Duty First

by Ed Ruggero

  But the cadets are out. In their woodland camouflage BDUs, with their shoulders hunched up against the weather, from a distance they look like a herd of two-footed animals looking for cover. They stream out of the barracks by the hundreds, by the thousands. Most of them head for Thayer Hall, the four-story former riding hall turned academic building that sits perched on the edge of the flat ground. Inside, the fourth class cadets of Company F-2—The Zoo—prepare a defensive plan to close the border of the fictitious republic of “Magapa” from a hostile mounted force.

  A young woman, seven months out of high school, stands in front of the classroom, her map overlay projected on the big screen beside her. A river cuts across the small-scale map from northwest to southeast; a small town lies at the center where a bridge, carrying a north-south road, crosses the river. Low hills squat beside the blue water where she has placed her infantry squads to control the river crossing. She gestures at the map, unsure of herself.

  “The La Costan forces,” she says, naming the fictitious enemy, “probably won’t use the road.” She points to another route from the north. “They’ll … uhm … come this way?”

  It comes out like a question. The other plebes in the room, who are also completely new to this, offer no encouragement.

  With her finger she traces a route that will keep the approaching enemy hidden behind a ridgeline until they are up to the bridge, almost directly across from the American position where this platoon leader-in-training has positioned her meager force.

  “We’ve … uhm … we’ve plotted artillery fire back there,” she says, “because we won’t be able to see them if they move up that way?”

  There are small crosses on the map overlay marked “TRP,” for target reference point, pre-planned targets for the artillery. The platoon leader on the hill south of the river might not be able to see the enemy, but with a good plot and a radio, she’d be able to rain artillery fire on anybody stirring around back there.

  The plan is a good one. It lets the Americans control the river crossing without sitting right on top of it; they won’t get pinned down in the low ground around the bridge. But the delivery isn’t inspiring.

  Sergeant First Class Jonathan Brown, the Tac NCO for F-2, tells her so.

  “What’s with that timid little voice you’re using?” he asks.

  “I have a cold.”

  “Too bad. You’re out in the field; I’m out in the field. You’re cold and wet; guess what? So am I.”

  Brown, who has been a field soldier for most of his fifteen years in the army, sits in a chair in the middle of the room. He looks around the room, where the cadet desks are arranged in fours and fives. This is a teaching point about conditions in the field, not an attack on a sniffly cadet.

  “You’ve got to put that information out there,” he says. “You’ve got three squad leaders, three type-A personalities; all of them want to get out on that hill and start getting ready. Tell them what they need to know, then let them do their jobs, right?”

  The young woman nods. She is already moving back to her seat, ready to be out of the spotlight. The next plebe who briefs, using the same slice of map and same scenario, tries to sound more confident. In addition to the squad positions, he has also indicated where the platoon’s critical anti-tank weapons will be positioned.

  “You probably don’t want to stick your CP right on top of that hill,” Captain Brian Turner, F-2’s Tac, says from the doorway. “Why is that?”

  The briefer turns to the screen. Sure enough, he has put the little symbol for the platoon command post smack on top of the high ground.

  “They’ll see you from a mile away,” another cadet says.

  “Right,” Turner says.

  Turner, who was the associate Tac of Alpha Company during Beast Barracks, is a tanker. He knows how tank commanders scan the terrain in front of them, looking for the obvious: a lookout on the high ground, spotters near the hilltops.

  “What else?”

  “Artillery?” a cadet attempts.

  Turner nods encouragement. The cadet goes on.

  “They’re going to plot artillery on the hilltops, too,” the plebe finishes. “Just like we do.”

  For almost fifty years, U.S. Army training exercises were plotted on maps of Europe; everyone knew who was coming over the hill. The generic replacement for the Soviet army—the motorized rifle and infantry regiments of La Costa—is a notional enemy. Today’s plebe tacticians could call it a “fill-in-the-blank enemy”: Somali warlords, Serbian police forces, Haitian mutineers.

  The cadets do not ask about the scenario; after all, this isn’t a class on world politics. This preparing to fight fill-in-the-blank enemies will create an Army that can deploy anywhere and, on command, shoot up whoever happens to be coming down the road to the river.

  “Firehose learning,” Turner says during a break. Cadets pass in the hallway. The background music is shuffling boots, winter-cold sneezes and coughs. This is military intersession, a two-week mini-semester during which cadets take only classes in military subjects.

  “The team leaders shoot a lot at them [the plebes]. They’ve come a long way in a short amount of time as far as their knowledge goes.”

  “Team leaders work with the plebes on the capabilities of a specific branch,” Sergeant First Class Brown adds. They cover a different one each month. For instance, when they were working on their knowledge of the infantry, they had to learn all the weapons, their ranges, what they could do. Here, we’re starting to put all that knowledge together.”

  Brown is a big man with coffee-colored skin and large hands. He looks like he could be Eddie Murphy’s big brother. “This summer, they’ll get out on the ground at Camp Buckner and see that there’s a lot more to it than drawing some symbols on a map. But this is a good start.”

  Turner and Brown are in the front rank when it comes to both teaching cadets the skills they’ll need, and to setting the example of how officers and non-commissioned officers should act. Turner works with the first class cadets, who are closest to becoming lieutenants. He also spends time with the plebes, so he can get a sense of what the company looks like from the bottom up. Brown, the “real” non-commissioned officer, works with the yearlings [sophomores] and cows [juniors], who hold NCO rank in the corps.

  Like most of the officers at West Point, Turner believes that the strong presence of senior NCOs like Brown has added immeasurably to the cadets’ preparation. They leave the Academy with a clear understanding of how lieutenants and NCOs should work together. But working with senior NCOs can only accomplish so much.

  “Cadets are a little isolated,” Brown says. “They don’t know how to talk to privates, because they haven’t been around privates. They’ve been around cadets; they just see officers and NCOs.”

  Graduates of the Army’s ROTC program aren’t as isolated. In fact, they often spend their summers and time out of class working at jobs—like flipping burgers—that put them right next to the kind of young man or young woman who comes into the Army as a private.

  Turner walks out into the storm and heads back to Bradley Barracks, the same building Alpha Company occupied during Beast. The blowing snow is channeled by the buildings, and Turner pulls his hat low to cover his eyes and returns the salutes of cadets coming in the opposite direction. His greetings are informal: How ya doin? Hey, how are you? Hi, there. He is the friendly lord of the manor.

  The barracks are warm compared to the storm outside. They are also scrupulously clean. One of the two hallways in the company area is crowded: Old desks stand along the walls, replaced by new desks with computer platforms. Cardboard and pieces of packing crate are stacked haphazardly.

  “All this stuff has to go,” Turner says aloud to some cadets.

  Nearly every doorway in the company is decorated with a photocopied flyer. At the top, it says “F2 Zoo” above a photo of an adult and baby gorilla. Beneath the photo, lest a visitor think this was a college dorm, is the company’s mission:
“To conduct operations that promote academic, military, physical and moral/ethical excellence to prepare its soldiers for future leadership roles in the Corps of Cadets and the United States Army.”

  Below that, the acronym “METL.” In the Regular Army, METL stands for “Mission Essential Task List,” those things the unit must be able to do to fulfill its wartime mission. The METL for F-2 reads:

  Foster Academic Excellence

  Prepare Soldiers for immediate and future military leadership

  Instill a competitive spirit within the Zoo that demands physical fitness and athletic prowess

  Reinforce a moral and ethical climate based on the Seven Army Values

  Protect the force

  “The cadets came up with this,” Turner says of the fliers. He steps up to one door and absentmindedly straightens a wrinkled corner of the paper. Turner got this process started and held the cadets responsible, but he doesn’t take credit.

  His office is at the end of the long hall. Inside, he flops down on one of the two vinyl, government-issue couches. Like most other Tacs, he’s decorated in the “I-love-me” style: There’s a guidon from the tank company Turner commanded, a group photo of his Ranger school class, a framed certificate of completion of the Special Forces Selection Course at Fort Bragg. The walls are a kind of equivalent of the badges soldiers wear on their uniforms: here’s my military biography, my curriculum vitae.

  “This company had a kind of bad track record for academics,” Turner says. “I picked a good firstie to be the academic officer, and I told him: ‘You’ll get graded on your performance. Make it work, you’ll get the A [in military aptitude].’ He set up a system to monitor people who were having problems. Like in physics and chemistry, he identified those yearlings who were doing well. Then he took them up to the Center for Enhanced Performance.”

  The center is a laboratory, staffed by civilian educators, that uses the latest in psychology and pedagogy to help cadets boost performance in academics and even in sports. F-2’s academic officer got all of his tutors trained there, then posted a schedule of the exams in major courses. He pushed the chain of command to get involved: Squad leaders and team leaders knew how their people were doing.

  The year before Turner arrived, F-2 averaged thirteen or fourteen course failures a semester. In the semester just ended, there were seven. Turner is proud of the record and pleased that it was the cadet leadership that marshaled the company’s talent. The chain of command even did the unpopular stuff, enforcing study conditions in the barracks.

  “When some yearlings are goofing off in the hallway and making noise, [the leaders] say, ‘You got something better to do?’ We had all these people worried that grades would fall off, you know, since the plebes had TV cards in their computers, phones in their rooms. Looks like we’re going to have forty-five or so on the Dean’s List.”

  The door to the office is open; a cadet comes to the door, pauses.

  “What’s up?” Turner asks.

  When Turner greets cadets he often slides into Army-speak: The aphorisms and colorful metaphors that pour in a solid stream from some people as soon as they put on camouflage. When Rob Olson—white-bread son of suburban Minneapolis—lapses into this, it is mostly the common Army-Southern hybrid: lots of twang. Turner’s army-speak has a hint of black English. “What’s up?” comes out close to “Waz-up?”

  The first class cadet enters the office and hands Turner a three ring binder that says “Pass Book.” This is how cadets request weekend passes and provide addresses and phone numbers of where they’ll be while away from West Point. Some of the entries are a little sloppy.

  “I don’t want no Sanskrit in here,” Turner says, pointing to an illegible entry. He quizzes the firstie on the approved passes. Did he check on eligibility? Is the system he used fair? A big part of his job, as Turner sees it, is to help the cadets connect what they’re doing with what they’ll do in the Army. This is also a way to fight cynicism among cadets.

  “They complain about having to do some stuff. They say, ‘How is this going to help me in the Army?’ And I tell them that lieutenants have more than one job. You have your go-to-war stuff: are you technically and tactically proficient? Then you have all that other stuff. You’ve got to take care of soldiers, take care of families, keep track of equipment, help people plan their careers, all of the other stuff”

  “Cadets respond to responsibility,” he says. “I put one of my more cynical cadets in as company XO [executive officer, second-in-command]. People said, ‘Whoa, you kiddin’ me?’ The guy’s even on the overweight program and might get launched out of here. But he’s stepping up to the plate.”

  Turner’s job is to help all of his cadets learn how to succeed. His favorite tool is the one-on-one counseling session. He pulls open a drawer filled with neat folders, extracts one, and lets it fall open in his hand. It is a cadet performance record. Stapled to one side is a spreadsheet that shows the cadet’s academic and military grades, summer assignments, academic major, hometown. There is a small black-and-white photo in one corner, a counseling form on the opposite side. Just above a job description that lays out what the cadet is supposed to do in support of the company mission, there are two blocks filled with handwritten comments. One is labeled “Strengths,” the other is “Needs Improvement.” The handwriting is the cadet’s.

  “I have them fill this out. Then I tell them what I see and we talk about what they need to do to improve. A lot of leaders … don’t keep their subordinates informed. I guess people think of it as a confrontation. But if you let them know the score right at the beginning, if you take the time to do that right, when snafus come along you just go back to the original and say, ‘This is what we agreed to, this is what you’re showing me.’ You can’t be afraid to confront people. You have to have the ability to look someone in the eye and say, ‘You’re not cutting it. You’re not making the standard and this is what you need to do to fix that.’ ”

  Two cadets appear at the door, and Turner motions them in. First Class Murphy Caine, the cadet company commander, begins talking as soon as he steps in the office and, although he doesn’t interrupt, rarely stops. The other cadet is a junior, Company First Sergeant Cedric Bray. The two cadets, who hold two of the most important leadership positions in the company, look like testimony to Turner’s broad reach in looking for leaders. Caine is small, with dark hair and fair skin, energetic, constantly moving. Bray, tall and black, speaks deliberately and watches everything around him.

  Caine walks over to Turner’s chair behind the desk.

  “Can I sit in the power seat, sir?” he asks. He sits and places the palms of his hands flat on the desktop. Turner asks about a meeting scheduled for that evening. Caine and the other upperclass cadets will brief the company on their plan for the semester: responsibilities and expectations for the chain of command and each class. They’ve culled the guidance given them by Turner and the higher echelons and have broken that down into a series of practical, usable steps.

  “What’s your plan?”

  “I’m going to talk about the company mission,” Caine says from behind Turner’s desk. “Then the company staff is going to get up and talk about all the pieces, about how we’re going to make that happen.”

  “Give me an example,” Turner says.

  “Well, the academic officer will talk about tutors, about how we’re going to run that program. The platoon leaders will talk about conditions in the barracks, study barracks, and about passes. We’ll show how we got input from the chain of command, how our goals fit into what came down from higher.”

  The cadets used the Army manual for laying out the plan. Turner is pleased because the cadets have accomplished two missions: they have created a plan for running the company for the semester, and they have learned how to plan using the Army model. It’s not Desert Storm, but in eighteen months, some of these cadets wearing the black shields of the first class will be in Bosnia or the Sinai or wherever the current hot s
pot happens to be. They’ll be ready to contribute.

  Turner leads the two cadets into the hallway as they talk about the state of the company area. The Tac speaks to every cadet he passes; he knows names, hometowns, what subjects they’re good in. In between chatting up passing cadets, Turner quizzes Caine and Bray on the new furniture: how many desks have come in? How many are still missing? Bray, a good First Sergeant, knows what’s going on in his company and answers every question. Just as the cadets are learning some new skills, Turner has challenged himself as well. He is preparing to be a field grade officer (major and above), exerting his influence indirectly, leading through his subordinates and resisting the temptation to jump in and do everything himself.

  Turner leads the cadets into one of the latrines that run down the center of the building. Each latrine is also a locker room, with several dozen gray metal lockers for athletic equipment, racks for drying wet clothing, showers.

  “Why do you inspect?” he asks the cadets. “What are you looking for?”

  “You want to make sure people have the equipment they need,” Caine responds. “That it’s in good shape, that they’re taking care of it.”

  “Right. This isn’t about ‘You’re a dirtbag.’ ” Turner says.

  The lockers do not have doors. Gym shorts are on one side of the shelf, athletic T-shirts on the other, socks rolled into tight little balls. Athletic shoes go on top of the locker, aligned and facing forward. Taped to one end of a set of lockers is a photocopied page from cadet regulations: Appendix D, Annex B, United States Corps of Cadets Standard Operating Procedure. The sheet has a line drawing of an athletic locker. The shirts and shorts in the illustration are drawn with a ruler; the real lockers are almost as neat and are arranged in exactly the same way.