by Allen West
Colonel, governor, and professor, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain rose to the occasion. He answered that call to service and never stopped serving even after his days in uniform were over. He was the rare man who will stand among the greatest of military and civilian leaders in America. He truly embodied the slogan “Be all you can be.”
My journey to “be all I could be” started in the US Army Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) program at Henry Grady High School. I always knew I wanted to join the US Army. From hearing my dad’s stories of World War II, and from meeting Marines at my mom’s workplace, I knew my destiny was the military. It was Mom and Dad who said they wanted the first officer in the family. And now, as it happens, we have our second officer, my nephew Major Herman Bernard West III. Doggone, I remember bouncing that fella on my knee.…
This is how a family legacy of service is established. This is how a nation shall always be protected, because each generation inspires and raises the next generation of guardians.
At Grady High I came to know esteemed warriors who would shape me into the soldier and man I am today. These men—Lieutenant Colonel Pagonis, Major Heredia, Master Sergeant Buchanan, and Sergeant First Class McMichael—had served in Korea and Vietnam. Master Sergeant Buchanan had been a prisoner of war. He told horrific stories and showed us student cadets his arm, which had been debilitated during his time in captivity. Major Heredia spoke of the Korean War and of the Chinese and North Korean tactics of using captured Americans to force tank columns to stop and be ambushed. I learned that there was evil in this world that must be confronted and that our country needed men and women willing to stand as watchmen on the ramparts of freedom and liberty. As former combat leaders, my ROTC instructors had decided, much as Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and others before them, to continue serving the nation through their local community. I firmly believe the Army JROTC program plays a vital role in developing the United States’ future leaders, because it exposes students to men and women who have been leaders and servants of our republic. I’m honored to receive many speaking invitations, but I truly love those opportunities to address high school JROTC cadets, because that program gave me my start.
My instructors at Grady High saw something in me that I didn’t know existed: leadership potential. They selected me to be the program battalion commander when I was a junior. Now, that did cause some angst among the seniors, but they knew I’d earned the privilege. And because I’d learned to concern myself more with being respected than liked, it all worked out. We had a fantastic battalion. During my year as commander, we earned our gold star designation as one of the top Army JROTC programs in Atlanta among more than twenty high schools.
Those men—Pagonis, Heredia, Buchanan, and McMichael—taught me pride in wearing the uniform, they enhanced my sense of discipline, and they imparted to me a burning desire to be an Army officer. Those men were like an extension of my dad. They had “that way” about them. When it was ROTC day to serve as cafeteria monitors, doggone, was it orderly. All they had to do was give that look and even the “baddest of the bad” would pipe down. When Sergeant McMichael got steamed at you, boy, could he break you down.
Now there are people who would take programs like high school JROTC out of schools. Frankly I believe they are misguided idiots who have no clue that what they’re doing could actually harm our young people. If ever I were to become US president, I’d ensure that every inner-city high school had a JROTC program.
When I left Grady, I was ready to join the ROTC program at the University of Tennessee. Because I had three years of high school ROTC under my belt, I was fast-tracked to begin working on my commission as an Army officer. But as I mentioned, there are always bumps in the road, and I hit my first one in college. I was put on academic probation in my sophomore year and suspended from the ROTC program. Here I was, so close to the one thing I truly wanted in life—to be an Army second lieutenant—and I had nearly blown it. For a moment I toyed with the idea of dropping out of college and working, but that thought didn’t last long. I knew I had to knuckle down.
First things first, I wanted to move off campus.
I lived in the Hess Hall dorm during my freshman year and in Clement Hall in my second. Now, for my junior year, I found a nice one-bedroom place for 180 bucks a month. Mom and Dad said they were not going to pay for an apartment. Frankly they were pissed off about my grades. It wasn’t that I was spending time partying or hanging out, I just hadn’t found my academic path.
I’d gone to college thinking I wanted to be an engineer. I spent a year and a half in that major, and Statics and Dynamics just about did me in. I loved math, but I wasn’t an abstract thinker. So I switched my major to political science. The summer before my junior year, I got my old job back at Sears in the Columbia Mall in DeKalb County and worked my butt off to save up money for the apartment. Ol’ Buck recognized how I was busting my butt, and he chipped in for some furniture. Little did I realize that my apartment would become his weekend getaway with my little brother, Arlan, especially during college football season! During my junior year, I took a couple of jobs as night desk watchman at a dorm and salesclerk at a music store called the Record Bar and showed the folks I could take charge of my life.
Just like my high school decision and plan to run away, the way I chose to embark on my junior year at UT reflected another life-changing choice. I restored my grades and was reinstated in the ROTC program. And thus, during the summer of 1982, I found myself flying off to Fort Lewis, Washington, for summer Advanced Camp, a boot camp for ROTC students seeking to earn a commission. Little did I know it then, but years later I would return to Fort Lewis as an instructor and evaluate cadets in those very same barracks.
Advanced Camp was long at seven weeks, and back in the day it was tough. The nights in the Pacific Northwest were damn cold, especially for this southern boy. It was always wet, and I had never seen mosquitoes that bad! I ended up getting quite sick and was coughing up blood at one point, but I was not about to quit or be recycled. This was it. I had completed all of my ROTC requirements. All I had to do was complete Advanced Camp and I would be Second Lieutenant Allen B. West.
Well, I finished, and on graduation day I was ecstatic. I’d met friends who would be my colleagues for years to come. I flew from Fort Lewis back to Atlanta, and there was Buck waiting with this huge smile on his face. He looked at me and how skinny I was and said, “They kicked your butt, didn’t they, boy?”
I was always going to be his boy. Years earlier he’d gone to the airport to collect his boy who’d run away; now he was picking up soon-to-be “2LT” West. The entire family traveled to Knoxville for the big day. It was July 31, 1982, and my parents and brothers watched me take the oath—the third member of our family to do so—giving my pledge to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic, and bear true faith and allegiance to the same.”
What a day. What a special honor. I was on top of the world. I still needed to complete my academic requirements at Tennessee, which I did the following summer. I couldn’t believe it: I was Second Lieutenant Allen B. West with a bachelor’s degree in political science. You had to pinch me.
I returned to Atlanta and worked at Sears while awaiting my order to active duty. Then the orders arrived, and I was instructed to report to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for Field Artillery Officer Basic Course, class 2-84. Before I departed, Buck and Pootney sat me on the front steps and gave me the lecture I surely needed. These were the words that stuck in my mind from these two combat veterans: “You are a brand-new, fresh second lieutenant. You don’t know nothing and need to come to that realization. You need to find your platoon sergeant and listen to him. Make sure you allow him to teach you. He will respect you because of the rank, but he needs to respect you as a man and leader. Never forget that if you take care of your soldiers, your men, they will take care of you and hold you in high esteem and respect. Screw your men over, and they will
screw you over. A good leader is first a good follower. Listen and lead, but most of all, take care of your men.”
Those parting words would guide me some twenty-two years later to make a spontaneous decision on the battlefield in Iraq, one that would have an indelible impact on my life. But more on that later in this chapter. The trip to Fort Sill was my first time driving to this part of the country. Entering Key Gate, I was at the home of the Field Artillery, a truly historic place, and one now part of my history. The six months at Fort Sill were something special. I was introduced to the Army culture.
I was also introduced to the precision of gunnery and shoots. Since I was passionate about math, gunnery was especially fun for me. Others hated it, but I really got into the old-school calculations using slide rules and charts to solve problems. In fact, some of the other fellas would come to me for gunnery tutoring before exams. Having to devise gunnery firing solutions was awesome, and the shoots … well, sitting on a hilltop striving to put an artillery round within fifty meters of the target was challenging, especially in an Oklahoma winter. Crap, I had never been that cold. And don’t forget, these were the days before Gore-Tex and all that high-tech, high-end gear. My follow-on orders came for the Second Infantry Division in Korea. I didn’t mind. If I was to excel in my trade, I wanted to be where there was an adversary, and that was certainly true in 1984 in Korea with its demilitarized zone.
Without my knowledge, however, my name was also submitted—and selected—for an Airborne unit in Vicenza, Italy. Airborne? Jumping out of airplanes? Doggone, now that was a bit of a surprise. Our TAC (training, advising, and counseling) officer told me I had been chosen because of my class standing, physical fitness level—back then I could run like the wind—and sharpness.
So from Fort Sill, I came home to Georgia for Basic Airborne Course. I was roster number A114 in Airborne School and I successfully graduated, but then came the real challenge. With only five jumps under my belt, I was supposed to pass one of the toughest schools in the Army, Jumpmaster School. I was adopted by an Airborne instructor who took a liking to me, and after two weeks of intense training, studying, and written and hands-on exams, I passed. I was off to Italy. Before I left I married my college sweetheart, Gail Mosby, in a small, intimate ceremony at Fort Benning. Gail had been a strong Christian influence in my life and was instrumental in keeping me focused.
In Italy I was assigned to the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion, which was soon designated as the Fourth Battalion, 325th Infantry Regiment. This was the perfect unit for an officer beginning his service. I had many memorable experiences during my Vicenza assignment. I learned to ski, and, before redeploying, I was even the winter training base camp OIC (officer in charge). The moment that began my political maturity, however, came in the winter of 1985 when I went through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin. President Ronald Reagan had given his famous “evil empire” speech in 1983, and during that winter I saw the reality of communism and socialism and the importance of President Reagan’s words. I walked the streets with Soviet officers and soldiers as well as East Germans. I saw the plight, the lack of freedom, and the emptiness in the eyes of the people. Right then I understood what makes America exceptional. I also recognized that there was indeed an ideological enemy, and I didn’t ever want to live under its thumb. I came to understand what freedom and liberty meant and why it was worth fighting for. When Reagan bombed Libya, we soldiers all felt a sense of pride that we were fighting back. The malaise of Jimmy Carter was gone. We were soldiers at a turning point, and we knew it.
During the tour of duty in Italy, Gail and I suffered several traumas—the loss of her mom and the loss of my dad. It had been a tough assignment for a young new lieutenant who left his wife nine months out of the year while deploying all across Europe on contingency missions. I was not a good husband, nor ready to be one. By the time I returned from Italy we had separated, and in 1988, we divorced. We maintained a healthy friendship over the years, and in 1994 she was there for my mom’s funeral.
And so in 1987 I faced a difficult trip back across the country for Field Artillery Officer Advanced Course. Emotionally, I was starting over. For the first time in my life, I had not seen something through.
After the course I was reassigned to Fort Riley in Kansas. I had asked for Fort Benning, Fort Stewart, or Fort Campbell, as I had thoughts of resigning my commission after this second tour and wanted to be back down south. Coming from an Airborne unit, now heading to a Mechanized Division, First Infantry, I didn’t know what to expect. The assignment ended up being a blessing, because I met a man who would be a great friend and mentor for many years—Colonel John R. Gingrich, aka Da G-Man. I was recommended for early battery command. Again I jumped ahead of peers and senior captains. Yep, I was a captain now.
My professional career was thriving, but I felt empty emotionally. Then God sent an angel my way. Her name, fittingly enough, was Angela. Her dad had been a career military man, and she was completing her MBA at Long Island University in Brooklyn. Somehow I convinced her to marry me and come back to Manhattan, Kansas, where she had been an undergrad at Kansas State University. Naturally I was concerned about being a better husband and man, and I’m still working on that today.
No sooner had we been married than a little something kicked up far away in a place called Kuwait. Colonel Gingrich chose me to lead the advance party for the battalion, and I left my new bride not knowing what the future would hold. I had experienced the ideological evil of communism and socialism in my first duty assignment in Europe. I was now about to experience the evil of a Middle Eastern dictatorship.
We routed the Iraqi army in no time, maybe a hundred hours. We were just that good at open desert warfare. I had been to the National Training Center in the Mojave Desert several times and knew my trade as a fire support officer very well.
However, once our major combat operations were over and we had pounded the enemy, something struck me hard. An Iraqi woman found her way into our headquarters base camp. She was dehydrated and had her children with her. Soldiers in the Iraqi army had raped her and killed her husband and brother. We quickly got her medical support, but that level of brutality was something my colleagues and I discussed long after. Now I was learning about another type of evil, and I became interested in reading about and understanding Muslim culture in a historical and contemporary context so that I could make sense of what I had seen.
Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm were awesome experiences for a young captain, but afterward I witnessed the mistake we always seem to repeat in America. We drew down our forces to reduce defense spending and made the military pay the bills for other government programs. I headed over to Kansas State to teach ROTC, where Angela was a professor in the business college.
At Kansas State I was responsible for training cadets during their most important junior year to prepare them for their officer boot camp. Coincidentally they would attend the same Fort Lewis Advanced Camp that I had trained at back in the summer of 1982. We were very successful at K-State and created what would become one of the best ROTC programs in the nation. In 1994 I was honored to be named the Army ROTC Instructor of the Year. Many of the former cadets are now senior majors, lieutenant colonels, and even battalion commanders, and we still keep in touch. One of my cadets was part of the Special Forces unit that first went into Afghanistan fighting on horseback with the Northern Alliance against the Taliban.
At the same time that I was training cadets, I was working on my first master’s degree. In 1995, after our daughter Aubrey was born and I had completed my academic work, I received a one-year assignment to Korea, the place I was originally supposed to have been sent in 1984.
So off to Korea I went, to the Second Infantry Division as an operations planner and assistant operations officer in the Division Support Command—a great assignment. I was promoted to major there and selected for the Army Staff College back in Kansas.
In Korea I saw evil once again. Standing o
n the demilitarized zone—the DMZ—and looking into North Korea, I could see the totalitarian Stalinist state. Through my studies and education, I grew to understand these various governing philosophies and how they contrasted with that of our American republic. I knew one day we would have to confront North Korea because the world vision of its leaders is antithetical to our own. Sadly, as I write this in 2013, it seems that day may be drawing closer. Nonetheless, for me it was an incredible experience to have been behind the Iron Curtain and to stand guard along the DMZ. My worldview continued to develop.
I returned to the States. Between 1996 and 1997, I completed work on two master’s degrees and graduated from Army Staff College. Our second daughter, Austen, arrived and I received orders for a new assignment at Fort Bragg. I would be working for my next great teacher, coach, mentor, and friend—Colonel Denny R. Lewis, incoming commander of the Eighteenth Field Artillery Brigade (Airborne).
This was the largest artillery unit in the Army. Colonel Lewis selected a brand-new staff college graduate and major—me—to be his operations officer. He was hard as woodpecker lips in the winter, but also brilliant and laser-focused. Serving under this gentleman set me on a course to be an exceptional leader, trainer, and manager of resources. One day when we were sitting in the backseat of his command Hummer discussing his vision of a battalion evaluation exercise, Colonel Lewis gave me the simplest order in my military career: “Al, don’t screw this up.” Truth be told, he used more colorful language than that. My time with Colonel Lewis at Fort Bragg played a tremendous role in shaping me into the leader I am today, which I’ll discuss more in the following chapter.
After serving as the colonel’s operations officer (OpsO), I was reassigned in the brigade to be the executive officer of the First Battalion (Air Assault), 377th Field Artillery Regiment. I was now second in command of a battalion—the little kid from the inner city of Atlanta, Buck and Snooks’s son. And I have to say, my radio call sign was freakin’ awesome: Gunslinger 5! The highlight there was a two-month deployment to Alaska to test a new artillery munition called Sense and Destroy Armor (SADARM).