My Share of the Task(14)
On Wednesday, January 21, 1981, the hostages’ release lifted the pall that the ordeal had cast over America. But the failure in the Iranian desert would cast a long shadow over U.S. special operations. A commission under retired navy admiral James L. Holloway would capture in stark terms what had gone wrong and, more important, what needed to be done. It would provide initial direction for a journey that would shape the rest of my career.
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That career had started nearly four years earlier, when I reported to Fort Benning, Georgia. There, in early August 1976, two months after graduating, I left behind the largely theoretical world of West Point to begin my real-world education—graduate work in the nuts and bolts of soldiering. I had also volunteered for Ranger School. The nine-week Ranger course was created at the outset of the Korean War as a way to teach leadership by simulating the stress of combat. It had developed its own mythology. Stories of sleep deprivation, hunger, physical exhaustion, and instructors who did their best to make the course hell led many officers to decide against attempting it (fewer than eighty of two hundred lieutenants from my basic course chose to attend) and intimidated those of us who did. Still, wearing the Ranger tab on our left shoulder would be an important step in establishing our bona fides as soldiers.
Rangers have a rich lineage. During World War II Ranger units conducted high-risk missions across North Africa and in the Nazi underbelly in Sicily and Italy. They rescued American POWs from the Japanese prison camp at Cabanatuan in the Philippines. On D-Day at Normandy the 2nd Ranger Battalion, a unit I would later command, climbed the cliffs of an angular bluff called Pointe du Hoc under a downpour of enemy fire to locate and destroy enemy guns. The postwar Army of 1973—struggling to rebuild professionalism and pride badly shattered in a painful, unpopular war—launched a new era of Rangers.
In November 1976, we arrived in the Harmony Church area of Fort Benning. There, in World War II–era wooden buildings, the Rangers had established a Spartan enclave set apart from the more relaxed standards of the 1970s Army at large. Many Ranger instructors (RIs) wore “high and tight” haircuts, made a point of fitness, and prided themselves on their apparent indifference to physical discomfort. During the military’s post-Vietnam nadir, Harmony Church was a refuge for the flint of the Army.
Many of the instructors, like Staff Sergeant Swackhamer, were larger-than-life characters. His Dickensian name haunted the first phase of the course, and he treated the Fort Benning sawdust pits, where he taught hand-to-hand combat, like the sands of the Colosseum. When we shivered under our winter gear during patrols later in the course, another iconic RI, Sergeant First Class Jutras, erect and seemingly comfortable in a single layer of summer fatigues, taunted us in a thick Rhode Island accent: “Cold, Rrrain-jah?” Lore had it that once, in the final phase of the course conducted in the swamps of Florida, Jutras had continued a lecture on poisonous snakes despite being bitten, calmly describing for the Ranger students the feeling as the venom took effect.
After Vietnam, everyone had an opinion on what ailed the military—and how to fix it. My class’s tactical officer waged his personal war for the soul of the Army. Convinced that West Point lieutenants tended to band together and “carry” weak classmates through Ranger School, he sought to make the early weeks of the course so painful and difficult that the weak would be culled from the ranks and denied Ranger tabs they couldn’t earn on individual merit. His favorite tool was the “worm pit,” a long, mud-filled ditch covered at about eighteen inches with a canopy of barbed wire. Through the cold of November and December we crawled through the mud and water, the first of us breaking the ice on top as we crawled. One night I watched as five lieutenants in my platoon quit. In accordance with Ranger School policy, they signed Lack of Motivation statements, forfeiting forever any chance of winning Ranger tabs and accepting a stigma that would follow them for the rest of their military careers.
Leadership lessons often came unexpectedly. One evening, early in the course, we conducted a six-mile speed march at the end of which our tactical officer took us to the physical training (PT) field. We shivered as the sweat from the march chilled us, steam rising from our shaved heads in the cold of the night and glare of the field lights. After a short time we were ordered to navigate the obstacle course and worm pit, crawling through the icy slush. Rapidly the cold produced spasmodic breathing and our limbs and hands became unable to grasp ropes or perform motor functions. It felt as though we had crossed the line between being hard and being dangerously stupid.