by Ed Ruggero
The barracks PA system announces, “Third regiment lunch formation goes indoors.”
“Force protection,” Caine offers. “No sense in standing around in the wind and freezing cold, maybe have somebody slip on the ice and get hurt.”
The cadets don’t remember having any formations moved indoors last year. The year before that, one or two were moved indoors. Some cadets see this as wimping out. After all, wars aren’t cancelled because of weather. But leaders also must take care of soldiers and avoid unnecessary injuries. There is always a clash between the “drive on” attitude—we’re tough, we don’t give in, we don’t give up—and common sense.
Back out in the hallway, the three men talk about bulletin boards. Caine is particularly proud of one labeled “community activities.” A banner reads “Support Breast Cancer Research,” just above a wrinkled piece of foil tacked to the center. It is the top of a yogurt container. The cadets learned that the yogurt company makes a donation for breast cancer research for every top sent in. Since the yogurt cups are served in the Mess Hall by the thousands, the cadets have made substantial donations.
Half of the bulletin boards are covered with candid photos of the cadets, along with printed biographies on three-by-five cards that state hometown, favorite sports, favorite quotation, branch the cadet wants to join. One cadet has put up a photo of a classic Ford Mustang; another has a close-up of himself at the helm of a sailboat. There are group shots: barracks birthday parties in which the celebrant is covered in shaving cream. One young woman has a picture of herself in an evening gown, long hair draped to her shoulders, Hollywood smile in place. Another board has two small snapshots. In each of them a plebe stands with his back to a wooden locker in a cadet room while two other cadets—upperclass, judging by their demeanor—stand on either side, one talking into each ear. The pose is a classic tableau of plebe year.
This is the posture plebes assumed when an upperclass cadet said “drive around to my room.” The unlucky plebe stood up against the locker (or the wall) and steeled himself for what was coming, which could be a simple demand for recitation of fourth class knowledge to a screaming match between two cadets—one on either side—that was meant to rattle, demean, and sometimes reduce to tears the plebe caught in the crossfire. One graduate in his early forties remembers being invited by upperclassmen to “come hang around my room and listen to music.” When he showed up, the cadets indicated the doors of the wardrobe, which opened out. The plebe draped one arm over the top of each swinging door and hung there—with the sharp edges of the door biting into his armpits—while the upperclass cadets challenged him to see if he could last through an entire song.
But the upperclass cadets in this picture are smiling. It’s a game, meant to be ironic (“this is how it used to be”) and a threat (“and we could make it this way again”). The plebe, however, doesn’t look amused. The whole point of being a plebe is powerlessness. Things happen to plebes. The plebe in the picture has no control over whether this game turns nasty. Turner taps the photo. “That’s me,” he says.
The plebe has a full head of hair; Brian Turner keeps his head shaved. The plebe in the picture is thin; the officer standing in the hallway now has spent a lot of time in the weight room. But mostly the plebe looks scared; the captain is the picture of confidence.
“I was playing a little game with the cadets. I didn’t tell them much about myself. I sort of kept it a mystery, like the captain in Saving Private Ryan. And sure enough, they wanted to know more. Somehow they got my mom’s phone number back in Chicago, called her up and got some stories. Next thing I know they’re busting on me with dirt from when I was a kid. They got this,” he says, indicating the bulletin board photo. “They got another picture of me and superimposed my head on Mr. T’s body.”
“You have to laugh,” Turner says. He is smiling, but the amusement doesn’t run deep. “They [the cadets] look to see if you’re comfortable enough with yourself to have a sense of humor.”
“I didn’t have a lot of confidence in myself as a kid. That was one of the things I was looking for when I walked through the gate here.”
The other thing the young Brian Turner was looking for at West Point was a way out of his Chicago neighborhood. “The guys I went to high school with were punks. I didn’t know what I wanted to be, but I knew what I didn’t want to be.”
Turner bounced around among three different high schools as his mother, raising him alone, struggled to support Brian and his younger brother. Turner was always the new kid in school, and he stuck out because of his interest in reading and in getting good grades. Then a cadet came to visit Kenwood Academy, where Turner spent his last two years of high school. Impressed by the sharp cadet in the neat white-over-gray uniform, Turner started reading more about West Point and the Army.
One afternoon, he was working at his job as a ticket-taker at a local movie house when a man came in wearing a BDU field jacket. Turner saw the man’s Ranger tab and commented on it. The impressed customer became even more animated when he heard Turner was interested in West Point. The movie patron was Kit Bonn, ‘78, who was then in graduate school at the University of Chicago. Bonn invited Turner to meet him for lunch on campus, and the two talked about West Point until Brian was even more convinced that he’d found his course.
“I didn’t come to West Point thinking, ‘Let’s see how this goes,’ ” he says.
He chuckles at his own bravado as he remembers meeting his Beast roommate. “Our first day here, and I announce, ‘I’m gonna graduate from here, and I’m gonna get my diploma from the President.’ ”
Predictably, his roommates laughed at him. They were focused on getting through the next day of Beast. Four years later, President George Bush was the guest of honor at Turner’s graduation.
“Usually the speaker just gives out diplomas to the top guys,” Turner says. “But that was an election year, and I guess he figured it was good campaigning, so he gave diplomas out to everyone. And my old roommate was like, ‘You made that call four years ago, man!’ ”
The barracks are slowly filling up with cadets returning from class. Turner returns to his office, which has a view of the hillside behind the barracks: rocks, ice, steadily falling snow, and another brick wall. If Eisenhower and MacArthur Barracks have million-dollar river vistas, the view from the back side of Bradley Barracks is tenement airshaft.
Turner is single, the only single male Tac in the corps, living in an isolated community of mostly married people. He hates that part of the assignment here. “Professionally, this is a great assignment. I believe in this place and what we’re doing here. Personally, it’s tough. Almost all of the officers here are married. There’s no O Club to speak of,” he says, referring to West Point’s Officers’ Club. At other posts, particularly the large installations, the Officers’ and NCOs’ clubs act as social centers: low-cost country clubs with frequent dinners, dances, and even shows. West Point’s club is open for lunch and the occasional dinner.
The end of the working day at Fort Hood might see the officers of a unit head off to the O Club bar for a beer. It is this team identity—I’m part of something bigger than just myself—is what many soldiers like best about the service. That spirit is harder to find at West Point, at least among the staff and faculty.
“Working with the cadets is great, and I try to stay busy that way. I help out with the marathon team, I’m helping set up Ring Weekend, the Martin Luther King Day dinner. I work with the Contemporary Affairs Seminar and I travel around with the admissions folks. Still, at the end of a long day it’s pretty tough to go back to that empty apartment.”
Single officers live in the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters on South Post, on the grounds of a defunct women’s college West Point acquired for its facilities. Apartments for majors run to about nine hundred square feet: a bedroom, a living room, a galley kitchen, and a tiny bath. Some of them have river views; half of them overlook the parking lot for the Visitors’ Center.
Single officers are, in some ways, second-class citizens. For instance, Turner can host cadets at his apartment, but they must come in groups of two or more. Married officers don’t need chaperones. The message the Academy sends with this policy, which is just knee-jerk overprotectiveness, doesn’t sit well with Turner. The young men and women who aren’t allowed to visit Brian Turner’s quarters unescorted will spend their summer parachuting out of airplanes and helicopters, driving tanks, even walking patrols on Korea’s demilitarized zone. He is entrusted with their development, but isn’t trusted to be alone with them.
Turner might be expected to react to such a slight by withdrawing from the cadets. Instead, he becomes more involved. This week he is helping the Contemporary Affairs Seminar plan the dinner to honor Henry O. Flipper, West Point’s first black graduate. All the Academy brass will attend, he says, but there is not much mixing of the races off duty. Turner even hears some complaining that black male cadets don’t choose the Army’s combat branches in any great numbers.
The combat arms—infantry, armor, field artillery, combat engineers—are the specialties most people think of when they think of soldiering. These are the branches whose job is to kill the enemy. They are also the largest branches, and the branches from which the Army draws most of its generals. But many cadets—black and white—don’t see the combat arms as preparation for civilian careers. Turner believes that West Point contributes to this problem in its minority recruiting practices.
“First, any African American high school student who’s good enough to come here is also being recruited by other colleges: Howard University and Brown and Yale. West Point tries to get them from the same angle: the marketability of a West Point education. We say, ‘This is great preparation for life, for a great career. A free education at a name school.’ So we wind up with kids who are already thinking about what they’re going to do when they get past this little five-year commitment.”
“I’m tough on African American cadets,” Turner says. “I try to make it clear to them that they’re always on display. There are three things people told me to be careful of, especially as a black officer.
“First: never be late. Second, you’ve got to write and speak properly.”
Turner is “on” all the time. He naturally wonders if the first thing someone sees is a black officer, instead of a captain who happens to be black.
“And the third thing is: be a leader.”
Yet Turner acknowledges that some of the cadets, seeing his success in a branch dominated by white officers, think of him as an “Oreo,” a sellout. He doesn’t spend a great deal of time worrying about it. He is more concerned that many senior black officers won’t become involved in events like the Flipper Dinner because they’re afraid people will think of them as militant.
Turner gets pressure from both sides. A white lieutenant colonel in the Tactical Officer Education Program told him he wears his race on his sleeve. Some black cadets think he should wear it more prominently. When a black woman cadet was accused of shoplifting while on leave (a violation of the honor code and grounds for dismissal), Turner was convinced she was guilty: her performance in school went down, and she withdrew from her friends. Although the honor board didn’t find her guilty, the cadets knew where Turner stood. Other African American females thought he should have supported her based on race alone. To him, the assumption made by those young women—that he is an African American before he is an Army officer—is troubling.
“My concern for the Academy is that we don’t think race is an issue anymore.”
This isn’t an intellectual exercise for Turner. It touches the way he interacts with cadets, the way he approaches his work.
“I get here early and I leave late,” he says. “I have to work twice as hard to get the same respect, and it’s tiring being in a fishbowl all the time. But that’s OK; I can handle it. I’ve run into some things that were tougher to handle.” In his first unit, Turner’s immediate superior, his company commander, told him he was doing a great job as a lieutenant. But his Officer Evaluation Report was not stellar. The company commander told Turner that the commander at the next level (battalion) had made some comment about race. Turner approached the battalion commander, who was white, but the only feedback he got was, “You have an attitude problem. You walk around here like you’re better than everyone else.”
“I was pretty disappointed that that was the best feedback the system could give me. I mean, how are you supposed to work with that?”
Turner kept on working hard and was vindicated in his next report. More importantly, he made something positive out of the experience.
“That’s why I spend so much time counseling cadets. That’s why I don’t hesitate to tell them exactly how they’re doing, exactly where they stand. That’s the only way they’re going to be able to perform. And they’ve got to learn that doing that, telling people where they stand, is part of the leader’s job.”
It is time for lunch. Turner stands and goes through the small ritual of putting on his camouflage field jacket: First he tightens the drawstring that pulls the waist in tight; then the zipper, then the buttons, all the way up to the collar. He is not compulsive, but he is meticulous, and, like a good soldier, he wears his uniform smartly.
“I learn so much from these kids,” he says, studying his black leather gloves as he pulls them on. “I could make more money somewhere else, but right now I want to do good things for people.”
Outside the barracks, the sky is closer. It seems to have collapsed over Central Area like a gray dome covering the big quadrangle. The snow is piling up in drifts, blowing into the doorways. (No one knows it yet, but the long weekend holiday the cadets have been anticipating will be cancelled in the interests of safety. “Another weekend in my room,” a senior writes the following week.) The snow muffles all sound except the crunch of boots. Then a bugle blows the repetitive “Mess Call,” the notes sharp in the cold. All around, cadets, their shoulders hunched against the wind, move to their communal meal.
On the fourth floor of Bradley Barracks, Cadet Shawn Kilcoyne, commander of Company E-2, is talking his way into a decision Major Rob Olson says he’ll regret.
“Tell me again why these people should go on pass?” Olson says, a tone of disbelief in his voice. Olson stands on one side of a conference table in his office, Kilcoyne stands on the other. Between them lies the company passbook, which records requests and approvals for weekend passes, and the “slug sheets,” which record offenses and punishments under cadet regulations.
“Some of the cadets have major things going on this weekend,” Kilcoyne says.
“And so you want to hold off on these,” Olson says, fingering the slug sheets.
It is the Wednesday before a long weekend. Cadets in good standing can turn a weekend pass into three days away from West Point if they’re proficient in all their subjects and not under restriction. To say that cadets are eager to leave West Point during the gloom period—the gray months between Christmas and spring leaves—would be like saying they lead a more structured life than students at Florida State. Kilcoyne is making a case for leniency.
“What things are going on?” Olson asks.
“One of these guys,” Kilcoyne says, tapping the book, “his parents are having a twenty-first birthday party for him. The others have been invited. The platoon leader thought we should use discretion here.”
“Tell Joey,” Olson says, referring to the platoon leader, “and his discretion to come see me.”
Kilcoyne shuffles his feet. He knows he’s waffling, trying to pin the decision on the platoon leader. As the commander, he either supports the recommendation—and needs to say so to Olson—or he doesn’t, in which case he should have had the guts to say so.
“I think we should use discretion, sir,” he says.
Sergeant First Class Mercier, the company’s Tac NCO, sits on a vinyl couch in the office. He looks like a man who is biting his tongue.
Olso
n uncaps a felt-tipped pen and writes on a pad: Make the right, not the popular decision. He underlines “right” three times. Kilcoyne looks at the pad, but he’s steady on course.
“I thought that since there was, you know, parental involvement, and since you only turn twenty-one once, and it’s a big birthday and everything, that we ought to let them go.”
Kilcoyne is in a tough position. He’s a new cadet commander (the semester is only nine days old). More importantly, he’s dealing with cadets who are all but peers, and he’s caught between them and the Holy Grail of cadet life: free time, the weekend pass, a few precious hours away from the little gray cell. Clearly he’s decided it would be better to face Major Olson than to lay down the law in the barracks.
Olson walks behind his desk, but doesn’t sit. Behind him, fat snowflakes fall steadily outside the window. He thrusts his hands deep in his pockets, stares down at the blotter, rocks back and forth on his heels. Kilcoyne stays next to the conference table, watching his Tac and squirming a bit.
Olson knows what’s going on here: Kilcoyne is knuckling under to the pressure. And while a twenty-first birthday is a big deal, if he caves in he may never regain the respect of the rest of the company. Kilcoyne will be shoved this way and that every time some cadet has a “major thing” that he or she believes should take precedence over regulations, over strict and fair.
Kilcoyne has been asked to make a hard call. Every theory, every discussion of leadership he’s ever encountered talks about the need to make tough decisions and live with the consequences, but he doesn’t seem to know it.
“If leading soldiers has a degree of difficulty of five,” Olson said over the summer, “Leading peers is a ten. But if I make the decisions for them, the cadets won’t learn.”
Olson isn’t thinking about a canceled twenty-first birthday party or disappointed parents. He’s trying to decide how to make the best use of a learning opportunity. How can he best teach Kilcoyne, this soon-to-be-lieutenant, that he must be fair in all situations? If Olson disapproves, chances are Kilcoyne will put it just like that. Hey, I wanted to let you go, but the Tac slam-dunked me, man. And he won’t have learned the lesson.
