Duty First (38 page)

Up another ridge on a paved road beside a small nineteenth-century
cemetery, then along a dirt track that leads uphill (again) for another half mile. The cheering section is in full stride now, the numbers seem to be growing. It’s a smalltown parade, a gaggle of fired-up college kids in running shoes and on mountain bikes. They exchange gossip and talk about possible scores and who went through the culvert and how many points the company has.

Near the top of the ski slope the team enters a clearing. The crowd following, all good soldiers, falls behind the white tape marking the spectator area. In the middle of the clearing is a fourteen-foot-high wall made of wide planks painted black. The front of the wall is decorated with a gold Ranger tab that stretches seven or eight feet across. There is no platform on top, just another plank set on its side on the telephone-pole frame. There is a sawdust pit at the bottom on both sides. The task is simple enough: The team must get over the wall with all their equipment and weapons.

The Zoo team has practiced this particular event several times a week for the past two months; and it looks it. Two cadets back up to the wall, squat down, boost the leaders to the top. Even for the tallest cadets, it is still a stretch. The cadets scaling the wall must pull themselves from a dead-arm hang to the top of the narrow planking, then get a leg up, then go over without simply falling. When a few are on the far side, two men pause at the top to hand over the team’s weapons, the rucksack with the heavy radio, the bridge equipment. The crowd shouts encouragement and advice.

Kevin Bradley is the next-to-last man to scale the obstacle. His teammate crouches, back against the wall, and Bradley steps in his hands. The yearling pulls with both arms and launches Bradley upward; two cadets straddling the narrow top of the wall grab his hands, pull him up. But Bradley doesn’t go over. He sits on the wall, his back to the last man, hooks his knees on the edge, then leans over backwards, dangling as if from a trapeze. His helmet and equipment all head for the ground; the straps and hooks and belts hit him in the face. One of the cadets straddling the top of the wall pins Bradley’s legs to the top plank. Bradley is upside down, his head a good seven or eight feet off the ground, arms extended. The
last cadet on the near side backs up and runs full speed at the wall, leaping at the last second, clawing, grabbing Bradley’s belt, his harness. Using Bradley as a human ladder, he scrambles up, stepping on Bradley’s armpits. His flailing boots smack Bradley in the face. Then he is up and over, as quickly as if he had climbed stairs. Bradley and the last man leap to the ground, and the whole team is across in just over a minute.

The crowd goes wild. It is the fastest time the Zoo has delivered all spring, but there is no stopping, and the team takes off at a run, the crowd still cheering.

They run on a ridgeline trail to the mountaineering site, where the Zoo team rappels down a steep rock face above the tennis center. The following crowd clambers down the hill, using a climbing rope as a handhold. They race to get ahead and be in place for the finish.

Breaking out of the brush along the road by the Cadet Chapel, members of the team check to make sure they have everyone. Sweaty, blowing hard, they scamper down the steps by the gym and run out onto Jefferson Road, which passes the Supe’s house. As they turn the corner, they come up behind two wide-bodied humvees. In previous years, the final task was to push a jeep around the block on which Quarters 100 sits; the humvee weighs more than twice what the old jeep weighed.

The team starts off fast, pushing the big green vehicle toward MacArthur’s statue. Around the corner, sandbags are laid end-to-end across the road. The eight cadets (one is inside steering) strain to get the vehicle over the bags. In front of Arvin Gym, they maneuver the humvee around some traffic barriers. By the time they come around the block, they are near the end of their strength. Stumbling, mute, they grab their equipment, do one last check to ensure that they are all together and have everything (leaving a piece of equipment behind incurs a penalty; leaving a teammate behind means disqualification). Then, incredibly, they sprint across the finish line.

The street is lined with spectators; the Zoo cheering section is hoarse, but manages a last roar. Once the team crosses the line,
another judge checks their equipment for completeness, and they are finished.

It is 10:30 on Saturday morning.

The Zoo team goes off to shower, to tend their wounds, to scrub the camouflage paint off their faces and arms. The Bradley family heads to the grassy field where the rugby team practices. They’ve brought along a picnic for the entire Sandhurst team.

The Bradleys are in their forties, both schoolteachers, with an easygoing demeanor that makes it easy to picture them in a classroom. They are the kind of adults teenagers would talk to. Madge Bradley, whom Kevin resembles most strongly, has dark, almost black hair. Warm and friendly, she smiles a lot and speaks with a strong New Jersey accent, like someone from a Bruce Springsteen song.

“When he first came here I was worried that we’d lose Kevin,” she admits. “But in fact what happened was that my family didn’t get smaller, it got bigger.”

Madge comes from a large family, and so is used to having a crowd around. Because the Bradleys live so close to Philadelphia and the site of the Army-Navy football game, their home has been a gathering place before and after the game for Kevin and his friends.

“She loves it,” Dave Bradley says, smiling behind his sunglasses.

“We have kids sleeping on the floor, on the couches, in all the rooms,” Madge adds. “My brothers come along and I tell them to bring lots of food … those kids can eat.”

The Bradleys’ van is parked at the edge of Clinton Field, close to the center of the cadet area. A hundred yards away, tourists snake through the rows of cannons on Trophy Point and pose for pictures with the Hudson as a backdrop. Dave Bradley unfolds a large table. Cori covers it with a tablecloth and the family goes into a little drill, as practiced as the one-rope bridge exercise. Two big coolers, one full of soft drinks and the other full of long sandwiches (“hoagies,” in New Jersey); brownies and chips and napkins and pickles. They’ve been doing this for four years, and now they can hardly believe it’s about to end.

Madge checks to make sure Kevin isn’t around, then tells a story. When Kevin was six years old, the family visited Washington and went to the top of the Washington Monument. The elevator operator looked down at Kevin and asked him if he wanted to operate the lift. Kevin, wide-eyed and excited, said he did, and the man told him which button to push.

“Kevin pushed the button and that man announced to the whole elevator, ‘Look at this man, only six years old and already serving his country.’”

Dave Bradley says that Kevin grew up wanting to be a pilot. At a college fair, Kevin approached the table for the Air Force Academy.

“The guy noticed Kevin’s glasses and asked him about his vision. ‘You have to have 20/20 vision to fly for us,’ the Air Force guy said. And there was this guy from West Point sitting at the table right next to that, and he jumped up and said, ‘You can fly for us!’”

The Bradleys let their son find his own way into West Point. Kevin visited twice; after one of the trips he told his teacher-parents that he liked the way the classrooms were run. The sense of orderliness appealed to him, but the parents disagree as to whether Kevin ever had a particularly hard time.

“He didn’t like getting yelled at,” Madge says.

“He wasn’t much of a yeller himself,” his father agrees. “Kevin was captain of a couple of teams in high school, football and baseball. And he was always a quiet kind of leader. One of the coaches told me that Kevin would listen to the other kids, then he’d talk. And people would listen to him.”

“Cori told me I should have yelled at him more to get him ready,” Madge jokes.

He did, they agree, have a rough start to Beast in 1995: Kevin wound up in the hospital on R-Day with a stomach virus. He called home in a panic that he was already falling behind.

“I told him to just take it one day at a time,” Madge says. Then, after a pause, she adds, “I follow that advice in my life, too. When Kevin was a plebe I spent a lot of time worrying about stuff that never came to pass. So now I try not to worry. It’s a waste of energy. I’ll still
worry some—I’m a mother—but I’ve learned that most of what we fear doesn’t happen.”

Kevin and some of the other cadets from the company team show up, wearing loose-fitting PT shorts and shirts and walking gingerly. Kevin has a long scratch on the inside of one thigh where brambles tore through his trousers. He reports that he has a welt, almost perfectly square, where his rifle gouged him between the shoulder blades as he was getting off the one-rope bridge.

The team digs into the meal laid out on the folding table, piling their plates high with sandwiches and brownies and chips. The underclass cadets are quiet; talk among the firsties soon turns to graduation week.

Kevin says that some parents are hosting a picnic on graduation day. The firsties have been invited to be “pinned” there. The new lieutenants will take the oath of office at Michie Stadium, then receive their diplomas. Later in the day, dressed in army greens, they will have their new gold bars pinned on. They can choose the time, the place, and even who will pin them.

Kevin winces as he sits on a cooler and flexes his legs, then lets himself smile as he talks about the ceremony. His parents, who are about to lose him again—first to training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and then to the U.S. Army in Europe—busy themselves with the details. How can we help? Can we chip in for food and drink? What time?

Kevin is a little short on details because there are just too many other things to worry about between now and graduation day. He finishes his sandwich, puts his paper plate on the ground, and stretches his tired legs in front of him. Then he checks his watch.

“Gotta go,” he says, pushing himself into an upright position.

He is, incredibly, off to practice diving with the Scuba Club.

“Thanks for lunch and everything, and for coming up,” he says, kissing his mother’s cheek.

The cadets say their thank you’s and hobble away to the next requirement. In a few minutes, the Bradleys are left alone. Dave watches his son as Kevin walks away across the grass.

“He takes advantage of every opportunity to learn that they offer
him,” Dave says. Then he folds the picnic table and packs up what little food is left.

If West Point excels at anything, it is at taking advantage of learning opportunities. Early on a spring morning, Pete Haglin is experiencing one of these “developmental opportunities.”

Haglin is the “section marcher” for his boxing class, responsible for getting the class ready: everyone in uniform, attendance taken, mouthpieces in, headgear on, lined up in two ranks before the instructor. Every general who went to West Point started out in charge of such a group. Haglin moves quickly to one of a half dozen lockers in the big boxing room and pulls out the equipment for class. Then he consults a pocket-sized notebook, calls names, and checks that everyone is properly outfitted. It is 7:30 in the morning, in the second semester of his freshman year in college.

The cadets pop to attention when the instructors enter the boxing room, which looks like a movie set for a period film. Built in the thirties, it is seventy feet long by thirty wide, with arched windows high in the front wall, exposed steel beams, and lots of worn brick. The lower parts of the walls are covered with thick yellow pads. A dozen heavy bags hang from chains at the front of the room, near the door. Tall mirrors stretch for twenty feet along the wall opposite the windows. The cadets move in a round robin of warm-ups, from the exercises to the heavy bags to the mirrors for shadowboxing. Then they gather at the end of the room where the ring waits.

Major White, the lead instructor, climbs into the ring. He is a big man, a former Army football player, handsome and muscled like a bodybuilder. White wears polished black coach’s shoes, prim white socks pulled up above his ankles. His black shorts are, in the style of DPE, tight, like cut-off spandex. His shirtsleeves grip his biceps. The baggy look hasn’t caught on here. His clothes look tailored, or deliberately shrunk.

The cadets have been moving continuously since the beginning of the class, going on fifteen minutes by the time they gather at the ring.

“I want you to get a little taste of what it’s like to be a boxer,”
White thunders. “You’re going to have a couple of puny little one-minute rounds in a fifty-minute class. Think about these pros, training five, six, seven hours a day, going round after three-minute round. Boxers are some of the best-conditioned athletes in sports.”

Boxing is a required sport for all plebe men. The whole course lasts only nineteen lessons, but it has an effect all out of proportion to its duration. Plebe boxing is the source of a wealth of stories these men will tell for years to come because, for most of them, it is the first time they have had to confront real physical fear. The boxing ring, with its stained mat and unforgiving ropes, is where these future warriors learn about courage.

Haglin climbs into the ring. He wears a head guard with a bridge because he’s broken his nose three times as a kid: once paying soccer, once playing basketball, once in a fistfight. But the bridge is in his way, and to see to the front he has to cock his head like a bird. He takes his corner, bangs his fists together as he shuffles from one foot to the other.

Haglin, who stands about five ten, has a good reach on his opponent, who is an inch or two shorter. But the other boxer is much thicker, maybe twenty pounds heavier. And apparently fearless. When White calls out, “Box,” Haglin’s opponent strides across the ring and delivers a series of jabs like jackhammer blows. None of them connects hard enough to stagger Haglin, but he gives up the initiative. His feet move too fast, his punches are a bit off the mark. Still, unlike some of the other boxers this morning, he is more concerned with landing solid punches than with simply avoiding getting hit.