Duty First

by Ed Ruggero

  If he lets Kilcoyne make the wrong decision—and any corporal in the Army knows that playing favorites with punishment is a bad decision—morale in the company will suffer. Cadets who are looking for reasons to be cynical about the system will have new ammunition. Olson does the math in his head, then looks up.

  “OK,” he says. “Your call.”

  Kilcoyne leaves the room, thinking he’s gained a victory. He’ll no doubt tell his classmates that he won a round from the Tac. As soon as the cadet is gone, Sergeant Mercier says, “Boy, he’ll live to regret that decision. I mean, I can understand his reasoning, but it’s going to make it impossible for him to get things done around here.”

  “That’s the decision I expected him to make at this point,” Olson says. “We have to make sure he learns from this. He’s going to fall flat on his face the next time he has to make some unpopular decision and they all say, ‘Hey, what about those passes?’ ”

  Even Olson wouldn’t have predicted how fast Kilcoyne’s decision would come back to haunt him. A mere twenty-four hours after their meeting, another firstie is cited for a parking violation. When Kilcoyne tells his classmate the citation means restriction and loss of weekend privileges, the firstie reminds Kilcoyne of the birthday party favoritism. When Kilcoyne asks Olson what to do, the Tac gives him two options: Live with the lower standard, or get up in front of everyone and say, “I screwed this up.”

  Kilcoyne, looking for a less humiliating way out, insists that he is only trying to take care of soldiers. Olson tells him, “That’s bullshit. What you did was sell out the system you’re supposed to uphold. It’s just like the cadet prayer says, a choice between the harder right and the easier wrong. You ignored that.”

  By letting Kilcoyne learn this particular lesson this particular way, Olson demonstrated that E-2 is in fact, not just in name, a cadet-led company.

  “I’m running a little experiment this semester,” Olson says. “It could be great or I could fall on my face.”

  Kilcoyne is part of the experiment. Olson picked his “front-runners,” his top performing cadets, for chain of command positions the first semester. This semester, he chose leaders from the middle of the pack. He wanted to see if he had created a developmental environment for all of the cadets in his company.

  “In the first nine days [of the new semester] they’ve done more things right than my first semester chain of command.”

  Olson opens his desk drawer, pulls out a can of smokeless tobacco and puts a pinch beneath his lower lip. He finds a Coke can and carries it to the table with him. He punctuates his sentences by spitting into the can.

  Olson concedes that a lot of Tacs—maybe most—wouldn’t have handled Kilcoyne that way. There is a danger in letting his cadet commander make the wrong decision: The other cadets in the company will see the injustice—and that will be the lesson they take away.

  “I’ve got to make sure the CO’s lesson is very public—he’s got to fall down and skin his nose without losing all effectiveness—and I’ve got to sponsor that.”

  Olson believes that leaders must learn to deal with failure; and if they don’t fail on their own, he isn’t beyond throwing a little disruption in the way to force them to react, force them to handle the confusion. He did that with Kevin Bradley during Beast the previous summer.

  Bradley, he says, had the job “wired” in a couple of days. The company was running well, but Olson saw the learning curve flattening out because things were going smoothly. One day the company finished training early and was all set to eat chow, then meet a truck convoy for the ride back to the barracks. It was a smooth operation right up until Olson called the operations center and asked an officer to have the trucks sent out early, just as the company was about to eat.

  “I said to him, ‘Don’t tell anybody I called you,’ Olson says, smiling and spitting into the can. “Sure enough, the company is about to start eating and the trucks show up and now Kevin has to deal with the whole mess.”

  Months after that summer night, Bradley—who didn’t know the foul-up was his Tac’s handiwork—said it was a stressful evening. The cadets had set up the chow line in the only space available for the vehicles to turn around. The huge trucks backed up on a narrow mountain road, belching diesel fumes. A hundred and fifty hungry new cadets and thirty cadre members stood in platoon formations on a path leading from the training site; they could smell the food from where they stood in their neat ranks. Four or five officers, a half dozen NCOs, a dozen truck drivers and their NCO were all crammed into this small clearing between the base of the hill and the road, and all eyes were on Kevin Bradley.

  Some of the cadet chain of command wanted to pack up the meal and send it to the rear and unpack it and set it up all over again. Others wanted to rush the new cadets through the chow line. The sergeant in charge of the trucks and drivers was clearly agitated that he and his troops were being jerked around. He didn’t want to wait, and Bradley didn’t want to piss off the transportation chief.

  And the whole mess had been created by Rob Olson as a training vehicle for his company commander.

  “Kevin ran around a little bit, but then he made his decision. He had the new cadets eat, though he gave them less time. He briefed the NCO with the trucks and kept everyone informed. He wasn’t quite sure about it all, but I asked him if he was accomplishing the mission. He said yes and even figured out that they would still get back to the barracks ahead of schedule, so the squad leaders would have a little extra time.”

  “The only time you grow as a leader is when you get outside your comfort zone,” Olson says. “When you’re not the master of your universe. I’m not all that worried about my boss seeing me make a mistake, because I think he’ll find me doing nine things right for every mistake. I tell the cadets that there are going to be days when you have shitty training. If your boss comes to see you on that day, you’d better be able to say, ‘Sir, I grew some privates and NCOs who now understand how to make the Army training system work.’ ”

  There is no handbook for Tacs; they are charged with developing their subordinates into leaders. They take the lead in the Academy’s trickiest mission, and there is not even a consensus on how it’s to be done. If Olson has 150 cadets in his company, he will keep 150 different development plans going at once. Not every cadet needs the same thing, and not every cadet has the same experience. Some will screw up, some will have an easier time and not learn as much as those who do fall down. Not all of them will get to be platoon sergeants and company commanders. Yet they all must be ready on graduation day. Much of the responsibility for their preparedness falls on the tactical officer.

  A second class cadet knocks on the door—two sharp raps—and asks for Olson’s signature on a form that will allow her to overload her courses this semester. He asks about her schoolwork, then brings up a plebe in the young woman’s squad. The plebe has been having trouble handling things, and the upperclass cadets do not know quite what to do about her.

  “You can’t hold her hand,” Olson says. “If she wants to go into the latrine and bawl her eyes out and wallow in self-pity, let her. But I get the sense the upper class backed off.”

  The squad leader nods. It’s one thing to lean on plebes who screw up but are still trying to do the job. It’s quite another—it’s even perceived as dangerous—to lean on a plebe who is having a meltdown. Olson insists that the plebe must be treated like her classmates.

  “Ask yourself: Is she going to be ready to stand on a street corner in Bosnia in a few years?”

  He spits again, then puts the can down on the table as he signs the young woman’s form. A copy of Parameters, the professional journal of the U.S. Army, is open on the table. Olson is reading an article titled “Military Values and Ethics.” Beside that is a book: Breaking the Phalanx: A New Design for Landpower in the 21st Century. On the cabinet that holds the sink there are three small toy cars, either left over from a visit by his son, or waiting for the next visit. The cars, the c
onstant stream of cadets, the professional reading program—Olson’s life is a juggling act just as the lives of his cadets are juggling acts.

  Olson has been selected for the next level of the Army’s professional schooling, a year at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. C&GSC, as it is known, is another gate, another bottleneck, another in the narrowing steps up the pyramid of promotion. Olson’s selection, along with his early promotion to major, are indicators of his success, but he isn’t sure he wants to go because it might mean a year away from his family. His wife, Major Holly Olson, an obstetrician at West Point’s hospital, may have to stay.

  “They need an OB/GYN at Leavenworth,” Olson explains. “Even tired old majors and lieutenant colonels out there still fornicate and make babies. But we’re not certain Holly could come along.”

  The Olsons have requested what the Army calls “joint domicile,” meaning they would be assigned to the same installation and could continue to live as a family. Even though Olson says that the Army does what it can to keep doctors happy (they’re hard to retain), there is no guarantee the Olsons can stay together.

  There are many reasons to stabilize assignments, to keep soldiers at one installation for a planned three- or four-year tour of duty: it makes personnel planning easier, more predictable for the service; it helps reduce the unavoidable turmoil in units when leaders and specialists, such as Dr. Olson, leave. Most importantly, it saves money.

  “The near-term battle is to get Holly to Leavenworth. If we can’t do that, she and the kids will head out to Fort Riley [also in Kansas, several hours drive from Fort Leavenworth] and I’ll get an assignment there after school.”

  Hands behind his head, Olson thinks about what the summer might hold for him and shows the first chink in the nearly faultless armor of the happy, self-actualized Army officer. “This could be tough on the kids,” he says.

  Olson’s apparent ingratitude at being selected for schooling wasn’t received well in Army headquarters. He called and said he didn’t want to be separated from his family for a “bunch of stuff he could learn from books.

  “General Miller, one of my old bosses, got wind of my little temper tantrum and called me up. He really chewed my ass out. Told me to act like an adult, to ask for help before I start making stupid threats. I didn’t even get to talk, I just listened. And he was right, of course.”

  Despite the threats, Olson is happy in the Army and unsure of what he would do as a civilian. Although classmates now in business have approached him about getting out of the service, he has a limited understanding of what civilian managers do.

  “I love the Army,” he says. “I’ll truly regret leaving when the time comes, but the Army doesn’t define me. It’s a thing I do. My family, my relationship with my wife, they define me.”

  Olson’s comments sound a lot like the aphorisms with which the cadets like to decorate the barracks. But he lives this way; it is the source of his calm demeanor and confidence: He has found a job he loves, he has taken the time to figure out what’s important to him.

  In 1987, when he graduated, it didn’t look to Rob Olson that he was on track for any of this. Academically, he did not succeed at the Academy, attending summer school three times to make up course failures.

  “By all standards West Point had I was going to be a shitty lieutenant. I was a poor student, although I did well physically and in my military grades. But I wasn’t that confident coming out of here. Then I got to the Army and realized nobody expects me to memorize Newton’s laws. What they wanted was someone who was sincere, who had common sense, who had enough charisma to make a unit come together.”

  He attributes a lot of his success to good mentors he had early on, some of whom, he admits, chewed him out constantly. He also learned that while it was important to succeed in the bosses’ eyes, it was just as important to be judged a success by his soldiers and NCOs.

  It is nearly lunchtime. Olson calls Holly and asks if she has time to meet for lunch. “Maybe she won’t deliver until after lunch,” he says into the phone. “Tell her to cross her legs.”

  “Holly always loves when I give her medical advice,” he says after hanging up.

  Outside, it is still snowing. The sky seems to be falling, and the whole world is done in black and white. Olson walks up the hill behind the barracks to an access road where cars and trucks are parked in a tight line. He pulls a set of keys from his pocket and unlocks the door to a huge, bright red pickup truck, which was a combination Father’s Day, birthday, and Christmas present for a couple of years.

  The truck seems impractical: There are four people in the Olson family—too many for the bench seat. Olson doesn’t have to haul cargo in his job as a mentor to cadets. But just as country music and gun racks are part of the landscape in GI towns like Columbus, Georgia (outside Fort Benning) and Kileen, Texas (outside Fort Hood); trucks are part of the culture for Army officers and NCOs.

  Keller Army Hospital sits at the north end of post, in the shadow of Storm King Mountain. Unlike the other buildings on West Point, the hospital wasn’t designed to look like a medieval fortress. It is sleek and modern, with long banks of smoked glass windows and a pleasing, symmetrical shape. It is, however, gray.

  Olson greets the soldiers and civilians who work in the OB/GYN clinic. Like the cadets he speaks to everywhere he goes, they all seem to know him. He sticks his head into a small office where a woman in battle dress uniform sits filling out a logbook, her back to the door. “I’m here for my checkup,” he announces.

  “Great,” she answers without turning around. “Feet in the stirrups and I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  Like her husband, Holly Olson has the easy physical grace of an athlete, a relaxed demeanor and a firm handshake. Five nine, with wavy brown hair cut short, round glasses that make her look like what she probably always was in school: the smart girl in the class. She is unguarded and engaging, a natural conversationalist.

  They head to the hospital cafeteria for take-out. The food here, as in every subsidized restaurant on-post, is cheap and plain. After collecting a raft of sandwiches, chips, and sodas, the Olsons head back to Holly’s office. The room is small, about twelve by twelve, with a window high up on one wall, two large desks, a chair for the patient and a tiny sink in the corner with bottles of pink hospital soap. There is a spray of flowers in a vase on Holly’s desk, long branches with tiny buds that reach almost to the writing surface. Rob sits in the patient’s chair beside the desk, holding his sandwich box in his hand. Holly sits at her desk, turned sideways. Their feet—they are both wearing black combat boots—are toe-to-toe.

  Olson is his wife’s biggest fan.

  “She’ll jump out of bed in the middle of the night when her beeper goes off, come down here and save the lives of baby and mom in some medical drama. I spend my day worrying whether or not Jocko’s locker is ready for inspection, yet when I come home she listens to me as if I have the most interesting job in the world.”

  “It’s hard,” she tells him. “You’ve got a lot to keep track of.”

  Things haven’t been easy for this couple.

  After graduation in 1987, Rob Olson was sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma for his officer’s basic course in the artillery school. Half a year later he joined his first unit, the famed 101st Airborne Division, at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Holly Louise Hagan, also USMA ‘87, resigned her brand-new commission (with the Army’s blessing) to attend Medical School at the University of South Carolina. Olson drove back and forth to South Carolina to visit Holly, who was a busy first-year medical student. They continued to date long distance, with Olson making the several-hundred-mile drive as often as his schedule of field problems would permit.

  They were married in 1989. Later, Holly applied to medical school at Vanderbilt University so she and their new daughter would be closer to Rob.

  “So there Holly was,” Olson says. “Going back to medical school after a year off [for maternity leave], worrie
d about how much she’d forgotten. Oh, and she’s in a new school in a new city and doesn’t know any of her fellow students. And she has a new baby. And the nanny we’d arranged for when she got to Vanderbilt quit right before Holly got there.”

  It was just at that time, when it seemed as if things couldn’t get any more stressful, that the 101st Airborne Division deployed to the Persian Gulf for Operation Desert Shield.

  “First letter I get from Holly, I’m sitting out there in the desert and I read about the nanny quitting and the new school and the new baby and it sounds like she’s about at the end of her rope. And I’m in the middle of nowhere. I told my battery commander, ‘Sir, I’d like to call home.’ And he said something like, ‘Hey, Rob. Use the first pay phone you see.’

  “It was forty days before I could call her,” he said. “By that time she had everything under control, of course. But I had forty days to wonder how she was doing, and there wasn’t anything I could do to help.”

  Olson laughs as he tells. He never doubted that Holly would pull everything together; it was about him wanting to help her through a tough period.

  One wall is decorated with a large photograph of Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu, where Holly served for several years. The big pink hospital sits on a hill overlooking Pearl Harbor. The matting of the photograph is signed with good luck messages from the hospital staff. Where Rob’s office is decorated with guidons and flags and plaques, Holly’s has this one photo.

  She did not come to West Point to become a doctor, but during her first two years as a cadet she discovered two things: she wasn’t interested in the branches of the Army most West Point graduates join, and she found that she was still a top-performing student. Chemistry was her favorite subject, but there are no jobs for chemical engineers who are second lieutenants. She says she became a doctor by default. “I’m still not sure my dad believes I’m a real doctor.”