Duty First

by Ed Ruggero

  In order to be respected among his colleagues who wear stars and run the Army, in order to be a voice among the other major commands, whoever occupies the big office in Taylor Hall must have commanded at the highest levels. Christman led an engineer company in Vietnam, a battalion in Germany, and several directorates in Washington before becoming the commanding general of Fort Leonard Wood and the U.S. Army Engineer School, responsible for training all the Army’s combat engineers.

  “And even all that isn’t good enough,” Weart says. “The guy has to connect with the cadets if this place is going to run well. And not everyone can do that.”

  Weart mentions a few names. Howard Graves, Christman’s predecessor, “acted like he was afraid of cadets.”

  Dave Palmer, who was Superintendent from 1987–1992, was also incapable of connecting with the cadets, staff, or faculty.

  “No personality,” Weart says. “Christman has it all. The cadets love him.”

  Christman needs all this influence because of the paradox of leadership at his level: He has very little direct control over what happens at West Point. He leads by keeping focused on the mission, by providing opportunities for his subordinate leaders to make things happen, by setting the course. This hands-off approach takes imagination and energy. It also takes more than one man’s share of self-confidence, and no small amount of courage.

  Outside the administration building, Thayer Road is awash in gray uniforms as hundreds of cadets head back from class. General Christman steps outside, then makes a little clicking noise. He is doing exactly what the most junior instructors do: he tries not to be outside when the street is full of cadets, because they all salute and they all want him to salute back, one at a time.

  An academy van is parked by the curb in front of Taylor Hall, and two NCOs stand by the open door. Christman greets them by first name; they call him “general.” One of the NCOs gets the two-handed shake.

  The van crawls slowly through the area. Most traffic is banned here, so the cadets walk in the street. They also salute—there is a license plate with three stars on the front—and Christman waves back, like a popular mayor. He says aloud the names and sports of a half dozen cadets he sees, and every cadet he names is a Corps Squad athlete.

  The only criticism of Christman commonly voiced among the faculty and staff is that he focuses too much on Army sports and Corps Squad athletes.

  His visit to the Mess Hall earlier that day was for the express purpose of congratulating the women’s basketball team. On the way through the crowd, Christman stopped to chat with two huge cadets, both football players. After greeting the basketball players he waded through the crowd to a far corner of the huge room to say hello to the hockey team.

  Asked if the Superintendent knows any cadets who aren’t athletes, his aide, Major John Moellering, hesitates before answering. It could be that the question has not occurred to him before.

  “Well, he knows the chain of command,” Moellering says. “The brigade staff. And the Honor Committee.”

  Much of this criticism of Christman comes from the academic side of the house. According to one professor, at every briefing of the staff and faculty, the Superintendent trots out various Corps Squad captains and sports stars. “But I couldn’t tell you what the top-ranked academic cadet looks like, or who the scholarship winners are.”

  In a meeting with the presidents of West Point’s alumni organizations, who gathered at the Academy in August, Christman spent nearly forty minutes of his hour talking about sports facilities. To dramatize the need for new locker rooms in the football stadium, he used orange traffic cones, set up on stage, to show the size of the shower room used by the football team.

  Another of his slides showed Army’s record against Navy for the last few years: the cadets performed below .500 across all Corps Squad contests.

  “Only in one year since 1970 has Army won more than half its contests with Navy. I’m here to field competitive teams on the fields of friendly strife,” Christman told the audience of alumni.

  At one point in the briefing Christman put up a simple, two-axis graph showing how West Point’s sports facilities have declined in quality since he was a cadet athlete in the early sixties. One line on the graph shows how the facilities of civilian universities have improved in that same period. He offered no explanation as to the source of the information. Then he turned to the audience and said the graph is “subjective”; he made it up to illustrate his point.

  Christman then showed the alumni photographs of the decrepit rifle and pistol range, the medieval locker rooms the track team uses, the overcrowded weight room. He compared these to photographs of the same facilities at Navy and Air Force, which are sleek and modern.

  Christman insists that the facilities directly affect recruiting because they have a negative impact on candidates who visit West Point.

  “Does this look like it belongs to a school that’s serious about athletics?” he asked the audience as slide after slide went by. “Modernization of our sports facilities is a nuclear arms race with civilian universities.”

  That kind of statement makes many people at West Point shake their heads in amazement at Christman’s priorities. But the Superintendent knew his audience, and he knew his opportunities. There would be no modernization of sports facilities unless the alumni coughed up the money. Near the end of his talk, he held up a photocopy of an article that had appeared in Sports Illustrated magazine, a piece entitled “Seventy-Six Things Right about Sports.”

  He paused, looked down at the page in his hand, then up at his audience.

  “Army versus Navy in anything.”

  The van drops him at the Officers’ Club, and the Supe hustles down the steps to the barbershop. He greets the young woman barber as he does everyone: big smile, eye contact. “How are you? Good to see you.”

  “Be careful you don’t break your comb in that really thick stuff on top,” he says, patting his nearly bald head. The barber smiles, clearly charmed.

  As he sits in the chair, Christman considers John Norton’s prescription for growing leaders: You watch em, you coach em, you trust em.

  “I would say you have to turn that around,” Christman says as the barber snips at his thin hair. “And put trust at the top. The leader has got to engender a feeling of trust in his subordinates; they have got to trust him or her. That’s how you build a cohesive unit—trust between the leader and the led. It comes from the confidence the subordinates have in the competence and character of the leader, in his ethics, in his integrity. The troops pick up on all that stuff right away, and they can spot a fake instantly.”

  Like Abizaid, the Commandant, Christman believes that people have to have the opportunity to run things on their own. In his own career, he learned more when he was allowed to “run with the ball.” Now, as Superintendent, letting his subordinates run with the ball means he has to be willing to support them when they fail.

  Christman had a chance to affect the command relationship Army-wide when he served with the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, the agency that spells out how training is to be conducted. He was concerned about commanders being in too deep, about two-star generals hammering subordinates four levels down about the most minute details of training and maintenance.

  “They took a good idea—check on things—and carried it to a ridiculous extreme. That will squash initiative. It’s antithetical to what we’re trying to accomplish. We want to have comfort with ambiguity. The more you resist that, the more inconsistent we are with the current environment for junior officers.”

  “When I was a firstie on the Beast detail, I was in charge of the R-Day ceremony on Trophy Point,” he says, describing the swearing-in ceremony conducted for the new cadets. In rehearsal with the cadre, Christman says, “I bollixed things up. I was trying to move people; they were all in the wrong positions; it was a mess.”

  “The officer in charge was a Major Rhyne. He let me go long enough so that I could see what I had
done. Then he said, ‘Let me step in.’ And what he meant was let me step in and help you without making you feel like an ignoramus.’ And he did a couple of small things and bailed me out. He let me go far enough to learn the lesson. What I admired most was how he made the corrections. Very mature, nonthreatening.”

  “Later on I had a similar experience introducing the Superintendent, General Lampert. I mispronounced his name, and he came up to me and said—very quietly—‘Dan, just remember, it’s with a p, not a b.”

  Christman smiles at the memories, but these are more than just good stories, they are part of what has shaped his near fanaticism about the interaction between leader and led. If he beats a drum other than Army sports, it is this: leaders respect their subordinates, and demanding does not mean demeaning. Christman and the recent Commandants have forced an evolution in the Corps of Cadets. It is his handiwork that guarantees that plebes are stressed without personal, demeaning attacks.

  When his haircut is finished, Christman thanks the barber and heads out into the cold. The sunshine has warmed some of the sidewalks, melting ice and leaving dark streams of water on the sidewalks. He crosses the cadet area and enters the front doors of Quarters 100.

  Christman strides into a coatroom as large as some of the living rooms in on-post junior officers quarters. There are racks of hangers; sports equipment fills the corners; a “Beat Navy” pennant is tossed on a shelf top. It looks like the mudroom of a house full of active teenagers.

  Christman greets the household staff and asks that lunch be served in a sunny breakfast room just off the walled garden. Outside the big windows, the upper floors of the cadet gymnasium are visible above the brick wall. One wing of MacArthur Barracks looms over the southern end of the garden.

  “We have to keep in mind that we’re not just preparing these cadets to be lieutenants. They’re going to be stepping up to the plate in 2024 or so to run the whole army. How are they going to handle terrorism, anti-narcotics, the nuclear threat, as well as be able to fight in regional conflicts?”

  The sandwiches are tuna fish and lettuce on wheat bread; they come out on glass plates wrapped in plastic. There are Diet Cokes, and ice in glasses from the Class of ‘99 Ring Weekend. The class crest is engraved on the side of each tumbler.

  “Our world, the world we graduated into, was bipolar,” Christman says. “One of my biggest concerns is that we turn out agile thinkers, because the world isn’t so simple anymore. We have to emphasize creativity and nonlinear thinking.”

  He swirls his Coke in the glass. The Academy motto, Duty, Honor, Country, visible on the side, makes it the perfect prop.

  “And we have to do that while holding to these classic values.”

  Christman spends less than ten minutes at lunch. He thanks the staff, then heads to the front of the big house. The Lee Room, just off the entrance hall, is set with thirty-some folding chairs, and the room is big enough that it doesn’t seem crowded. There are plates of cookies on the low tables. A large oil painting of Robert E. Lee in his U.S. Army uniform hangs above a fireplace with a green marble mantel. This is an unfamiliar Lee, dark hair and mustache, no beard, Union-blue tunic. Lee, Superintendent in the 1850s, lived in this house and used this front parlor as an office and reception area. His desk and a clock are in one corner.

  Christman has invited the juniors just back from the fall semester’s exchange program in for a chat. Christman sits on a bench beneath a wide window as the cadets file in; the back seats fill up first. These are some of the top-performing cadets of the class of 2000, who were sent out for a semester to represent West Point and learn from other academies. They went to Navy, to Air Force, to the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, to St. Cyr in France. Christman passes around a plate of cookies, then jokes with the cadets about the privileges they enjoyed at their host schools.

  The cadets are not afraid to either praise or criticize West Point. One young woman talks about how being away from West Point made her appreciate that there are reasons why the Academy does things in a certain way.

  “It helped me fight off cynicism,” she says of her semester at Air Force.

  The conversation ranges widely, from the professional and technical training of Coast Guard cadets, to hazing at Air Force, to how many washing machines are available to Navy’s midshipmen and how much they cost. Christman takes it all in, writes some notes, smiles and jokes.

  Brigadier General Fletcher Lamkin, the Dean of the Academic Board, is in the room; the cadets address many of their questions to him: about late lights, about the after-hours availability of labs and academic buildings. One cadet draws laughs from his classmates and the Supe when he refers to the Dean as “General Fletcher.”

  “Sure, you can call me by my first name,” the Dean jokes.

  The range of the discussion mirrors Christman’s job. He must be concerned with everything from the size of the shower room used by the football players to the demographics of the nation from which West Point will draw its classes for the next few decades. He thinks about the impact of technology on the Army and how best to prepare leaders who can manage information. He will be held accountable for the performance of thousands of lieutenants commissioned during his watch, as they pull duty at roadblocks in Bosnia, safe havens in Kosovo, and maneuvers in the California desert. He must consider how the Army retains officers and how West Point treats its plebes. He knows the record of the women’s basketball team and who is being considered for the captaincy of the men’s hockey team.

  The job could be consuming, and Christman goes about it with an energy that might lead some people to believe it is all he thinks about. But he has some perspective, and a sense of humor.

  At the end of an enthusiastic introduction to a group of alumni, the president of the Association of Graduates spoke of how much Dan Christman loves West Point. Christman rose and told a story on the AOG president.

  “We were at a meeting in Texas, and Jack [Hammack, ‘49] gave me that kind of introduction. He ended by saying, ‘And I know that every night, just before he goes to sleep, Dan Christman is thinking about what’s best for West Point.’

  “And my wife, Susan, who was sitting up front, said, ‘Well, not every night, Jack.’ ”

  EVERY CADET AN ATHLETE

  Spring doesn’t arrive at West Point until April, and even then its hold is shaky. The air can still be cold, but on sunny days, visitors can see the light green tint in the trees creeping up the side of Storm King Mountain, which looms in the distance behind the cadet gym. A plaque outside the entrance to Arvin Gymnasium notes that the facility is named for Carl Robert Arvin, USMA 1965. Captain of the varsity wrestling team, two-time All-American, and first captain of the Corps of Cadets. Captain Arvin was killed in action in October 1967 in Vietnam. He was twenty-four years old.

  Inside the gym, a line of nervous cadets waits outside the door to the third-floor wrestling room. They wear camouflage BDU shirts over PT shirts and shorts. They are in their stocking feet. As they wait to be tested, they nervously chew on protective mouthpieces, bounce back and forth on the balls of their feet, laugh nervously, and study the grading charts lined up on one wall.

  The cadets are all third class, yearlings. This morning’s class is the culmination of hand-to-hand combat instruction: nineteen lessons for the men, nearly forty for the women. Like everything else at West Point, the standards are spelled out exactly: in this case on neatly lettered boards, although the grading here is more subjective than usual. The cadets in line are being graded on how well they protect themselves from attack, and how aggressive they are.

  “Couldn’t we all just get along?” one of them jokes.

  The wrestling room has no windows, and only one light is on, so the sixty-foot square room is quite dark. Add to that the heavy-metal music pounding from overhead speakers at ear-splitting levels. Add to that a maze of wrestling mats turned on edge so that they reach from floor to ceiling, folded into twists and turns like alleys and short hall
ways.

  A Cadet Jones is the first called into the room. Medium build, about 160, with dark hair and olive skin. When he enters, the first thing Jones sees is a dark figure, its arms, legs, and chest girded in pads, face covered with a wire mask. The room is too dark to see anything but the outline of this person. The music is loud enough to rock dental work.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” the dark figure says, approaching in a crouch.

  Jones is not allowed to attack; he must wait to be attacked.

  “There’s a fight, you gotta break it up,” the figure screams above the noise. Jones turns to the right, and, sure enough, two more shadowy figures are pushing and shoving each other, screaming and cursing.

  Jones calls, “Hey, hey! Break it up!”

  Suddenly one of the fighters whirls and attacks Jones with a baton (it’s rubber), which means he can react. He sidesteps the blow, moves in, and delivers two or three quick punches to the face-mask of the attacker, then grabs an arm and throws the assailant to the floor, finishing him off with a flurry of kicks and punches.

  An instructor tells Jones to move on. Just ahead is another padded figure, this one much shorter. The figure is quiet until Jones gets close.

  “Hey buddy, hey buddy,” she repeats, over and over. She’s annoying enough to want to hit, but she hasn’t struck, so Jones can do nothing. As he turns left into a narrow alley between the wrestling-mat walls, the short figure follows Jones, badgering him, jumping up and down, touching his elbow. Just ahead, another padded figure comes out of the gloom, this one with a bigger stick. Maybe even a bat.

  But no one has said stop, and the annoying little bugger is still at Jones’s elbow. “C’mon, c’mon,” the figure in the alley screams, brandishing the big stick. “You want a piece of this? You want a piece of this?”

  Jones steps to his right, hugging the wall for protection. He glances back over his shoulder at the bouncing follower, jumping up and down like a hopped-up troll.