Duty First

by Ed Ruggero

  Bryan is the Alpha Company counselor. Her job is to talk to new cadets about what’s troubling them, to give them a sounding board, a place to vent without having to involve their squad leaders. Bryan seems older than her twenty years, with a calm, confident air that suits her job. She has wide, dark eyes and wears her short hair pulled back in a ponytail. Tonight she wears the yellow physical training shirt of the Beast cadre and shower shoes on her feet.

  Kevin Bradley, Alpha Company’s commander, thinks the counselors, who are not in the direct chain of command, are part of the problem.

  “They’re not much help,” he says. “It’s better than last year, when the counselors used to write reports on the cadre. Now they live with the company. But she can’t tell us what goes on in counseling, because of confidentiality. The new cadets see her as someone they can talk to without having to call her ‘ma’am.’ Everyone calls her the ‘milk and cookies lady’”

  Bradley’s comments are not just a knee-jerk reaction to what some people see as an invasion of political correctness and sensitivity training.

  “It should be the squad leader’s job to counsel the new cadet,” Bradley says. “We have to learn that. Besides, she’s no more qualified to deal with new-cadet problems than are any other members of the chain of command.”

  More than that, Bradley sees some of his cadre becoming lazy. “Some of them are getting into the habit of telling the new cadet, ‘Well, go talk to the counselor.’ They think it lets them off the hook.”

  Inside the room where Jett’s squad works, Jacque Messel sits with a brand-new pair of dress shoes on her lap. She checks her sports watch every few minutes, waiting for her 9:30 appointment to meet Bryan. Messel, whose father played such a big role in her entering Beast, has been thinking about leaving.

  Bryan and Jett shake their heads at parents who push West Point on sons and daughters. As they stand in the hallway, Lange, the recruited hurdler from Minnesota, is in the Tac’s office, on the phone with his father.

  “He wanted to go to the University of Minnesota,” Bryan says. “His father basically told him don’t come home [from West Point].”

  Major Rob Olson is also standing by in the hallway outside his own office in order to give Lange a little privacy. Olson says that Lange has an older brother in the Class of 2000; the two haven’t spoken in a year.

  “That’s a sign of a healthy relationship,” Olson says sarcastically.

  Lange finishes his end of the conversation but doesn’t hang up; his father wants to talk to his son’s Tac. Olson gets on the phone, delivers a couple of polite “yes, sirs” and hangs up.

  “The guy is a dentist,” Olson said. “And he gets on the phone with me and says, ‘This is what needs to happen out there, Major’”

  Olson seems mildly surprised that Dr. Lange felt qualified to tell him how to run his unit. “The guy’s a prick,” he says. But the Tac is more upset at the cost to New Cadet Lange, who is isolated and unhappy and now embarrassed.

  Back outside Grady Jett’s room, New Cadet Daveltshin, from Kyrgyzstan, passes Jett and Bryan, his face intent. He says something in a thick accent that sounds like “Engo don, tsir.”

  Jett explains that the squad motto is, “Ain’t goin’ down, sir,” which is from a Garth Brooks song. Jett says Daveltshin had a hard time with the idiom.

  “He was at attention against the wall and he kept leaning forward to catch everything I was saying.” Jett demonstrates the pose—head cocked to the side, bent over at the waist—that Daveltshin used to try to grasp the strange words that probably weren’t in any textbook he’d ever studied. “I told him, ‘You’re at attention!’”

  Jett and Bryan laugh, but they admire the guts it takes to come to a foreign country and an alien culture to try something so difficult. The second class cadets talk about finding someone—a professor, an upperclass cadet—who speaks Russian so Daveltshin can talk to someone in his native tongue. When the new cadets were allowed their weekly ten-minute call, Jett loaned his own telephone calling card to help Daveltshin phone home half a world away.

  A new cadet from another squad appears, his hand full of laundry tags. He squeezes himself between Jett and Bryan and the room full of his classmates. He is clearly lost. In the past the hallways were always a free-fire zone, and a second’s hesitation or hint that you didn’t know exactly where you were going or what you were doing invited all sorts of unpleasant attention. The new cadet, whose shaved head and oversize, government-issue glasses make him look even more helpless, stands at awkward attention.

  “What are you doing?” Jett asks.

  “Sir, I’m trying to deliver these laundry tags to the upperclass cadet rooms.”

  “But you don’t know where my room is. You just thought you’d come down here because I was standing here.”

  Inexplicably, the new cadet breaks into a wide smile. It’s the wrong response.

  “Smirk off,” Jett snaps. “Did I say something funny?”

  This is the kind of response that, in the past, would have drawn a half dozen cadre members into the hallway for the fun and yelling. But that doesn’t happen. Instead, Bryan turns to the new cadet; he’s huge, six four or five, and towers over her.

  “Tell me what your mission was when you left your room,” she says, leaning comfortably against the wall, her arms folded over her chest.

  The new cadet gives a reasonably clear statement of his mission. Then she asks, “What was your plan?”

  He didn’t have a plan, so she talks him through what he should have done before venturing into the hallway. The new cadet stands at rigid attention, a giant tree. Inside his enormous running shoes, his toes wiggle furiously.

  This is the point at which, many old grads would argue, the new cadet should learn a hard lesson, with lots of screaming to reinforce the learning point: Plan ahead. The new approach at West Point is this: He’ll learn the lesson if he processes what is happening, if he thinks about it. And whether or not he thinks about it has always been up to the individual.

  For her part, Alisha Bryan is learning how to teach someone a lesson—one all lieutenants should master. And she isn’t practicing techniques she’ll have to unlearn as a junior officer.

  Fifteen minutes later Clint Knox enters the crowded room with instructions from the platoon sergeant on how to send out laundry (this will be their first time). When he shares these with his squad-mates, they respond with questions.

  “Do we separate dark and light in those little mesh bags?”

  “Do we fill out a tag for each little bag?”

  “How many sets of BDUs should we send out and how many should we keep?” Tom Lamb asks. “How long does it take to get them back and how many uniforms do we need between now and then?”

  They don’t know enough about the upcoming training to predict what they will need. Knox screws up his face and swears. Greg Stitt, the platoon sergeant, gave him about 70 percent of the information he needs.

  When Jett and Greg Stitt reappear, the new cadets ask about the training schedule, about how long it takes to get uniforms back, about where to drop off the bags of dirty laundry and where to recover the clean stuff when it returns. Jett and Stitt are surprised by the questions. They didn’t think through just how much information the new cadets would need; they forgot they have to walk trainees through everything.

  Stitt shakes his head; he’ll have to go around to all the squads again because his first instructions weren’t clear. He explains the process, then shuffles out of the room, one lesson closer to being a lieutenant.

  At 5:30 the next morning the new cadets of Alpha Company gather for their first instruction in Close Quarters Combat, the modern incarnation of hand-to-hand combat. The Tac officers and NCOs stand twenty yards behind the formation. The company first sergeant, second class cadet Josh Gilliam, runs by, papers fluttering in his hand. Gilliam is still moving at top speed, just as he was two nights earlier as he tried to organize the bivouac and get used to the idea that
the platoon sergeants had to report to him.

  “First Sergeant,” Major Olson calls. Gilliam skids to a halt.

  “How many sets of BDUs do the new cadets have left now that we’ve sent out laundry?”

  Gilliam does a fair imitation of a deer caught in headlights. He glances left and right in the middle of the open field, as if the answer might be lying on the dewy grass.

  “Sir, I don’t know.”

  Olson chuckles. He could have warned the cadre about this last night, of course. But Rob Olson doesn’t want to be the First Sergeant; he wants to teach Gilliam to be the first sergeant. Besides, if he stepped in, he would have violated one of his rules: Let the leaders do their jobs. That means taking a chance that, now and then, things will get screwed up.

  “That’s not quite the answer I was looking for,” Olson says gently.

  “Sir, I’ll find out,” Gilliam says, then races off.

  Twenty yards away, someone is finally yelling at the new cadets.

  “Welcome to Close Quarters Combat!” the instructors bellow.

  “Hoo-ah,” the new cadets yell back.

  As the first weeks of Beast slip past, the Hudson Valley becomes more inhospitable. By this mid-July morning near the end of the first detail, it is as hot and sticky as the Deep South. Although it is only 8:00 A.M. the air is thick with moisture and annoying clouds of insects as the sixteen squads of Alpha Company move to a training site for a day called Squad Competition. More than a dozen stations are spread around an open area the size of three football fields. At each the new cadets will have to do some sort of event that involves teamwork and athleticism: running, lifting, climbing, carrying, jumping. The cadre members keep score, and all the numbers are posted on a big tote board in the middle of the field where everyone can see them. These are not, strictly speaking, military skills. This is more of a very athletic version of the kind of team-building exercises some corporations put their employees through.

  Major Rob Olson stands with Kevin Bradley, the Alpha Company commander, who will turn twenty-one tomorrow. Since Bradley and his cadre are on-duty, working with the new cadets twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, there’ll be no time for a celebration. This day, as with every other in CBT, training started at 5:30 and will end, for the new cadets, at 10 P.M.; the cadre will stay up longer.

  “Kevin,” Rob Olson calls; Bradley comes jogging over. He wears his BDU cap pulled low over his eyes. The insects swarm around his eyes, ears and mouth, but he tries to ignore them as he listens to Olson.

  “What are you going to do for the squads that win the competition?” he asks.

  Olson’s accent is not Minnesota, but the almost-Southern drawl that can be heard among career NCOs and officers from any part of the country. A staff sergeant from New Jersey sounds a good deal like a lieutenant from California. Delivered this way, Olson’s questions never sound like a challenge. Whether or not it’s an affectation, the result is clear: Cadets open up to him.

  “Sir, we’re going to let the squad leader buy them pizza to eat in the barracks.”

  This is a big deal. The new cadets gulp their meals down in the mess hall—while sitting at attention—or while sitting on the ground in the field. A little relaxed junk-food orgy will be a real treat.

  “That sounds great,” Olson says. “How about the squads that bomb? What are you going to do for them?”

  Bradley, who stands with his hands clasped in the small of his back, shifts his weight slightly, then finally swats at a bug near his ear. Another long second or two later, he says, “Sir?”

  “Well, what’s our objective out here?” Olson says in the same tone he might use to ask, “How’s that ol’ huntin’ dog?”

  “Uh … build squad cohesion, sir.”

  “Sure. You’ve got sixteen squads, and some of them aren’t going to do well. Somebody has to come in last place. So how are you going to build cohesion in the squads that do poorly? You’re not just going to write them off, are you?”

  Bradley knows the answer to this question. “No, sir.”

  “Good,” Olson says. “Go figure it out and tell me what you come up with.”

  Bradley moves to the shade of some trees near the middle of the field; he removes his canteen from his equipment and takes a drink.

  “This is the hardest job I’ve ever had,” he says as he watches a squad of new cadets run an obstacle course.

  “Major Olson doesn’t give us any answers. We have to figure it all out on our own.” Bradley isn’t complaining, just acknowledging that Olson is making him earn his pay.

  A little while later Bradley trots back to Olson and briefs his plan. When he shoots off on some tangent, Olson doesn’t correct him. Instead, he asks a few questions that steer Bradley back on track. Olson doesn’t have just one answer in mind, something he wants Bradley to divine. He listens and makes a few comments on Bradley’s plan.

  Olson, who has commanded hundreds of men from Korea to the Persian Gulf, could come up with an answer, probably a better answer than the twenty-year-old cadet in front of him. But as Olson has consistently maintained, he isn’t here to do the cadets’ jobs for them; he’s here to make sure they learn how to do what’s expected of them.

  “The only way to do that is for me to get out of their way,” he says.

  Not all of the Alpha Company cadre learn their lessons as well as Bradley.

  At one site the juniors who are supposed to be in charge are disorganized. The cadet giving the opening briefing repeats himself two or three times. When they get out the score sheets they realize that they haven’t brought any pens to record the scores, and they have to borrow one from a new cadet. The new cadets are always being harassed about attention to detail and meticulous preparation, so it isn’t lost on them that the cadre screwed up.

  Because Rob Olson lets his subordinate leaders lead, he takes a chance that they’ll “drop the ball” now and then. Olson is responsible for everything that happens or fails to happen with these new cadets all summer long. If one of Olson’s superiors shows up and finds things aren’t to his satisfaction, Olson will hear about it. (Colonel Joe Adamczyk, the Brigade Tactical Officer and Olson’s boss, is famous—infamous among cadets—for nit-picking the details. And he is always on the prowl.)

  But Olson has decided to live in that scary place between always doing things the safe way and taking a calculated risk to develop leaders. He accepts a bit of uncertainty as the norm. Olson’s questions, his Socratic method of challenging these young leaders is the flip side of what most people want in leadership training: checklists, foolproof methods, universal truisms, easy answers.

  Throughout the summer, whenever one of his cadets says, “Sir, we’ve got a problem,” Olson never says, “Do this and this only.” He says, “OK, what are we going to do about it?”

  To his way of thinking, whenever he throws it back at them, he is sending a couple of messages: “I think you’re smart enough to figure this out”, “I trust you to do this right”, and, “You’re worth my time and effort, good enough for me to bother getting you ready for bigger things.” Those messages, more than anything else, are at the root of “inspirational leadership.”

  PREPARE FOR COMBAT

  Less than two weeks later the new cadets of Alpha Company have moved from pseudo-athletic team-building exercises to a more serious business. It is early August, and the squads gather in groups at the bottom of a dusty hill at Lake Frederick, some thirteen miles from main post. These veterans of five weeks of Beast are here to learn ITT, for Individual Tactics and Techniques: Army-speak for how to move under fire without getting killed. On the slope before them they can see coiled concertina wire, ditches, and other obstacles amid trees and tall grass. There are worn places where others have gone ahead of them.

  Specialist Fourth Class Stubblefield, a soldier from the 10th Mountain Division, is the instructor at this site. His face, covered with camouflage paint, is almost as dark as his uniform. There is a machine-gun simu
lator (powered by compressed gas) hammering away just a few yards from where he stands. Stubblefield has a powerful voice that he’s run ragged by screaming to be heard above the din. “Whenever you’re on my course, I want to see you carrying your weapon at the ready position,” he tells the new cadets. Although he’s been in the Army just a couple of years, he speaks with the confidence and authority of a senior NCO. The new cadets, dressed in BDUs, load-bearing equipment, and helmets, their faces also painted dark green, listen intently. A couple respond with a low, “Hoo-ah.”

  “Let me see your weapon, high-speed,” Stubblefield says to a new cadet.

  He clears the weapon—every weapon is loaded until it’s cleared—then closes the bolt and the dustcover.

  “This is the ready position,” he says, grasping the weapon firmly with both hands, one finger on the trigger.

  “Why is this such a big deal? Why do we stress this?”

  A new cadet speaks up, giving the obvious answer. “So we’re ready.”

  “Right. Keep both hands on the weapon. This shows you’re ready. This says to the enemy, ‘Go ahead, give me a reason to waste you.’”

  “This …”

  He slouches, rests the butt of the rifle on his ammo pouch at his waist. “This says ‘I don’t care.’ And when you’re pulling guard duty in Bosnia or in the Sinai, this makes the enemy think, ‘I can get in there and plant a bomb.’”

  Stubblefield hands the weapon back to its owner. In the rear of the gaggle of new cadets, two women stand side by side. One of them holds her rifle slung on her shoulder; it is almost as long as she is tall. “You know,” she says to the other woman, “we need to take this stuff seriously, because there’s no such thing as a front line anymore.”

  All morning the new cadets have been practicing the skills they will use on this course. In the open space at the bottom of the hill they’ve learned how to crawl with a weapon, how to provide covering fire to one another, how to keep low as they move under fire. Now they face the day’s big test: an uphill course of several hundred yards that will have them crawling, climbing over obstacles, shooting, moving as a team, and covering one another’s movements. There are no real bullets, but the course is rigorous, and plenty of people are watching.