Authors: Ed Ruggero
Olson is his wife’s biggest fan.
“She’ll jump out of bed in the middle of the night when her beeper goes off, come down here and save the lives of baby and mom in some medical drama. I spend my day worrying whether or not Jocko’s locker is ready for inspection, yet when I come home she listens to me as if I have the most interesting job in the world.”
“It’s hard,” she tells him. “You’ve got a lot to keep track of.”
Things haven’t been easy for this couple.
After graduation in 1987, Rob Olson was sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma
for his officer’s basic course in the artillery school. Half a year later he joined his first unit, the famed 101st Airborne Division, at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Holly Louise Hagan, also USMA ‘87, resigned her brand-new commission (with the Army’s blessing) to attend Medical School at the University of South Carolina. Olson drove back and forth to South Carolina to visit Holly, who was a busy first-year medical student. They continued to date long distance, with Olson making the several-hundred-mile drive as often as his schedule of field problems would permit.
They were married in 1989. Later, Holly applied to medical school at Vanderbilt University so she and their new daughter would be closer to Rob.
“So there Holly was,” Olson says. “Going back to medical school after a year off [for maternity leave], worried about how much she’d forgotten. Oh, and she’s in a new school in a new city and doesn’t know any of her fellow students. And she has a new baby. And the nanny we’d arranged for when she got to Vanderbilt quit right before Holly got there.”
It was just at that time, when it seemed as if things couldn’t get any more stressful, that the 101st Airborne Division deployed to the Persian Gulf for Operation Desert Shield.
“First letter I get from Holly, I’m sitting out there in the desert and I read about the nanny quitting and the new school and the new baby and it sounds like she’s about at the end of her rope. And I’m in the middle of nowhere. I told my battery commander, ‘Sir, I’d like to call home.’ And he said something like, ‘Hey, Rob. Use the first pay phone you see.’
“It was forty days before I could call her,” he said. “By that time she had everything under control, of course. But I had forty days to wonder how she was doing, and there wasn’t anything I could do to help.”
Olson laughs as he tells. He never doubted that Holly would pull everything together; it was about him wanting to help her through a tough period.
One wall is decorated with a large photograph of Tripler Army
Medical Center in Honolulu, where Holly served for several years. The big pink hospital sits on a hill overlooking Pearl Harbor. The matting of the photograph is signed with good luck messages from the hospital staff. Where Rob’s office is decorated with guidons and flags and plaques, Holly’s has this one photo.
She did not come to West Point to become a doctor, but during her first two years as a cadet she discovered two things: she wasn’t interested in the branches of the Army most West Point graduates join, and she found that she was still a top-performing student. Chemistry was her favorite subject, but there are no jobs for chemical engineers who are second lieutenants. She says she became a doctor by default. “I’m still not sure my dad believes I’m a real doctor.”
Her parents were supportive, but her home was no hotbed of feminism. Nor did her family have any ties to the professional military. Instead, she looked around her home town and saw all kinds of people with bachelor’s degrees and no job, people still living with their parents. She didn’t want that to happen to her.
As a cadet, Holly dated a few classmates, but it didn’t work out, for the same reasons the women cadets in the Class of 2000 mentioned: the small town atmosphere, where everybody knows everybody’s business. And for Holly, who graduated near the top of her class, she had to deal with the fact that many young men are intimidated by smart women.
“I didn’t wear it on my sleeve or anything,” she says. “It’s not like I walked in the room and said, ‘Hey, did I tell you today that I’m smarter than you?’ ”
Holly finished seventeenth in their class, on her collar she wore the gold stars that mark the top cadets. Her husband was ten from the bottom and a veteran of summer school, called STAP (Summer Term Academic Program). He characterized their dating as “STAP-boy dates Star-girl.”
“Rob was persistent,” Holly says. “He kept asking me out and I’d say ‘no’ and he’d ask again and I’d say ‘no.’ Then one day I said ‘yes’ and he was really surprised.”
“I already had plans for the weekend,” Olson adds. “Because I
was just expecting to get shot down again. I was going down to Fordham to watch some friends of mine play rugby. Then she said yes, and I had already told my buddies I’d be there, so I asked Holly if she’d like to come along. As soon as I got my car from the parking lot it started to pour.”
“Hard,” Holly adds. They’re a team now, telling a story they both know well and have laughed about before.
“And of course neither of us has a raincoat,” she says. “I was wearing this big wool sweater.”
“So I stop at this convenience store,” Olson says. “I have about seven bucks on me. So of course I buy a six-pack of Bud and a box of plastic trash bags to wear as rain gear.”
“We got drenched,” Holly says. “And it was freezing. We smelled like dead sheep.”
“So after the game I decide I’m not bringing my first date to the rugby party—I was smart enough to spare her that. Instead we’re going to drive to New Jersey.”
“We were going to Joey Simonelli’s parents’ house,” Holly adds.
“Right. To dry off” Rob looks at me. “Joey is a classmate and one of my best friends. See, I was making this date up as I went along.”
Holly lifts her hand to her face as she laughs.
“And we’re getting close to the George Washington Bridge, and I realize I spent all my money on the beer and the trash bags. I’ve got no money for the toll,” Rob says.
“Here I dragged this girl out into the pouring rain to watch a rugby game, and now I didn’t even plan well enough to have the bridge fare. So I know I have to ask her for money, but I’m such a coward that I wait until we’re on the ramp—there’s no turning back—and I blurt all this out. And she just looks at me …”
Holly finishes the story. “I just looked over and said, ‘There’s no toll in this direction.’ ”
They share a laugh, and Olson says, “I exposed my ignorance and I didn’t even have to.”
“But there I was with this guy I’d been avoiding, and everything that could go wrong was going wrong, and I was having a great time,”
Holly says. “We laughed the whole time and we had interesting conversations. It was a great date after all.”
Outside, the after-lunch appointments are gathering: young women, some of them in uniform, with swollen bellies. They clean up the plastic trays, and Holly washes her hands in the small sink. After exchanging a few notes about their schedules, they plan on being home for family dinner.
A couple of weeks later the Olsons are guests at a banquet, a formal dinner in the Mess Hall, hosted by the sophomores for Yearling Winter Weekend.
Rob Olson wears a wasp-waisted coat, dark blue, and light blue pants that make up the officer’s dress mess uniform. The lapels of his jacket are faced in scarlet, the color of the field artillery; the shoulders are topped with gold braid. It is the kind of dashing uniform that looks good on young men; it also sports enough baubles and brass and gold to make it an easy target for caricature. Holly Olson wears a long black dress, appropriate for the drafty Mess Hall. All around, second-year cadets, their dates, and their families glitter and shine. Many of the yearling women are escorted by firsties; most of the yearling men have civilian dates.
This is just one of a string of formal dinners the Olsons will attend as part of their official duties: there was Plebe Parent Weekend in the fall, Yearling Winter Weekend in January, followed by One Hundredth Night (one hundred days until graduation) for the first class, and Five Hundredth Night (for the second class).
“I could just keep the monkey suit on a hangar and jump in it every weekend,” Olson says.
“And the menu, believe it or not, has been the same for each formal,” Holly adds.
But they are smiling. The other Tacs, most of them are men, and their wives, come up to the Olsons. The young couples are taking advantage of having baby-sitters at home, and are heading to the South Gate Tavern, just off post, for a few drinks. Everyone seems in fine spirits—the women are beautiful, the men are handsome.
“You going out dressed like that?” Sergeant First Class Tim Bingham asks Olson, pointing to the glittering uniform.
“I can shoot pool in this as easily as in jeans,” Olson says. Then, leaning forward so that only Bingham can hear, “And I can say, ‘Hey, get off my stool, you rednecked motherfucker,’ just as easily in this.” He straightens. “Matter of fact, it makes me look taller,” he says pulling at the bottom of the jacket and smiling his mischievous smile.
Everyone is smiling, in spite of the weather, which is frigid, in spite of the fact that the semester has just begun and these cadets are not yet halfway through their time at West Point. On this night they shine. Cadets stand outside the little circle of officers, waiting to introduce parents to their Tacs and Tac NCOs. Mothers and fathers beam. Young women in slinky gowns try not to shiver as the big doors of the Mess Hall swing open and a January wind spills inside. Many of the women—the ones with gallant and resourceful dates—wear cadet parkas over their evening dresses. The tables are set with cloth napkins; the steel flatware has been polished; the peanut butter has been removed from the table.
Olson jokes with his fellow Tacs, and although they are a little old to be fraternity brothers, there is good-natured shadowboxing. The Olsons have made it to this place through hard work. They have been successful in the Army, and they are destined for more success. They are surrounded by friends, by work they love. They live in a tight-knit community and mostly overlook the downsides of the small-town atmosphere. And no matter how tedious it will seem on Monday morning, when Olson is once again consumed by thinking about whether Jocko is going to be ready for inspection, or whether some procrastinating firstie has bought his officer’s uniforms, or whether some plebe is crying in the latrine at night, tonight it is like a fairy tale. Or as much like a fairy tale as real life can get when the baby-sitter is waiting. They are in their anointed season, young and strong and healthy, with everything to look forward to.
T
he notion that failing—and the learning opportunity that follows—must be part of leader development is not just a heretical idea held by a few social scientists toiling away in the windowless offices of Thayer Hall.
“You have to be able to fail and learn from it,” Brigadier General John Abizaid, Commandant of Cadets, says. “I talk about my screwups; God knows I have plenty of material. People have to know that they can learn from their mistakes. We do ourselves a disservice with the idea that we want people who don’t fail.”
He is in his office above the Cadet Mess. In the daylight, the Plain and the river beyond are visible through the arched windows. On this winter evening, the barracks lights throw yellow rectangles on the snow; General Washington, astride his horse and below the windows, looks out over the quiet cold.
Abizaid hangs his camouflage field jacket on the back of his chair.
He is forty-seven, dark-haired and handsome, with a friendly smile and a mischievous sense of humor that doesn’t seem to fit his role as head of the military side of cadet life. He graduated forty-second (of 944) in the Class of 1973, studied at the University of Amman in Jordan, and at Stanford; he also has a master’s degree from Harvard.
But Abizaid has not hung his Harvard degree, or any other diploma, on the walls of his office. Instead, he has two paintings of 82nd Airborne Division soldiers in World War II combat. One shows a general officer leading from the front: Matthew Ridgway USMA 1917, in a battle for the LaFiere causeway in Normandy, June 9, 1944. The two-star general has moved to the very front of his stalled attack and is personally exhorting his soldiers to press on.
Abizaid walks through the warren of hallways above the Mess Hall to an amphitheater-style classroom filled with forty or fifty cadets of the Infantry Tactics Club. These cadets, and there are men as well as women, spend some of their precious free time studying and practicing the Army’s most basic craft: how to close with and destroy the enemy.
The cadets jump to attention when Abizaid enters. He greets them in his breezy style, then takes his place in front of the room beside an overhead projector. Using colored markers, he sketches a map. There is a small hill at the top of the frame, overlooking an airstrip that runs left to right across the center. South of the airfield, some blue lines denote a body of water. To the right of the airfield, on the east side of the map, Abizaid draws a half dozen buildings, little black squares and rectangles. He labels them “CAMPUS.”
“There are American civilians here,” he says, pointing to the buildings. “Our job was to get them out safely. The plan looked like this.”
He puts down a second sheet, an overlay on which he draws military graphics that show how a company of infantry was to move off the airstrip, secure the buildings and the civilians, then prepare for a counterattack from the east, where the enemy had light armored vehicles.
“That’s what everybody thinks is going to happen,” he says. Then
he pulls off the overlay with the original plan and tosses it to the floor with a flourish.
“But we need to get rid of that because, of course, the plan never works.”
He begins to speak more quickly, using a red pen to draw enemy forces. There are powerful anti-aircraft guns on the hills above the airfield that can be turned on the GIs with devastating effectiveness; these same guns will also keep the planeloads of American reinforcements away. There are several dozen armed policemen among the American civilians on the campus; the enemy light-armored vehicles are not a forty-five minute drive away—as reported—but are much closer. And the construction workers who’d been laboring on the airstrip are armed and organized into a company of infantry.