Duty First

by Ed Ruggero

  On the deck, one soldier checks the enemy casualties, removing their weapons; another is on the radio, reporting the friendly casualty, the enemy dead, the successful completion of the mission.

  “Hoo-ah!” the new cadets yell at the end of the little drama.

  Before Alpha Company gets out on the high cliff, there are more basic skills to learn: how to tie the knots that will hold them up; how to fashion a “Swiss seat,” the rope brace that wraps around the back and through the legs and from which their weight will hang.

  Grady Jett’s squad marches to a corral made up of a thick nylon rope stretched around some trees to make a forty-by-sixty-foot rectangle. Two cadet squad leaders demonstrate the knots; then, along with soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division, they move around inside the corral, checking, correcting, coaching.

  Jett knows the importance of drills; his squad has been practicing their knots for two days. They each carry an eight-foot length of rope with them, and at every opportunity Jett puts them through their paces with the unfamiliar knots. When the cadet in charge of the training site asks, “Who knows what a square knot is for?,” Jett immediately shoots up his hand. His new cadets follow instantly, proud that their squad is prepared.

  Staff Sergeant Bielefeld, the NCO in charge of the training site, sits on a large rock some twenty feet above the new cadets. Bielefeld served with the army’s elite Ranger Battalions before his stint with the 10th Mountain Division.

  “West Point turns out good officers,” he says, watching the low ground and the scrambling cadets. “So does ROTC. I only knew one dud West Pointer; he was a by-the-book guy.”

  Another NCO, who spent four summers training ROTC cadets at their Advanced Camp (military training) thinks that West Point cadets are at a disadvantage.

  “They’re not used to dealing with soldiers and NCOs; they’re so isolated here. And they act like wild bucks when they get out. Of course, I’ve seen that with ROTC lieutenants, too.”

  His complaints are not unusual. Lieutenant Colonel Dave Brown, ‘80, who commanded hundreds of brand-new infantry lieutenants at Fort Benning for their initial training, said the West Pointers had a more difficult time handling their newfound freedom than did the ROTC graduates.

  “They’re locked up for four years, then they get out; they have money, a car, freedom,” another graduate said about new West Point lieutenants. “They go nuts.”

  The new cadets of Alpha Company first practice rappelling on a gradual incline, a sixty-or seventy-foot rock face at a forty-five-degree angle. The slope, and just about every other rock in the area, has been painted with the blue and red 10th Mountain Division shoulder patch, but the most common decoration is the black and gold army insignia that reads, “RANGER.” The cliff faces, the bleachers, even the big rocks that sit alongside the trails, are all painted with oversize Ranger emblems.

  The Ranger tab (a cloth patch some two and a half inches long by half an inch wide) is awarded to soldiers who complete a very demanding nine-week course in small-unit tactics. Particularly prized by infantrymen, it has a high place in the hierarchy of badges denoting toughness and skill. And, by regulation, it is available only to men.

  Colonel Peter Stromberg, head of the Department of English, is a former infantry officer who earned his Ranger tab after graduating from West Point in 1959. Stromberg thinks the omnipresence of the Ranger tab at the training areas sends the wrong message to women cadets: Rangers are the ultimate soldier. Women can’t be Rangers; therefore, women cannot be ranked among the best.

  Lieutenant Colonel Kathy Snook, a professor in the math department and a member of West Point’s first coed class, sees this as a leadership problem, something the Department of Military Instruction (which has overall responsibility for summer training) should “fix.” “It goes along with a kind of mentality that says, ‘If you’re not infantry or armor or field artillery, you’re not really in the army’”

  To her way of thinking, the people who talk about the army as if it included only the combat arms—specialties restricted to men—are denigrating the contribution of women.

  There is an Orwellian flavor to the business of what a few words painted on rocks can mean. Ranger training was long known as the “Army’s premier leadership school,” because it taught a soldier to lead under exaggerated conditions of stress: hunger, fatigue, and continuous operations. It was nine weeks of “gut-check” leadership: no support groups, no consultants, just lots of stress and whatever courage a soldier can pull from deep inside. But according to the Public Affairs Office at Fort Benning, Georgia, where Ranger School is headquartered, the Army no longer refers to the training as a leadership course.

  “We call it a ‘small unit tactics course’ [now],” a Public Affairs official says. “If you call it a leadership school, then it has to be open to anyone. You could hardly make a case for keeping women out of a leadership course, right?”

  The painted signs on the rocks at West Point are thus a slippery slope that could lead to all sorts of arguments about the integration of women into the military. But none of the cadets appears to be thinking that as they try to master the art of rappelling down a cliff. At the top, the sergeants check the knots on the line before moving each cadet to the edge.

  “Sound off, new cadet!” the sergeants urge.

  “RANGER,” the new cadets yell, the women just as loudly as the men.

  Because this is risky training, everything is tightly controlled by the NCOs. No one moves unless he or she is responding to instructions. The new cadets are kept back from the edge, waiting in corralled lines, as if at an amusement park. This is called “positive control.” The cadets become used to moving only when told, and when they are told to move, they do so instantly. Once conditioned that way, the idea goes, the new cadet standing on the edge of the cliff will continue to respond instantly, reflexively even when the command takes the new cadet out into space.

  The new cadets are directed to undo, then re-tie their Swiss seats, the rope girdle that will hold them up.

  “C’mon, c’mon,” a sergeant barks at them when they move too slowly. “We’re not splicing DNA here.”

  There is a twenty-five-foot cliff and a seventy-five-foot cliff. The new cadets practice on the smaller one first. The sergeant in charge of the twenty-five-foot cliff points at the first new cadet in line and summons her forward.

  New Cadet Deborah Welle, the wit of third squad, steps up and faces the instructor, who is a head shorter than she is. He is the picture of cool confidence and speaks in a firm, quiet tone, signaling that he is completely in charge of everything going on. He yanks on her Swiss seat to make sure it is tied correctly and is tight. If she falls, even if she lets go with both hands, she’ll hang from this girdle of nylon rope.

  Once she has hooked the climbing rope into the D-ring at her waist, she turns her back to the cliff and shuffles toward the edge.

  “This is interesting,” she says. There is a little tremor in her voice.

  A moment later, the tremor is gone. Just as she’d been instructed, when she reaches the edge, Welle shouts, “On rappel, lane one!”

  Down below, another new cadet takes the ends of the ropes in his hands. If she falls, he need only pull the ropes tight and she will stop falling.

  “On belay, lane one!” her partner shouts back.

  “Loosen your grip with your right hand, let the line play out, and get into that L shape,” the NCO tells her.

  The first move is the trickiest. She bends at the waist and leans out over space until her legs are perpendicular to the rock face, her upper body still upright. To do this, she must move her feet a couple of inches over the edge of the cliff.

  “This is a first,” Welle says almost under her breath. “No jokes.”

  And over she goes.

  At the bottom, smiling, she just remembers to shout, “Lane one, off rappel!” as she clears the rope.

  Over on the seventy-five-foot cliff, New Cadet George Elias, who has bee
n Alpha Company’s model new cadet, stumbles a bit on his first bound. When he swings, his feet are below him, stretched toward the ground instead of toward the rock. He crashes into the wall.

  “Bigger bounds,” an NCO calls to him from the top of the cliff. The men at the top lean daringly over the edge, hanging by the safety lines at their waists. “Bigger bounds.”

  Elias tries it again, gaining confidence. When he reaches the bottom, he smiles and announces, “That was great. Especially when I smacked my face into the wall.”

  Jacque Messel is more timid; she tries to keep her body close to the rock wall as she goes over the edge, a beginner’s mistake. She winds up almost vertical, balanced on her toes, an unstable position. The NCO at the top leans over the edge, coaching her until she gets her legs in front of her, her hands braced on the line. She manages a couple of small bounds. On the ground, she backs up until the end of the rope slides through her D-ring, then smiles as she pulls off her thick leather gloves. She is sweaty and her uniform is covered with dust, but she no longer has the dark look she wore when she decreed, at last night’s meal, “This place is not for me.”

  After mountaineering training, the new cadets move back to the barracks to learn another lesson about soldiering: For every hour a soldier spends in the field, he or she will spend two or three hours cleaning and repairing field equipment. Alpha Company gathers in Bradley Barracks, named for Omar Bradley, Class of 1915.

  Jett directs his squad to one of the biggest rooms available, a three-man room belonging to New Cadets Ben Steadman, Pete Lisowski, and Tom Lamb. Within a few minutes of their gathering, the floor is covered with twenty pairs of assorted shoes and boots, all of them brand new and waiting to be spit-shined; ten rucksacks; fifty-some tent pegs; a pile of shelter halves; six cans of black shoe polish; eight or nine canteens; five pairs of running shoes; one bottle of nail polish remover; two cans of shaving cream (one empty); about two pounds of grass and dirt (brushed off the field equipment); and the ten harried members of Jett’s squad.

  They got to the barracks just ahead of a July thunderstorm that left the sky a steel blue. Because Jett, the Army football player stresses teamwork above all, they have assembled in one humid box of a room to clean their equipment in assembly-line fashion. In doing so they’re trying to win a small victory from the ever-present enemy: the clock. You can’t actually hear it ticking (everything is digital), but they all know it’s there.

  Two new cadets hold shelter halves up against the wall while a third whisks off grass and dirt with a fingernail brush. Future artilleryman Pete Haglin stands at the sink, dirty tent stakes piled on his right, clean ones on his left. He moves the dirty ones under the tap and into the clean pile. Pete Lisowski sits inside one of the big wooden wardrobes that line one wall of this room; he uses a brush to scrape dirt off rucksacks and foam sleeping pads.

  By 9:00 they’re attacking the boots and shoes that cover the floor like flotsam. They trade theories about the best way to strip the finish off so they can spit-shine the leather. One works with nail polish remover, another smears shaving cream on the toes of his shoes, still another uses a stiff brush. Marat Daveltshin, the new cadet from Kyrgyzstan, dabs great globs of polish onto his boot. He has clearly decided success is a matter of thick coverage.

  Jett hurries into the room, wearing the summer white-over-gray dress uniform. On his arm is a brassard that reads “Duty Driver.” He carries a two-way radio in his hand. Tonight he is part of a detail that mans the command post known as Central Guard Room; in between driving runs he has come to check on his charges. As soon as he appears the new cadets begin firing questions at him.

  “Sir, does shaving cream work better than nail polish remover for taking off this finish?”

  “Sir, what about using a brush?”

  “Sir, do you have to take off the finish first?”

  “Is this right?” Bob Friesema asks, holding up a shoe and making little circles of polish with one finger stabbed inside a piece of T-shirt. Jett steps amid the debris, handing out advice, offering suggestions, reminding them to drink lots of water. The new cadets are going through what a social scientist would call “acculturation” as they master one of the more mindless tasks connected to military appearance. Jett, who is responsible for everything that happens here, even though he is on guard duty is getting another lesson in leadership.

  “You’ve got a TA50 layout day after tomorrow,” Grady Jett tells his people as he pokes at the piles of field equipment. “Get your gear cleaned up and store it over your closet. You’ve also got shoe and boot inspection tomorrow.”

  Another change in the demeanor of Barracks: Jett doesn’t yell at the new cadets, doesn’t kick their equipment around the room or berate them because they don’t already know how to do the task or because they respond slowly. He is all about getting them to do the work.

  His warnings prompt another flurry of activity as the new cadets check watches and gauge how much time they can devote to polishing now, and how long before reveille they’ll get up tomorrow to continue. Jett doesn’t need to yell; the unfamiliar task and the unforgiving clock provide plenty of stress.

  Ben Steadman, the former Army linguist, reaches into a dresser drawer where brand-new T-shirts are stacked in neat piles; he pulls one out and rips it up to create more shine rags. Someone else, hurrying, knocks over the bottle of nail polish remover, and suddenly the room is filled with its strong smell. Jett tells them to remove their athletic shoes and air their feet out; in a moment they are all barefoot, toes blackened by new combat boots. Tom Lamb, a soft-spoken blond from Washington, has wicked blisters on the backs of his heels, silver-dollar-sized patches of raw flesh. Jett takes a look, then sends Lamb to see the medic. The new cadet returns in a few minutes with a tiny piece of moleskin to patch the wound.

  There is little in the room that is personal. Steadman’s bookshelf holds an annotated Bible and a text in Russian. There’s a shiny new edition of Bugle Notes, the plebe bible. Finally, there is an Army-issue Manual of Common Tasks, the sourcebook for the soldier skills they must learn this summer. Lamb, who spent a year at the University of Portland, has the issue books plus Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. Each of the three new cadets who live in this room also has the allotted one photograph, maximum size, eight by ten. The big frames are filled with smaller pictures of friends and family. Two young women, their white bikinis stark against tanned skin, smile out of the frame on Lisowski’s desk.

  When the platoon sergeant, Greg Stitt, enters, the new cadets have another round of questions about spit-shining. They’re the same questions they asked Jett, phrased in a slightly different way, as if to say, “I know there’s an easy way to do this and you guys are just holding out on us.” The new cadets address the cadre as “sir,” but they aren’t afraid of them; they’re afraid of being unprepared for inspection.

  Jett notices that two new cadets have left: Omar Bilal, a recruited football player from Maryland; and Marat Daveltshin, the allied cadet from Kyrgyzstan.

  “Are you guys a team if two of you are off somewhere else?” he demands.

  One of their number scurries to find the lost patrol; the two missing appear moments later, arms full of equipment and shoes, and crowd into the hot room.

  “Bilal sat by himself at breakfast [in the field] this morning,” Jett confides. There are several reasons Bilal might separate himself. He is the only recruited athlete in the squad, the only black, and he is a year older than most of his classmates. Jett isn’t alarmed, but he is aware of the kinds of things that can splinter a team. His experience with Army football the previous season underscored this point.

  “We didn’t really come together as a team, and it showed in our performance.”

  Jett steps into the relative cool of wide hallway.

  “Teamwork is the only way to make it through this place. The whole Army is a big team,” he says, precisely echoing the Army’s leadership manual. The team identity he’s determined to create extend
s even to how the new cadets put on their uniforms.

  “I make them get in a room together and check each other off. When we first started it was clear that they worried more about themselves. I want them to come out together; even if they know something is wrong, they’re all wrong together. The first time I saw that they were working together was when one came out in the hallway with his shirttail untucked. I corrected him and dropped him [for push-ups], and the whole squad dropped.”

  The minute attention to uniforms and military courtesy is exaggerated in the barracks, where life is much more formal than in the field. It was in the barracks, in private and mostly out of sight of the officers, where the most vicious hazing used to take place. So it is here that the differences between plebe life then and now become most apparent.

  Out in the hallway, new cadets walk briskly, but they do not “ping” (an exaggerated walk, like race-walking, that made plebes look like windup toys and led to shinsplints). When they look for a room number, they look around the hallway; twenty years earlier, such movements would have elicited screams of, “Why are you gazing around my hallway? You want to buy this place, beanhead?”

  Of course it’s easier to find things—like numbered rooms in a long hallway of identical doors—by looking around. But back then, it just wasn’t allowed. Period.

  Under the old system upperclass cadets frequently appointed themselves unofficial “gatekeepers.” They even went so far as to mount campaigns to “run out” certain new cadets, singling out for extra hazing the ones who—in the opinions of these nineteen-and twenty-year-olds—didn’t quite make the grade. They kept up the pressure until the new cadet quit. And if a plebe sometimes got run out because his voice was too high or he smiled too much or he didn’t have what it takes—whatever that is—well, that was the price of doing business.

  Now the cadre’s job is to train the new cadets and make sure they perform the tasks to army standard. So Jett gives his squad instructions, then leaves them alone to do the work. Because he has to return to Central Guard Room, he has asked another cadre member, Alisha Bryan, to keep an eye on his squad.