In the rare case when the committee’s recommendation was not followed, the corps’ summary justice took over. A year before I arrived, the honor committee had found Cadet James Pelosi guilty of cheating. Pelosi’s lawyer got him reinstated on a technicality, so the corps began to treat him as if he did not exist by “silencing” him. No one spoke to him; he had no roommates and ate alone at a separate table; reportedly, plebes in charge of delivering laundry threw his in the dumpster. Being in a different company, I never knew Pelosi, but I recognized how precarious it was to allow vigilantism among eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds. The corps saw that as well, and banned silencing in 1973.
While honor was sacrosanct to me, other academy regulations were not. On the afternoon of Saturday, October 27, 1973, one day after I finished the sentence from my May slug, I screwed up again, this time drinking in my room with classmate and friend Rick Bowman. Rick and I would go on to serve together in the 82nd Airborne as lieutenants and then for many years in special operations, where he flew in, and ultimately commanded, the elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. But that was later, and for now we were fools in trouble—again.
When I appeared before the commandant’s board two weeks later, the colonel in charge, after hearing the details of my infraction, took off his glasses, paused, and shook his head. “Okay, you have got to explain this to me. You just finished a slug,” he said, tapping my files, “and here you are about to eat another one. Explain that to me.” I had no explanation, but I was glad to hear him asking for one: It meant that I wasn’t going to be thrown out. The colonel could do the math and knew that if he wanted to, he could make the slug big enough to put me over the limit in demerits. I did not offer any excuses and simply explained that I had shown poor judgment. He agreed. Forty-four hours on the Area.
Despite all of my behavioral nonsense, my peers evaluated me well. My tactical officer expressed disappointment in my poor decision making but never wrote me off. Some classmates jokingly compared me to Captain Virgil Hilts, the character played by Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, the 1963 film about Allied soldiers in a German prisoner of war camp during World War II. An irreverent, carefree inmate, Hilts is known as the “Cooler King” because he spends his time either trying to escape or being punished for it in the cooler, solitary confinement, where he plans the next attempt. The comparison was a good-natured honor. Sort of.
My fourth and final slug solidified this reputation. After dinner one evening near the end of our yearling year, I joined Kenny Liepold, Rick Bifulco, Rick Bowman, and a few others in barracks horseplay with unloaded vintage weapons from West Point’s museum. Being yearlings with more energy than sense, we were soon chasing one another down the hallway, clicking the triggers and yelling “bang,” taking cover behind corners, and feigning being hit by rolled-up-sock “grenades.” It was literally sophomoric.
We soon spilled out the back door and ran to the entrance of Grant Hall, a few yards behind our barracks. At the time, Grant Hall served as a place where upperclassmen were allowed to congregate and meet dates. Inside is a long, very West Point–like lounge: dimly lit and filled with overstuffed leather furniture. We achieved complete surprise, running through the door, mimicking the rat-a-tat of guns, tossing socks at perturbed upperclassmen and their dates, doing combat rolls at their feet, laughing wildly. Then we withdrew to our barracks rooms.
As we caught our breath, flashing lights lit up the walls and ceiling of our room from the street below. We looked out the window to see a military police car. Suddenly our door opened and a tactical officer entered, the hallway behind him full of faces trying to catch a glimpse of the fugitives. “Was it you?” he asked. “Yes, sir,” we responded. “You got the weapons?” We handed them over. Disappointed, the crowd in the hallway dispersed. He closed the door behind him and turned to us, only barely concealing his amusement. “What were you knuckleheads thinking?”
In the end, he wrote up the event conservatively and we received a light punishment. But I finished the year having walked 127 hours on the Area.
* * *
When I entered West Point, some Americans still believed the Vietnam War might end honorably. By the time I graduated, South Vietnam did not exist. As cadets, we watched the war teeter and implode, and the historical sweep was not lost on us.
My interest in Indochina began when my father first deployed to Vietnam in 1965, as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the war that summer. Then a lieutenant colonel, my father commanded the 2nd Battalion of the 18th Infantry Regiment, part of General William DePuy’s 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One. Their battalion ran search-and-destroy missions in the Bien Hoa area in South Vietnam, near the Cambodian border. Curious about where my dad was going, I read The Two Viet-Nams by Bernard Fall, the war correspondent and historian who chronicled the French and later American experiences in Indochina. Only eleven at the time, I struggled through parts of it, but from then on I was captivated by Indochina, and I eventually read all of Fall’s books.
The focus of my senior year in high school was a research project on Indochina. Ho Chi Minh, General Giap, Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, Bruno Bigeard, and the other players in the conflict fascinated me. Their outsized personalities and human flaws all converged in the military and political fights of the First Indochina War. The essay ended up well over a hundred pages long. It was not groundbreaking, but I had pursued the topic with an intense curiosity about how the French had failed so spectacularly in their efforts to maintain their colonies and why the Americans and the British had decided against overt intervention in those early years.
While I studied the French war, support for the American one evaporated. Growing up near Washington, D.C., my friends and I went to peace demonstrations in the capital, curious to see the events. I remained supportive of the war but was skeptical of the American war strategy. The echoes of the French defeat, culminating in the disaster at Dien Bien Phu, stuck with me. The war the United States fought in Vietnam was different from that waged by the French paratroopers, for better and worse. As much as the French tried to dress it differently, theirs was a war of empire, and their counterinsurgency was built on untenable colonial foundations. I didn’t think America’s was.
When I was in junior high school in 1968, my father deployed for a second tour, involving bitter fighting in the central highlands alongside our Montagnard allies. Beginning with the Tet Offensive, the upheaval of 1968—explosive civil rights and antiwar protests, the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, Nixon’s election, My Lai—was seared into my young mind. At home I watched my mother endure another separation for a war I strongly suspected she opposed. Mary Gardner Bright was a beautiful southern girl with no connection to the military who had met and fallen in love with a young lieutenant. It wasn’t an easy life, but she navigated six children through two wars with what, even as a fourteen-year-old boy, I recognized was stoic courage.
From the first day of Beast, it was unlikely that Vietnam would be “our war.” In the years before we arrived at the academy, the Nixon administration had steadily drawn down troops, a policy widely supported by the American public. By the time I reported to the Man in the Red Sash, there were fewer than seventy thousand American troops in Vietnam, down from more than half a million only three years earlier. Nixon, like the rest of America, wanted out.
Throughout 1972, the combatants waged bloody campaigns on the peninsula to shore up their negotiating positions that fall in Paris. In October of our plebe year, we watched National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger return from Paris to announce, “Peace is at hand.” But negotiations stalled later that autumn and broke apart in mid-December. That winter, Nixon ordered an intense bombing campaign.
On Saturday, January 27, 1973, North Vietnam signed peace accords with South Vietnam and the United States in Paris, formally ending what at the time was our nation’s longest war. In April 1
975, the corps watched intently from within the walls of West Point as Saigon fell. We followed world events to the degree we had time, but we were first and foremost college students. I never knew who among the cadets were conservatives or liberals; we did not walk down the halls deep in heated discussions about Vietnam or anything else. We were at the academy during the doldrums of the early 1970s, too late to have been ignited by President Kennedy’s idealism and too soon to be bolstered by Reagan’s confidence. Our president was Nixon, and he resigned in shame over Watergate in August 1974.
* * *
Shortly after Nixon resigned, I returned to West Point from summer training and leave. I’d had a good summer experience at Airborne School at Fort Benning, Georgia (where I became qualified as a paratrooper after making five jumps), and then Fort Hood, Texas, with a Ranger unit, and I felt a bit closer to being a real soldier, but at the time I did not know how central being a paratrooper and Ranger would be to my life. I returned to West Point more focused.
But I was carrying baggage. After four slugs and still on the hook to serve the punishment for the last (the Grant Hall raid). With a weak academic record, my future was anything but secure. The implications of my performance in my first two years had been made clear the previous spring when I had tried to take the first step toward what I considered serious soldiering and volunteered to be one of the few cadets allowed to attend Ranger School during the summer break. I was disappointed when I was turned down because of my low academic, disciplinary, and physical training scores. It was a wake-up call.
Soon after returning for the start of cow year, I met my new tactical officer. Then–Major David J. Baratto had graduated from West Point in 1964 and completed two tours in Vietnam, earning a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star and serving with the Army Special Forces. He was aware, competent, and tough—but never petty.
The young tactical officers who arrived at West Point in those years responded to the institution in different ways. Some, even those with combat experience in Vietnam, internalized the spit-and-polish culture of the institution. Others were disgusted that preparing cadets for war meant inspecting the underwear in their bureau drawers. To them, the academy was, to use a West Point phrase, choosing the easy wrong, not the hard right. While I was there, dozens of young officers quit their academy posts.
Major Baratto had scheduled counseling sessions with every cadet under his command in B-1. Until that point, my interactions with tactical officers had generally been positive, but also perfunctory. I was not in handcuffs when I met Baratto, but I had earned a reputation. At that time I was still walking punishment hours for drinking and for raiding Grant Hall the previous spring. I braced for a lukewarm assessment. I expected counseling for my prior infractions and advice that only if I focused more could I succeed at West Point.
“I’ve got your file here. You have a lot of potential and talent, and you are going to be a great cadet,” Baratto said in his soft-spoken manner. “I see you as having a serious leadership position at the academy, and as being a great army officer.” I was stunned. He continued, “I see a lot of potential in your peer ratings, and I think you are going to do really, really well.”
His words were not empty cheerleading. My personnel file included write-ups of my infractions, but also my peer ratings. At West Point, a cadet’s class rank was an amalgam of various scores and evaluations. The quarterly peer rankings on leadership were weighted heavily. In this area, the other members in B-1 ranked me at the top of the company. So while what Baratto said was based on my record, he had chosen to focus on aspects he considered relevant and important—not on my antics.
Baratto knew that I saw West Point as a means to an end and that I was anxious to finish. He held that the academy was a fine place, but more than anything, he addressed me as an officer-to-be, not as a cadet who needed to be lectured on collar stays. At every point in my career I saw people live up, or down, to expectations, and Baratto skillfully lifted mine that afternoon.
I had returned that fall ready to be more serious, and a number of factors, beginning with the confidence of Major Baratto, led my performance as a cadet to surge. I was a bit older, I was tired of being slugged, and I’d learned from my rejection for Ranger School that my poor performance carried costs. Shenanigans ended.
I matched my professional drive with personal focus. Many of my fellow cadets had come to West Point with girlfriends, but often, if a cadet survived plebe year, the relationship did not. I had arrived at the academy with plans to remain a bachelor, to go it alone.
Annie Corcoran changed all that. I first met her at Fort Hood in Texas during winter break in 1973. Our fathers both served there, and we met at a Christmas party organized in the neighborhood. Annie was beautiful, grounded, strong, and quietly but ferociously independent. Like me, she came from a military family. Her father, Colonel Edward Corcoran, had served in Korea as a lieutenant in August 1950. From the Pusan perimeter he had led his tank platoon far into, and back out of, North Korea in the war’s bloodiest year. Later he had served a tour in Vietnam. Annie understood what it meant to date or marry a soldier and had decided not to. But we connected, and she accepted my invitation to visit West Point from her college in Pennsylvania twice that spring. When I went to Fort Hood that summer to serve for a month with a Ranger unit, Annie was a lifeguard at the pool near my bachelor officers’ quarters, and I courted her aggressively. By the end of the summer we were dating seriously and I, who had planned to be the hard-bitten warrior, was in love.
When Annie wasn’t visiting, I often stayed in my room, reading biographies and histories, a passion that I inherited from my mother. A woman of extraordinary energy, when she read, my mother bore into a book and would have to be shaken to look up from the page. Throughout my childhood, she passed me Tennyson, biographies of T. E. Lawrence and John Paul Jones, Greek and Roman mythologies, tales of the Scottish chiefs, and stories of Roland at the pass and Horatius at the bridge. My mother was raised on these stories, and on Scots-Irish stoicism, so that when my father deployed to Vietnam, she not only held down the fort, she made it hum. If she was afraid for her husband, her strength would not allow her to show it. Instead, she changed her world. When Mary started a garden, it became an industrial-size operation; when she engaged in liberal politics in Arlington, she dragged me with her to stand in front of the local supermarket and hand out balloons and flyers calling for better education in the county. My mother was special.
On New Year’s morning in 1971, when I was a junior in high school, my mother woke up feeling sick, although they’d not celebrated the night before. My father, a new brigadier general, took her to the army clinic at Fort Myer. She was swiftly moved to the hospital. By midnight she was dreadfully ill, and a few hours later, in the early morning of January 2, she passed away. It was a shock to the family, and to my father especially. We all missed her deeply, but the impact her loss had on the stoic soldier I loved and admired was tragically evident.
Part of my mother’s legacy to me, my affinity for history and literature, pulled me through my final two years at West Point. Among those military biographies I consumed, Grant’s memoirs seeped into my pores most deeply: “The last two years wore away more rapidly than the first two,” Grant wrote of his attitude toward the academy, “but they still seemed about five times as long as Ohio years, to me.” So it was for me. Cow and firstie years featured more English and history courses, and these played to my strengths. “History 381: Revolutionary Warfare” was my favorite; it was one of the few classes that focused on small wars and unconventional warfare at an academy otherwise stuck in a World War II–era mentality. We studied the insurgencies and counterinsurgencies in Malaya, Algeria, and Greece, all of which I found fascinating. I studied figures like Lawrence and conflicts like Indochina that seemed to carry lessons relevant to being a soldier in the kind of wars I expected to fight.
Beginning in the fall of firstie year, o
ur general order of merit began to matter: It would determine which branch we joined and our first assignment. By that time, my grades had improved over the prior three semesters, and the academy began to weigh more heavily our military performance, where I scored well. Branch selection was dramatic. With my entire class seated in a Thayer Hall auditorium, starting at the top of the class, each cadet stood and announced his pick: engineering, field or air defense artillery, armor, intelligence, signals, or infantry. Each choice reduced the remaining slots available. As slots in other branches ran out, the lowest one hundred or so cadets that year were “ranked” into infantry by default. I had a choice, however, and went infantry. My grandfather, father, and older brother had all worn the crossed-rifle insignia of infantry officers, and I never considered any other option.
As graduation neared, the gears of my life turned smoothly. Annie agreed to marry me, I excelled academically, and, because of my meteoric leap in class rank, after graduation I would be able to join the storied 82nd Airborne Division. I hadn’t expected to be high enough in the class to have a shot at an assignment to the 82nd, so Annie had been studying German in anticipation of going there. But the chance to be a paratrooper and serve in one of the units most likely to be involved in any potential conflict made it an easy decision.
On Wednesday, June 2, 1976, I graduated and my father commissioned me as a second lieutenant. Our graduation ceremony was where we’d begun our cadet experience, at Michie Stadium. As I sat with 834 other members of my class, out of an original 1,378, waiting to receive our diplomas, I realized that I was very different from the seventeen-year-old boy whose friend had dropped him off four years earlier. I wondered if I could, or would, be the kind of military leader I admired, and I was eager to try. When the ceremony ended, in accordance with tradition, we launched our hats into the air and congratulated one another. I rapidly looked for Annie—and the exit. As quickly as possible, I threw everything I owned into the used Chevy Vega I’d bought and set course with Annie down the hill away from campus. As we neared the last bend before the academy gates, I turned to her. “Hey, look back at West Point.”
My Share of the Task Page 4