My Share of the Task (3 page)

| CHAPTER 2 |

Journey to the Plain

July 1972–June 1976

I
was raised to respect soldiers, leaders, and heroes. They were who I wanted to be. They were why I was there.

And in the unblinking sunlight of an August morning at the United States Military Academy in 1972, the colonel in front of me looked like the embodiment of all I admired. Hanging on his spare frame, his pine green uniform was covered with patches, badges, and campaign ribbons. Even the weathered lines of his face seemed to reflect all he'd done and all he was. It was the look I'd seen in my father's face. For a moment I could envision my father in combat in Korea, or as the lean warrior embracing my mother as he came home from Vietnam. He was my lifelong hero. From my earlier memories I'd wanted to be like him. I'd always wanted to be a soldier.

Yet the colonel's words were not what I wanted and expected to hear. As he stood in front of me and my fellow new cadets, he talked about collar stays, the twenty-five-cent pieces of wire cadets used to secure the collars of the blue gray shirts we would wear to class during the academic year.

As he spoke, we tried not to squirm under the sun. Our backs were arched, arms flat to our sides, elbows slightly bent, fingers curled into tight palms, chests out, chins forward, eyes ahead. Mouths shut. I was five weeks into my education at West Point. We were still in Beast Barracks, or simply Beast, the initial eight-week indoctrination and basic-training phase during the summer before the fall term of our freshman year—plebe year, in West Point's timeworn terminology. There were not many full colonels at West Point, so it was rare for cadets, particularly new cadets like us, to interact with them. It seemed like an extraordinary opportunity to hear from a man who'd done so much. But he wasn't discussing his experiences and the truths they had yielded; he was talking about collar stays.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “soon you will begin to wear the class shirt. You'll wear it every day of the academic year and, per uniform regulation, you will secure your collar with the collar stays that have been issued to you.

“It may seem insignificant to you now,” he continued, “but you're here learning attention to detail.” For the next few minutes the combat-seasoned colonel compared neglecting to wear collar stays with forgetting ammunition for our soldiers in combat. Focusing on even the small things, he reasoned, develops a leader who never neglects the critical ones.

I thought it was stupid. Collar stays were for your collar. Ammunition mattered. And although we were not yet officers, we knew the difference. The soldiers I had grown up admiring were Sam Grant in his dirty private's coat and Matt Ridgway and his hand grenades. They wore mud-covered or sand-dusted fatigues, not collar stays. In that moment, the colorful block of campaign badges on the colonel's left breast seemed less like proof of his having fought in the wars being waged far beyond the academy's granite walls and more like ornaments that flashed as he paced and pivoted.

Following the rules here would make me a good cadet, but that was not my goal. I wanted to be a combat leader. And in the colonel's soliloquy I could not see a connection between the two. What I could not have foreseen then were the lessons of unconventional leadership I would learn during my four years in that most conventional of places.

*   *   *

W
eeks earlier, on the night of Sunday, July 2, I didn't sleep much. The next morning I was to report to West Point to begin my training as a cadet. A friend had driven with me from northern Virginia to drop me off. At a motel a few miles from the academy, we sat outside, sharing cans of cold beer from a small cooler, talking late into the summer night. We'd talked often about my desire to be a soldier but rarely about what that really meant. I'd likely be a soldier for the rest of my life.

I was preparing to tread a well-worn path. Cadets had been entering West Point since its founding in 1802, and 140 years later, six months after Pearl Harbor, my father had done the same. Graduating in 1945 as a member of one of the abbreviated three-year wartime classes, he went on to fight in Korea and Vietnam and was a major general as I prepared to enter, thirty years after he first reported as a cadet. But he never pushed me to apply and was supportive but hands-off as I prepared my application. I attributed his stance to the fact that one of my older brothers had attended and then quit West Point a year earlier. I suspected my father worried that he had pressured my brother to go, but he also sensed I was different.

I always assumed I would attend West Point but had never thought much about what it would be like to be a cadet. From my birth to an army captain and his wife, I'd been an “army brat.” After that, West Point seemed the natural route. There was not much more to the decision. I never fixated on the school itself, never dreamed of wearing cadet dress gray. I arrived at the academy already looking past it, eager to get to the real soldiering that came only afterward.

The next morning, my friend and I drove through the academy's gates and followed the drive that runs along the edge of the cliffs overlooking the Hudson until it breaks away from the river and veers up a hill to Michie Stadium, where Army's football team plays. It was warm and I was nervous.

At the stadium we found swarms of people. This was Reception Day, better known as R-Day, and
1,378 new cadets had shown up to be officially “received” into the academy. From the stadium we were bused to a series of concrete courtyards walled off by barracks that cadets call “the Area,” a desolate stretch that I would come to know intimately. That morning it was controlled chaos.

From the perspective of a new cadet (as we were called until the end of Beast Barracks), upperclassmen ran the show. Postured like sentries in gray trousers and starched white shirts, they clenched their jaws and pulled their hat brims low over stern eyes. They controlled our every movement. Through decades of practice, R-Day processes neared scientific precision. The circuit ensured that all new cadets that day could be sworn in, stripped of outside possessions, supplied with new ones, measured, weighed, outfitted, sheared, scared, and, finally, paraded in front of their families in a matter of hours. For the academy, it was an impressive feat. Families saw the often-shaggy high school graduates they'd deposited earlier that morning reappear as uniformed, disciplined soldiers. For some parents and siblings, it probably felt like a miracle.

For new cadets it felt more like being rats in a maze. Directed through the process by an upperclassman known as the Man in the Red Sash, who tracked our progress on cards safety-pinned to our shorts, we felt like fools. Outfitted in T-shirts, knee-high black socks, and black dress shoes, we looked like fools as well. But it was efficient. Before arriving, I expected the hazing and knew to address the older cadets in formulaic “Yes, sirs” and “No, sirs.” But I had always regarded West Point as an inconvenient but necessary hurdle I had to jump to be a soldier. By the middle of my first day, the obstacle appeared gigantic, four years like an eternity.

Of the nearly fourteen hundred who stood on the point of land overlooking the Hudson River that evening, more than a third would not graduate; 180 would leave
before the summer was over. Some admitted cadets had quit that first day. But more than thirty of those newly shorn plebes, including Ray Odierno, Dave Rodriguez, Bill Caldwell, David Barno, Frank Kearney, Frank Helmick, Mike Barbero, and Guy Swan, would serve as general officers in turbulent times for our army and nation.

Earlier that day we had eaten our first meal in cavernous Washington Hall, the cadet dining facility, as we had every other meal before. That evening, we ate our second meal as we would eat every meal thereafter: by their rules. Seated “family style” at a table for ten, two upperclassmen ruled eight new cadets, controlling what and how we ate. Correctly reciting “plebe knowledge” we were all required to memorize might yield a rushed bite, or more, depending on how hard-ass our elders decided to be. Knowing Schofield's definition of discipline—which ironically counsels that the “discipline which makes the soldiers of a free country reliable in battle is not to be gained by harsh or tyrannical treatment”—might allow a cadet a quick forkful of potatoes before a minder ordered the utensil placed back on the table. Routinely, we left plates of untouched food at the ends of meals. Food became a fixation.

After dinner on the first night, we retired to our rooms, where our M14 rifles and other equipment had been placed on bunks before we arrived. I don't remember exactly what I thought as our first day ended. Much of what I had seen that day seemed silly. But the ubiquitous tablets containing names of graduates who had fallen in battle did not. Many of the soldiers I admired for their battlefield leadership had begun where I was now, had navigated the same peculiar process, and had emerged with qualities I sought to emulate. Had this seemingly absurd process molded them? After a long, often disorienting day, it was too much to ponder. When we finally fell into our bunks to sleep, I think I took comfort in the fact that no matter how long I stayed in the Army, I'd never have to have another “first day” as a soldier.

*   *   *

A
fter Beast Barracks, we settled into life as plebes. Like the peas on our plate during Beast, the minutes of the day throughout the academic year were not ours to consume freely. We necessarily became efficient. Reveille was at 0615 hours, and we arrived at formation ten minutes later in complete cadet uniform, clean and shaved. There were no wasted movements in those early minutes, especially in winter. Before entering the mess hall for breakfast, all four thousand cadets stood in formation outside the barracks, and the chain of command inspected our uniforms. The fife-and-drum corps accompanied every movement to, in, and from formation. The rest of the day was spent at class, with forty minutes for lunch. On autumn and spring afternoons, we either paraded for visitors or played sports, before rushing back to barracks to clean up, don our dress gray uniforms, and report to formation. Then the band fifed and drummed us back into the mess hall for dinner. After dinner was time for study before taps ended the day at 2300,
when all rooms went dark. Some studious cadets covered their windows with blankets to hide the light or requested official permission to continue studying—known as “late lights.” I never much did that.

I had a slow start academically, and for the first two years poor grades were a lurking threat to my cadet career. “
The subjects which were dearest to the examiners,” Winston Churchill once wrote, “were almost invariably those I fancied least.” The same was true for me during plebe and yearling years, when the curriculum was loaded with math and science requirements. The system of daily recitation and grading begun under the early-nineteenth-century superintendence of Sylvanus Thayer, known as the Father of the Academy, was bad news for a poorly prepared student like me. In math class each day, including Saturday, we stood at the blackboard in front of a new problem that tested the previous night's lesson, and “briefed the solution” to the class and instructor. I got crushed in math and over the first two years fared poorly in chalkboard battles with chemistry, physics, thermodynamics, and engineering. When I could, I retreated from my math and science textbooks to histories and biographies. Compared with Grant's account of Shiloh in his memoirs, attempting to prove mathematical theorems in calculus was unbearable.

Normally focused on daily requirements, West Point in 1972 felt estranged from the society it was meant to serve. A decade of fighting in Vietnam and a series of scandals like My Lai had degraded the military's credibility with the country, and as cadets we were periodically reminded that we were out of step with the views, values, and lifestyles of many of our generation. On Saturday, October 21, we traveled to New Brunswick, New Jersey, for
the Rutgers football game. We then were bused into Manhattan and allowed our first few hours of freedom since R-Day, but required to remain dressed in our distinctive gray cadet uniforms. Walking near Times Square, a friend and I heard a loud, long honk and looked up to see a forearm and middle finger poking out through a half-opened window of the passing car. As visible symbols, soldiers often receive praise or condemnation, and both reactions feel curiously undeserved. Yet the gap between us and American society was palpable—and disturbing.

Cadets were not alone in feeling alienated. At the end of his tenure as superintendent of West Point in 1974, General William A. Knowlton invoked the academy's historical role as an eighteenth-century fort when explaining to his successor that as superintendent he had spent four years defending “a stockade
surrounded by attacking Indians.” West Point was training officers for an army that had lost its moral footing in the eyes of its country. And it was commissioning officers into an army that valued the ideals its graduates infused into the force but also thought some of those graduates were “
prima donnas and spoiled brats,” in the words of Army chief of staff General Creighton Abrams, who had overseen the drawdown in Vietnam.

If West Point felt like a penal colony, the feeling forged close bonds among cadets. My roommate for the second “detail” in the winter (we rotated rooms and roommates three times a year), and one of my best friends for four years, was Arthur Ken Liepold. It was hard to miss Kenny, and I noticed him early during Beast Barracks. He was an offensive tackle with an expansive frame, kind eyes, and dimples that appeared when he smiled and laughed, which he did a lot.

Like most people, I was drawn to Kenny because he did not take anything or anyone at West Point too seriously, and did not suffer kindly those who did. His legendary devotion to friends, easygoing charisma, and disarming humor were antidotes to the rigor and pomp of West Point.

Another friend I made early was Rick Bifulco. Stocky and quick, Bifulco was a star lacrosse player from Long Island but was built like a boxer from Brooklyn. He excelled in math and engineering but had a wickedly quick wit and a mischievous streak. Success in academics and athletics came easily to Rick, but from the beginning it was clear he valued the intangibles of camaraderie more than anything else. Rick, Kenny, and I became an unlikely but close trio for all four years.