo on an enormous rock on the opposite side of Lake Popolopen. The squad no longer needed my motivation; they planned that whole midnight raid from the audacious beach launch to its ignominious finish standing at attention before the camp sergeant major.

  But all t
he cohesion in the world was no substitute for tactical knowledge. Competence was the biggest morale booster. I drilled my squad every night after we returned from the field. While their classmates ate pizza by the lake, we reviewed procedures for calling in artillery fire.

  “Why do we have to do this?” they moaned before setting to work.

  “Because you want to win,” I reminded them.

  And win they did. At the end of the training block, they stood at the top of nearly a hundred squads at Buckner. After seeing their work pay off, my encouragement was superfluous.

  This second summer at Buckner solidified my interest in becoming an officer. At the end of the summer, I had to commit to five years of service after graduation. Until that point, I had been free to walk away from West Point with no obligations whatsoever. A number of my classmates had, ensuring that West Point graduated only those who really wanted to be in the Army. The raw tests of physical mettle and blind obedience as a Plebe and Yearling had given me confidence but little inspiration. Up to then at West Point, I had only learned to follow. It was a necessary but insufficient preparation for leading soldiers. I couldn’t have known either the challenges or the rewards of leadership without trying it first. After training my squad, I knew that I wanted to be a platoon leader. Making them succeed had given me a satisfaction far greater than any individual achievement. The very act of leading was motivating: I wanted to deserve the men I would one day lead.

  “THE LAND THAT GOD forgot, where the mud is eighteen inches deep and the sun is blazing hot.” All I knew about Fort Benning and Airborne School was what I had heard in a cadence. For once the cadence wasn’t an exaggeration. It was easy to understand why the British had chosen Georgia as a penal colony. I arrived at Benning a few days after finishing my leadership tour at Camp Buckner in order to begin Airborne School. Every cadet was required to pass at least one military training course in order to graduate. Options included everything from combat scuba diving to mountaineering. For me the choice was obvious. After more than a hundred free-fall skydives with the jump team at West Point, I wanted to expand my parachuting repertoire of acrobatic sport to include skills more relevant to the infantry. Unlike the skydiving I had done already, Airborne School prepared its students to jump at low altitudes, ideal for penetrating behind enemy lines. After five successful jumps I could call myself a paratrooper.

  As I stepped out of the air-conditioned van that delivered me from the airport, my skin immediately started to perspire. Uncontrollable sweat. The air at Fort Benning was so thick with humidity that my uniform soon looked as if I had worn it in a rainstorm. Water steamed off the sleeves. The sun had turned the lawn on the training fields into nasty brown stubble, and I feared I was going to wilt next.

  Benning was more like an open-air museum than a twenty-first-century training center of the world’s dominant military. This was a post built to train millions of infantrymen to kill Germans. Everywhere were vacant fields to train volunteers and conscripts. Old Sherman tanks stood poised at intersections as if awaiting a wand to bring them to life. Streets named after Pershing and MacArthur wound through neighborhoods of crisp red-brick officers’ quarters. Huddled between shady trees were half a dozen statues dedicated to old battles and their heroes. At the center of it all was a handful of two-story barracks and training pavilions that made up Airborne School.

  They say that Airborne School “crams five days of training into three weeks.” It is really not that hard to jump out of an airplane and land on the ground. In fact, Leonardo da Vinci had anticipated the parachute concept five hundred years earlier. According to him, “If a man has a tent of linen, with all the openings sealed up, he will be able to throw himself down from a great height without injury.” The Army’s parachutes had one purpose: drop us fast enough that we would be a hard target to shoot and slow enough that we didn’t break every bone in our bodies crumpling onto the drop zone.

  The whole point of Airborne School, it seemed, was to frustrate us so much that we would do anything, even jump out of a perfectly good airplane, in order to graduate. After two long weeks on the ground, proving that we could shuffle out of a mock plane, count to four, and land feetfirst in sawdust, we advanced to the final week of five real jumps, four during the day and one at night. On our first jump day we ran in full gear down Cardiac Hill to the parachute sheds bordering the airfield. I picked up the main parachute and began putting it on. It was the most uncomfortable backpack ever manufactured. Around my waist I strapped a reserve parachute the size of a rolled-up beach towel. This reserve was supposed to give me confidence that “if my main don’t open wide, I’ve got a reserve by my side.” The next verse of the Airborne cadence was less comforting, warning that “if that one should fail me too, look out, ground, I’m comin’ through.” From a height of twelve hundred feet, would I bounce or splatter?

  After an excruciatingly slow and meticulous inspection, the jumpmasters had us sit down and wait for the plane. The gear cut off the circulation to every part of my body, but we were forbidden to so much as scratch our noses lest we inadvertently screw up our gear. Unlike the jumps I had done at West Point with a parachute I packed myself, jumping with gear I hadn’t prepared kept my hands firmly clasped on top of the reserve.

  What made me even more nervous were the “motivational” videos they had us watch as the hours ticked by slowly and my bladder filled to the brim while I continued downing canteen after canteen of water. Each video showed the gruesome results of different parachute malfunctions. One by one, paratroopers crashed into the fuselage of C-130 cargo planes, severed their limbs on the static line that attaches each suspended jumper to the receding jump door, knocked themselves unconscious in inadvertent collisions, or tumbled unnervingly through the sky with misshapen parachutes doing little to slow their descent. The background music running through my head was “Blood Upon the Risers,” an Airborne cadence sung to the tune of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

  There was blood upon the risers; there were brains upon the chute

  Intestines were a’dangling from his Paratrooper suit.

  He was a mess; they picked him up, and poured him from his boots,

  And he ain’t gonna jump no more!

  (Chorus)

  Gory, gory, what a hell of way to die,

  Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die,

  Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die,

  And he ain’t gonna jump no more!

  Definitely splatter. One of my West Point classmates hadn’t gotten the message about leaving his equipment alone after the jumpmaster inspection. He adjusted his chin strap and was immediately removed from the course. The last thing the instructors wanted was to drag a dead student off the drop zone because his loose helmet had blown off in the propeller blast. The trick about rules in the Army was knowing which ones were important. Precise details mattered more when making a parachute drop than when folding underwear for inspection.

  By the time we waddled up the ramp into the belly of the cargo plane, all I wanted was to get out of the harness. And the only way out of the harness was to leap from a hundred stories high onto a sandy drop zone on the Alabama side of the Chattahoochee River. Five minutes after takeoff, the jumpmasters signaled for us to stand up. We hooked our static lines onto a guide wire running the length of the plane. At intervals the jumpmaster shouted the time remaining, and we echoed each report down the ungainly column. “Thirty seconds!” I counted down in my head while watching the jumpmaster lean out the open door and check for the right spot. He positioned the first jumper at the door, a five-foot-two student the instructors had nicknamed “Oompah.”

  “Go!”

  Oompah did not go.

  “Go!”

  He stood frozen at the edge of the door.

  The jumpmaster planted his size 12 boot on Oompah’s ass, and out he went into the blue. Next in line, I heard Oompah’s scream evaporate quickly. The drills had been so repetitive that I didn’t have to think
. After inhaling sawdust for two weeks and enduring Georgia’s unrelenting heat, the blast of fresh cold air from the jump door was inviting. I stepped out into the breeze, counted to four, and watched my parachute unfurl like an oversized handkerchief above my head. “Airborne!” I shouted to no one and concentrated on the rapidly approaching ground. I did a pull-up with the risers by my head and slackened my speed just as my boots knifed into the soft sand of Fryar Drop Zone. I tumbled ass over head and completed a half-dozen revolutions before coming to a stop on my back. I tasted blood in my mouth where I had bitten my tongue. The sky above darkened with a hundred green parachutes dangling students. I made the sign of the cross and watched in awe.