The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education
Page 8
The remaining four jumps followed a similar script of waiting hours for a minute of exhilaration. Almost everyone passed, including a student who broke his ankle on the fourth jump, wrapped it in duct tape, and finished the last jump before reporting to the medics. At the graduation ceremony a grizzly sergeant stood in front of me in a red beret. He took a set of silver wings from my hand, positioned them above my left breast pocket, and hammered them into my chest with his fist. “Congratulations, Airborne.” Despite the welt he left, I smiled as he walked off. Minutes later our formation was running back to the barracks. “I wanna be an Airborne Ranger,” the jumpmasters shouted. With unprecedented enthusiasm we echoed the cadence, most of us aware that we had completed only the Airborne half of that implicit challenge.
AFTER JUMPING FROM PLANES, I studied them. I had earned one of a handful of slots to spend the first semester of Cow year as an exchange cadet at the Air Force Academy, a jewel of glass and aluminum reflecting the purple Rockies in Colorado Springs. I spent most of my time there in a plane or in the classroom learning the physics and aerodynamics of flight. To give me a taste of life as a pilot, the academy sent me to the airfield to learn how to fly an engineless glider. Riding the thermal vents in nearly complete silence was both peaceful and exhilarating. I pasted a poem by a Canadian Spitfire pilot on the opposite side of my flight checklist. One verse in particular summarized the magic of flying: “Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth / and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings . . . . I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung / my eager craft through footless halls of air.” I began to understand why cadets there walked to class with their eyes darting every few minutes to the clouds drifting above.
Despite the delight I took in flying or hurtling my body through clouds at skydiving practice, my future as an infantryman was at ground level. I took my first serious military history courses at the Air Force Academy, including an independent study with a distinguished historian of the Napoleonic Wars. Twice a week he and I argued the merits of Napoleon’s battles throughout Europe. With giant maps spread on his desk, he taught me how to see terrain from a strategist’s perspective.
“See how he concealed this division behind the fog?” he said, pointing to a map of Austerlitz. “Pure brilliance.”
Military history’s most quoted theorist, Carl von Clausewitz, was one of the Prussians captured at Austerlitz. My supervisor contended that this was the fog of war that Clausewitz alluded to in one of his most quoted passages: “War is the realm of uncertainty; three-quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A sensitive and discriminating judgment is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.” Reading Napoleon and Clausewitz, I began to appreciate the intellectual challenges of ground warfare and the vital importance that personal leadership held in wisely harnessing and directing military power.
I studied Napoleon’s campaigns in Spain. Flush with victory in central Europe, Napoleon decided to engineer a coup in Madrid and replace the Bourbon monarch with his brother Joseph, an early example of “regime change.” He expected to devote only a small fraction of his Grande Armée to the occupation of Spain. In fact, within two years more than half of French combat power was tied up on the peninsula. How, I wondered, had the best military mind of his age made such a disastrous mistake?
For one, Napoleon had drastically underestimated the degree to which the Spanish would resist foreign occupation. Small groups of irregular soldiers banded together and began the first insurgency in modern military history. It was Lord Wellington, the British commander who aided the Spanish resistance against their common foe, who coined the term “guerrilla” to describe them. Geography also conspired against the French: “The entire country was intersected by steep mountain ranges where roads were virtually nonexistent, much of the countryside was practically barren, and the whole terrain was more suited for guerrilla than regular warfare.” Napoleon had failed to adapt to the guerrilla tactics, insisting on brutal reprisals against sympathetic villagers that only served to swell the insurgency with fresh volunteers. In a major reversal of Napoleon’s fortunes, guerrillas managed to force the surrender of more than eighteen thousand French soldiers in a single day near the town of Bailen. Where organized Prussian corps had failed to stop Napoleon at Austerlitz, untrained irregulars succeeded in Spain. Five years later the French limped off the peninsula a quarter of a million soldiers weaker.
After the semester at the Air Force Academy, I returned to West Point. I took several history courses, including a required survey of modern military history. Our reading measured in the hundreds of pages per week, everything from the Pacific campaign in World War II to Mao’s principles of revolutionary warfare. Oddly, in retrospect, I took just one paragraph of notes about the Russians in Afghanistan, whose experience with mountain guerrillas had been as unsuccessful as Napoleon’s.
The most compelling assignments had little to do with tactics or strategy, however. Instead, I was drawn to the memoirs of other soldiers. My curiosity had become more and more amplified as my future came into greater clarity and proximity. I wanted to know what combat was like internally. Reading Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, I wanted to know where he found the resolve to keep fighting in the trenches. What did he think of his officers? Was there anything they could say or do to make his war less horrible? To understand the ferocity of fighting in the Pacific, we read E. B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, recounting his experience as a Marine. According to Sledge, he “had gradually come to doubt that there was a place in the world where there were no explosions and people weren’t bleeding, suffering, dying, or rotting in the mud.” And yet he kept fighting. How? And why, after smelling the stench of rotting corpses that couldn’t be buried, did he conclude that, all things considered, he would do it again?
For Vietnam we read James McDonough’s Platoon Leader, the memoir of a West Point graduate guarding a strategic hamlet. Considering that everyone in our class would eventually lead our own platoons, this was the most relevant selection. What was war like for the leaders? Were the officers ever scared? At least according to McDonough they were. He wrote, “The absence of fear in the face of combat would be a suspicious abnormality of character.” His biggest fear was of failing to protect his men, of making some mistake that might kill his platoon. And that concern, for McDonough, came in direct conflict with the imperative to repeatedly send his squads on dangerous missions. Reading a West Pointer’s account of combat also raised the question of whether West Point had prepared him (and, by extension, us) for war. Was he ready? His answer, that he was better trained than most but still not ready, was unsatisfying. I couldn’t accept his assertion that the line between skill and chance in combat was ill-defined. If he had killed his platoon, would he have considered it failure or bad luck?
Later in the semester I had my first opportunity to view a real battlefield, although its guns had been quiet for sixty years. The History Department offered history majors the chance to spend their spring break studying military history in Normandy, France. After nine years of French, I leaped at the chance.
I GAZED OVER THE lip of the cliff. Ten stories below, breakers smashed at the rocks like sledgehammers. The face of the cliff was almost vertical and wet shards of stone gleamed in the sunlight. The wind swept up and past me, whipping my coat and chapping my lips. I could taste the salt. No way, I thought. There was no way a group of soldiers could ascend a cliff like that under fire. I knew they had, of course, because the large monument behind me said so, but it was nevertheless a ridiculous and audacious proposition.
In the early morning of June 6, 1944, a force of just over two hundred commandoes from the U.S. Army’s 2nd Ranger Battalion climbed the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc, precipitously poised between the D-Day assault forces at Omaha and Utah Beaches in Normandy, France. After defeating impossible odds to gain this strategic foothold,
the Rangers repelled German counterattacks for over two days, reducing their numbers to fewer than fifty Rangers capable of continuing the fight.
Before our group of history majors and instructors left West Point, we had watched director Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, his portrayal of the invasion. The opening sequence of the film had left me nauseous. The Higgins boats ferrying troops ashore were bullet magnets. As soon as the ramp opened, vicious German machine-gun fire shredded the first ranks. Soldiers jumped over the sides of the boats to avoid the targeted funnel at the ramp, some drowning as bullets pierced their lungs in the water. On the beach, limbs flew through the air, severed by mortar and artillery rounds. The visceral horror that Spielberg managed to capture on film was so graphic that some viewers had protested airing the film on network television. This was what I was signing up for as an infantry officer. The historian in me wanted to examine the German bunkers and the exit ramps leading off the beach so that I could better understand the terrain that drove the strategy. The future platoon leader in me was less analytical. I wanted to be there, to imagine for myself what war was like.
When I had the chance at Omaha Beach, I waded out into the frigid water in my jeans and sneakers. The waves slapped at my knees. My toes turned numb in my wet socks. With the surf tugging me at my ankles, I turned around and looked at the five hundred yards of beach I would need to cross before assaulting German pillboxes on the bluffs. I imagined being pinned down by enemy fire and watching my company stumble through a nightmare. In the film, Captain Miller, Tom Hanks’s character, is asked by a corporal, twice, “What do we do now, sir?” That’s what all this boiled down to: What do we do—now—sir? What would I say?
I turned for answers to one of the officers leading our trip. Lieutenant Colonel Guy LoFaro was one of the smartest history professors in the department and also one of the toughest. He knew a thing or two about courage. A Ranger himself, LoFaro had fought at Grenada in 1983. Several years later, when he was a major with the 82nd Airborne, a crazed gunman had opened fire on a formation of soldiers exercising at Fort Bragg. Unarmed and wearing gym clothes, LoFaro had charged more than 150 yards to assault the sniper’s position. When he was ten yards away, he took a 5.56-millimeter tracer round to his gut. Special Forces soldiers eventually wrestled the sniper to the ground. He pled guilty to premeditated murder and received the death sentence. After five major surgeries and a forty-five-day coma, LoFaro survived and was awarded the military’s highest peacetime medal for valor.
“How do you know how you’ll handle combat?” I asked.
“You don’t,” he responded. “You’ll never know until you’re there.”
He paused and looked out over the cliff at the rollers drifting inexorably toward the shore. I nodded slowly as he discharged wisdom in measured, thoughtful bursts.
“What you know for certain is that it will be chaotic and loud, and you’ll be ready to piss in your boots. You’ll be more scared of letting down your men than anything the enemy’s gonna do to you. And then you’ll lead from instinct and judgment. That’s the price of a salute.”
Later that week we had a tour of the American cemetery on the bluffs overlooking Omaha Beach. I separated from the group and wandered off by myself.
Eleven thousand white crosses were arranged in perfect rank and file. A cold mist crept through the pine trees, dampening the rustle of needles. Underfoot, my shoes crunched the gravel path as the surf crashed faintly below. The mist thickened, creeping slowly from the water and through the ranks of crosses, and for a moment it seemed that it wasn’t the mist that was moving. The crosses themselves were marching again, toward me.
6
Class Dismissed
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
SAMUEL BECKETT, “Worstward Ho”
I KNEW ONE THING, I CONCLUDED: I DIDN’T KNOW enough. I hung my head and contemplated the disaster before me. I was in the middle of my last mandatory summer training period before beginning senior year as a Firstie at West Point. This last training evolution placed me as a so-called third lieutenant, leading a platoon in a real Army infantry battalion at Fort Lewis, a sprawling base southwest of Seattle. The exercise I was fumbling was my first opportunity to lead soldiers in a simulated infantry maneuver. It wasn’t pretty.
Half of my platoon was dead or wounded during a simulated raid on a chemical weapons lab. Everything was going well as we spread out from the helicopters and rushed toward the buildings. When we began our final assault, the “enemy” released smoke canisters considered to be nerve gas. I gave the signal to don our gas masks, and we continued the assault. What I hadn’t realized was how much the gas masks would slow us down. It was like running with half a lung. As my soldiers’ body temperatures spiked, they began falling down with heat cramps. There was enough water in our canteens to survive, but I had overlooked one small critical detail. In order to drink from the canteen with a gas mask, we needed a special attachment on the canteen cap. The problem is that 99 percent of the time, when we weren’t drinking from gas masks, the little attachment had a tendency to snap off. On a previous mission I had had the platoon dutifully tape down every single canteen cap, fixing one problem but creating another, much bigger problem. One by one as we dehydrated, we found it impossible to tear off the tape with our thick rubber gloves. I panicked as the situation deteriorated, making matters worse. It wasn’t long before our numbers shrank to the technical definition of “combat ineffective.” The real platoon leader, shaking his head in disbelief, blew his whistle and canceled the rest of the mission.
“Cadet, you damn near killed the whole platoon.”
“No excuse, sir,” escaped my mouth instinctively, and I stared at my boots for a second or two.
In a strange coincidence, I was training with the same unit whose audacity had won it fame on the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc in Normandy. The 2nd Ranger Battalion was one of the Army’s premier infantry outfits, stocked with handpicked soldiers and officers. Their standard of physical fitness was almost superhuman. Every morning the real lieutenants took turns running me into the ground. The lieutenant who had unwisely allowed me to direct his platoon in the raid was the fastest of the bunch. A thirty-seven-year-old former sergeant, he ran half marathons every weekend “just for fun.” When he took me out on “short” runs of eight miles or so, he pushed a six-minute-mile pace. My pride had to step in where my lungs gave out, usually at the sixth mile. The brains in the unit also surprised me. One officer had a Ph.D. in physics. Four of the soldiers in my platoon had Ivy League SAT scores. Every officer and nearly every soldier in the battalion wore a Ranger tab.
The unit’s training regimen was intense. When we shot at the rifle range, soldiers burned through thousands of rounds until a perfect shot was instinctive. When that got easy, the lieutenant introduced new levels of complexity, from shooting at night at moving targets to obstacle courses designed to add heart stress to marksmanship. Convinced that he had the best marksmen in the company, he took it one step further with high-speed paintball matches. As we raided an airport hangar at Lewis, I took a round right to the nose. It knocked me to the ground, and blood gushed from the cut it left. Standing over me, my lieutenant rubbed salt in the wound.
“That’ll teach you. Imagine what a real round would feel like if you forgot to look up a stairwell before charging up it like John Wayne.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re going to be a platoon leader—the brains of the platoon. Think first.”
What had amazed me at Pointe du Hoc was the courage demonstrated by the Rangers. Boldness seemed to be all that mattered. After a month with the 2nd Ranger Battalion, I realized I was only half right. Deliberate planning required smarts. Execution required practice. Details counted. Courage mattered only if you got those elements right. With that realization I returned for my last year at West Point with a new commitment. There was a lot to learn before I would be ready to take a platoon.
The only consolation for the sleepless nights was sharing them with a great roommate. In a lucky draw, I bunked with Bill Parsons. I had had a few classes with Bill and his twin brother, Huber, but I didn’t know him well before we worked together on staff. His reputation preceded him. Bill was the number one cadet in the entire class, an academic star in international relations, fluent in French and Spanish, quick-footed, and hardworking. Bill had grown up in Miami but was the furthest thing from flashy. He had the quietness of sincere humility. Bill and I became close friends, burning the midnight oil as we wrote plans for the Corps of Cadets. It wasn’t all work: When the stress level peaked, we joined forces in water gun battles in the hallway, charging into Liz’s room and dousing her with two gallons of ice cold water. Before parades, we would play the soundtrack to Braveheart at top volume and pretend we were strapping on kilts, axes, and shields rather than heavy wool tunics and wooden rifles. Our obsession with Braveheart , Gladiator, and Saving Private Ryan reflected the decision we had both made to become infantry officers after graduation. We were eager to fast-forward through nine months of inspections, parades, and engineering classes. West Point’s challenges were prosaic by comparison with the exposure we had each had to the Army beyond our isolated campus.