My Share of the Task (6 page)

The Army of the 1970s was particularly hard on commanders. Constrained resources and centralized edicts created an environment that seemed both demanding and limiting. Training was poor, yet units were consumed with mandatory instruction on seemingly irrelevant subjects as well as picayune inspections of garrison-related equipment and functions. Soldiers and units suffered the cost when truly combat-focused activities lost out to things that looked good or briefed well.

Values and integrity were often under pressure. Although the dark days of Vietnam body counts and My Lai were past, small but insidious reflections of corrosive values would surface. Seeking to reduce the visibility associated with having to file investigation reports on lost equipment, many company commanders avoided it by making up shortages through trading or “scrounging.” Similarly, there was pressure to meet reenlistment quotas. At the end of one reporting quarter, our battalion commander revoked an action my company commander had taken to prevent one exceptionally substandard trooper from reenlisting. As a result, the soldier was allowed to reenlist, the unit met its quota, and the Army would suffer that soldier for another tour. Because word of such actions spread quickly, speeches on leadership and values from such commanders often fell on deaf ears.

Appearances were deceiving. I was first impressed, then often disappointed, by some of the flashiest or most macho leaders in the division. And I found that even combat badges were unreliable predictors of knowledge or leadership. Similarly, sloppy appearances and nonmilitary demeanor were not necessarily indicators of flagging professionalism.

Such was the lesson when I first joined Charlie Company and met our company supply sergeant, Sergeant First Class Davis, or Old Dave. A tall combat veteran, Davis had reportedly once been a hard platoon sergeant but had badly injured his leg in a training jump and now limped painfully along, unable even to wear combat boots. As a result he was relegated to the supply room and had developed a significant, overhanging belly. In his rumpled uniform, low quarter shoes, and constant sheen of sweat, he was the antithesis of a poster-paratrooper. But he was an important part of my practical education, and I had much to learn.

A few months after I joined the battalion, Sergeant First Class Davis called me down to his stuffy supply room in the basement of our barracks. “Lieutenant Mac, I'm gonna teach you something here,” he said when I walked in. He thumbed through my platoon's equipment hand receipt, breathing heavily as he spoke. “Here's the hand receipt you filled out. See these columns here? Well, I could go here, here, and here,” he said, his finger bouncing over the page, “and because you signed in the wrong place, you would be responsible for whatever numbers I wrote in.” It wasn't a huge mistake, but I had been careless with the form and left myself vulnerable and potentially liable. “Now I could have done that, but I didn't. I was waiting to see if you were a good guy or not. And I have determined you are. I brought you down here to make sure you'll be more careful in the future. Remember, Lieutenant Mac, not everyone in the Army would do that for you.”

Years later, when relying on intelligence whizzes or speaking with bearded tribal leaders, I'd remember Old Dave, and that leaders don't always look like they stepped off the plain at West Point.

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P
ride in craft was an elusive trait in the post-Vietnam Army, but the sergeants and officers known as jumpmasters had it. Because of the inherent complexity and danger associated with military parachute (“airborne”) operations, jumpmasters, who led parachute jumps in the 82nd, needed absolute expertise in their craft. They had to lead planeloads of frightened paratroopers to perform the essential, unnatural act of leaping from an airplane. As a result, jumpmaster standards were exacting and the 82nd's jumpmaster school had a famously high failure rate. Many seasoned paratroop leaders passed only on their second or third attempts. During the jump process, jumpmasters not only ensured safety but also instilled critical confidence in the paratroopers about to jump. They began to do so from the beginning, with their meticulous equipment inspection of each paratrooper before he boarded the aircraft: Their hands and eyes followed a rapid yet precise sequence of parachute and equipment checks.

In the air, jumpmasters carefully controlled the final minutes before jumps. As we neared drop time, the two jumpmasters stood in the aft of the aircraft and simultaneously gave hand signals and shouted warnings:
Twenty minutes!
The planeload of soldiers, called a chalk since the World War II practice of using chalk markings to connect planeloads of paratroopers with their correct planes, stirred. Helmets went on and even veteran jumpers subtly checked weapons containers and other equipment. After giving the ten-minute warning, jumpmasters remained standing near the rear of the aircraft, one adjacent to each of the two paratroop doors they would control during the jump.

Exchanging a glance to ensure they were in unison, the jumpmasters next shouted,
Get ready!
Hearts pumped. To raise the men to their feet, jumpmasters pointed first to the paratroopers nearest the outside of the aircraft, then to those in the center, or inboard. Raising their extended arms, they commanded:
Outboard personnel, stand up!
Inboard personnel, stand up!
The next commands followed in rapid succession.
Hook up!
Snap hooks clinked as paratroopers connected the static line that would pull their parachutes to open as they left the aircraft.

Check static lines!
Check equipment!
Beginning at the nose end of the plane, each man checked himself and the trooper in front of him.
Sound off for equipment check!
This indicated they were ready:
Okay!
Okay! Okay!
carried down the line until the paratrooper nearest the jumpmaster gave a thumbs-up and shouted, “All okay, jumpmaster!”

With the doors open, the wind and engine roar were deafening, and the final performance began. Each jumpmaster inspected his doorframe for sharp edges that might sever a paratrooper's static line, then moved onto the jump platform, a step that extended about a foot out of the cargo door into thin air. As young paratroopers watched, each jumpmaster bounced on the platform to ensure and demonstrate its serviceability, then firmly grasped the sides of the doorframe and thrust his body as far outside the door as he could without losing his grip. As the wind buffeted his body and contorted his face, he calmly looked around—first for other aircraft or hazards to jumpers, then to the approaching drop zone (DZ). They scanned the ground for the geographic markers that they had memorized as indicators of the distance to the DZ. During the final sequence, they rotated back into the plane and alerted the jumpers:
One minute! . . . Thirty seconds!
With the DZ seconds away, the jumpmasters pulled themselves back inside the aircraft, faced the troopers, and commanded the first jumper,
Stand in the door!
Moments later the light adjacent to the door flashed from red to green and the jumpmaster slapped the first jumper on the rear. “Go!” The first paratrooper disappeared into the darkness.
We shuffled forward and tumbled out of the plane until it was empty. The last one out was the jumpmaster.

It was choreographed ritual, and necessarily so. Jumpmasters were the high priests. In an army where too many leaders hid a lack of competence behind crisp uniforms or spit-shined boots, jumpmasters showed something far more real: hard-won expertise. Over the years, I would watch as confidence and willingness to assume responsibility grew in leaders of every rank when we demanded true craftsmanship.

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T
hroughout my lieutenancy, I was never alone. A year behind me in school, Annie finished college while I was in Ranger School, and after a couple of months to allow me to grow back some hair and become “redomesticated,” we were married in a military ceremony where her father was stationed at Fort Monroe, Virginia. We had no money for a honeymoon and instead loaded our 1974 Chevy Vega and moved into our one-bedroom, $180-per-month apartment in a complex near Fort Bragg. Most of our possessions sat on shelves we made of cinder blocks and wood planks. But it felt right.

In many ways, Annie and I learned together. One Friday night, as a platoon leader, I scheduled a parachute jump, which typically finished after midnight, thus stealing part of the men's weekend. As we strapped on our parachutes, I sensed their resentment and decided to raise morale by suggesting that after recovering from the operation they all come to my place for a platoon party. I did not routinely hang out with subordinates, but this was a moment to build the team. The plan was set, but in the age before cell phones, it was not relayed to Annie.

Although it would be late by the time we would finish the jump and begin the gathering, I assumed I could get home before everyone arrived. But the platoon sent Sergeant Emil Holtz, an enormous mortarman, to the liquor store while the rest of them cleaned equipment. In spite of his looming appearance, Sergeant Holtz was a quiet, cerebral teetotaler. Unsure what the boys drank at parties, he bought a lot of everything with the cash they gave him. Soon thereafter, Annie answered the door in her nightgown, still unaware of the party plan, to find what looked like Andre the Giant, holding clinking grocery bags of liquor, wine, and beer. “LT says we're having a party,” he said bashfully. Others soon arrived. By the time I got home, Annie had already met most of the platoon and made them snacks. Later, she sat laughing and warmly chatting with a soldier's girlfriend, a nice girl who danced topless locally but who had dressed conservatively for the party. Annie's instinctive ability to make others feel welcomed and, in situations more dire, comforted, shone through.

Although when I first met Annie she had made it clear to me that she did not want to date or marry a soldier, I think she was more comfortable in an army family than she readily admitted. From her “army brat” upbringing Annie deeply admired her parents. Her memories, tinged with bittersweet good-byes and uncomfortable moments as the new kid in school, are invariably dominated by funny stories of her and five siblings being packed into station wagons or small quarters. I soon found that Annie had an indefinable quality—call it pluck—that made duty feel like privilege and made our army life an adventure.

In the fall of 1978 I made the decision to apply for Special Forces training. Lieutenant Colonel Dave Baratto, my tactical officer from West Point, was commanding a battalion of the 7th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, and after seeking his counsel, I submitted my request. The reputation of “SF” at that time was mixed at best, but I wanted to become a part of something that long ago had captured my imagination.

Just after I left the 82nd, the chief of staff of the Army, General Bernard W. Rogers, stripped the paratroopers of their maroon berets. To rein in other units that had begun wearing various nonstandard berets and other headgear, General Rogers issued a blanket ban. The loss of the maroon beret, the accepted paratrooper symbol worldwide and a badge of pride, was traumatic for the 82nd. At the time it seemed to me as though Army leadership, despite good intentions, was tone deaf to what mattered to the volunteer soldiers of its own force.

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B
y the time the paratroopers lost their maroon berets, I was wearing a green one. In November 1978, I joined Detachment 714, Company A, 1st Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne), part of the U.S. Army's famous—and, in the minds of some, infamous—“Green Berets.” Created midway through the Korean War, the Special Forces were modeled on the OSS's World War II Jedburghs, three-man teams dropped deep into Nazi-occupied Europe to recruit and lead partisan militias. In Vietnam, the Green Berets played their largest role to date, and stories of their operations and exploits had fascinated me from an early age.

Assigned to a twelve-man A-Team (Operational Detachment A), I became part of a brilliant concept that remains effective today. Manned with two officers and ten specially qualified sergeants, A-Teams were designed to possess skills, maturity, and cultural acuity. This enabled them to leverage indigenous forces, from militaries to guerrillas, in a wide range of missions in a more discrete alternative to larger, more conventional operations.

Special Forces' history was tinged with politics. During the 1960 presidential campaign, members of then-Senator John F. Kennedy's staff sought to burnish his defense credentials. Other senators had associated themselves with
high-profile weapons like the Polaris missile or B-52 strategic bomber. Kennedy would adopt the Special Forces, whose soldiers had worn the green berets illicitly until the fall of 1961, when the new president authorized the headgear as “a
mark of distinction.”

As he explained on June 6, 1962, to the graduating cadets gathered in the West Point field house, Kennedy envisioned that his infantrymen would likely face small, hot, peripheral wars “new in . . . intensity, ancient in . . . origin,” against the “guerrillas, subversives, insurgents” exploiting “economic
unrest and ethnic conflicts.” The Special Forces were the first troops Kennedy dispatched to Vietnam, where they trained the South Vietnamese. As the war escalated under President Johnson, their mission grew and activities diversified beyond training. They became highly publicized, and despite some extraordinary exploits, by the end of the war, controversies dogged the force. Criticisms ranged from being elitist to being “off the reservation” to
Time
magazine's August 1969 damning description—“
enveloped in the sinister”—after the Army investigated the Green Beret commander in Vietnam, along with six intelligence officers, after accusations that they had murdered an alleged South Vietnamese double agent.

By the time I joined the Green Berets in 1978, they only faintly resembled their Kennedy-era forebears. Traditionally, the Army had an aversion to elite units because such units tended to siphon resources, particularly talented soldiers, from the rest of the force. After Vietnam, that resistance reemerged, and Special Forces were allowed to atrophy. Young officers often received terse advice to avoid ruining their careers by joining Special Forces. “So you want to join the Speckled Feces?” an officer in my battalion had put it to me before I left the 82nd.