The two knew they were not volunteering for World War III. Like all sane Americans, they counted on SAC to keep that possibility remote. Anyway, nukes, B-52s, and missiles were not for them. SAC would stand its long watch without the Hagels.
No, Chuck and Tom thought they were signing up for their father’s war, but smaller, like Korea. They had watched Combat on television and seen The Sands of Iwo Jima and The Longest Day at the movies. This Vietnam confrontation looked to be more of the same, with some new stuff like helicopters. Go over there, fight the uniformed enemy—they did call them NVA regulars, after all—and then come home, put on an American Legion campaign cap, and get on with life in Nebraska.
It never occurred to the Hagels, nor to many others, that Vietnam resembled World War II only in the sense that both were wars. What the two men from Nebraska faced would look a great deal more like those grim, ugly, fleeting clashes with the Cheyenne and Lakota. Like their fellow citizens watching at home, Chuck and Tom Hagel had a lot to learn. Their education began soon enough.
CHAPTER 2
This Man’s Army
None of the numbers mean much except one, which reads like craps: 11-Bravo.
PETER TAUBER, The Sunshine Soldiers1
In the beginning was the drill sergeant, and the drill sergeant was with the army, and the drill sergeant was the army. Any U.S. Army recruit learns that in the first minute of the first hour of basic training. It’s sometimes said that there are no atheists in the foxhole. Maybe so. In the foxhole of basic training, all become believers in the hard-won ways of the U.S. Army. And the drill sergeant makes them so.
Hollywood long ago rented a pew in this church. Whether dramas (Sands of Iwo Jima, Take the High Ground, The D.I.) or comedies (Buck Privates, See Here Private Hargrove, Gomer Pyle USMC), movies and television reveled in the inherent narrative tension of often unwilling civilians being turned into proud, disciplined soldiers.2 The U.S. Army drill sergeant and his U.S. Marine Corps counterpart—and frankly, role model—the drill instructor (DI), standing tall in his “Smokey the Bear” 1911 campaign hat, dominated the center ring of the show. He was the star. With him calling the shots, well-worn tropes and clichés followed. Barbers cut thick heads of hair down to bare stubble. Drill sergeants violated the personal space of dazed recruits, shouting and cursing with gusto. Brilliant barracks lights flicked on at oh-four-hundred as an immaculately crisp drill sergeant banged away on a galvanized trash can. Ham-handed, lead-footed new troops, sweating it out in fresh, ill-fitted uniforms, fumbled to march in step and handle unfamiliar rifles. Individual screwups generated mass punishments. Men swung through arduous obstacle courses and banged away on hot rifle ranges. But by the end of the program, whether played straight or for laughs, the new soldiers marched by in serried ranks, good to go and ready to fight, no longer separate personalities, but interchangeable members of a team. And through it all, the drill sergeant set the pace. The Hagel brothers, like most volunteers and draftees of 1967, knew all of that, or thought they did.
With Tom Hagel wrapping up high school, Chuck went first. On April 26, 1967, induction orders in hand courtesy of the Platte County Selective Service Board, Chuck Hagel left Columbus, Nebraska, by bus. At the processing office in Omaha, Hagel met five other recruits. One of the others from Columbus, Joe Swierczek, sported long hair, a blue and white polka-dot shirt, and white bell-bottom trousers, quite appropriate as he played drums for a local rock band. The other four were more nondescript. By comparison, former athlete Hagel was older (age twenty-one), taller, almost six feet, barrel chested, with relatively short sandy hair, and looked you in the eye. Most importantly, he had a pronounceable last name. The duty sergeant who met the six men in Omaha gave Hagel the good news. You’re in charge. Get these guys to dinner and breakfast. Be on the train tomorrow morning.3 No trash-can banging, no in-your-face hollering, no Smokey the Bear hats—just one recruit dragging the others in his wake.
Hagel didn’t know it yet, but he’d already gotten his first lesson in how the army really worked, the secret behind what the drill sergeants endeavored to teach you. Civilians without military experience often think the military is all about rapidly carrying out directives like a mindless robot. But because people are not automatons, and no disembodied verbiage makes otherwise sane humans willing to stand up in a hail of hot bullets, it’s not about the orders. Soldiers may or may not follow orders. They will follow the example of those they trust. So the army looks for the exemplary ones. In picking potential leaders for the most deadly hunt of all, the army went with the older, bigger, faster, more alert ones. The younger, shorter, slower, less articulate people might demonstrate worthwhile talents over time. But they started their at-bat with a strike or two in the count.
Hagel and his five charges went where they were supposed to go and boarded the train for points south, to wit, El Paso, Texas. Then (and now) the military contracted travel to the lowest bidder, unless there was an emergency cooking. Getting six more recruits to Fort Bliss did not amount to a crisis. The sprawling post wasn’t going anywhere. So the train chugged its slow way south, through Kansas, Oklahoma, and then across the endless stretch of Texas. At stops, more small groups of nervous, uncertain recruits boarded. The journey ended at an empty El Paso train station at 3 a.m., of course. Most good folks were abed, and most bad ones were just getting home. But for the U.S. Army, it was business time.
Now the drill sergeant arrived in all his theatric splendor. Campaign hat tilted low over his narrowed eyes, the senior drill sergeant “welcomed” his latest batch of greenhorns with the time-tested opening line: “You’re all mine now!”4 Indeed they were.
The drill sergeant bellowed and the tired, frightened young men lined up, literally scared into straight ranks, as they didn’t yet know the rudiments of military drill. Their loud civilian clothes and unruly hair already felt wrong, and the drill sergeant made no secret that he thought so, too. He also offered that they were the worst batch of recruits he’d ever seen, that few if any could make it, or deserved to make it, in “this man’s army.” This tirade came suitably laced with an impressively original series of profanities. “And a new jarring gong of reality set in.” Hagel recalled. “From that moment on, it was a different world.”5
By the morning he met Chuck Hagel and two hundred other new soldiers, Sergeant First Class William Joyce had already served twenty-two years in the U.S. Army. He came from rural Alabama. “My only way out of there was the army,” he said years later. Joyce missed World War II, but not Korea. At Fort Bliss, he headed the dozen drill sergeants training Chuck Hagel and the rest of his recruit company. Many of these young men were going to war, as Joyce well knew. “I’m going to teach you to be mean and tough,” the drill sergeant said, “because if I fail, you get your head blown off in Vietnam.”6
Joyce and his fellow drill sergeants had been carefully chosen. Although the army had had some form of mass basic training going back to the years prior to World War I, in the interwar years that languished. In the 1920s and 1930s, units ran their own little programs. An extensive system of large-scale pre-combat training started again with the 1940 draft and persisted well into the Cold War. It did the job, and few would call it easy. But it seemed rather… well, generic, GI (government issue) in the bad sense. Army initial entry training taught you how to march, mop the floor, and shoot a few rounds downrange, but the whole undertaking emphasized completing the busy schedule, learning skills. Building will to fight seemed like an afterthought. The clear implication was that unless you were going to the infantry, you’d never see most of this stuff again. Cooks and drivers and helicopter mechanics didn’t really need to know how to fight, did they?
The marines thought they did. Tough, unforgiving, and unapologetic, Boot Camp made every marine a rifleman. Marines might then become cooks, clerks, or bottle washers, but all shared a visceral rifleman ethos. Unhappy with their service’s mediocre approach, army generals argued for a more consciously marine-style version kn
own as Basic Combat Training. That second word—“combat”—was in there for a reason. Basic Combat Training came to be in 1963, just in time for the Vietnam troop buildup. Army leaders studied the fabled Marine Corps methods at Parris Island, South Carolina. Selected army sergeants even attended the marine DI preparatory course. The soldiers didn’t want to be marines. But they saw a lot of value in the way the corps turned diffident civilians into committed, disciplined military men. The army borrowed the techniques, the attitude—and the hat.7
Basic Combat Training lasted eight weeks. It aimed to break down scruffy civilians and rebuild them as confident soldiers, ready to proceed to Advanced Individual Training (which varied based on the soldier’s assigned specialty), and then off to join actual units. The basic course included 352 hours of formal instruction and fifty-six days of 24/7 immersion in army discipline. Every eight weeks, Fort Bliss churned out 10,000 basic-trained privates. In addition to Bliss, by 1967 the army as a whole drew on centers at Forts Benning, Bragg, Campbell, Dix, Gordon, Jackson, Knox, Leonard Wood, Lewis, McClellan, Ord, Polk, Riley, and Sill to crank through up to 900,000 new troops a year.8 It was mass production, not of B-52 bombers or 105mm cannon shells, but young soldiers. If you ever wanted to feel like an insignificant cog in a very large green machine, the U.S. Army was ready to oblige.
Fort Bliss added its own pleasures. It’s hard to imagine a place less like Vietnam, with one exception: the temperature. The army got that right. “Oh, it was hot,” said Hagel. Even at three o’clock on a mid-spring morning, it was a warm, dry 70°. Midday topped 90°, and over 100° in the direct, unbearably bright sunshine. As for the terrain, Hagel identified three basic varieties: “sand, desert, rocks.”9 Hagel and his fellow recruits soon grew intimately familiar with these characteristics, spending plenty of waking hours examining the Fort Bliss micro-terrain while in the “front leaning rest,” that most unrestful army moniker for the “up” position in a push-up.
Drill Sergeant Joyce and his cadre ratified the decision of the administrative orderly back in Omaha. Starting that first lonely morning, Hagel found himself designated a recruit squad leader, complete with an armband marked with noncommissioned officer (NCO) chevrons. He was picked for the same reasons as always. He was a bit older, had some college, and looked athletic, tall and solid. Plus, Hagel didn’t flinch when men yelled at him. His coaches, his father, hell, even the nuns at Catholic school had already done plenty of that. Hagel’s rank was on an armband for a reason. It could go away as quickly as it arrived. It depended on how Hagel performed in each day’s training. As in war, it was all graded. But unlike combat, failure did not equal death.
That first warm morning, with the sun not even risen, the eight weeks of Basic Combat Training stretched like an eternity. Yet there never seemed to be enough hours in the day, or night, to do all the things the drill sergeant demanded. For a soldier, especially a trainee at Fort Bliss, time could run as slowly as a limp Salvador Dalí clock or as quickly as a hummingbird’s heartbeat. Hours could last for weeks, but if you lifted your head, bang, you were halfway through the day. The better soldiers—and Chuck Hagel turned out to be one—well, they figured it out. Do the job in front of you today, right here and now. Polish the brass. Clean the rifle. Pick up the cigarette butts. Run the mile. Deal with the immediate and focus there. Let tomorrow take care of itself.
The here and now of that first day kept everyone busy. Along with many other activities, the men moved into their new home. Trainee barracks at Fort Bliss were temporary buildings, built to last five years and house a platoon of thirty men. They were already twenty years old, and as the training program began, held forty souls.10 Army experience told Drill Sergeant Joyce and his NCOs not to worry. A quarter of the men would soon drop behind—sick, lame, lazy, crazy—either recycled to the next session or out altogether. And the old barracks would be just fine. Recruits take very good care of buildings. They mop, dust, shine, scrub, polish, and paint with a vengeance. Every Saturday morning there’d be a white-glove inspection. Drill Sergeant Joyce would show the way for the company commander, an earnest lieutenant eager to be quit of Fort Bliss and off to Vietnam. In some ways, the sequence resembled a seeing-eye dog guiding a blind man. The officer missed things. Joyce saw all. “He was tough as hell,” Hagel said.11 Thanks to Joyce, when the officer departed, the bad items got fixed, pronto. That’s how five-year barracks lasted two decades.
The first night, Chuck Hagel and his new platoon mates found out that the army had better things for its new troops to do than sleep. All were exhausted, wrung out by a day filling out forms, drawing uniforms and field gear, and three times shoveling in some random food in a steaming hot mess hall. Or was it steaming hot food in a random mess hall? No matter. After each hurried meal, in-processing recommenced immediately: more forms to sign, more items issued, getting yelled at, doing push-ups and getting yelled at some more, then more push-ups. As the longest of long days ended, it fell to squad leader Hagel to arrange an hourly schedule of fire watch. Soldiers in 1967 smoked a lot of cigarettes. A barracks built of old dry wood, in an arid climate, coated with layers of paint and varnish—it practically defined flammable tinder. The drill sergeants told stories of barracks going up in a few minutes.
So fire watch must be done. One man was awake all night, on his feet in full uniform, flashlight in hand. He walked the floor and made sure the rest slept tight. Each hour, in accord with Hagel’s slate, the guy on fire watch woke up his backfill. Yes, it prevented immolation. But the succession of sentinels, the office of the hours, also taught a valuable coping skill. Over the eight weeks, men developed the capacity to rouse quickly, do things for a while, and just as quickly drop down and crash back into sleep. War is all about getting rudely awakened, functioning, and then shutting down and stocking up Zs. The tossers and turners didn’t last long in combat.
There was something else, too. Soldiers quickly learned who got ready quickly and who dragged, the team players and the selfish ones. Hagel paid attention to this, another increment in his education as a military leader. He himself set the standard. He pulled his stint, and he was big enough to enforce the schedule. Drill sergeants checked the barracks at odd hours of the night, but never seemed to be around if a recalcitrant recruit needed some “motivation.” It was survival of the fittest. It might be 1967 outside Fort Bliss. But among the double bunks at night, the Paleolithic epoch rolled on.12 Big, alert guys ruled. And Chuck Hagel was big and alert. From the outset, his steely glance did the trick. As the eight weeks went on, he rarely had to threaten and even more rarely had to act. So it passed, the evening and the morning, the first day.
WORLD WAR II navy reserve officer Herman Wouk, in his wonderful novel The Caine Mutiny, explained it all rather succinctly: “The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots.”13 Substitute Army Basic Combat Training for the navy and you’ve got it. That’s the worst case, of course. The drill sergeants were not idiots—far from it. And the recruits were not idiots either, although they started quite ignorant of military skills. With their considerable combined efforts, the drill sergeants and their budding privates took things to pretty high levels of achievement. But from the atmospherics of the drill sergeant persona to the constant pressures of harsh activity to the training itself—just the right mix of novelty and repetition—the entire eight-week tableau smacked of genius, all right. You can get people to do amazing things by working together. Fear jump-starts the engine of discipline. But by the end, the motor is inside. And the good ones power the whole unit. Hagel was a good one.
The eight weeks of Basic Combat Training featured three primary evaluations: the physical combat proficiency test, rifle marksmanship, and the individual proficiency test. Along with those relatively objective measurements, the men were assessed daily on physical fitness, uniform appearance, cleanliness of their equipment, and timeliness in carrying out duties. Chuck Hagel decided right away to “try to be the best guy.”14
The
first two weeks focused on individual skills. First, the rookie soldiers had to learn how to wear their uniforms: ever present metal dog tags on a neck chain, white drawers and T-shirt, green long-sleeve shirt, green trousers, green baseball cap, black cotton-web belt with brass buckle (for shining), green wool socks, and black combat boots (also for shining). Most struggled. Some, like Hagel, got it. Some did not. “I was in with a lot of kids who had never had any organization at all in their life,” Hagel remembered. “They were drafted from Navajo reservations. We had Hispanic kids. In that part of the country, you threw them all in. We had kids who had quit school in seventh grade. We had some kids who’d never worn boots; hardly shoes. And it was a group that I had never ever quite experienced before. Tough group.”15 Drill Sergeant Joyce and his NCOs were tougher. Hagel was the company’s role model, what “right” looked like. But he got no special deals, no privileges except the opportunity to stay ahead of the pack. He helped the guys who wanted helping. The quitters fell by the wayside.
Sergeants told the trainees that the most efficient way to move people from points A to B was marching in formation. Conflicting opinions were not solicited. And the drill sergeants loved marching: eyes front, arms swinging in time, booted feet striking the pavement in cadence, voices sounding off, “One, two, three, four.” It looked like the ultimate physical manifestation of discipline, and felt like it, too, certainly for raw recruits struggling to fit into the mass. Attention (standing tall), parade rest (not at all a relaxing posture), right face, left face, the marching movements, the manual of arms—all of those used to be the army’s battlefield tactics in the days of smoothbore muzzle-loading muskets, although they turned out to be almost universally fatal when tried in the face of accurate long-range rifles at places like Bull Run and Shiloh. Yet close-order drill persisted. It taught men to start, stop, and change direction on voice command. It imposed instant order. The army’s wise heads, Wouk’s geniuses, long ago put drill in place, and saw that it was good.
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