Duty First

by Ed Ruggero

  When Stubblefield announces that it’s time to go, squad leader Shannon Stein jumps to the starting position, calling for her new cadets to line up behind her. Stein, a five-foot-four-inch, hundred-pound bundle of energy, replaced Grady Jett for the second detail of cadet basic training. (There are two complete sets of cadre for the summer, which maximizes the number of upperclass cadets getting leadership experience and brings in rested upperclass cadets halfway through the summer.) Stein has dark hair and eyes and, beneath the camouflage paint, is fair-skinned. She is also a star on the women’s soccer team, a recruited athlete whose heart was set on the Naval Academy until she visited West Point. The sleeves of her blouse are rolled into tiny cuffs just above the stock of her rifle; the smallest size is still too long in the arms for her.

  At the start signal, Stein leaps forward, diving into the dirt behind a couple of piled logs. “Cover me, I’m moving,” she shouts to her partner, then presses the side of her face into the dust—not close to the dust or near the dust or just above the dust—but deep enough to move a small bow wave of dirt before her. Flat on her stomach, she pushes herself forward with one leg, her helmet burrowing a path. She grasps her rifle by the sling, keeping it out of the dirt by draping it over her arm. This is the low crawl. The new cadets in her squad watch intently as they wait their turn. A couple of them murmur the five-point checklist they learned this morning as Stein goes through it before every move: Check the weapon’s safety, the dustcover (which protects the bolt), check to the left, right, front.

  When Stein reaches the first covered position, she rolls over and takes up a firing position, propped on her elbows, rifle forward, covering her partner as he moves. A few yards up the hill, the machine-gun simulator pounds the air like a string of car crashes. On the lane in front of them, a smoke grenade pops; the thick cloud hangs on the hillside in the heat. Once Stein and the other squad leader have moved forward, the first new cadets launch themselves on the hill. The pairs zigzag through the dirt, moving from covered position to covered position, running in a crouch. The goal is to remain exposed for no more than three seconds, which makes the two-hundred-yard course a long one.

  The noise level rises as each pair of soldiers begins moving. The ones covering fire blanks, and soon the lane NCOs are throwing hand-grenade simulators, which go off like enormous firecrackers. The attackers scream to each other over the din of firing.

  “Cover me, I’m moving!”

  “Safety, dustcover, left, right, front! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

  Soon there are two squads spread out on the hill. Slowing down is not an option: There is relentless pressure from the rear as more people join the assault. They must keep some distance between them (“One grenade can get you all!”). There is some shade provided by a few scrubby trees and tall weeds, but mostly the course is dusty and hot. The new cadets approaching the top look as if they’ve been working in a flour mill; their faces are streaked with sweat and runny camouflage paint. The dust turns black around their mouths, and they breathe it in with great gulps of air.

  Up the hill, Stein dives into a hole, then crawls into the maw of a dark concrete pipe, like a sewer drain; her partner covers her over the top. She is small enough to squeeze through the space, but scrambling on the concrete bites at her knees. Her helmet and equipment bang against the sides as she works her way through fifteen to twenty feet of tunnel. When she emerges in the sunlight, her helmet has slipped down over her eyes. She pushes it back and raises her weapon to the ready position.

  When it is her turn to move again, she approaches a field of tanglefoot: criss-crossed barbed wire strung two feet off the ground. Stein flops onto her back, lays her rifle across her chest and churns her legs to push herself under the wire. Here the earth has been ground to a fine powder that rises in clouds over her shoulders. She blinks away the sweat and the dust and powers through with surprising speed.

  After ten or twelve minutes of tremendous exertion, the lead cadets are within a few yards of the “enemy” position, an eighty-foot trench near the top of the hill. It is deeper at one end than the other; the deep end is filled with green water. Stein and her partner plunge in, clear left and right, firing blanks at the plastic soldiers that occupy the trench. Once her buddy boosts her out, Stein checks in front of the trench for more enemy. Finished, she shoulders her weapon and turns back to watch her new cadets. She is muddy and soaked from the waist down, covered with white dust from the waist up; her face is a war mask of green camouflage and powder. Her breath comes in sharp spikes, but she manages to call encouragement to her charges.

  “Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go,” she shouts, her voice high and surprisingly strong.

  Allied cadet Marat Daveltshin thrashes beneath the tanglefoot, losing his way and getting hung up in the steel web. A soldier/instructor working the lane calmly coaches him.

  “Open your eyes, Daveltshin!” Stein yells. “Look where you’re going!”

  When Daveltshin reaches the trench, Stein yells at him again: “Kill Ivan!”

  Ivan is the generic name for a Soviet soldier. The trench is manned by little plastic silhouettes of “enemy” soldiers left over from the Cold War years. Each three-foot-high figure wears a red star on the front of his helmet. Daveltshin, who might have wound up an “Ivan” if not for the collapse of the U.S.S.R. butt-strokes the enemy with his weapon as enthusiastically as anyone else.

  Bob Friesema plunges into the trench at the deepest end, helps his partner out, then tries to pull himself clear. The top of the trench is a rounded pile of dirt; he jumps up, but there are no hand-holds and he slides back slowly in spite of his exertions. He jumps again, slides down again into the rank water. He should be exhausted, but he becomes more determined, jumping higher still.

  “C’mon Friesema,” Stein yells. “You’re seven feet tall. If I can get out of that ditch, you can.”

  Friesema’s partner, out of the trench and on top of the berm, reaches back with one arm. Friesema grabs the offered hand and scrambles clear. He lays in the dirt, breathing like a beached whale, but remembers to scan his front, his weapon ready to meet more enemy.

  Clearing the trench was supposed to be the high point of the exercise, the objective of the assault on the hill. Some of the new cadets become so engrossed in the idea of diving into the brackish water—and thus showing how “Hoo-ah” they are—that they forget to clear the trench; some pay no attention to the little plastic enemy. There are almost as many observers as there are new cadets in the trench—the lieutenant and NCOs from the 10th Mountain Division, a couple of Army medics, a dozen cadet cadre. The gallery of spectators defeats the effort to make the training realistic. Instead, the trench-clearing begins to resemble some fraternity initiation rite: Dive into the green water, run around, and shout.

  When the last of her new cadets is through the course, Stein leads her squad off the hill and onto a paved road. The new cadets talk excitedly, trading war stories about how hard they ran or how deep the water was where they crossed the trench or how quickly they got up the hill.

  At the bottom of the hill, they break off to fill canteens, check skinned knees and elbows as Stein watches them. “I’ve got this whole mother-father syndrome with them, you know?” she says, referring to her charges. “I’d do anything for them, but I’m hard on them, too, as they can tell by the number of push-ups and flutter kicks they do.” She smiles. “They love those flutter kicks.”

  Although her days are long (she got up at 4:30, a half hour before the new cadets), she says being a squad leader “is definitely the best job.”

  “We’re with them constantly, from reveille to taps without letup. The new cadets are constantly asking questions, they constantly need corrections, they constantly need watching out for. ‘Have you changed your socks? Do you have water in your canteen? Button your chin-strap, fix this, fix that.’”

  Part of her concept of leadership was formed this summer when she had an unusual—for her—experience
: She failed one of the phases of Airborne School.

  Stein went to Fort Benning, Georgia with a large contingent of cadets for parachutist training. Airborne School is divided into three one-week sessions: ground week, in which the trainees do a lot of conditioning and practice landings; tower week, during which they practice exiting an aircraft from a thirty-four-foot tower, then practice landing after dropping (in a parachute) from a two-hundred-foot tower; and jump week.

  Shannon Stein, recruited soccer star and self-described “PT stud,” washed out during the first week. She couldn’t perform a “PLF,” the parachute-landing fall jumpers do to lessen the impact of hitting the ground. A PLF takes a minimum amount of control and athleticism, and a jock like Stein shouldn’t have had a problem with it.

  “I was just used to falling on the ground in soccer, I couldn’t learn to do it gracefully.”

  Stein was disappointed in the reaction of her “blackhat,” her NCO trainer. (Cadre at airborne school wear black baseball caps.) “He just got disgusted with me and at one point said ‘I don’t even want to train you anymore’ and he left me. I would never do that to one of my people. Later I found him playing cards with the other blackhats. He could have been training me. But it was a good experience for me. I’d never failed at anything like that before, you know? And I told this story to my squad: Here’s this little athletic girl who goes down to Fort Benning and gets recycled through Airborne School—which isn’t even really that hard. I could have gone home and had three weeks of leave and come back without my wings, or I could stay an extra week [to go through ground training a second time]. I stayed. I feel like I really earned my airborne wings. It’s not like I got them out of a cereal box or anything.”

  “I told my new cadets about this because they were real nervous about going to BRM [Basic Rifle Marksmanship], but I told them ‘You can get through this. If you put your mind to it, you can get through anything.”

  Stein tried the message out on Jacque Messel, who didn’t qualify with her weapon the first time through.

  “I told her, ‘You can do it.’ And she did. She was surprised, but I wasn’t.”

  Messel, who is standing nearby, is disappointed that she has missed the morning’s training because she had to see a doctor. If she misses too much, Messel will have to repeat the training the following spring while her classmates enjoy spring leave. But she is obviously sick, with a pale and exhausted look, and has been throwing up for a couple of days.

  According to Olson, very few new cadets will try to get out of training by feigning or exaggerating sickness. Instead, they’ll train when they’re hurt and make things worse. Zachary Lange, the Minnesota hurdler, spent the morning of the assault course hobbling around with an infected ingrown toenail.

  “If I walk on my foot just a little bit sideways,” he says, demonstrating the angle with his hand, “I can make it [through the assault course].”

  Lange is not alone. Stein’s squad has a collection of bruises and scrapes and cuts. The medic patches them up and they head back to the squad. They are afraid to be left behind, but not because of the threat of a lost spring leave. They have become a team.

  The sun is low and the sky a washed-out blue as the rest of Alpha Company comes off the assault course. They are muddy, soaked with sweat and the scummy water of the trench; the moisture makes clay of the dust that had been clinging to them. At the bottom of the hill they get a resupply of blank ammunition. Stein reminds her squad to drink lots of water. As she speaks, she taps a loaded magazine on her helmet, a trick to make sure the rounds are properly seated in the aluminum magazine.

  Pete Haglin, who can’t get enough, asks, “Ma’am, when do we get to do the cool laser-tag stuff?”

  “That’s next,” Stein says.

  The new cadets will learn how to wear and operate MILES equipment, a set of sensors and low energy lasers that simulate firing and being hit by fire. The system is an electronic way of keeping score in a simulated battle. (The acronym means Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System.)

  At dusk the new cadets move off to another hill, this one an infiltration course in which they will “attack” another squad. For those who stay in the Army, this is only the first of many night exercises. With practice, trained soldiers can move and drive and even fly in darkness almost as easily as in daylight, but that kind of sophistication is years away for West Point’s Class of 2002. For them, as for any soldier in the field for the first time at night, most of what goes on seems confusing and aimless. They wear themselves out thrashing around in circles through the thick underbrush until almost midnight. By the time they stop, they are soaked with perspiration; then the temperature drops as they stretch out on the ground to catch a few hours of sleep before the next day’s training.

  They are practicing the basic skills of the foot soldier. Even though most of the men and all of the women will wind up in some other branch of the Army, they will all have at least a limited understanding of what the infantry does, and how difficult it can be. By the second morning, they are beginning to show signs of just how far the lesson is sinking in.

  After a hot breakfast, trucked from the Cadet Mess at West Point and served out of insulated cans, Stein’s squad gathers in a sunny clearing for their first class of the day. They are all dirty; yesterday’s mud and sweat has congealed into black and brown streaks that decorate hair, faces, hands, and clothing. A night of sleeping on the ground has done nothing to help them look refreshed.

  The instructor is Sergeant Brust of the 10th Mountain Division. Brust wears a combat patch—he’s a Gulf War veteran—and is not nearly as dirty as the cadets, though he has been on-site for days. He is not a big man, but he speaks with a calm authority as he stands before a portable easel. There are a couple of drawings illustrating how a squad of ten men moves under different conditions: when expecting enemy contact; when contact is possible; when contact is not likely. Brust uses a lot of jargon, some of which the new cadets may have heard before, some they haven’t heard.

  “Army doctrine is that we need a 3:1 ratio in the attack,” Brust says. The new cadets stare blankly.

  As the class goes on the sun climbs, and soon it is uncomfortably hot and close; the humidity clings to trees, grass, skin. The NCO talks about dead space, about masking fires. Every once in a while he’ll explain one of the new terms, and there are others the new cadets can get from context. They sit in the sunlight, struggling to stay awake.

  The eleven-man squad in the diagram is divided into two five-man wedges, with a squad leader in between. At the head of each wedge, the little circle is marked “TL,” for team leader.

  “You must stay twenty meters apart here,” Brust says, touching the little black circles that indicate soldiers. “Here’s the team leader. He trains [his soldiers], gets them ammunition, checks their feet, and makes sure they have dry socks, makes sure things are OK at home.”

  The new cadets blink slowly; none of this looks very difficult yet. You stand in a wedge. There is another squad at the site besides Stein’s. When Sergeant Brust tells them to get up and practice the formations he’s just talked about, they respond slowly. Suddenly Alpha Company’s cadet First Sergeant steps out from where he’s been watching and snarls at the new cadets to move quickly when an NCO gives them an order. There is a flurry of camouflaged arms and legs as the new cadets respond.

  “That will not happen with us, do you understand?” Stein yells at her squad. She is embarrassed that the new cadets didn’t show Brust more respect, and she’s determined her squad won’t do the same. “When he says move, you move. How you act out here is a direct reflection on how much pride you have in yourself.”

  When Stein talks to her new cadets, she has only one tone—harsh—and only one volume—loud. The approach is losing its effect. The new cadets respond with an unenthusiastic, “Hoo-ah.”

  Insects buzz. It’s hot now, and the new cadets drink water in hopes of staying awake. Brust unrolls a chart titled “Prepare f
or Combat.” There is nothing philosophical about it; the chart shows a list of equipment an infantry squad might carry. He reads it to them.

  “Your grenadier carries forty rounds of 40-millimeter H-E-D-P,” he says.

  No one is taking notes. No one asks what H-E-D-P is.

  “Your M60 machine gun can lay down nine hundred to a thousand rounds a minute. It’s the most important weapon in the platoon.”

  “V-S Seventeen panels,” he says, touching the chart. “Combat lifesaver bags.”

  The cadets follow the motion of his hand, as if he is a conductor.

  “In your pre-combat inspection, you check for stuff that’s going to make noise when you move, the water in your canteen, jangling equipment, that kind of stuff. You check their boots.”

  The new cadets doze in the heat.

  “One of you might be my lieutenant one day,” Brust says. “I might be your platoon sergeant.”

  Brust gets the squad up and into a wedge formation. Once he has them moving again, Brust becomes animated. Pointing to the woods ahead of them, he says, “OK, now we start taking fire.”

  The new cadets slowly go to ground and take up firing positions. They look out from under the brims of their helmets. Some of them lower their heads to the ground, as if sniffing the dust.

  “Once we get fire superiority, we got to put some lead on em, then we can move.”

  The front team simulates firing at the enemy position; the five-man team in the rear, responding to the team leader’s arm signals, starts to move to the enemy’s flank. Two new cadets cross in front of their own men.