On New Year’s morning in 1971, when I was a junior in high school, my mother woke up feeling sick, although they’d not celebrated the night before. My father, a new brigadier general, took her to the army clinic at Fort Myer. She was swiftly moved to the hospital. By midnight she was dreadfully ill, and a few hours later, in the early morning of January 2, she passed away. It was a shock to the family, and to my father especially. We all missed her deeply, but the impact her loss had on the stoic soldier I loved and admired was tragically evident.
Part of my mother’s legacy to me, my affinity for history and literature, pulled me through my final two years at West Point. Among those military biographies I consumed, Grant’s memoirs seeped into my pores most deeply: “The last two years wore away more rapidly than the first two,” Grant wrote of his attitude toward the academy, “but they still seemed about five times as long as Ohio years, to me.” So it was for me. Cow and firstie years featured more English and history courses, and these played to my strengths. “History 381: Revolutionary Warfare” was my favorite; it was one of the few classes that focused on small wars and unconventional warfare at an academy otherwise stuck in a World War II–era mentality. We studied the insurgencies and counterinsurgencies in Malaya, Algeria, and Greece, all of which I found fascinating. I studied figures like Lawrence and conflicts like Indochina that seemed to carry lessons relevant to being a soldier in the kind of wars I expected to fight.
Beginning in the fall of firstie year, our general order of merit began to matter: It would determine which branch we joined and our first assignment. By that time, my grades had improved over the prior three semesters, and the academy began to weigh more heavily our military performance, where I scored well. Branch selection was dramatic. With my entire class seated in a Thayer Hall auditorium, starting at the top of the class, each cadet stood and announced his pick: engineering, field or air defense artillery, armor, intelligence, signals, or infantry. Each choice reduced the remaining slots available. As slots in other branches ran out, the lowest one hundred or so cadets that year were “ranked” into infantry by default. I had a choice, however, and went infantry. My grandfather, father, and older brother had all worn the crossed-rifle insignia of infantry officers, and I never considered any other option.
As graduation neared, the gears of my life turned smoothly. Annie agreed to marry me, I excelled academically, and, because of my meteoric leap in class rank, after graduation I would be able to join the storied 82nd Airborne Division. I hadn’t expected to be high enough in the class to have a shot at an assignment to the 82nd, so Annie had been studying German in anticipation of going there. But the chance to be a paratrooper and serve in one of the units most likely to be involved in any potential conflict made it an easy decision.
On Wednesday, June 2, 1976, I graduated and my father commissioned me as a second lieutenant. Our graduation ceremony was where we’d begun our cadet experience, at Michie Stadium. As I sat with 834 other members of my class, out of an original 1,378, waiting to receive our diplomas, I realized that I was very different from the seventeen-year-old boy whose friend had dropped him off four years earlier. I wondered if I could, or would, be the kind of military leader I admired, and I was eager to try. When the ceremony ended, in accordance with tradition, we launched our hats into the air and congratulated one another. I rapidly looked for Annie—and the exit. As quickly as possible, I threw everything I owned into the used Chevy Vega I’d bought and set course with Annie down the hill away from campus. As we neared the last bend before the academy gates, I turned to her. “Hey, look back at West Point.”
“Why?” she asked, twisting in her seat to look at the tips of the parapets getting smaller behind the hills.
“Because that’s the last time we’ll ever see it.”
| CHAPTER 3 |
The Army in Which I Should Like to Fight
August 1976–March 1982