The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education

by Craig M. Mullaney

  Ranger School demanded that candidates understand how to write combat operations orders, the tactical plans written at a mind-numbing level of detail. I composed and briefed orders every week until I could rattle off plans without any note cards. “It’s all about confidence,” my mentor, Major William Ostlund, said repeatedly. A flawed order delivered on time and with confidence always beat an otherwise perfect but mumbled order. Ostlund told me I would rarely have time in combat to prepare ten-page orders. More often, he said, I would brief a plan conceived in fifteen minutes off a map spread out on the hood of a Humvee. The value of more detailed planning at Ranger School was in conditioning my mind to anticipate contingencies and instinctively take account of details.

  A week after I completed the Boston Marathon, Ostlund surprised me with a mandatory physical fitness test. A high score was a prerequisite for Ranger School. At that point I could barely walk on my bruised feet. I met him at 5:30 a.m. by the train tracks. Lights were just coming on across the Hudson River in Garrison. As I stretched my cold muscles, Ostlund turned to me.

  “Don’t expect the Ranger instructors to cut you any slack for being a Rhodes scholar. If you’re going to pass Ranger School, you’d better be able to get through a PT test with all the odds stacked against you.”

  It was a prophetic warning; I ran my two miles as fast as my sore feet could move and puked as I crossed the finish line.

  “Just weakness leaving the body . . .” Ostlund smiled.

  Training for Ranger School and preparing for Oxford occurred in parallel. I was just as unprepared to live by myself at a foreign university as I was to pass a guerrilla warfare course. For four years West Point had taken care of nearly every domestic chore, all in an effort to keep us focused on the serious business of academics, leadership training, and physical conditioning. I had no idea how to cook, had never done my own laundry, and my wardrobe consisted of two pairs of jeans and khakis and a few polo shirts. I had never balanced a checkbook or learned how to budget.

  Major Nagl’s wife, Susi, one of my history thesis advisors, took on my cooking deficiency. Twice a month I walked over to their apartment with three other cadets and took turns stuffing quail, distinguishing shallots from onions, and flambéing Bananas Foster. For months it looked as if I would starve in England. One night I made a mess of the pears I was supposed to peel before poaching.

  “Craig, what did you do to those poor pears?”

  Susi looked at the knife in my hands.

  “Oh, dear,” she exclaimed.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “You’re using the blunt edge of the knife.”

  “Right.”

  “That’s okay. We’ll just make a sauce. Good try, though,” she added.

  To my credit, I was adept at making coffee, and Susi taught me how to top it with homemade whipped cream laced with Kentucky bourbon. As valuable as the survival cooking lessons were the tips for choosing wine (Rule #1: Juice comes in boxes, not good wine). Susi had been on the Oxford varsity wine team. Back then she could tell the color, vintage, grape varietal, and year of six different wines—blindfolded. At this stage, distinguishing white from red was a challenge for my taste buds. I added wine tasting to my growing list of Oxford goals.

  One Saturday I woke up at dawn and ran beside my company’s team as they completed an all-day endurance course. After ten miles of running in jungle boots with a rucksack filled with eighty pounds of books, I collapsed facedown on my bed. My knees were flashing beacons of pain. I had broken the cardinal rule of military training: understanding the difference between hard and stupid. I awoke five hours later and drove with Trent, Jim, and Chris to New York City. We checked into our rooms at the University Club and changed into full dress gray, the most elaborate cadet uniform in our arsenal. This was Charlie Hooker’s idea of a proper pregraduation send-off, the last big night for “his” cadets before we scattered to the four winds. Trent and Jim would head to Germany and Chris to Kansas.

  The door to our private dining room opened, and Charlie’s fellow West Point bankers greeted us in tuxedos. We began with vodka martinis and Beluga caviar, graduated to exquisite veal scallops and 1985 Bordeaux, and retired to the billiards room with Cuban cigars and vintage port. As the night grew late, the old grads sent us to Greenwich Village with a driver and town car. Driving through Manhattan with the windows open, surrounded by friends, and buoyed with spirits, I was on top of the world. Twelve hours before I had been marching with an eighty-pound rucksack on my back. Five weeks later I would be facedown in mud.

  GRADUATION WEEK ARRIVED AS the boxes I packed for Oxford steadily climbed to the ceiling. Next to the crates of books were duffel bags stuffed with gear I would need for Ranger School. The two destinations couldn’t have been any more different. Fortunately, my father had arrived with his eight-passenger van to help me move. Even after four years of military training, I still wasn’t allowed to pack the van. Like lawn mowing, egg frying, and car washing, this was a skill over which my father believed he had a monopoly. The rest of the family tagged along for several days’ worth of award ceremonies and parades. My mother and father couldn’t stop smiling, despite the unsparing heat. My sisters, Bridget and Kelsey, swiveled their heads at every well-built cadet who jogged past. I was so consumed with packing, however, that I nearly missed my brother’s curiosity.

  Although he was the third of four kids and already a freshman at Bishop Hendricken, we all saw Gary as the baby of the family. The rest of us shared my parents’ dark eyes and dark hair. Gary, on the other hand, was a Swede like my grandfather. With dimples, blond hair, and blue eyes, he looked nothing like us. As a cruel joke I told him as a toddler that he was an adopted son. He believed me until my mother provided his birth certificate as evidence of his lineage. Gary and I did share one passion in common: wrestling. He had started at age five and developed a peculiar style characterized by insane flexibility, earning him the nickname “Gumby.” That winter I had watched him wrestle in the freshman state championships. He slipped out of his opponent’s cradle like Houdini and then pinned him. Now that he was older, he no longer smiled incessantly during his matches; instead, he scowled. He had developed a wrestler’s intensity. Maybe we weren’t so different. As I packed, Gary tried on my uniforms and swashbuckled against Bill’s younger brother with my parade saber.

  The first award ceremony we attended was for history majors. My family looked on from the front row of the auditorium as the chair of the History Department called me to the podium. I was the recipient, he read, of the John Alexander Hottell Award for excellence in history. He handed me a beautifully engraved cavalry saber and posed for a photograph. I looked into the audience for Colonel LoFaro, the officer who had taken me to Normandy. He smiled back as I caught his eye. Earlier in the year, LoFaro had taken a group of us on a tour of West Point’s cemetery. “I come here whenever I need to refill my tank of motivation,” he said. It was somewhat morbid, I thought at the time. How could dead West Pointers be motivating? Then he led us to a simple gravestone belonging to a 1964 graduate, John Alexander Hottell III, the namesake of the history award. Hottell had studied as a Rhodes scholar before earning two Silver Stars for gallantry in Vietnam. He died in a helicopter crash while flying to visit wounded soldiers in a hospital. Before he died he had sent his wife an obituary that he wanted published in case he was killed. LoFaro read from the obituary:We all have but one death to spend, and insofar as it can have any meaning, it finds it in the service of comrades in arms. And yet, I deny that I died FOR anything—not my country, not my Army, not my fellow man, none of these things. I LIVED for these things, and the manner in which I chose to do it involved the very real chance that I would die in the execution of my duties. I knew this, and accepted it, but my love for West Point and the Army was great enough—and the promise that I would someday be able to serve all the ideals that meant anything to me through it was great enough—for me to accept this possibility as a part of a price which must
be paid for all things of great value. If there is nothing worth dying for—in this sense—there is nothing worth living for. . . . I lived a full life in the Army, and it has exacted the price. It is only just.

  We all have but one death to spend. On stage I turned the silver scabbard in my hands and curled my fingers around the ebony hilt.

  “THE FIRSTIES ARE SO SHORT...” began Liz Young from the Poop Deck at the center of the mess hall.

  “How short are they?” shouted three thousand underclass cadets at our last breakfast at West Point.

  “The Firsties are so short that they have fewer minutes to graduation than the Plebes have weeks.”

  Just a few hours after the taunting announcement in the mess hall, we lined up in order of class rank to receive our diplomas. Bill Parsons and I stood at opposite ends of the graduation podium, our classmates at attention in long lines behind us. Vice President Al Gore stood between Bill and me. He had just delivered our commencement address, warning about the challenges of joining a peacetime military. It was less than two years before the disasters on 9/11 validated his injunction not to be complacent with our conventional military strength.

  An officer read William Parsons off his diploma. I winked at Bill as he took the first diploma in our class as the valedictorian. His class standing meant he was shipping off to his first-choice assignment with the 173rd Airborne in Vicenza, Italy. His was the path I would have taken had I not won the Rhodes. We looked forward to meeting up in Europe and continuing our conversations.

  At the first syllable of Mullaney, I walked up the ramp and shook the vice president’s hand. As I moved off the podium, I pumped my diploma over my head and returned to my seat. Nearly a thousand names followed mine. The sole moment of excitement was the announcement of “the Goat,” the guy in our class who managed to finish last in the order of merit. As the announcer called his name, the entire class erupted in applause. The reward for his accomplishment was the same second lieutenant bars we received and a bag of 935 silver dollars—one from every member of our graduating class. As the last member of the class sat down with his diploma, the brigade commander called us to attention. We sang the alma mater and swore a commissioning oath to “support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign or domestic.” We took the obligation “freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.” The brigade commander turned to face the class and gave the command we had been waiting four years to hear.

  “Class dismissed!”

  I bent over and flung my cap as high as I could. It joined nine hundred other white caps above our heads like a flock of doves. I leaped across the aisle and gave Bill an enormous bear hug, lifting him off the ground. The white folding chairs toppled like dominoes as cadets bulldozed paths to embrace friends. I found Liz bouncing like a SuperBall. Trent was unusually happy. I think he was even smiling. He bear-hugged me, just to remind me that he was the stronger wrestler. It wasn’t long before families intercepted cadets. Charlie Hooker, impeccably suited in West Point colors, found me first. I reached out to shake his hand, and he pulled me in to wrinkle his suit.

  “Craig Michael!”

  I heard my mother’s distinctly accented voice, employing the first and middle name combination that was always sure to get my attention. This was the only way she ever got my head out of a book as a kid. With a purse in one hand and a camera in the other, it was unclear whether she wanted to take a picture, cry, or give me a hug. She tried to do all three at once. As we hugged, I saw my father behind her. He was crying. His face was beet red, and tears were drenching his beard. He didn’t even try to wipe them away. I had never seen my father cry before, not once.

  7

  Black and Gold

  The first quality of a soldier is constancy in enduring fatigue and hardship. Courage is only the second. Poverty, privation, and want are the school of the good soldier.

  NAPOLEON

  NOT FOR THE WEAK OR FAINTHEARTED. THE BLACK and gold sign at the entrance to Ranger School read like an insurance waiver. One more step with my bald head and stuffed duffel bags was like a signature confirming I understood the risks. A few dozen of us huddled by a nondescript chain-link fence in the pitch-dark. Finding Camp Rogers had been its own reconnaissance exercise. It lay hidden in a dismal corner of Fort Benning’s tangled forests, well beyond view of Airborne School’s 250-foot towers. A friend dropped me off at 4:30 a.m.

  “I hope I don’t hear from you,” he said as he waved me off. “If I do, that means you either got kicked out, died, or quit.”

  Of the three hundred students gathering in the dark, fewer than half would pass the course. The investment advice that Charlie Hooker gave me a few months before became particularly relevant. Past performance was no predictor of future success. West Point graduation was barely eight days behind me, and the starch, shine, and polish were already quaint artifacts. Failure was a distinct possibility, perhaps even a probability.

  The duffel bag on my back carried more than boots and batteries. It also strained under the weight of expectations—my own and also those of West Point instructors whom I knew I couldn’t face in failure. The image in my head of LoFaro shaking his head in disgust was as scary as the barrel-chested Ranger instructors staring at us from the other side of the fence. Returning was as dim a prospect as moving forward.

  RANGER SCHOOL WAS ESTABLISHED during the Korean War. Every year nearly three thousand officers and enlisted soldiers, screened and trained in advance by their units, churned through Ranger School’s meat grinder. The Army designed the course to build combat leaders, mimicking the stresses of combat through severe food and sleep deprivation. Between mock ambushes and raids testing tactical knowledge, students marched insane distances under heavy rucksacks in order to test their stamina and will. By one student’s count, we would march as many miles as the distance between Boston and Philadelphia.

  Ranger School consisted of three successive phases—Darby, Mountain, and Swamp—each building on the foundation set in the previous phase. Those who weren’t successful in a particular phase were either dropped from the course or allowed to repeat the phase as “recycles.” For the small minority who passed straight through without recycling, the course took nearly nine weeks. In the end, fewer than half the class typically earned the right to wear a two-inch black and gold Ranger tab on their left shoulder. Napoleon had boasted that he could get a soldier to risk his life for “a bit of colored ribbon.” With sixty-one days of pain staring me in the face, I had to admit Napoleon was on to something. For an infantry officer, the Ranger tab was an unspoken prerequisite for respect and promotion. For all practical purposes, Ranger School was mandatory. Many commanders refused lieutenants who arrived at their first units without one, telling them in the fashion of the Spartans to return with a tab or not at all.

  “FORTY-FOUR. FORTY-FIVE. FORTY-FIVE. FORTY-FIVE. Let’s go, Ranger. Keep pushing.”

  My triceps shook uncontrollably as they approached muscle failure. Forty-nine was the magic number I needed to hear from the Ranger Instructor (RI) grading my push-ups.

  “Forty-six. Forty-six. Keep your back straight, Ranger. Forty-six. Is that how you do push-ups at West Point?”

  It was a rhetorical question. The ache from my muscles matched the desire I had to reach out and punch this RI. He seemed to be intentionally discounting my push-ups.

  “Ten seconds, Ranger. You’d better move that ground. Forty-seven. Two more, Ranger. That one was no good. Forty-seven. Forty-seven. Five seconds.”

  I heaved my body up with the last reserve of strength in my chest.

  “Forty-eight. Good, Ranger. Three-two-one-time.”

  I collapsed onto the ground.

  “Ranger, you are a ‘no-go’ at this station. Do you understand?”

  I nodded from the dewy grass where I lay exhausted. Yes, I understood. He had just failed me on push-ups, a nonnegotiable prerequisite for joining this Ranger class. I hadn’t done fewer than one hundred push-ups on
a fitness test since Plebe year. By not counting half my push-ups, this RI now had me in a precarious position. Pushing forty-nine more repetitions on exhausted arms was going to be twice as hard.

  “You have ten minutes until your retest, Ranger. Wait over there with the other rejects. Look at it this way”—he grinned—“you’ll be back at the main camp in time for breakfast.”

  I sat down and stretched my arms across my chest. My watch ticked off the minutes. I absolutely could not return to West Point and tell people I had failed Ranger School before making it through the first hour. Maybe it was the anger and fear welling inside me that gave my chest an adrenaline rush as another RI pointed at me and said, “Take two, Ranger. Let’s go.”