Duty First

by Ed Ruggero

The cadet moves to the shadow with the stick—what else is there to do?—when BAM! Something big crashes into him from the side, from a small opening between the wrestling mats. This one is a big—six feet, 180 pounds—and he pushes Jones up against the wall, gloved hands reaching for the throat. Jones swings wildly, staggers, then gains his footing, fights back, swings out from under the two-handed grip and delivers three hard kicks to the big man, who falls to the floor. Jones get in a few more shots for good measure.

  Down the alley. The screamer has disappeared. Turn the corner; another figure beckons in the distance, jumping up and down. As Jones moves out, someone else runs up behind, plows into him, wraps him in a bear hug. Jones sidesteps, ducks, goes down on one knee and twists free. Spinning, he throws hard, straight punches as the attacker rolls into a ball.

  Now Jones is on his feet, blowing hard, face red with exertion. An instructor in gray appears, points to a far corner of the room, where two more padded figures grapple. Jones has taken only a single step when one charges him, a full run from twenty feet away, arms upraised, screaming. Jones goes stiff for a second, then dives forward toward the attacker, who must jump at the last second to avoid being bowled over. Jones scrambles crablike, follows the rolling attacker kicks and punches and kicks and punches with real fury now, until the gray shirt comes up and taps him on the shoulder.

  This is City Streets, where cadets practice what they’ve learned about fighting hand-to-hand.

  One instructor is fond of telling cadets that the reason they take boxing is, “So that you know you ain’t gonna die if someone punches you in the face.” It is also about aggressiveness; and there is always the chance that cadets may have to use these skills some day.

  Major Jennifer Caruso, who might be an inch over five feet tall, tells the story of a woman cadet on Spring Break in Jamaica. “She was out on the dance floor with a bunch of friends, and this guy starts coming onto her, grinding her, you know? So she says to the guy, ‘Back off!’”

  Caruso does a fair imitation of how loud a woman would have to yell such a thing on a crowded dance floor. She stands, muscles tensed, feet apart, balanced; she is ready to attack. The tension, the coiled potential energy, comes off her in waves.

  “But the guy doesn’t get the hint, so he starts crowding her, then he grabs her. So—wham! She pushes his arms away and smacks him in the chest.”

  “Then she hit him again and the guy went flying. She said the whole dance floor moved over and cleared a space around them,” Caruso continues. “The guy got up real fast and got out of there.”

  Caruso nods, proud of what her student learned.

  Instruction in what West Point calls “combatives,” the umbrella term for anything involving fighting, is not just about getting through Spring Break or surviving a mugging. The Academy says its young initiates must do things outside their comfort zone: combatives qualifies. For the men, it is boxing and, during third class year, wrestling. There is an elective called “grappling,” a combination of collegiate style wrestling and fighting techniques borrowed from other disciplines. There is even an advanced hand-to-hand-combat course, another elective cadets can take during the “life sports” section of their education, in place of golf, for instance.

  The course the plebe women take is “Close Quarters Combat.” Jacque Messel’s class meets at the relatively civilized hour of 8:30 A.M. The fifteen plebe women in BDU shirts over PT uniform are more talkative than the men gathering on the first floor for boxing. When they enter the room, they remove their shoes and line them up in neat ranks along the edge of the mat, like a ghost formation. Then they start practicing the falls and the blocking movements they’ll use against attackers.

  The big wrestling room, sixty feet square, is lit by harsh fluorescent lights, which create a low hum in the background. The floor is covered with football-style blocking dummies and heavy bags. One of the instructors (they’re all women in here) is pregnant and wears a huge gray DPE shirt that billows out when she walks.

  Most of these cadet women were athletes in high school; for many of them the standard physical education program was a joke. The most difficult part of the PE program in most American high schools is the angst of insecure teenagers worrying over whether or not they should undress in front of their peers. Not so at West Point. Here one had better master things quickly.

  The instructors pile the bags on the floor, and within a minute or two of class starting the women are diving over into forward rolls. The ones who master it quickly move on. The ones who have difficulty, and Messel is one of those, stay behind and get more attention from the instructors.

  Captain Carol Anderson, the primary instructor, watches from the side. She is the same woman who led the Commandant’s staff in swimming.

  “I ask all the women I teach,” Anderson says, “if they’ve ever been in a fight. I say, ‘Not a tug-of-war with your little brother over a CD. I’m talking about a fight where someone has tried to hurt you, where you have tried to hurt someone else.’ Not surprisingly, 99.9 percent have never been. If someone tries to attack them, beat them up, rape them, they’ll at least have learned something they can do to protect themselves.”

  Anderson dominates the room. She is five ten, with the thin, muscular build of a sprinter or basketball player; a short ponytail; little wire-rimmed glasses; commanding voice. On her black shorts she wears badges for top scores on both the Army’s physical fitness test and West Point’s dreaded indoor obstacle course, nemesis of cadets. Instructors in DPE don’t have to take the test. Some, she says, take it as a “gut check.”

  Near Anderson, two women practice a move to block a direct punch, then counter by pulling the attacker’s head down into an upcoming knee. The women pull their punches and one of them says, “I don’t want to mess up your hair.”

  “A lot of them think they don’t need this,” Anderson says. “And I get more attitude from the women than from the men.”

  Anderson gathers the women in close for a demonstration. Her moves are graceful, deliberate, and rapid as a snake strike. She smiles as she goes through the choreography, talking about oblique movements and kinesthetics, mixing a little plain English.

  “If you do this,” she says, dropping her guard, “You’re gonna get whacked.

  “When you do a heel strike,” she says, shooting her arm out and at the nose of a cadet who stands just out of reach, “I want you to strike through, which means that I’m not trying to strike the nose, I’m trying to reach through to the back of the head.”

  Around her, a couple of cadets practice the move silently.

  “When you do the groin strike, hit hard,” she continues, swinging her arm down sharply at the groin of a woman standing close behind her. Her large hand is open.

  “Then pull and twist,” she says, demonstrating a move quick enough to start a cold lawnmower. When she says, “That’s one of my favorites,” a couple of cadets chuckle.

  Anderson tells a cadet with a club to come at her. It is the classic move, a staple of every movie about basic training, where the instructor invites a trainee to attack. The cadet approaches, and Anderson delivers a rapid combination: heel strike to the face, knee to groin, knee to head, and—a coup de grace as the attacker goes to the mat—a groin pull.

  Later, as the cadets practice, Anderson watches a woman punch and kick a much bigger partner. For many of the cadets, this is about passing the course. For Anderson, it is something else.

  “Maybe three out of ten are really trying, the others do the minimum they can to get a good grade,” she says as she watches.

  Messel and her partner move at less than half speed.

  “But they’re a lot more sincere in Self-Defense II, where we talk about rape attacks.

  “I tell the cadets I’ve been the target of three attempted rapes since I’ve been in the army. And this wasn’t out in the desert with Iraqi soldiers. These were soldiers or husbands of soldiers. And I’m not the typical rape victim. I’m five ten, 150 poun
ds. Usually victims are small women, so if it can happen to me it can happen to anyone,” she says. “Eighty percent of the girls get it then.”

  Anderson didn’t learn tough in a classroom, or in any Army training film. She grew up in Compton, California, which she says is “much worse than southcentral L.A. in terms of gang-bangers.”

  Anderson lived with her grandmother in Denver for a while, but her mother got sick and her father asked her to return to Los Angeles.

  “I wasn’t there a week when I knew I wasn’t going to last at Compton High.

  “They were doing stuff in eleventh grade that I had done in seventh grade. You mostly just went to class and hung out and went to the next class and hung out.”

  Anderson’s brother and sister were involved with gangs, and in her neighborhood young women either wound up pregnant, in jail, or dead. She wanted no part of that. With money saved from a summer job, she bought a plane ticket to Denver, flew out on her own and called her grandmother from the airport. But her plan didn’t work, and she soon found herself back in Los Angeles. Soon after she took the high school equivalency test, got her diploma a year early, and enlisted in the Army as a way out of Compton.

  As an enlisted soldier, Anderson was a supply specialist. She went to Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1989 and was commissioned in the Corps of Engineers. In 1991 she went to Desert Storm with a combat engineer (heavy) platoon; she took bulldozers, road-graders, front-end loaders and their soldier/operators to war. Her outfit, designed to build supply roads and airfields, was not equipped for combat. It relied, for protection, on other units.

  “We were attached to this battalion of combat engineers [a unit equipped to operate close to the front]. I had this raggedy old CUCV [a civilian sport utility vehicle painted camouflage], and they had humvees and nice equipment. We’re just following them along in the desert. I didn’t even get a map, much less a ‘slugger’ [a hand-held global positioning system]. When we stopped everybody went to sleep: all the soldiers, all the squad leaders, my platoon sergeant. I got called to battalion headquarters. While I was there, the commander says, ‘We’re leaving. You need to meet up with this other battalion.’ He was on the radio, talking on two nets, taking and giving orders. He gave me about a minute or two of his time. I didn’t even have a compass, just a map I had taken from someone else. He said, ‘We’re going this way and you’re going that way.’ It was like, ‘Take charge. See you later, lieutenant.’ He abandoned us.”

  Before Anderson could even get back to her troops, the engineer unit was rolling. She woke her platoon sergeant and told him they were being abandoned. “You can’t let them leave us out here!” he screamed at her.

  “I said, ‘Too late, it’s happening.’ He told me I was the dumbest second lieutenant he’d ever seen.”

  Anderson smiles telling the story, but leaves no doubt that it was a frightening night. She didn’t know the enemy situation; she wasn’t sure where the friendly units were. She wasn’t even sure which direction to go. She and her platoon sergeant knew they were in Iraq, but they didn’t know if they were going to run into Iraqi or American units.

  “There’s nothing out in there to navigate with, no terrain features. Just sand in front, sand behind, sand to the left and right. My platoon sergeant happened to have a compass—we didn’t even get issued stuff like that!”

  “He and I disagreed on which way to go. He wanted to go one way and I wanted to go the exact opposite direction. Finally, he said, ‘Whatever. We’ll know how wrong you were when we get killed.’ ”

  Anderson and the platoon sergeant decided not to tell the soldiers their predicament. They acted like they knew what they were doing. The only one privy to the disagreement between Anderson and the platoon sergeant was her driver. They began moving, and Anderson finally spotted a vehicle, tiny in the vast flat expanse of sand.

  “I couldn’t tell if it was a friendly or not, but there wasn’t much I could do about it at that point. He started buzzing towards us, and I see it’s a humvee. He comes pulling up and this lieutenant jumps out and we’re both so relieved that we hug each other. His mission was to find us, but he only had another fifteen minutes or so to wait and then he was gone.”

  “We’d have been left there in the middle of the desert. To this day I couldn’t tell you how I found that humvee. My platoon sergeant and I never got along before that; this changed it all. He apologized and told me he was glad I didn’t listen [to him]. We navigated by his compass and by the grace of God.”

  West Point puts officers like Anderson close to cadets so that the cadets can learn from these experiences. But Anderson says, “I don’t tell the cadets [that story]. I still feel a little like that dumb second lieutenant.”

  This image is hard to fit with the woman in the wrestling room, who is the very picture of self-confidence. In fact, Anderson is the first woman to teach boxing at West Point. She shrugs, gives a no-big-deal look.

  “It’s just a class I teach. In fact, it’s one of the easiest ones I teach. It’s all about movement.”

  Perhaps, she allows, boxing comes easy to her because she was a fighter back in Compton, California.

  “I got suspended for fighting probably three times a year in high school. And that’s just for the times I got caught. I got expelled from grade school. That was just how it was in Compton. We got picked on a lot. Had these raggedy old hand-me-down clothes and our shoes were from the department store and not the nice kind. Kids would ridicule us.

  Anderson says she never started a fight, but she never walked away from one either. Not surprisingly a lot of what she has to tell cadets has to do with tenacity and perseverance. You can accomplish a lot, she tells them, if you’re willing to work hard. But there is an undercurrent of discontent when she talks about cadets.

  “I expected a lot of motivated young people excited about becoming Army officers. I don’t see that. You do have a percentage of ‘high speed-low drag’ cadets, then you have the great majority who are trying to get by. And another small percentage who aren’t doing anything and are still here.

  “Some cadets are here after doing things that would get a soldier thrown out of the Army. I’ve busted my butt to become an officer. For someone who’s worked as hard as I have to get where I am, it pisses me off to see people scraping by and still here. There are lots of kids out there, just as smart, who would love to have this chance, and some of these kids are just cruising here.”

  It is the end of the period, and the plebes glance at the clock as they stomp into their shoes. Anderson gathers her clipboard as the cadets race off to the next requirement. “They know they’re going to make it. The government brings you here and spends all this money, they want you to graduate. The message is to push people through.”

  The Department of Physical Education is the department cadets love to hate. It’s just too easy to make fun of their tight uniforms, their big sports watches, the go-to-hell stance they adopt in the department photo hanging just inside the door to the gym.

  “Nobody likes them,” Bob Friesema says of DPE. “And I’m not just talking cadets. My math professor told us about this lunchtime basketball league the faculty has. Nothing gives him a bigger thrill than beating DPE.”

  The DPE instructors are drill-sergeant picky about uniforms, military courtesy standards.

  “In high school if you played to your ability you got a good grade,” Friesema says. “Here, it’s ‘You meet the standard’ or ‘too bad.’ You have to be an outstanding athlete to get an A.”

  Friesema’s comments aren’t the complaints of a teenage couch-potato. Although he had no experience boxing, he intimidated opponents just because his height gave him an advantage. At six four, he can outreach most opponents. He was a competitive runner and swimmer as a kid. Now he works out every day with some combination of running, lifting weights, pull-ups, push-ups, and sit-ups, for forty-five minutes, just to stay proficient and able to pass the tests.

  Wes
t Point tells prospective cadets that the academy is a physical place. The admissions website specifies that candidates must have “above average strength, endurance and agility.” A commercially published handbook for candidates shows a photograph of cadets playing a game of pick-up basketball. The caption reads, “If you don’t like athletic competition, you will be a misfit at West Point.”

  The beginnings of this emphasis on athletics came from Douglas MacArthur’s observation that young soldiers in World War I respected officers with athletic ability. When he became Superintendent after the war, in 1919, MacArthur decreed “every cadet an athlete.” Participation in sports, either varsity, club, or intramural, has been mandatory for most of the twentieth century.

  Athletics have gone from a good idea to a religion at West Point. And, like religion, it can have its excesses.

  One woman who graduated in the late eighties says she was bulimic before she went to West Point, was bulimic her whole time as a cadet, and stayed that way until she became pregnant with her first child (she is now the healthy mother of four).

  The pressures to conform to an ideal body type, already heavy on young women in America, are exaggerated at West Point. This woman, who won a varsity A in track, said that West Point did little or nothing to help women with eating disorders. She mentioned a classmate who was an All-American athlete, but who also had an eating disorder. She contends that coaches and officials ignored the signs because the woman was such a successful athlete. “They figured, ‘If she’s winning, she must be healthy’ ”

  Some cadet women are afflicted with “exercise bulimia”, they eat, then exercise feverishly to work off those calories. This behavior is the easiest to disguise, since exercise, in West Point’s culture, is always a good thing.

  “I used to get up and run at 0515,” the former bulimic says. “And there were a surprising number of people out there. And a good number of them were women.”

  But the presence of eating disorders is no longer a dark secret at West Point, if it ever was.