My Share of the Task(11)
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.