Duty First

by Ed Ruggero

  Her parents were supportive, but her home was no hotbed of feminism. Nor did her family have any ties to the professional military. Instead, she looked around her home town and saw all kinds of people with bachelor’s degrees and no job, people still living with their parents. She didn’t want that to happen to her.

  As a cadet, Holly dated a few classmates, but it didn’t work out, for the same reasons the women cadets in the Class of 2000 mentioned: the small town atmosphere, where everybody knows everybody’s business. And for Holly, who graduated near the top of her class, she had to deal with the fact that many young men are intimidated by smart women.

  “I didn’t wear it on my sleeve or anything,” she says. “It’s not like I walked in the room and said, ‘Hey, did I tell you today that I’m smarter than you?’ ”

  Holly finished seventeenth in their class, on her collar she wore the gold stars that mark the top cadets. Her husband was ten from the bottom and a veteran of summer school, called STAP (Summer Term Academic Program). He characterized their dating as “STAP-boy dates Star-girl.”

  “Rob was persistent,” Holly says. “He kept asking me out and I’d say ‘no’ and he’d ask again and I’d say ‘no.’ Then one day I said ‘yes’ and he was really surprised.”

  “I already had plans for the weekend,” Olson adds. “Because I was just expecting to get shot down again. I was going down to Fordham to watch some friends of mine play rugby. Then she said yes, and I had already told my buddies I’d be there, so I asked Holly if she’d like to come along. As soon as I got my car from the parking lot it started to pour.”

  “Hard,” Holly adds. They’re a team now, telling a story they both know well and have laughed about before.

  “And of course neither of us has a raincoat,” she says. “I was wearing this big wool sweater.”

  “So I stop at this convenience store,” Olson says. “I have about seven bucks on me. So of course I buy a six-pack of Bud and a box of plastic trash bags to wear as rain gear.”

  “We got drenched,” Holly says. “And it was freezing. We smelled like dead sheep.”

  “So after the game I decide I’m not bringing my first date to the rugby party—I was smart enough to spare her that. Instead we’re going to drive to New Jersey.”

  “We were going to Joey Simonelli’s parents’ house,” Holly adds.

  “Right. To dry off” Rob looks at me. “Joey is a classmate and one of my best friends. See, I was making this date up as I went along.”

  Holly lifts her hand to her face as she laughs.

  “And we’re getting close to the George Washington Bridge, and I realize I spent all my money on the beer and the trash bags. I’ve got no money for the toll,” Rob says.

  “Here I dragged this girl out into the pouring rain to watch a rugby game, and now I didn’t even plan well enough to have the bridge fare. So I know I have to ask her for money, but I’m such a coward that I wait until we’re on the ramp—there’s no turning back—and I blurt all this out. And she just looks at me …”

  Holly finishes the story. “I just looked over and said, ‘There’s no toll in this direction.’ ”

  They share a laugh, and Olson says, “I exposed my ignorance and I didn’t even have to.”

  “But there I was with this guy I’d been avoiding, and everything that could go wrong was going wrong, and I was having a great time,” Holly says. “We laughed the whole time and we had interesting conversations. It was a great date after all.”

  Outside, the after-lunch appointments are gathering: young women, some of them in uniform, with swollen bellies. They clean up the plastic trays, and Holly washes her hands in the small sink. After exchanging a few notes about their schedules, they plan on being home for family dinner.

  A couple of weeks later the Olsons are guests at a banquet, a formal dinner in the Mess Hall, hosted by the sophomores for Yearling Winter Weekend.

  Rob Olson wears a wasp-waisted coat, dark blue, and light blue pants that make up the officer’s dress mess uniform. The lapels of his jacket are faced in scarlet, the color of the field artillery; the shoulders are topped with gold braid. It is the kind of dashing uniform that looks good on young men; it also sports enough baubles and brass and gold to make it an easy target for caricature. Holly Olson wears a long black dress, appropriate for the drafty Mess Hall. All around, second-year cadets, their dates, and their families glitter and shine. Many of the yearling women are escorted by firsties; most of the yearling men have civilian dates.

  This is just one of a string of formal dinners the Olsons will attend as part of their official duties: there was Plebe Parent Weekend in the fall, Yearling Winter Weekend in January, followed by One Hundredth Night (one hundred days until graduation) for the first class, and Five Hundredth Night (for the second class).

  “I could just keep the monkey suit on a hangar and jump in it every weekend,” Olson says.

  “And the menu, believe it or not, has been the same for each formal,” Holly adds.

  But they are smiling. The other Tacs, most of them are men, and their wives, come up to the Olsons. The young couples are taking advantage of having baby-sitters at home, and are heading to the South Gate Tavern, just off post, for a few drinks. Everyone seems in fine spirits—the women are beautiful, the men are handsome.

  “You going out dressed like that?” Sergeant First Class Tim Bingham asks Olson, pointing to the glittering uniform.

  “I can shoot pool in this as easily as in jeans,” Olson says. Then, leaning forward so that only Bingham can hear, “And I can say, ‘Hey, get off my stool, you rednecked motherfucker,’ just as easily in this.” He straightens. “Matter of fact, it makes me look taller,” he says pulling at the bottom of the jacket and smiling his mischievous smile.

  Everyone is smiling, in spite of the weather, which is frigid, in spite of the fact that the semester has just begun and these cadets are not yet halfway through their time at West Point. On this night they shine. Cadets stand outside the little circle of officers, waiting to introduce parents to their Tacs and Tac NCOs. Mothers and fathers beam. Young women in slinky gowns try not to shiver as the big doors of the Mess Hall swing open and a January wind spills inside. Many of the women—the ones with gallant and resourceful dates—wear cadet parkas over their evening dresses. The tables are set with cloth napkins; the steel flatware has been polished; the peanut butter has been removed from the table.

  Olson jokes with his fellow Tacs, and although they are a little old to be fraternity brothers, there is good-natured shadowboxing. The Olsons have made it to this place through hard work. They have been successful in the Army, and they are destined for more success. They are surrounded by friends, by work they love. They live in a tight-knit community and mostly overlook the downsides of the small-town atmosphere. And no matter how tedious it will seem on Monday morning, when Olson is once again consumed by thinking about whether Jocko is going to be ready for inspection, or whether some procrastinating firstie has bought his officer’s uniforms, or whether some plebe is crying in the latrine at night, tonight it is like a fairy tale. Or as much like a fairy tale as real life can get when the baby-sitter is waiting. They are in their anointed season, young and strong and healthy, with everything to look forward to.

  TRUST BETWEEN LEADER AND LED

  The notion that failing—and the learning opportunity that follows—must be part of leader development is not just a heretical idea held by a few social scientists toiling away in the windowless offices of Thayer Hall.

  “You have to be able to fail and learn from it,” Brigadier General John Abizaid, Commandant of Cadets, says. “I talk about my screwups; God knows I have plenty of material. People have to know that they can learn from their mistakes. We do ourselves a disservice with the idea that we want people who don’t fail.”

  He is in his office above the Cadet Mess. In the daylight, the Plain and the river beyond are visible through the arched windows. On this winter evening, the barr
acks lights throw yellow rectangles on the snow; General Washington, astride his horse and below the windows, looks out over the quiet cold.

  Abizaid hangs his camouflage field jacket on the back of his chair. He is forty-seven, dark-haired and handsome, with a friendly smile and a mischievous sense of humor that doesn’t seem to fit his role as head of the military side of cadet life. He graduated forty-second (of 944) in the Class of 1973, studied at the University of Amman in Jordan, and at Stanford; he also has a master’s degree from Harvard.

  But Abizaid has not hung his Harvard degree, or any other diploma, on the walls of his office. Instead, he has two paintings of 82nd Airborne Division soldiers in World War II combat. One shows a general officer leading from the front: Matthew Ridgway USMA 1917, in a battle for the LaFiere causeway in Normandy, June 9, 1944. The two-star general has moved to the very front of his stalled attack and is personally exhorting his soldiers to press on.

  Abizaid walks through the warren of hallways above the Mess Hall to an amphitheater-style classroom filled with forty or fifty cadets of the Infantry Tactics Club. These cadets, and there are men as well as women, spend some of their precious free time studying and practicing the Army’s most basic craft: how to close with and destroy the enemy.

  The cadets jump to attention when Abizaid enters. He greets them in his breezy style, then takes his place in front of the room beside an overhead projector. Using colored markers, he sketches a map. There is a small hill at the top of the frame, overlooking an airstrip that runs left to right across the center. South of the airfield, some blue lines denote a body of water. To the right of the airfield, on the east side of the map, Abizaid draws a half dozen buildings, little black squares and rectangles. He labels them “CAMPUS.”

  “There are American civilians here,” he says, pointing to the buildings. “Our job was to get them out safely. The plan looked like this.”

  He puts down a second sheet, an overlay on which he draws military graphics that show how a company of infantry was to move off the airstrip, secure the buildings and the civilians, then prepare for a counterattack from the east, where the enemy had light armored vehicles.

  “That’s what everybody thinks is going to happen,” he says. Then he pulls off the overlay with the original plan and tosses it to the floor with a flourish.

  “But we need to get rid of that because, of course, the plan never works.”

  He begins to speak more quickly, using a red pen to draw enemy forces. There are powerful anti-aircraft guns on the hills above the airfield that can be turned on the GIs with devastating effectiveness; these same guns will also keep the planeloads of American reinforcements away. There are several dozen armed policemen among the American civilians on the campus; the enemy light-armored vehicles are not a forty-five minute drive away—as reported—but are much closer. And the construction workers who’d been laboring on the airstrip are armed and organized into a company of infantry.

  This is Grenada, 1983, and the American civilians are medical students. The cadets in the room were only a few years old when this combat action took place. John Abizaid was a captain, ten years out of West Point and commanding a company of about a hundred Army Rangers.

  He speaks to the cadets as if they are in command of the men on the ground.

  “You underestimated the enemy and what they could do to you,” he says, looking into the audience. “There’s no real plan for fire support. The BTR-60s [Soviet-made light armored vehicles] are much closer than you thought. You’re suddenly taking fire from this hill. What do you do?”

  “Attack the hill,” several cadets respond. This may be natural aggressiveness, or they may be showing off for the Commandant. Perhaps a few of them learned this in a military science class.

  “Of course,” Abizaid says. He shows how the company commander changed the plan. Two of the company’s three platoons now move up the hill to silence the powerful enemy guns, leaving one platoon to take on the police, secure the medical students, and protect the company’s flank from a mounted assault.

  “Now, you’re this platoon leader,” he says, using a pointer to show the soldiers moving off by themselves to the east, toward the expected counterattack. “What’s your first concern?”

  There is a chorus this time. “Security,” the cadets answer. This is one of the principles of war, drilled into them in military science and military history and plebe knowledge. On the ground it translates to, “expect the unexpected.”

  The platoon leader given this mission, Abizaid points out, has been with this unit only three months, has been in the Army less than a year and a half. He pauses to let that point sink in.

  This is all much closer to you than you think.

  “The whole United States of America is going to be watching him and what he does to protect these civilians.”

  The cadets going into World War II probably never heard this admonition. But the young men and women in this room have grown up with twenty-four-hour news; they know that CNN might swoop down on them at any time, putting them—and their actions—on the world stage for everyone to judge.

  The Commandant walks them through the battle, and the cadets are riveted. Abizaid, a natural storyteller, gives them the sights and sounds, the heat, and the worries of command. He has conveyed the shock of what happened that day: the GIs on the ground had been in their own barracks just hours before. Many of them know they’re on an island called Grenada, but because the maps they’ve been given show only the island, they don’t know where Grenada is.

  The lieutenant and his platoon of forty-some men secure the buildings of the medical school and set up positions facing east, waiting for the mounted attack. On the hill, GIs are dying in the assault on the big guns.

  “Now what do you do?”

  They are not as quick to answer now, but one cadets ventures, “Send out OPs [observation posts].”

  Abizaid taps the map with a pointer. A large hill to the east keeps the Americans from seeing what’s on the flank, so the lieutenant sends a jeep, just landed off an aircraft, out along the road heading in that direction. Then he hears gunfire, and the jeep doesn’t return.

  “The company commander tells the lieutenant to get over to this hill and find out what’s out there.”

  The lieutenant spreads his platoon too thin, then compounds the problem by walking away from his other leaders; he is now out of contact with the unit he is supposed to command. When a GI destroys an approaching armored vehicle with an anti-tank weapon, the lieutenant—who is now farther east than any man in his platoon—goes out on the road to inspect the damage.

  “Good idea?” Abizaid asks.

  “Bad idea,” a cadet responds.

  “Right. But let’s not forget that it’s easy for us to sit in a classroom and criticize this guy,” he reminds them.

  “He got shot five times. One of his guys had to crawl out there and drag him back.”

  The entire action took less than four hours. In that time, Abizaid points out, the lives of soldiers and civilians rode on decisions made by that lieutenant.

  Abizaid points to a first class cadet in the front row and directs him to a white board in the front of the room.

  “We could put these lessons in terms of the Principles of War, but for our discussion, let’s just do them this way.”

  “Never underestimate the enemy,” he says. The firstie writes.

  He shows them another map, a sketch of the battle at the Little Big Horn. George Custer, who took several companies of cavalry to their deaths along that river in Montana, lies buried in the West Point cemetery less than a mile from where these cadets sit.

  With a little prodding, Abizaid extracts a few more lessons.

  “Never send soldiers somewhere they can’t get help. Never plan for a fair fight.”

  The cadets nod; some of them take notes.

  “Now, here we are in Bosnia,” Abizaid continues, pulling the map of Grenada off the projector.

  Many
of the cadets in this room know recent graduates on duty with the peacekeeping force; some of the seniors expect to join that force within a year. And if that is not enough of a reality check: the day’s newspapers are filled with the story of American troops being sent to Kosovo on yet another peacekeeping mission.

  “We have this Muslim village on the boundary established by the Dayton Peace Accords.”

  Abizaid puts up another slide that he has prepared ahead of time.

  “There are supposed to be no weapons in this village or in the boundary area. The Muslims who lived here before want to move back into the village. A report arrives at American headquarters that the former inhabitants want to go home and rebuild. There is also a Serbian complaint that the Muslims are moving weapons into the town, that they plan to use it as a staging area for ‘terrorist activities.’ ”

  A young lieutenant, a recent West Point graduate, gets orders to check out the Serbian complaint and ensure that no weapons are coming into the village. This is exactly the kind of scenario Abizaid is preparing these cadets for: quick thinking, handling diverse cultures, with a mission that is anything but simple. Compared to this kind of mission, an order to storm the village and kill everyone inside would be easier to figure out, if more dangerous.

  “You’re the lieutenant,” Abizaid says. “You’ve got forty-eight hours to prepare for this mission. You know that the roads are clear, because UN vehicles have been using them, but other than that there are lots of mines and unexploded munitions all over the area. You get a few translators. What do you do?”

  Abizaid sits on the front edge of the instructor’s desk, dangling his feet and holding the pointer in two hands.

  “Before you get out your Ranger handbook or start asking for checklists, let’s just spend a few minutes thinking about what kind of things you’d like to know.”