American Spartan

by Tyson, Ann Scott

  His father’s abrupt departure triggered something else inside Jim: it motivated him to go to extremes to excel in basketball, in what would become a lifelong quest to try to make his father proud.

  The day after Jim watched his father disappear down the dusty street in Hobbs, he started shooting five hundred baskets a day. He practiced in the wind, rain, and sleet, and when it was so cold he could barely feel the ball in his hands, let alone bounce it on the snow-covered driveway. He practiced when he was tired or sick. And he never let his last shot be a miss. If he missed on the five hundredth shot, he would take it over until he made it. He went to school an hour early each morning to train at the gym. After school, he attended practice, went home to finish shooting baskets in the driveway, ate dinner, and did his homework. At night he lay in bed and played one or two entire games in his mind before he fell asleep. By middle school, he was consistently scoring thirty to forty points a game, chalking up school records, and went on to play on the Hobbs High School powerhouse team under legendary coach Ralph Tasker. Still, he felt his father’s love eluded him.

  In May 1986 Jim graduated from high school and accepted a basketball scholarship for a junior college in Hobbs. But, standing on the court one midsummer day at a gym in Las Cruces, he had an epiphany. It dawned on him he would never make a living as a basketball player and would have to coach. That’s not what I want with my life, he thought. A week later, he was standing before a military recruiter. His sudden decision to enlist was not entirely out of the blue. About the same time he had his change of heart on the basketball court, he had found himself enthralled by Robin Moore’s fictionalized account of Green Beret exploits in Vietnam. Aside from the combat and daring depicted in the book, there was something exotic and intriguing to Jim about the idea of fighting with an indigenous force. He was also under considerable pressure to make his own way in the world. His father, then on his third divorce, had made it clear that Jim was to be out of the apartment they were sharing in Las Cruces by the end of the summer. At nineteen, Jim was about to get married and had his first child on the way. He decided to make the rounds of the military recruiting offices, which were lined up in a row of storefronts in downtown Las Cruces. First he walked into the Navy office and said he’d like to be a Navy SEAL. The recruiter gave a chuckle, so Jim immediately turned and left. He then went into the Army recruiting office next door. “I want to be a Green Beret,” he said. “Sit down,” the recruiter replied.

  Three months later, in mid-November 1986, Jim left for Army basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. He took the same obsessive drive he’d shown on the basketball court to the training fields, seeking to prove himself and master the skills he needed to lead men in combat. Underneath it all, he was filling the void of love he had felt as a child by forging bonds of camaraderie and brotherhood with his men.

  Jim spent the next two years struggling to pass the grueling trials required to earn his Green Beret. He volunteered for the Special Forces Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) school, set up in 1981 to resemble a Viet Cong prison camp and train the soldiers to resist physical and mental torture and interrogation. Soldiers were stripped, beaten, blindfolded, deprived of sleep, water-boarded (tied down with water poured over their face to make them feel as if they were drowning), and confined in small cages for hours. Jim passed, and soon went on to formal Special Forces training. The first phase involved more arduous physical trials. In one test of his skill in using a compass to find his way through the woods, he slipped off a log, broke a rib, and had to start over. During a parachute jump he suffered a concussion, and had to start over again.

  At the end of 1988 he began the last phase of the Special Forces qualification course, or “Q course.” Known as “Robin Sage,” the final trial is a four-week unconventional warfare exercise carried out over thousands of square miles in the backwoods of North Carolina. Soldiers are organized into twelve-man teams, just as they would be during real operations. The teams infiltrate a fictitious country known as Pineland where they link up with a guerrilla force and its leader, or “G-chief.” The goal is to train and advise the guerrillas as they liberate Pineland from an oppressive regime. The exercise had a rocky start for Jim. Soon after arriving at the guerrilla base camp, the G-chief and some of his men summoned Jim and, at gunpoint, took all his communications gear, stripped him naked, made him hug a tree, and tied his arms and legs around it. His team had to spend half their operational fund to get him released.

  A formative lesson Jim learned at Robin Sage—one that would stay with him in coming years—was that it didn’t really matter how he accomplished a mission, as long as he got it done. Sometimes instructors assigned missions that would be impossible if done by the book.

  One afternoon, for example, Jim was told to carry out a reconnaissance of an extraction point twelve miles distant and return by midnight, just a few hours away. Realizing he’d never cover the distance in time, he led his teammate to a farmhouse and asked a man for a ride. The man readily agreed, gave the two soldiers some blueberry pie, and had them toss their rifles in the back of his pickup truck and climb in. Jim accomplished the mission with hours to spare.

  “How the fuck did you do it?” an instructor asked.

  “Hey, Sergeant, mission accomplished,” Jim replied. He emerged with a provocatively unconventional mind-set that would be his trademark from then on.

  Weeks later, the Robin Sage instructors gathered Jim’s team together under the pine trees as they cleaned weapons at Camp Mackall, and one by one called out the names of the soldiers who passed.

  “Gant!” his instructor said. “You made it.”

  He had earned his Green Beret and crest with the motto “De Oppresso Liber”—to free the oppressed. “It was the proudest day of my life,” Jim told me.

  Jim was assigned to the 5th Special Forces Group. Green Berets are organized into five Special Forces groups, which focus on different regions of the world, and the 5th Group concentrated on the Middle East, so the next stop for Jim was Arabic language school. After Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the 5th Group took part in the first Gulf War, the U.S. military campaign Desert Storm. Jim was a sergeant and was involuntarily extended beyond his four-year contract to go to war. His unit worked with an Egyptian mechanized battalion that was part of the central thrust from Saudi Arabia into Kuwait. His unit called in air strikes, breached obstacles, and targeted an Iraqi military base before moving into Kuwait City to help secure the Kuwait International Airport. By then a staff sergeant, Jim left the war disappointed that it was a completely uneven contest and he had not experienced real combat.

  In 1992, Jim finished his enlisted time and decided to enroll in Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) at New Mexico State University to become an Army officer. He was working as a security guard and martial arts instructor to support his wife and five-year-old son, Chant. But he was unhappy in civilian life, and the pressure strained his marriage. He divorced and later remarried. By early 1997, he was a lieutenant assigned to the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii and had just been given his first platoon.

  As a twenty-nine-year-old former Special Forces staff sergeant who’d already been to war, Jim felt intensely the imperative of training the thirty men in his platoon for combat. “What struck me is how badly those men needed leadership, and how little they knew,” he told me.

  Giving it his all, Jim plunged into the study of small-unit tactics. He began poring over Army infantry manuals. He scrutinized maneuvers such as the ambush and how to walk point in a patrol. He also sought to become a technical expert in the weapons systems his men used. Always one to question the written word and test it against “ground truth,” he looked for lessons in firsthand accounts from recent wars—not the grand set-piece battles of World War II but the close-in jungle warfare of Southeast Asia. “What I wanted to know is how these platoons fought in Vietnam,” he said.

  Over time, Jim wrote all of his own standard operating procedures
, or SOPs, and developed his own training regime for close-quarters battle and light infantry operations. His goal was to train his men as he wanted them to fight. Sometimes that meant flouting conventional Army wisdom, much to the consternation of his senior commanders.

  Grenades were a good example. Army rules required a safety officer to stand next to a soldier and instruct him point by point in how to use a grenade. Jim didn’t want his men to have that crutch—there were no safety officers in combat—so his men learned to toss live grenades by themselves.

  Once after he led his platoon through a live-fire drill taking down a building as they practiced urban combat, a training officer, Maj. Brian D. Prosser, offered a critique. He advised Jim and his men that when stacking up before rushing in to clear a room, they should hold their rifles with either their left or right hand, depending on which direction they would have to shoot. Jim thought that was crazy, and immediately spoke up in front of all the other soldiers.

  “Hey, sir, what you are telling my men will get them killed. Before you come out here and give AARs [after-action reviews], you need to know what you are talking about,” he fumed.

  Prosser, stunned, told the outspoken lieutenant they would talk “offline.”

  That night, during another live-fire drill, Jim was inside a darkened building when Prosser walked by at the end of the hallway talking with another officer. “Goddamn that Lt. Gant,” he said. “If he didn’t know his stuff so well, I’d fuck him up.” Soon afterward, Prosser became the executive officer of Jim’s battalion, 2nd Battalion, 5th Infantry Regiment.

  What unnerved his superiors even more was that Jim’s platoon was by far the scraggliest in the battalion. Jim himself let his hair grow too long, never polished his boots, and allowed his men to take candy and cigarettes with them to the field. Jim called his soldiers by their first names, hugged them, and shunned formalities such as salutes. But Jim trained his men hard and was a stern taskmaster if they messed up.

  The commander of 2-5 Infantry was then Lt. Col. Campbell, a smart, hardworking officer well liked by his men. Campbell, like Jim, was Special Forces qualified and had served in the 5th Special Forces Group, where he commanded an ODA, or A-team. They were from the same Army “tribe.” “Jim stuck out because he was prior enlisted, he was a little more cocky, and had definite ideas on how things would go,” Campbell told me in his Pentagon office years later, when he was the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations. Still, at the time Jim’s maverick leadership proved almost too much for Campbell.

  One day Campbell was watching all the platoons in his battalion go through a rehearsal for a night live-fire training exercise. It was a dangerous drill in which the platoon tried to capture a hill that was fortified by mock enemy guns and about three hundred yards of trenches. Each platoon had to navigate a minefield, cut through three layers of barbed wire, and then clear the enemy out of the trench system that surrounded the hill. Meanwhile, the platoon’s own machine gunners fired real bullets to suppress the enemy firing positions. But there was a problem: the machine gunners could not see the soldiers as they moved through the trench to clear it. The answer, according to Army Field Manual (FM) 7-8 on infantry platoon tactics, was for one of the soldiers to run along in front of the rest carrying a chemical light and a fifteen-foot-tall pole with a reflective neon orange panel at the top. That way, the machine gunners could fire well in front of the flag as a safety precaution to make sure none of their own soldiers were shot. But in Jim’s view the flag had a serious drawback—in a real combat situation it would alert the enemy to the platoon’s position, allowing for an easy counterattack. Jim again wanted his men to train as they would fight.

  During the exercise rehearsal before live guns were fired, all the platoons followed the Army manual instructions and carried a flag through the trenches—except for Jim’s, which was the last to go through.

  “I have a better idea,” Jim told his men. “We aren’t using the flags. Keep your head below the trench line. Anyone outside the trench is getting shot!”

  His men followed orders, but as soon as Campbell and other officers observing realized what was happening, all hell broke loose.

  “Jim! What the fuck are you doing?” Campbell shouted through a bullhorn as he peered down at the soldiers through his black-rimmed Ranger glasses.

  “It’s not my fault if you have eight fucked-up platoons!” Jim shot back. Outraged, Campbell ordered him to lead his platoon through the exercise again, following FM 7-8.

  “I want you in my office Monday morning,” Campbell said tersely.

  At the appointed time, Jim appeared before the stern-faced Campbell. “This is a letter of reprimand,” Campbell said, handing Jim the document, an administrative chewing-out that can hurt an officer’s career. Jim signed the letter, and Campbell told him he was dismissed. Jim turned, saluted, and walked toward the door.

  “Jim,” Campbell added before he could leave, “I thought about it all weekend. You were right.” Later, on Campbell’s recommendation, Jim trained his entire battalion in close-quarters combat and other drills using his unconventional tactics and techniques.

  Over time, Jim’s men proved among the most combat ready in the battalion, beating out other platoons in live-fire and other competitions. In turn, Jim began winning approval from superiors. Campbell gave him stellar reviews and considered him the most outstanding of the more than thirty lieutenants in his battalion.

  In 1998, Jim went on to lead a second platoon in the 2-5 Infantry, a scout platoon that conducted reconnaissance. He was disappointed at the paucity of information in the Army’s infantry field manual on patrolling. So, in his ongoing study of Vietnam tactics, he wrote a detailed pamphlet called The Point Man. It was designed to train the soldier walking point at the head of a patrol as well as the men behind him how to best detect and respond to enemy contact. The Point Man so impressed his superiors that toward the end of Jim’s time in command, he was entrusted with training all the platoons in his battalion in this more sophisticated way of patrolling. In ten days of intensive live fires and maneuvers in a lush, jungle-like training area, none of the battalion officers came to observe. Then late on Friday afternoon, two hours before the training ended, one officer arrived at the range: Maj. Prosser, who had clashed with Jim early on.

  It was June 1999, and Prosser was about to leave Hawaii. He came to give Jim a gift, one that would change Jim’s life. He handed Jim a hardback copy of Gates of Fire, the historical novel by Steven Pressfield about the three hundred Spartans and their legendary stand against the Persians at Thermopylae. Jim returned exhausted from his training, and later that night opened the book. In it, he found this inscription:

  Jim,

  We didn’t start off well. . . . I thought you were a young punk platoon leader. Things change—you’re older now. . . . Of all the officers in 2-5 Infantry, I will miss you the most. Your energy, personality and drive are refreshing to be around. No one can say that Jim Gant’s heart is not in the right place. Belief in yourself and your duties are more than half the battle. . . . and along with persistence and drive make all the difference. You have all these qualities and more. It has been my honor and privilege to serve with you.

  Prosser went on: “This is a book about warriors . . . about men of old. Although fictional, I found it fascinating and full of lessons on character and life. . . . Remember, circumstances do not make a man, they reveal him.”

  Jim began reading the novel, which is narrated by the lone survivor of the battle, a squire of the Spartan warrior Dienekes. He was astonished by what he found. Every page of Pressfield’s intimate account of the making of Spartan warriors and their heroics at Thermopylae seemed to sharpen and illuminate Jim’s own emerging beliefs about combat. “It spoke to me like the Bible,” he said. It was an intellectual and spiritual affirmation of truths that had come to him in the trenches and drill fields, about leading men in war. “I immediately knew those people [the Spartans]. I knew that time. I was meant
to be a Spartan, perhaps I was. Every single part of that touched me. It was as though I had a very focused black-and-white picture, and Gates of Fire gave it color.” Jim identified powerfully with the Spartan culture, and with the practice of young boys leaving their birth families to become part of a brotherhood of men-at-arms.

  The key to motivating his soldiers, he had learned as a lieutenant, was simple: he loved them. “I try to treat people under my command the way I would want someone to treat my son. When you put it in those terms, it is easy,” Jim explained to me. In coming years, he would act in many ways as a surrogate father to his men. He prepared them for combat, held them and cried with them, and risked his life to protect them and get them home. He told them again and again that when they were wounded in combat, the faces they would see and the voices they would hear comforting them—and the hands responsible for keeping them alive—would be those not of family members but of their fellow soldiers. He also expected his men to love him in return, as much as they loved their own fathers. In giving and expecting so much, he bonded with his soldiers in a way that went well beyond the norm for commanding officers.

  Years at war followed, in which he honed his leadership skills and principles. Then one chilly night in 2011 in Afghanistan, he found himself face-to-face with his most inexperienced group of soldiers yet—with only two days to prepare them for combat.

  CHAPTER 15

  SGT. EUGENE “SONNY” BOLES, a thirty-two-year-old Army cook, stepped out of the darkness into a tent at Combat Outpost Penich. He waited uneasily to learn why he had been sent to Konar Province, Afghanistan. It was February 2011. Only a few months earlier, Sonny and other members of his platoon from the Army’s 1st Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, based in Fort Riley, Kansas, believed they were deploying to Iraq to escort convoys. Then rumors began flying about a security mission in Africa. But around Thanksgiving, their company commander announced they were going to Afghanistan. They were slated for an unusual mission with the Special Forces. It was all Sonny knew that night standing out in the cold.