The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education

by Craig M. Mullaney

  After a month the head coach held a wrestle-off to fix the final team. Trent destroyed me, 11-3. The only points I scored were the escapes he allowed in order to take me down again. I shook his hand at the center of the mat and walked off to the indoor track. My knees were raw with fresh mat burns and stung with sweat as I stumbled around the track. With the edge of my sweatshirt I wiped away from my mouth blood mixed with tears.

  “Hey, you okay?” Trent draped his hand over my shoulder.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Just a little mat burn. Good match.”

  “No, seriously, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, man. I just need some time to myself.”

  “No hard feelings?”

  “No hard feelings. The better man won.”

  “Wrong,” said Trent, stopping to face me. “The better wrestler won.”

  I walked another lap or two and then headed back to the barracks for a shower. I closed my eyes and turned the faucet until it stopped. Under jets of scalding hot water, I made peace with my defeat. I had been wrestling for ten years, and although I hadn’t won every match, none hurt so much as this, the final match. I let the steam clear my head and then, after toweling off, I called home and told my mother. We had a long talk, but mostly she just listened. My mother had a talent for making people feel better without saying a word. Focus on something else, she suggested at last. She was right—West Point had no shortage of challenges.

  “Can you tell Dad?” I asked. “I don’t want to tell him.”

  I hung up and was about to walk over to the mess hall when my door swung open. There was Trent and our wrestling buddies, Chris and Jim.

  “We’re going to order take-out. You in?”

  The three of them smiled and punched my shoulder lightly in turn.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I’m in.”

  For the next four years I would eat most dinners, almost every Sunday brunch, and every tailgate burger with these three guys. Every Sunday after dinner Trent and I would go to Mass in the auditorium above the mess hall. When we had weekends off, my father would cart us back to Rhode Island in the big van. We would study together, carouse together, and suffer together through it all. I was the only guy not on the wrestling team, but it didn’t matter to them.

  CADETS REFERRED TO LIFE inside the granite castle as being “in the fishbowl.” We swam around the bowl day after day with no change except the weather. We stood in formation two or three times a day, marched in squares between our barracks and the mess hall, and as Plebes “pinged” to class at exactly 120 steps per minute.

  At first glance the movements of cadets through their daily activities would look as regular and synchronized as a well-tuned watch. By order of the cadet leadership, windows were open and aligned at exactly one clipboard’s height. At a distance, in our gray trousers, black shirts, and short haircuts, we looked like an army of broad-shouldered clones. Every hour an announcement from the central PA system ordained the uniform by reference to a temperature chart. It boomed like the voice of God: “Attention all cadets. Attention all cadets. The uniform is: As-for-class under short overcoats. That is all. Out.” Inside the barracks, off limits to non-cadets, the only difference between any two rooms selected at random were the name stickers pasted in fifteen different locations around the room: below the toothbrush, above the spit-polished boots and antique parade rifle by the door, and hanging on the inspection clipboard. Otherwise, each room was an eerie carbon copy of the next, from the books arranged in height order to the desk blotters whose X’s through each day marched toward graduation.

  Less obvious were the hundred ways we rebelled. The mess hall, far from the public eye, was one of the favorite venues for cadet humor. After the first few months of harassment, the upperclassmen at my table began to get creative. There were milk-drinking contests and white tornadoes (a concoction involving every condiment on the table) to induce vomiting. Then there were the first-aid drills we had to perform when one of us was “hit” on our shirts with a splash of spaghetti sauce. Later, one of the upperclassmen began bringing a gong to the table. At the sound of the gong, we had to ask sports and movie trivia or perform skits we had prepared during study breaks. I had no illusions about my status: I was a dancing bear.

  The best meal of the year was the Christmas dinner in early December. Assisted by the other classmate at my table, that afternoon we delivered cigars and individually wrapped presents for each place setting. We dressed formally in full dress gray, a wool tunic studded with brass buttons, and marched to dinner in a jubilant wave of cadets. To the accompaniment of Christmas carols, our upperclassmen opened their gifts, and we dug into thick slabs of ham drizzled in maple syrup. As the waiters cleared our plates, and against the specific orders of the one-star general who served as Commandant of Cadets, we began singing the “Twelve Days of Christmas,” simultaneously heaving our heavy oak table into the air in a competition to get our Table Commandant, standing precariously on a chair balanced on top of the table, higher than anyone else’s. Across the six wings of the mess hall, four hundred tables soared in undulating waves as condiments spilled into the aisles and rattled off the floor. Captains and majors strained in vain to contain the mayhem. I heaved and heaved with the tune, nearly popping the brass buttons off my uniform and cracking a public smile a mile wide. It was a glorious riot. After dinner we moved outside under the stars, huddled against the cold wind whipping down the Hudson, and lit one another’s cigars, enjoying one of the rare respites from “good order and discipline.”

  On any given night, a thousand amateur comics went to work distracting cadets from their studies. One night, two knocks on our door surprised my roommate and me. A Firstie walked in, possibly drunk, with a burning match and a can of hairspray.

  “Ever see a flamethrower?” he asked us with a grin.

  “No, sir.”

  Without warning he sprayed the aerosol and lit a fireball that nearly singed our eyebrows. He turned around and walked out of the room. Another night, he came by with a box of pizza and asked us if we wanted any. He opened the box at our affirmative response, and before us were a missing section of cardboard and his rather unappetizing slice of male anatomy. A smart Plebe quickly learns not to expect favors from upperclassmen. The first time I accepted a Firstie’s offer to “hang out,” I found myself suspended on two elbows from the doors of an open wardrobe.

  Each exam week featured one of the more extreme rebellions against “the System.” Trent, Chris, Jim, and I had covered Trent’s walls in washable marker with the hundred names, places, and ideas we needed to connect in the ten hours remaining before our world history exam. Suddenly, what sounded like a thousand windows slammed open as cadets rushed to stare down at the floodlit cement quad.

  “What is it?” I asked Trent.

  “Naked Man,” he replied.

  And there he was—a cadet streaking across two hundred yards of open ground wearing nothing but a jock strap, with an officer and cadet on duty chasing him in vain. The quad roared with cheers as he evaded capture. Over the years “Naked Man” evolved into ever more creative exhibitions of flesh. There was “Naked Officer,” involving a stolen officer uniform stripped off in dramatic fashion, “Naked Jedi Warrior,” featuring a light saber made of a broomstick and tactical ChemLite glow sticks, and “Coed Naked Basketball” on the courts between Lee and Grant Barracks. According to legend, Cadet Edgar Allan Poe had found his way out of West Point by a similar prank: arriving at formation wearing nothing but a parade hat, starched belts, and a cartridge box. By day we were industrious models of obedient behavior. At night—well, it was a good thing no one was watching.

  Even parades, in all their pomp and circumstance, masked controlled resistance. Assigned officers stood ready with clipboards poised to grade our performance. The suspense was palpable. Would our bayonets stay aligned at 45 degrees as we marched past the Commandant? Would we shift our eyes, right!, at just the appropriate moment? Drill and ceremony brought out every
officer’s latent Prussian. Meanwhile, whispers between cadets set the betting pool on the number of cadets who would pass out in the heat or lose their unwieldy tar bucket helmets in a gust of wind. One of the moments that confirmed my ineptitude at drill and ceremony took place during an afternoon parade practice. At the command of “Right shoulder, arms!” I lifted my rifle up to my right shoulder and accidentally stabbed with my bayonet a classmate standing in front of me. Frightened to say anything, both of us stayed quiet until we marched out onto the parade ground. It wasn’t long before Donigian noticed the trail of blood streaming down my classmate’s uniform.

  Donigian stated the obvious, “You’re bleeding.”

  “No excuse, sir,” responded my punctured classmate with the tone of sangfroid we were all encouraged to adopt. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

  Donigian escorted him to the hospital, where the medic sewed three stitches into the base of his neck. Back at the barracks that night, Donigian awarded my classmate a fake Purple Heart and ordered me to report to his room every morning for “additional instruction” in rifle drill. My incompetence at drill was more than a frustration. This was different from burning out a car battery by leaving the lights on. Then the only consequence was the silent treatment from my father, too disappointed to even tell me what I had done wrong. Now, armed incompetence had serious consequences.

  MY INEPTITUDE ON THE parade field was compensated somewhat by success in the classroom. After a Catholic education, academic discipline at West Point was a relatively easy transition, but it did have its peculiar aspects. At Bishop Hendricken we had begun class with the Lord’s Prayer. At West Point, class began with us standing at attention and delivering an accountability report to the professor: “All present and accounted for.” Class was our place of duty; unexcused absences were punishable offenses. Nor was exhaustion a viable excuse. It was a four-year battle to stay conscious in class on less than five hours of sleep. Since attendance was mandatory, it was rare to sit in a classroom where there weren’t a half-dozen cadets nodding their heads in a sleepy rhythm. There was an art to avoiding the whizzing hunks of chalk that exploded behind those whom instructors caught sleeping. Professors with combat arms backgrounds were the most creative with their punishments. If they caught you sleeping, they might “slit” your neck with a permanent marker. The message was clear: Stay alert, and stay alive.

  My class took almost exactly the same sequence of courses for our first two years, and all of our homework, labs, and tests were uniformly synchronized. Every Plebe studied for exactly the same calculus or chemistry exam. The cooperative instinct to survive together was balanced by a sharp emphasis on individual achievement. It used to be the case that after each test, cadets’ classroom seats were rearranged in order of class standing. That perversity died along with mandatory equestrian drills. Now cadets had to wait until the end of the semester to learn exactly where they stood in relation to their peers, ranked and ordered to three decimal points of precision.

  Among our first classes was English 102, a.k.a. “Plebe Poetry,” a course apparently designed to suck the soul out of Shakespeare. Literature had been a passion in high school; my wrestling coach used to shake his head in disbelief as I lay down between the stands at wrestling tournaments to read novels, oblivious to the matches, whistles, and screaming parents. If not for extracurricular reading, Plebe year might have extinguished my love of literature altogether. Twice a week I crammed in my room and delivered regurgitated recitations before the class. One by one we mouthed Henry V’s Saint Crispin’s Day Speech: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” Happy few? Didn’t our instructor remember Plebe year? For a full eight points I needed to demonstrate an “informed reading with perfect accuracy and pronunciation; appropriate tone and attitude” of a rather odd assortment of poems. There was Othello’s nostalgic farewell to “pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!” followed by the morbid verses of Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” On the one hand, we were exhorted to woo Andrew Marvell’s “coy mistress,” but on the other hand, we also had to repeat, like Macbeth, that life “is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” And what was the value of mimicking Romeo when such a negligible fraction of us had our own Juliets. Comprehension, fortunately, wasn’t graded.

  Psychology, on the other hand, made perfect sense. Taking the course as a Plebe was an exercise in self-diagnosis. After we read about Ivan Pavlov’s 1927 experiment with a dog and a bell, our workbook exercise was to identify the stimulus and response in a scenario involving a Plebe and a Firstie. Was Plebe year an experiment we were just being let in on? Pavlov hadn’t figured out anything a cadet couldn’t have told him: Every single time I heard two knocks on my door, my heart rate jumped. The double knock was the “neutral stimulus” associated with being flamed by an upperclassman. And it certainly seemed plausible that West Point was really just a large “Skinner Box,” a device designed in the late 1930s to reward rats that performed a desired task with an associated incentive. Stanley Milgram’s Yale experiments didn’t sound far-fetched at all. Asked how far participants would go when asked to gradually electrocute students who answered incorrectly, our guess was close to Milgram’s 60 percent, whereas the average American received Milgram’s results with shock and disbelief. We had implicit faith, for better or worse, in the power of obedience. After class, reading the “Grand Inquisitor” scene in The Brothers Karamazov, I considered whether the fictitious Torquemada was correct in his skepticism of free will. To what degree had I asked for the authority to which I was increasingly bound?

  History, unexpectedly, was my favorite class. In high school I had been so flummoxed by history that I dropped out of the advanced placement course with my head hung low. My West Point professor, a rare helicopter pilot armed with a Ph.D., took history in an entirely unfamiliar direction. High school history had been a sequence of dates and names to memorize. The most common questions began with what, who, or where. This was different. Now, every question began with why or how.

  Difficult readings corresponded to our professor’s high expectations. This was a course of ideas, ideas that had changed history. What did it mean for Albert Einstein to theorize that there was no fixed frame of reference for an observer? Was truth itself relative? He had us read a translation of Voltaire’s Candide, prompting us to challenge Candide’s assertion, repeated after each new calamity that strikes him, “Everything is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.” Was history predetermined? Was any other outcome besides this present possible? More philosophically, how could we explain suffering in an ordered world? Unlike calculus, history was nuanced and subtle. It was the hardest challenge I had ever faced as a student, an intellectual basic training. At the end of the course I decided to major in history.

  FATIGUE MAKES COWARDS OF men. So said a prominent sign inside Arvin Gymnasium. West Point liked to remind us at every opportunity that we weren’t just college students but also future officers. I doubted that any other college advertised its physical education courses as instrumental to developing “initiative, courage, and self-sacrifice.” In order to imbue weakling eighteen-year-olds with the requisite “will to win,” every Plebe took three grueling courses.

  Gymnastics, affectionately dubbed “spaz-nastics,” was the most bizarre of the three. For three months I tried in vain to perfect headstands, handsprings, and trampoline hip swivels. Scored on a scale of 0 to 5 by instructors who must have been trained in Romania, most of my attempts earned, encouragingly, a “high 2.” According to the grading criteria, my performance was appropriately classified as “generally inconsistent,” demonstrating “minimal control, poise, rhythm, and form.” Not surprisingly for West Point, scores weren’t rounded up. The finale of the course involved a combination floor routine and obstacle course that shook the dust out of the old wooden gymnasium, giving participants a telltale hacking cough that was a West Point rite of passage.
If you don’t vomit at the end of the obstacle course, they told us, then you didn’t try hard enough. Hack, hack.

  Plebe swimming was gentle by comparison, requiring only that I drop blindfolded from a ten-yard diving platform in full combat gear and swim across the pool in sodden camouflage. Outside the earshot of our instructors, we called it “Plebe drowning.”

  My career in boxing, the third course, had an ignominious start. Thrust into a class of varsity athletes, I was the runt. We drilled for weeks on combinations of jabs, hooks, and uppercuts before our instructor, a Special Forces major with triceps defined like the turns in a steel cable, opened a battle royal in the boxing ring. If someone hadn’t made him equip us with gloves, he probably would have had us fight bare-fisted. The purpose of the course was less about technique than enduring acute pain. “No pain, no gain,” he chanted as we stumbled into the ring and bludgeoned each other. By virtue of having started the semester on the wrestling team, I ended up in the same boxing section as Trent.