by Ed Ruggero
“No, no, no!” Brust shouts. “You’re gonna get killed by your own guys if you step in front of them.”
He talks for a moment about fratricide, about how easy it is to get killed by what the Army calls “friendly fire.” In the Gulf War, friendly fire accounted for a whopping 26 percent of the 146 battle deaths. Brust, in the age-old tradition of the NCO trainer, is trying to bring that lesson home to the next generation. But he doesn’t tell them about the charred tanks, about the bodies burned beyond recognition, about the boys incinerated by high explosives. Instead, he gives them a five-minute break while he goes off in the woods to smoke a cigarette. Someone has told him he is not allowed to smoke in front of the new cadets.
If any of these young people, most just a few weeks out of high school, are startled to find themselves carrying automatic rifles and sitting though a class entitled “Prepare for Combat,” it doesn’t show.
“I’m sore everywhere my bones stick out,” Barry DeGrazio says, rubbing his knees with open palms. All of the new cadets got beat up on the previous day’s assault course. Everyone is bruised and a little battered. This is why they call the infantry a “bloody knees business.”
“It’s like football,” Omar Bilal, the football player, offers. “The harder you do it, the less likely you are to get hurt.”
Clint Knox, the dark-eyed graduate of a military high school, muses that he turned down an ROTC scholarship at Tulane—and gave up his summer—to sit out here with Sergeant Brust.
“And Playboy rated Tulane one of the top two schools when it comes to good-looking women.” He says this seriously, as if quoting the New England Journal of Medicine.
Tom Lamb, who attended the University of Portland for a year, is happy to report that he had his fun. “I got it out of my system,” he says, smiling at some memory.
When the talk turns to the first-aid training, Lamb surveys his squadmates, their faces thick with yesterday’s grime and another coat of green camouflage paint.
“If one of you guys was dying, I’d give you mouth-to-mouth to save you.” He pauses. “But you’d have to be dying.”
Lamb has the gentle demeanor of a scholar, in spite of his GI glasses and trench-knife haircut. He was in Army ROTC at Portland; he is twenty years old.
“When you’re twenty, you’re not a teenager anymore,” Bilal says. For these young people, twenty is old.
“Imagine Shakespeare,” Bilal continues. His squadmates know he’s referring to a classmate, not the Bard. New Cadet William Shakespeare, USMA 02, was an enlisted soldier in the Army and is several years older than his classmates, older than most of the cadre. “He’s getting yelled at by people younger than him.” Bilal shakes his head at the ignominy.
Barry DeGrazio talks about being in the fastest running group. New cadets are divided into black, gold, gray, and green running groups, based on their performance in an early physical fitness test, the first week of CBT. DeGrazio’s group runs a sub-six-minute-permile pace up the steep hill behind the football stadium. It is, everyone agrees, an insane standard.
Pete Lisowski says, “I’m proud to be in the slow group.”
They are all looking forward to school—and the end of Beast—and they are all nervous about college-level work. Clint Knox is concerned that high school was too easy and didn’t really prepare him. He asks if cadets can be commissioned in the Finance Corps and says that his ambition is to go to business school.
This is the kind of talk that makes some old grads howl. They say West Point is about preparing leaders for the Army; it is not a place to polish a resume for business school. The problem with that thinking is that “West Point” looks great on graduate school applications, and every candidate knows it.
The enthusiastic Pete Haglin says that he got into West Point because he had good SAT scores. “But my grades weren’t that great because I didn’t do any work.”
Haglin, the new cadet who received his acceptance to West Point after already making a deposit in housing at another school, is concerned about how he’ll handle college work in the upcoming school year.
Shannon Stein comes back from the latrine and sits down with the new cadets.
“All right,” she says. “Let’s not waste time here.” She begins quizzing them on their required knowledge.
“Hey, you,” she says. “Tell me about the SALUTE [spot] report.”
Later, when they break for lunch, Stein sits with the new cadets again. She gives away most of her MRE, but scrounges for candy.
“I need a pick-me-up,” she says. One of the new cadets tosses her the small packet of M&M’s from his meal. Around us, other squad leaders have left their squads to eat alone; some upperclass cadets sit in a group.
“What do you think of me eating with you guys?” Stein asks. She is only two years older than her new cadets. When she looks for some affirmation that she is doing things right, she looks to the new cadets instead of to other cadre members.
A couple of them respond, “Hoo-ah, ma’am,” which might be an endorsement, or might be a way to avoid the question.
“We’re definitely eating Schade’s deep-dish [pizza] when we get back,” Stein promises them as she munches the candy.
“What kind of pizza did Cadet Jett get you?” she asks, looking for another yardstick against which she can measure herself.
Pete Haglin asks Stein, “Ma’am, why was last year’s Beast so easy?” He already sounds like an old grad, and he hasn’t completed basic training.
Stein doesn’t question his assumption. “It goes in cycles, I guess. Only six people quit Beast last year.”
“We had fifty people quit just during first detail,” Haglin asserts.
In fact, Alpha Company has not lost a single new cadet.
“We had a kid who quit during the R-Day parade!” Stein says. “He saw his family [in the bleachers] and he just walked right off the field before we took the oath.”
The new cadets are amazed, maybe even a little jealous. Now Stein is warmed up and has an audience. “Another kid in my Beast,” she says, “had an uncle who lived around here somewhere. One day he took off in his running gear and ran to his uncle’s house. It was, like, seventeen miles. You can tell how easy Beast was last year because those plebes were undisciplined.”
Like most people their age, cadets are capable of dazzling generalizations, and the assumption underlying many of them is: My plebe year was the last hard one.
Just two years earlier Shannon Stein was herself a new cadet. The homesickness in her letters would not surprise anyone who has been around young soldiers, with their sudden appreciation of home life, their surprise at what they can accomplish.
“Let me tell you how great you have been,” she wrote to her parents in 1996. “Every day I go to the mailbox, I have something. My buddies sometimes do not have a single letter.”
After thanking her parents for some packages, she ends with lists of needed supplies, written in big, block letters.
“MOM, IF I DON’T TALK TO YOU … PLEASE SEND THE FOLLOWING: SMELLY STUFF, SPORTS BRAS 10 MORE, FOOD!, SHAMPOO/CONDITIONER.”
She also wrote about the upperclass cadre: who was a good role model, who was not. Often the stories were couched in terms of who liked her.
“My squad leader is really nice to me,” she wrote. The platoon sergeant: “He is so cool and he really likes me.” During second detail, her squad leader was a prior service cadet, “one of those hotshot guys.”
“My squad leader loves me,” she wrote. “In fact, everyone in this detail loves me.”
It is not surprising to find her using this language to describe her relationship with her leaders (“he likes me”). She was, after all, new to the business of senior-subordinate behavior. But Stein still seems confused during CBT ‘98. While she was no pushover for her squad, she may have been exactly what Master Sergeant Don MacLean had in mind when he talked about new leaders being confused about their roles, about not being used to thinking in terms of “
I outrank this person.”
She sees herself as a champion for her new cadets.
“My plebes don’t do table duties,” she says.
New cadets and plebes are required to perform weird rituals at the table. One new cadet is the “gunner,” another the “hot beverage corporal,” and another the “cold beverage corporal.” Once everyone has been served, the gunner announces, in parade-ground tones, how many servings of food are left.
“I asked them,” Stein says of her new cadets, “What is the purpose of a Mess Hall?’ And they said, ‘To feed people, ma’am.’ ‘Right,’ I said. ‘So eat.’”
She holds an imaginary plate over her shoulder and recites a litany that hasn’t changed in at least twenty years.
“Sir, there are five servings of mashed potatoes left on the table. Would anyone care for more mashed potatoes, sir?”
She lowers her hands. “That’s stupid. I don’t make them sit at attention at meals, either. I think meals are for eating and should be relaxing. In my Beast I could never fully digest my food.”
This makes her popular with the new cadets, but not with the other cadre members. “The platoon leader came over to our table one day when we had [an extra space]. I told him ‘You can sit here, but they don’t do table duties.’ He’s like, ‘What?’ I said, ‘They don’t do table duties and you can’t haze them.’ He left.”
Stein’s new cadets are happy to eat in peace, but they are already concerned about falling behind their classmates. There are dozens of table duties to be mastered, and the summer is the time to learn them well. Stein’s new cadets are not learning these rituals, and they’re worried about the academic year, when the table will be suddenly full of upperclass cadets scrutinizing every move the plebes make.
Ben Steadman has finished eating his MRE; he gets up, asks Stein where the Porta-John is.
“In the woods,” Stein tells him. “But I don’t know where you are.”
Steadman walks off from the group without his helmet or his rifle. Two cadre members—one is the platoon sergeant with whom Stein has clashed—sitting close by immediately stop him, drop him for push-ups, and send him back for his equipment. They say nothing to Stein, and she says nothing to Steadman or to her classmates.
The talk drifts to the first-detail cadre. All of the new cadets admired Greg Stitt, the second class platoon sergeant who found his inspiration to come to West Point in the 82nd Airborne Division Museum.
“We learned from him that you take care of your people. He taught us something every day; he taught us how to get the job done,” one of the new cadets offers. “This platoon sergeant is 180 degrees out,”
This draws no comment from Stein. In her presence, the new cadets refer to the second detail’s redheaded platoon sergeant as “Lucky Charms,” after the leprechaun on the cereal box.
When Stein gets up to go to the latrine, they talk about the time the second-detail platoon sergeant took over as their table commandant when Stein was absent for a meal.
“He said we were pronouncing Daveltshin’s name wrong and he argued with us and wouldn’t let us eat.”
“He ate, though,” Bob Friesema adds bitterly.
This is a major sin. Leaders do not eat before subordinates. The new cadets learned this first detail.
“He kept us in the hallway practicing facing movements for forty-five minutes,” Tom Lamb says.
“You can learn a lot from bad examples of leadership, too,” Friesema adds.
Lisowski says simply, “He sucks.”
At the bottom of the hill where Stein’s squad breaks for lunch, three captains wait for the training to begin again. The key to the Army’s success, these officers agree, is to push decision-making down to the junior leaders. Captain Dave Grasso, a Green Beret who will spend the coming year preparing to become a Tac, tells a story about a corporal who was in charge of a team of four or five soldiers at a checkpoint in “BH” (Bosnia and Herzegovina).
“This crowd gathered and started throwing bricks at them [the GIs]. He went through his graduated response, on his way to using deadly force. But he knew that if he shot anyone it would be an international incident, so he kept his cool, even though the rules of engagement allow you to shoot if you feel threatened.”
Captains Andy Groeger, who is also in the TOEP program, and Steve Patin, agree. Peacekeeping missions, the Army’s stock-in-trade at the beginning of the new century, present a range of challenges.
“We have E4s and E5s [corporals and sergeants] manning roadblocks in Bosnia,” Grasso continues. “We don’t have enough captains and lieutenants and platoon sergeants to watch everything. Any area is a potential hot spot. They’re making life-and-death decisions they might have referred to the chain of command if they had time.”
A hundred yards away, beneath the hammering machine gun and the periodic Blam! of artillery simulators, another new cadet company is being introduced to the assault course and the gospel of infantry combat: if you can be seen, you can be hit; if you can be hit, you can be killed. There is very little shade, and the new cadets sweat under their helmets and heavy camouflage.
After the heat and the dust of the assault course, the cool dark of the bar in West Point’s Hotel Thayer is inviting. The room is nothing fancy: cheap synthetic carpeting, bus-station furniture, lots of wood-grained plastic. At least the hotel sits on a bluff above the Hudson; its big windows keep watch over the channel and the low mountains on the eastern bank.
It is late in the afternoon; one of the few patrons is a tall man with a thick shock of white hair, electric blue eyes, and a plastic name-tag that reads “Jack Norton ‘41.” Norton is at West Point for a meeting of the alumni association. He orders a Manhattan.
Norton, eighty years old the previous spring, still looks and talks like a soldier; he sits straight in his chair, long fingers curled around the stem of his glass. His West Point class ring—worn on the left ring finger, as it is by most graduates—is almost smooth with age. He is a remarkable storyteller, recalling details of sight and sound over more than half a century. In a few short minutes Norton has traveled back to World War II to a time when he was a twenty-six-year-old captain preparing to parachute into Normandy on D Day. Norton confirms what all the history books say about those first hours: It was all confusion.
Many of the planes carrying the troops from England were blown off course. Some of them steered away from the planned drop zones because of ground fire. Others, their pilots going into combat for the first time, got lost. Thousands of paratroopers, the spearhead of the invasion, found themselves floating down onto a darkened countryside they didn’t recognize from their map studies. Miles from their drop zones, scattered, disorganized, lost, they wandered around searching for their buddies, their leaders, their targets. And as one veteran said: “Young German men with whom I had no personal quarrel were shooting at me.”
Norton says they expected chaos, and they built a force that could function anyway.
“We knew that the battle was going to be won or lost by the small units,” he says. “You win at the platoon level, you win the battle.”
Norton’s statement, true in 1944, is still true in Dave Grasso’s story about “BH.” Success means decision-making and action at the lowest levels.
“It starts with good soldiers,” Norton says of his men. “Nothing threw them. They took what was at hand and they got the job done.”
Norton looks into his drink for a moment, his white hair framed by the window and the river rolling past behind him. Sitting in this bar fifty-four years after D Day, he speaks with obvious affection about those men. “They were physically able and just fearless.”
“The second thing is leadership. Those soldiers had respect for and confidence in their leaders. The leaders were the first ones out the aircraft door and into the fire.”
The kind of leadership began at the top, with James Gavin, ‘29, who as assistant division commander (and later commander) of the 82nd Airborne Division, helped cre
ate the doctrine for employing this new kind of force. Gavin (the former enlisted soldier who inspired Cadet Greg Stitt to apply to West Point) was a Tac at West Point when Norton was a cadet and the war in Europe, already two years old, threatened to engulf the world. Cadet Jack Norton used to visit Gavin’s quarters, where the officer would talk to him about tactics, about building a huge Army, about his ideas for employing an airborne force. Norton, who babysat Gavin’s daughter, wound up following his mentor, and the two men fought together from 1942 to 1945. Norton ended the war as Gavin’s lead officer for plans and operations.
Sitting in the bar, leaning his long frame back in the flimsy chair and peering out from behind thick glasses, Norton’s bright blue eyes shine as he speaks of his combat commander.
“He set us on fire.”
Gavin convinced his soldiers that they were something special. He built a unit made up completely of volunteers, from which he demanded more—in terms of performance—than other units had to give. If another infantry unit did a twenty-mile training march, Norton says, the paratroopers marched twenty-five.
The commanders gave something else to the soldiers, something that was perhaps the decisive factor on D Day. “We let the sergeants and lieutenants know, in every field exercise, in every sand table exercise, that they were the ones who were going to be making the decisions,” Norton says. He holds up his hand and counts the critical points on his fingers.
“You watch em, you coach em, you trust em.”
This gospel according to Norton is part of the Army’s doctrine, promulgated in a manual called, simply, Leadership.
[T]he leader must let the leaders at the next level do their jobs. Practicing this kind of decentralized control in peacetime trains subordinates who will, in battle, continue to fight when the radios are jammed, when the plan falls apart, when the enemy does something unexpected.
It takes courage to operate this way… if subordinate leaders are to grow, their superiors must let them take risks.
