“Gentlemen,” he said, “soon you will begin to wear the class shirt. You’ll wear it every day of the academic year and, per uniform regulation, you will secure your collar with the collar stays that have been issued to you.
“It may seem insignificant to you now,” he continued, “but you’re here learning attention to detail.” For the next few minutes the combat-seasoned colonel compared neglecting to wear collar stays with forgetting ammunition for our soldiers in combat. Focusing on even the small things, he reasoned, develops a leader who never neglects the critical ones.
I thought it was stupid. Collar stays were for your collar. Ammunition mattered. And although we were not yet officers, we knew the difference. The soldiers I had grown up admiring were Sam Grant in his dirty private’s coat and Matt Ridgway and his hand grenades. They wore mud-covered or sand-dusted fatigues, not collar stays. In that moment, the colorful block of campaign badges on the colonel’s left breast seemed less like proof of his having fought in the wars being waged far beyond the academy’s granite walls and more like ornaments that flashed as he paced and pivoted.
Following the rules here would make me a good cadet, but that was not my goal. I wanted to be a combat leader. And in the colonel’s soliloquy I could not see a connection between the two. What I could not have foreseen then were the lessons of unconventional leadership I would learn during my four years in that most conventional of places.
* * *
Weeks earlier, on the night of Sunday, July 2, I didn’t sleep much. The next morning I was to report to West Point to begin my training as a cadet. A friend had driven with me from northern Virginia to drop me off. At a motel a few miles from the academy, we sat outside, sharing cans of cold beer from a small cooler, talking late into the summer night. We’d talked often about my desire to be a soldier but rarely about what that really meant. I’d likely be a soldier for the rest of my life.
I was preparing to tread a well-worn path. Cadets had been entering West Point since its founding in 1802, and 140 years later, six months after Pearl Harbor, my father had done the same. Graduating in 1945 as a member of one of the abbreviated three-year wartime classes, he went on to fight in Korea and Vietnam and was a major general as I prepared to enter, thirty years after he first reported as a cadet. But he never pushed me to apply and was supportive but hands-off as I prepared my application. I attributed his stance to the fact that one of my older brothers had attended and then quit West Point a year earlier. I suspected my father worried that he had pressured my brother to go, but he also sensed I was different.
I always assumed I would attend West Point but had never thought much about what it would be like to be a cadet. From my birth to an army captain and his wife, I’d been an “army brat.” After that, West Point seemed the natural route. There was not much more to the decision. I never fixated on the school itself, never dreamed of wearing cadet dress gray. I arrived at the academy already looking past it, eager to get to the real soldiering that came only afterward.
The next morning, my friend and I drove through the academy’s gates and followed the drive that runs along the edge of the cliffs overlooking the Hudson until it breaks away from the river and veers up a hill to Michie Stadium, where Army’s football team plays. It was warm and I was nervous.
At the stadium we found swarms of people. This was Reception Day, better known as R-Day, and 1,378 new cadets had shown up to be officially “received” into the academy. From the stadium we were bused to a series of concrete courtyards walled off by barracks that cadets call “the Area,” a desolate stretch that I would come to know intimately. That morning it was controlled chaos.
From the perspective of a new cadet (as we were called until the end of Beast Barracks), upperclassmen ran the show. Postured like sentries in gray trousers and starched white shirts, they clenched their jaws and pulled their hat brims low over stern eyes. They controlled our every movement. Through decades of practice, R-Day processes neared scientific precision. The circuit ensured that all new cadets that day could be sworn in, stripped of outside possessions, supplied with new ones, measured, weighed, outfitted, sheared, scared, and, finally, paraded in front of their families in a matter of hours. For the academy, it was an impressive feat. Families saw the often-shaggy high school graduates they’d deposited earlier that morning reappear as uniformed, disciplined soldiers. For some parents and siblings, it probably felt like a miracle.