The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education Read online

  Occasionally, I joined Bill and Huber for Bible study. Growing up in Catholic Rhode Island, I had never known any Baptists. Bill was diligent about his faith, digging into the text, looking for the correct interpretation, memorizing passages. I couldn’t imagine Bill without a concordance Bible tucked into his rucksack. His enthusiasm led to missions work, sharing his faith with potential college converts on spring break. My faith was much more private, a conversation between God and me that I wasn’t eager to share. I preferred the solemnity of Mass and its reliable rituals. Singing praise was unnatural for me, as were the long prayers Bill said before meals. We had extended conversations in our room about religion, politics, and philosophy. After a trip we took to the Holocaust Museum, where we had stood inside one of the freight cars that had shipped Jews to Auschwitz, we argued about whether man was naturally good or evil. How, I asked, could you argue man’s inherent goodness after seeing Nazi scientists dunk Jewish prisoners in ice water to test how long it would take downed pilots to become hypothermic? Back and forth we would go, citing verses and saints, until we both realized how late it was. Bill was the first close friend who pushed my assumptions, even though (or perhaps because) we hardly ever agreed.

  A FEW MONTHS EARLIER, Major John Nagl, an instructor in the Social Sciences Department, had gathered Bill, Liz, me, and a couple dozen of my classmates into a room and encouraged us to apply for the Rhodes Scholarship, a ticket to study at the oldest university in the English-speaking world: Oxford. Nagl’s presentation was mesmerizing, with slide after slide of centuries-old quads, cobblestone streets, and portraits of former military scholars who had honed their wits in smoke-filled pubs over pints of warm beer. Given the harried pace of cadet life, the idea of an intellectual idyll in England, where I could spend an entire afternoon reading in a café or debating with scholars, could not have been more tantalizing.

  “Only the best students in the country win,” said Nagl at the end of his brief. “If you think you’re one of the best, come back in the fall ready to work.” The gauntlet had been thrown.

  I had first run into Nagl at Camp Buckner the year before. After a brief discussion about graduate school, I asked him what I could do to prepare.

  “First,” he said, “relax.

  “Second, buy a journal.

  “Third, write in that journal every day. Observe. Analyze. Synthesize. The point is to write, ask questions, and, most important, to think.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  After I had returned from the Air Force Academy and produced two full journals for Nagl’s inspection, he introduced me to Paul Yingling, a field artillery major who taught political philosophy at West Point. Arguing that a journal risked becoming an echo chamber, Yingling insisted that I test out my ideas over coffees with him. He cared less about the Rhodes Scholarship than he did about my personal development.

  “Conversation,” Yingling claimed, “is an end in itself.” We talked endlessly about his favorite authors. I’d never engaged in a no-holds-barred discussion with a professor before. The questions were impossible. Did I agree with Machiavelli, must a prince be prepared to “enter into evil, when forced by necessity”? Was that applicable today, for an officer? Was it “safer to be feared than loved”?

  “An interesting life,” Yingling told me, “is one filled with controversial successes punctuated by occasional and spectacular failures.” We picked apart T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a poem about unrequited love that was one of a handful I’d copied into my journal. Don’t be like the timid Prufrock, Yingling warned, asking yourself: “Do I dare? Do I dare disturb the universe?” Life wasn’t meant to be lived from the sidelines. In one email exchange, Yingling drove home the sense of urgency I felt about preparing to lead outside West Point’s gates. He suggested that I was “in the door,” about to jump. “Very soon, the costs for making bad choices will rise exponentially. . . . Oxford may be your last chance to contemplate first principles in a systematic manner. . . . This process is like getting shot at: It has the marvelous effect of focusing one’s mind.”

  IN EARLY NOVEMBER, AFTER dozens of coffees with Yingling and an equal number of drafts of my Rhodes application, Bill, Liz, and I all received letters inviting us to interviews. Bill’s interview was in Atlanta, but both Liz and I had interviews in the same Boston district. We spent the next two weeks grilling each other after hours about current events and policy nuance, thinking in vain that this was a test we could cram for. The invitation indicated that there would be a cocktail party the night before the interview. Like Cinderella before the ball, I realized I had nothing to wear. I was hesitant to arrive in my cadet uniform; my answers would be robotic enough without adding the larynx-choking wool tunic. I called up the best-dressed mentor I knew: Charles Hooker.

  Charlie was a West Point graduate in his mid-forties who had opened his home and family to me and several other friends, including wrestlers Trent, Jim, and Chris. After a career in the Special Forces, he became a successful Wall Street banker and there learned the things they don’t teach you in the jungle, such as picking the right Bordeaux vintage and distinguishing between hound’s-tooth and herringbone. He was a natural mentor for a working-class kid who knew as little about the professional world as the real Army beyond West Point. Charlie’s father had been a sergeant major, an enlisted man whose work ethic must have mirrored my own father’s. In him I found the unconditional support of a parent and the experience of a soldier-financier.

  Charlie and his wife, Lisa, put me through a high-intensity fashion exercise in the walk-in closet of their New Jersey home. Designer suits and footwear lined two levels stretching fifteen feet to the back.

  “I think maybe the alligator-skin belt and wingtips. What do you think?” asked Charlie.

  “Sure,” I responded. What were wingtips?

  “How do you like your cuffs?”

  “Huh?”

  “Regular or French?”

  “French,” I guessed, and Charlie pressed a pair of cuff links into my hand.

  He began fitting a coat around my shoulders.

  “How about that—it’s a perfect fit.” Charlie fixed a folded handkerchief in my pocket. “Craig, you are ready for cocktail combat.”

  Relieved of the burden of making a fashion faux pas, I packed my suit and drove to a set of interviews in New England. By the final round in Boston, I was able to relax at the cocktail party, despite the mahoganypaneled stuffiness of a Beacon Hill brownstone. Conversation hovered several levels above the typical mess hall banter I was used to. One gentleman asked me how I thought the Internet might transform the American economy. I sipped my chardonnay, garbled some nonsense, and got a nodding head that seemed to say, “You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.” I didn’t. Only after the party did I learn from Liz, who was also interviewing in my district, that the gentleman I was unimpressing had been in President Clinton’s cabinet. I hoped the interviews would go better. After the party, I called Nagl.

  “What’s your joke?” he asked.

  “Huh?”

  “You need a joke.”

  “Sir, you know me. I don’t do jokes.”

  “Then I guess you won’t be drinking warm beer. Fort Benning will be beautiful in August.”

  “Do you have a joke?” I was pretty sure this was what he had wanted me to ask from the get-go.

  “You’re interviewing right after Liz?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When you walk in, ask the panel how you look in your uniform.”

  I woke up, went for a jog, snacked on a bagel, and read the newspaper. After finishing, I walked over to the St. Botolph Club. Before the cocktail party, the only private club I had ever entered was the country club where I had spent high school summers bussing tables and watching the wealthy kids lounge by the pool. I would have been intimidated even if the panel hadn’t included a cabinet secretary. I hoped my uniform would make me look bigger than I felt.

  “Good mo
rning, Craig.” An older lawyer in a pin-striped suit greeted me in the hallway. “Follow me.”

  I closed the heavy oak door behind me and paused as I took in the dark wood paneling, bookshelves of leather-bound volumes, and nine panelists arranged around a long table. I had learned their day jobs at the party. One presided over the Massachusetts Senate. Another younger Rhodes scholar ran a nonprofit that provided Internet access to low-income communities, while a third taught moral philosophy at Harvard. There was a surgeon who penned articles for the New Yorker and another full-time columnist who was syndicated in newspapers across the country. My seat was the empty one at the end, the one I had learned during Buckner ambushes to call “The Kill Zone.” I gamely delivered Nagl’s “joke” but heard only a couple of polite chuckles.

  Yingling had encouraged me to approach the interview like a conversation rather than an interrogation. This was easier said than done. The actual interview was like getting cross-examined by a committee of Nobel laureates. Questions followed no logical path but instead jumped across fields in a way that made my brain hurt. Is the military a just instrument of power? Could you please outline the major works of French literature since the seventeenth century as they pertain to the development of the modern French novel? What is the second law of thermodynamics? Define a good war. Was Vietnam a good war? Would you expel a soldier who told you he was gay? When I gave a response I thought was good, they frowned. When I balked, they smiled. Fifteen minutes was an eternity. After thanking the panel for their time (like thanking a firing squad), I walked out in a daze. There was no way they were going to select me, especially considering the ridiculous résumés of the Ivy League candidates contending for just four slots. One guy spoke eleven languages fluently and had been an election observer in Kosovo. I was way out of my depth.

  Liz had waited for me in the lobby, and the two of us walked down to a bar and watched our classmates cheering Army against Navy in the football season finale. Army was losing badly. I called my parents, who were at the game in Philadelphia, and told them my chances looked as poor as Army’s. “That’s okay, Craig,” said my father. “You did your best.” I wasn’t sure. At halftime, we walked back to get the results in person. The nine scholarship candidates gathered in the waiting room, wringing hands and tapping feet. I twisted a piece of string in my pocket.

  The interviewers filed into the room. I stood up next to Liz to receive the verdict. The pin-striped lawyer, acting as jury foreman, read each name slowly.

  “Elizabeth Young.”

  Liz erupted with one of her patent smiles as the panelists continued with another three names.

  “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” Liz, her hair bobbing out of control, was practically jumping off the ground. She turned and gave me an enormous hug. As the guy next to me shot me a look full of daggers, I realized that the last name had been mine.

  “I’m going to Oxford,” I kept repeating under my breath as the panelists shook our hands one by one. I rushed off to the phone booth and called Nagl.

  “I won, and so did Liz.” I had to keep my voice down, knowing that the other students hadn’t all left the building yet. Nagl’s reply was unintelligible, something between “Hooah” and “Fucking A.”

  “Thank you, sir, for all your help. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “Stop kissing my ass, Craig.”

  “How’d Bill do?” I asked.

  “No dice.”

  “Oh.” The news that Bill hadn’t been selected deflated my excitement. I knew how disappointed Bill would be. Every step along the way we had been a team.

  “Great job, Craig. Go celebrate.”

  My next order of business was to call my parents in Philadelphia. My father almost ruptured my eardrum as he announced the results to thirty thousand fans in Veterans Stadium.

  “I’m proud of you, Craig. I’m really, really proud of you.”

  My mother told me afterward that when my parents returned home, my father took a trip to my hometown and found the preschool that, seventeen years earlier, had kicked me out. My father never forgot a slight. “Just thought you should know my son’s a Rhodes scholar.” He turned around before they even had a chance to figure out who he was talking about.

  TRENT WASN’T GOING TO let me get a big head. As soon as I returned, we were back in the weight room at 5:25 a.m. I had been working one muscle, my brain, at the expense of the others. Trent quickly made that clear by breaking me set after set until my arms collapsed. The bench press was the great equalizer.

  “Don’t give me any of that ‘Rhodes scholar’ bullshit. An Oxford degree won’t make you any stronger.”

  “Point taken,” I gasped as Trent waited until the last possible second to lift the barbell I had let sink to my ribs. “It doesn’t take a ‘Rhodes scholar’ to (fill in the blank)” became a frequent refrain in the Army whenever my ego inflated or I reverted to absentminded habits.

  After winning the scholarship, my last six months at West Point were less frantic. I enrolled in one elective that acted as an antidote to academic grade grubbing. It was a contemporary poetry course taught by Marilyn Nelson, a visiting poet. I had debated signing up for another poetry class after Plebe poetry, but after hearing the Army Chief of Staff, General Eric Shinseki, refer to soldiering as an “affair of the heart,” I decided to give it a try. I wasn’t getting much “heart” training in the required steel design course I was taking with Bill and Huber Parsons. “Plug and chug,” we called it, agonizing through mindless spreadsheets. Poetry, by contrast, was anything but a chug. We read Allen Ginsberg and James Dickey, William Meredith and Robert Lowell. Professor Nelson mixed it up with Yeats, Wordsworth, Frost, and Keats. Every class began with a five-minute meditation because, she said, poetry was the interior analogue of travel, an exploration of the mind and soul. We were also learning how to stand still. Poetry didn’t happen to a mind crunching task lists. West Point was like looking at a newspaper photo at nose distance. You see the dots, but not the picture. Although combat would require us to see both the forest and the trees, West Point was a school for lumberjacks. I hoped to find some perspective in literature. It had been one of my compelling reasons for applying to Oxford.

  In February I flew to England for a long weekend. I couldn’t wait to see Oxford, even at the cost of two months’ cadet salary. The weekend was a preview of my next two years. I bought last-minute tickets to an Irish play in London’s West End and spent the next day walking around Oxford with no destination in particular. I attempted one of our poetry assignments, a Zen walking meditation: “Walk as if you are printing your footsteps on the ground.” After nearly four years at West Point I was eager to walk with that sense of quiet deliberation, as if walking, like Yingling’s conversations, was its own reward.

  My last night had a full moon. The February night air was brisk, and the wind rattled the branches above the crushed gravel path. Magdalen College’s deer herd huddled for warmth like gray ghosts in their enclosure. I stopped where a locked gate blocked my path. In the high stone wall to my left was a bronze plaque engraved with a poem by C. S. Lewis, the Magdalen professor who had written the Narnia books that turned me into a compulsive reader as a child. In the moonlight, I read the poem twice, the second time out loud. From my coat I took out my journal and scribbled a favorite line: “We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.” That’s what I wanted—to balance the education at West Point with its photo negative.

  On the flight home I listed all the places I would travel: Prague, Istanbul, Moscow, Tokyo, Edinburgh, Cairo. I wanted to explore new academic fields, try new sports, and make new friends. On the other hand, I also had some delusional ambitions: sing in a chorus, write poetry, ski the Alps. The magic of Oxford on a moonlit night had gone to my head. I double-underlined, like a math answer, my number one priority: “fall in love.” Approximately once every three months for the next two years I would revise my Oxford “objectives,” adding requirements to gain a pilot’s
license, read all of Shakespeare, and pick up my father’s ability to whistle for a cab with two fingers.

  Romantic musings contrasted sharply with more immediate concerns. As a result of winning the Rhodes, and the peculiar logistics of officer training, I would have to finish Ranger School before the fall semester began at Oxford. My classmates, whose schedules weren’t as convoluted, wouldn’t start Ranger School, the Army’s famously grueling leadership crucible, until the following January, after they had completed the Infantry Officer Basic Course. I would do that training, four months in length, only after I returned from England. If the basic course was like a bachelor’s degree in infantry tactics, then Ranger School was a Ph.D. in physical toughness and mental endurance. Winning the Rhodes reversed the sequence for me, meaning that I would have, in West Point parlance, “a steep learning curve.” More like vertical, I realized, as I spent my mornings in the gym with Trent and my afternoons running with Bill. I signed up for the Boston Marathon to give me an incentive to push harder.