Duty First

by Ed Ruggero

  Twenty yards from the entrance to Bradley Barracks a young woman, a junior, teaches ten new cadets the fundamentals of drill. The woman wears her hair pulled up tight onto the back of her head. Firm voice, complete control of her material—she is all business. The young woman’s mentor watches from twenty yards away. “She’s ready to pass Drill Sergeant School right now,” he says.

  Sergeant First Class Tim Bingham, a combat engineer in the Army, is the tactical Non-Commissioned Officer—Tac NCO—for Alpha Company. Bingham, a stocky thirty-two-year-old, has thirteen years in the Army, including a three-year stint as a drill sergeant at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. His job is to teach the cadre—the upperclass cadets—about sergeants’ work. In the Army, noncommissioned officers such as Bingham are the doers. Everything that gets done—from teaching a soldier to shoot to making sure a combat vehicle is ready to roll—gets done because some sergeant makes sure it gets done.

  Bingham delights in bringing a healthy dose of Army-issue common sense to the intellectual development of cadets.

  “Joe [a typical Army private] doesn’t care if you’ve got a civil engineering degree,” Bingham says. “He wants to know if you can take care of him … on a six-month deployment.”

  Looking around the crowded and noisy area with some delight, he notes how the cadre greet the new cadets. He summarizes it neatly as “Welcome to the team. This is how we do business.”

  Cadet basic training is run by cadets, juniors and seniors operating under the supervision of U.S. Army officers and non-commissioned officers. Alpha Company has two officers, two NCOs, and thirty-some cadet cadre. Their R-Day mission: turn the 158 civilians about to join Alpha Company into New Cadets—uniformed and marching in some semblance of order—in time for the Oath Ceremony scheduled for 4:00 that afternoon.

  Cadet Kevin Bradley a senior, is Alpha Company’s twenty-year-old cadet commander. He got this job—a choice assignment—by demonstrating his leadership potential and earning high grades in military aptitude through his first three years. Bradley has the fit, scrubbed, and earnest look of many cadets: five nine, light brown hair cut close to his head, blue eyes. He tends to the quiet side.

  “When he talks,” an officer says of him, “the other cadets listen.”

  Bradley describes himself as “pretty much the standard West Point candidate,” meaning he was no stranger to leadership positions even before he came to West Point. In his case that means captain of his high school football and baseball teams, student council president, and member of the National Honor Society. While the admissions office has no checklist of minimum achievements for a candidate, the academy does look for young men and women with “demonstrated leadership potential.” Bradley was a good candidate for success on the day he walked in. In his three years at West Point he has worked his way up through positions of increasing responsibility, supervising anywhere from one to a handful of cadets. This summer is his biggest challenge.

  Bradley will work most closely with Major Rob Olson, Alpha Company’s Tactical Officer, or simply, “the Tac.” Olson, West Point ‘87, has already spent ten years in the Army as an artillery officer. He is tall, loose-limbed, and talkative, given to jokes, Army aphorisms and the occasional profanity. He has an aw-shucks way of talking, as if what he’s saying has just occurred to him and it might not be that important, but, gosh, since we’re standing here …

  Olson and Bradley spend much of the day watching. Their work, the preparation before R-Day gives way to NCO work, which will be handled mostly by juniors. As he stands with the taller Olson, Bradley is learning an important lesson: how to stay out of his subordinates’ way and let them do their jobs.

  By noon the threatening sky has made good on its promise; it is raining. Not in the kind of drenching showers that sometimes visit here in the summer, just an annoying drizzle. Some cadre members have ordered their plebes to wear ponchos. None of the cadre members wear rain gear because whatever keeps the rain out also traps so much body heat that the wearer will certainly sweat through his clothes.

  Major Olson pulls Kevin Bradley aside; together they survey the area.

  “What’s different here?” Olson asks. A few score of the hundreds of new cadets around them are draped in the green plastic ponchos.

  “Some of them are wearing ponchos,” Bradley says. Anyone who’s been in the military more than a day knows it’s called a uniform because everyone is supposed to look the same.

  That’s the obvious answer, and Olson nods. But he expects more from his cadet company commander.

  “What’s going on?” Olson prods.

  “Well, some of the squad leaders decided their people should wear ponchos,” Bradley ventures.

  This is also pretty obvious. The new cadets, part of the culture for less than three hours, are already at a stage when they’ll wear only what they’re told to wear. Besides, most of them wouldn’t have known to look for the poncho amid the piles of gear in their closets.

  On the surface, this seems like a good idea. Common sense. The Army issues rain gear so soldiers won’t get wet when it rains.

  “Right,” Olson says. “Ordinarily, not a bad idea. What’s wrong with it today?”

  Bradley is still thinking about uniformity, about appearances, about how things will look for him and Alpha Company if some high-ranking visitor comes along. He’s still operating at the surface level. Olson could simply tell Bradley what he’s thinking, of course, but Olson’s job isn’t to get Bradley to follow orders (Bradley already knows how to do that.) He wants Bradley to think for himself, at a level higher than “everybody needs to be in the same uniform.” Olson wants Bradley to think like a commander.

  “They’re running up and down to the sixth floor,” Bradley says.

  “Right,” Olson says. “Heatstroke city. So what do you think you should do?”

  Bradley checks the sky. It isn’t raining very hard; his own shoulders are just damp. “Let em get a little wet,” he says with authority.

  “You can always change the plan later,” Olson reminds him. “You just gotta remember to have a plan.”

  Other seniors help Bradley run the company: He has an executive officer, a supply officer, and a training officer. Each of the four platoons has a senior platoon leader, a junior platoon sergeant, and a junior squad leader for each of the four squads. Seniors are first class cadets, or firsties; juniors are second class, also called “cows.” (In the nineteenth century, cadets got only one furlough in four years: the entire summer between sophomore and junior year. Cadets left behind talked about school starting “when the cows come home.”) Until the end of basic training, new arrivals are simply “new cadets.” Those who make it through Beast will become plebes (as in plebeian, the Roman underclass), also called fourth class cadets.

  Beast Barracks revolves around the squad leader and his or her relationship to the new cadets. The squad leader is the focal point of the new cadet’s life: mother, father, counselor, coach, and trainer. It is a difficult, exhausting job, but it will teach the upperclass cadets who hold it the most about direct leadership. The cadets in this role say that their Beast squad leaders had a tremendous impact on them. Now they want to have the same effect on their new cadets.

  Bradley and his cadre members have been here for almost two weeks before R-Day rehearsing the canned speeches and practicing the skills the new cadets will learn during the first half of Beast Barracks. They talk about their own Beast experience like old soldiers who went through this fifteen or twenty years, instead of twenty-four months, earlier. Yet that short time has been enough to make them aware of the changes in West Point’s recent history, in particular the move away from what is now considered “abusive” leadership.

  “No one is going to be in their faces yelling at them when they make a mistake,” a second class squad leader says. “But we’re going to be right there making sure they do things right. That’s harder on them and us.”

  “You don’t want them doing things just becau
se they’re afraid to mess up,” another squad leader says. “You want them to do things because they don’t want to let people down.”

  This theme is repeated over and over again at West Point. The best leaders inspire their followers to want to perform. It is the party line. There is quite a bit of formal instruction on how to treat people with respect. There is even a senior whose job is “Brigade Respect for Others Officer,” a fact that astonishes graduates who remember Beast and plebe year as a time of deliberate humiliation and even abuse. But today’s cadets are not parroting the latest buzzwords. They have figured out on their own, through experimenting and being the subject of experiments, that leading is not about pushing.

  By 2:00 the new cadets have moved into larger groups for drill. They move about the area in the blocklike formations they will use during the afternoon’s parade. The drum beats steadily, bah-boom-bah-boom-bah-boom, the noise bouncing off the stone walls.

  Inside the barracks, it is cooler, but not quieter as new cadets pound up and down the metal stairs. There is tape on the floor, running down the middle of the stairs and splitting each landing. The new cadets have been told to drive on the right side of the line, a precaution to help avoid collisions as they run up and down.

  The rooms, small and Spartan, are designed for two, though most new cadet rooms will have three occupants. The linoleum floor is polished. The windows open on to Central Area, and the drumbeat and sharp commands carry up six stories. On one wall is a single bunk; the other wall has bunk beds. On each bunk are stacked a GI green blanket, sheets, a pillow. On the sink are three toothbrushes, toothbrush holders, bars of soap, plastic soap dishes, cans of shaving cream and disposable razors, all lined up like toy soldiers. Inside the open closet are rucksacks, helmets with camouflage covers, folded shelter halves, pistol belts, all the things that will remind the young men and women that they didn’t choose Notre Dame or UCLA.

  On the desk is a box of Academy stationery: heavy and formal with an engraved Academy crest. The new cadets will be required to write home tonight. There is a small paperback book with a camouflage cover, a manual of what the Army calls “Skill Level One” tasks: all the easiest things a soldier must master. There is also a copy of Bugle Notes, the “plebe bible,” which is full of information and West Point lore, and a paperback study guide of fourth class knowledge. The new cadets will spend much of their summer memorizing information about the Academy (Who is the Dean? What are the names of the Army mules? What are the words to the Alma Mater?) and the Army’s equipment and organization.

  Also on the desk is a one-page letter written by the squad leader for the room’s occupants. Though it appears to have been written in a rush (and would make the squad leader’s English professor cringe), it carries a critical message for the new cadet.

  WELCOME!!! You are now a member of the Good Ole Gang, 4th squad 3rd platoon. I Cadet Jett will be your squad leader for the next three weeks. You have just started to infringe on the beginning of your West Point experience today, 29 June 1998. I as well as the rest of your company cadre (The Aces) are looking forward to working with you this summer. You will experience many new things in your life this summer as well as the future that lies ahead in your road to success at USMA. There will be times that will seem impossible this summer and others that will be more fun. No matter what you are faced with you must stay motivated and work as a cohesive squad to make it through. You will hear me speak of team work quite often the next three weeks, because it will be the key reason for your successes and failures not only this summer, but the rest of your future at West Point.

  The author, squad leader Grady Jett, is a wide receiver on the Army football team. He believes in attitude, practice, and teamwork, and his squad will hear those words over and over in the coming weeks. The upbeat tone of Jett’s letter contrasts with a famous “Welcome” speech delivered to a long line of plebe classes by a now-retired department head.

  “Look to your left and right,” he said. “One of the three of you won’t be here on graduation day.”

  For the first two years, cadets have the option of resigning, with no commitment. They can leave free and clear and owe the government nothing for the two-year scholarship. The decision point is the first academic class of junior year. A cadet who is present at the beginning of that class is obligated to serve for five years after graduation. A cadet dismissed during junior or senior year (for violations of the honor code, academic failures, or as part of a disciplinary action) can be sent into the field Army as a private soldier.

  While at West Point, cadets are members of the United States Army, subject to military law and discipline. They are also on full scholarship, which includes tuition, room, board, medical and dental care, and a stipend of seventy-two hundred dollars a year, most of which goes to paying for books, computers, and uniforms.

  Downstairs, a squad of new cadets is lined up in a single rank facing their squad leader, a young woman who wears her hat pulled low. She leans her head back slightly to peer from beneath the brim. Her charges, who were civilians when they ate breakfast this morning, stand in a straight, evenly spaced rank. They are all dressed in white shirts, gray cadet trousers, and black shoes. (They were told to bring well-broken-in, plain-toe black leather shoes from home. The few who didn’t bother to break-in the shoes already regret it.) The men have fresh, severe haircuts; the women wear their hair very short or pulled up into tight buns.

  “What are your four responses?” the squad leader demands.

  All around them other groups are drilling; there are overlapping marching commands, the heavy beat of the bass drum, now accompanied by several bugles. Other squads and individuals are reciting their four responses, or answering the constant question, “Do you understand?” But this group is intently focused on the woman in front of them. They have known of her existence for only a few intense hours. They don’t know her first name, or where she’s from, or much about what she expects of them. Most don’t know what she can do for them, or even that she has been preparing for this role for weeks, months. Most of them cannot imagine that this apparition of military exactness, with the sharp uniform and erect carriage and command voice, was in their position just two years earlier. They know none of this because no one has told them, because no one thinks it’s important they know anything other than the four responses. And everything about them is focused on answering her correctly. They respond in perfect unison, rattling the windows, oblivious to everything but the need to perform.

  “Ma’am, my four responses are …”

  Captain Brian Turner is the associate tactical officer of Alpha Company. A 1991 graduate of West Point, Turner just finished a year in the Tactical Officer Education Program (TOEP, rhymes with rope). At the end of the summer, he will become the Tac of Company F-2, one of the academic year companies. He is twenty-nine years old, unmarried. During Beast, he is an assistant and understudy to the more experienced Rob Olson. Turner and Olson could hardly appear less alike—except for their uniforms.

  Rob Olson is a tall, thin, and white. Raised in Minnesota, he played one season of hockey at West Point. He is a natural storyteller, full of self-confidence, a man who gives the impression that nothing would rattle him. He has been tested in a variety of field assignments and in Desert Storm. Based on this performance, Olson was promoted ahead of his peers; he pinned on the gold oak leaves of a major a year before most of his classmates. Rob is married to a West Point classmate (now an Army doctor) and is the father of two small children.

  Brian Turner is black and shorter than Olson, with the compact muscularity of a wrestler. In the minimalist language of stage directions, he would be described as eager. Like many of the young officers and most of the cadets, Turner is all energy. He can barely stand still, but shifts his weight back and forth from one foot to the other. In conversation, he swings back and forth from the very serious to a playful broad grin. Five eight, with coffee-dark skin, a native of inner-city Chicago, he is losing his hair pr
ematurely, a look he helps along by keeping his head close-shaved. When he removes his hat for a photo he jokes, “I have so much forehead they call me five head.”

  Tuner, like Olson, has commanded troops. He is eager to marry his army experience with the theories he has learned in the TOEP program. He speech is rapid-fire, full of Army jargon.

  “The cadre has to plan, resource, train,” he says. “Cadets who don’t make the standard this summer don’t get a spring break, so the plebes will be motivated to pass their skills tests.”

  “The focus of the summer is on the cadre. If the new cadets fail, it’s on the leadership. If the platoon is unable to pass, we’ll look at the platoon leader. This is a steep learning curve for these cadets over the summer.”

  Turner walks up the six flights of stairs to where the new cadets of Alpha Company are stowing gear, sorting through uniforms. As the day wears on, the new cadets undergo a visible transformation, going from gym shorts and athletic T-shirts to gray trousers and athletic shirts, to gray trousers and the white uniform shirts they will wear in the Oath Ceremony on the Plain this afternoon.

  “Somewhere in this hallway is a future general,” Turner says. “They’re definitely Generation X, though. They want to know the ‘why’ behind everything. They’re sponges, they want to learn about leadership.”

  He acknowledges that changes have been made in the way basic training is run.

  “Beast is just as hard as it ever was,” Turner says confidently. “Now it’s hard on everyone. I mean, the old grads have been bad-mouthing changes of any kind since MacArthur reformed the place.”

  When Douglas MacArthur returned to West Point from the battlefields of World War I, he was a decorated combat veteran, cited for gallantry. He entertained the idea—considered outlandish by many—that cadets should not spend their summers on the parade field, as they had throughout the nineteenth century, but should have to learn the combat skills required of junior officers. He ran into stiff opposition, especially from the academic board, the tenured professors who saw it as their job to keep West Point as it has always been. The battle is part of Academy lore.