“Duty-Honor-Country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, and what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn."
― General Douglas MacArthur
Swim season ended with the Patriot League Championships, and suddenly I didn’t know what to do with myself. A handful of swimmers also played on West Point’s water polo team, and although I knew that my playing polo might raise eyebrows with the swim team’s coaching staff, I found myself wanting to throw the ball around more than I wanted to participate in the swim team’s anemic offseason training program.
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| Tullahoma, TN, is not far from Ft. Knox. My grandparents drove up during the week and took me and my friend Chris to lunch during one free afternoon. |
Rocket was set to graduate, and most of the rest of the swimmers had other things that they needed to do to further their cadet careers. Army’s twice-per-week offseason swimming program didn’t feel particularly pressing. Besides, I knew I’d be out of the water all summer for Cadet Field Training at Camp Buckner no matter what else happened, and it had been a long time since I’d been able to call myself a two-sport athlete. More than anything else, I wanted to know if I could make it at the next level in my second sport. This was by no means a given.
The water polo team didn’t practice at Crandall Pool. They practiced in the thirty-three meter Intramural Pool, buried deep in the bowels of West Point’s Arvin Gymnasium. Despite more than six months of daily swimming as a plebe, I’d been down to the Intramural Pool exactly one time, for the swim test given at the start of Beast Barracks. As I headed down into the labyrinth beneath the gym’s main levels, I belatedly realized that I had no idea where I was going. I wandered through windowless tan-tiled hallways for a full quarter-hour before the tell-tale smell of chlorine at last told me that I’d found my destination.
The team was already in the water. Maybe two dozen guys had paired off in opposing lines for deep-water passing drills. So I’d fumbled around and arrived late, and that sucked. After more than two years removed from the sport, I knew that I’d need the team’s good graces to have a chance at all of earning an actual roster spot. Fortunately, several of the guys already knew me, and everyone seemed excited to see that I’d come out. I stripped off and started passing with a friend of mine, and if my skills felt rusty, I gradually decided that if the team had a junior varsity squad, I might well be asked to stick around.
That was as much as I dared hope.
Alas, Coach Bosse put an end to my two-sport dreams the next time that I saw him.
“You’re playing water polo?” he asked. He sounded skeptical, maybe even a little wary.
“I’m thinking about it,” I replied. “I’ve only been to one practice, but I wanted to give it a try. Why? You don’t want me to play?” I swallowed hard, already realizing how the conversation was going to end.
“I’d rather you didn’t,” Ray said. He sounded almost apologetic.
I took a breath to argue, but I looked at Ray, and instead I let it go. “If that’s what you want,” I said at last, “then fine. It’s no big deal.”
I was disappointed but far from surprised. Water polo season overlapped swim season for several weeks in the early fall, and I knew that Ray would not want to lose me during the team’s early conditioning work. Indeed, I wasn’t sure that I wanted that for myself. Ideally, I’d have played polo solely in the spring, letting swimming take priority in-season but playing polo in lieu of West Point’s twice-weekly parade practices later in the year. Even then, I knew that Ray wouldn’t want to take the chance on losing me at all, and honestly, I couldn’t blame him. It would have been hard to walk away from polo midseason, especially if I’d somehow managed to earn a spot in the team’s travel roster. That didn’t look likely plebe year, but later… It wasn’t impossible. Ray presumably had more faith in the swim team’s offseason conditioning work than I did as well, but I wasn’t about to bring up the program’s sparse attendance. In the end, my loyalty had to lie with Army Swimming regardless.
But.
Drill sucked, the twice-per-week offseason swim practices were no better than I’d feared they’d be, and I ended up liking Camp Buckner only slightly better than I liked Beast Barracks. We didn’t get hazed at Buckner, and that was good, but as a rising yearling, I thought of myself distinctly as a swimmer first, as a student second, and as a soldier distantly third—if at all. Worse, Camp Buckner offered no interaction whatsoever with my teammates, and we didn’t do nearly the same level of physical training that we’d done during Beast. During Beast we’d at least run a lot. At Buckner we spent most of our time practicing individual infantry skills, skills for which I had no frame of reference and little intrinsic interest. There were a few interesting challenges, of course, such as learning land navigation with a map and compass and learning to call for and adjust artillery fire. But by the time we’d finished Infantry Week, I knew for certain that I would not be following in my father’s footsteps. We spent an entire week lying in the mud, guarding the perimeter of a notional patrol base day-and-night against imaginary threats, and I was bored out of my mind. My father was keenly disappointed when I told him about it, but I honestly couldn’t understand his fascination with that particular lifestyle. I wanted him to be proud of me, but in this particular instance, he was going to have to learn to live with disappointment.
The one thing I liked about Camp Buckner was the week we spent down at the Armor School at Fort Knox, Kentucky. We flew down on a chartered commercial plane, our duffel bags stuffed to bursting with a week’s worth of uniforms and field gear. We arrived in the afternoon at a set of two-story open-bay wooden barracks buildings left over from the Second World War. Despite their age, the barracks themselves were immaculately clean and in excellent repair, having seen generations of young Army recruits endlessly buffing their floors and polishing their latrine furnishings to a high shine. We did this as well, and we pulled Fire Guard at night to ensure that the barracks didn’t somehow burn to the ground around us. This was the same kind of military nonsense that Camp Buckner featured in full, but somehow the change in venue made it infinitely more palatable.
The real difference, though, came on our first training day. We formed up by companies and boarded a set of white school buses for a trip down to the gunnery range. There we filed onto aluminum bleachers, sat down en masse, and watched in stunned silence as rock music blasted from the range’s heavy-duty speaker system. Combat vehicles came tearing ass up the range road behind us, first a hard-shelled Humvee with a Mark-19 automatic grenade launcher mounted on top, then a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and finally an M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tank. Targets popped downrange, and the vehicles engaged. Tracers flew light red lightning while thunder rumbled at the impacts. I felt my mouth fall open in stunned amazement.
The Mark-19 and the Bradley were each impressive enough, the Bradley in particular because it put down a line of 25mm tracer rounds with stabilized precision out to a target more than a mile away. Then the Abrams spoke, unleashing a blast of fire as large as the tank itself. Its single tracer flew almost faster than the eye could follow, hitting a target clear on the other side of the range complex. Each vehicle then drove downrange, engaging targets on the move and from various concrete fighting positions. They demonstrated their maneuverability on the way back, with the Bradley and the tank both going backward and forward over a waist-high gravel ramp despite a sheer three-foot concrete drop on one side.
I realized at last that I was watching breathlessly, sitting literally on the edge of my seat.
“Okay cadets, line up!” an instructor yelled. “We’re gonna load and fire that tank and Bradley.”
I used the tank’s hand and foot holds to climb onto its armored front skirt and then stepped onto the front slope of the hull. From there, I climbed to the top of the turret. This put me almost ten feet off the ground. I looked down into the loader’s hatch, finding a much smaller space than I’d expected, about the size of a large bathtub with a standing shower. The turret was painted all white inside, though the black metal bulk of the gun’s breech block dominated whatever open area existed, with three distinct crew compartments spread around it—one for the loader, one for the tank commander, and one down below for the gunner. Each compartment was separated by thin white metal guards intended to keep the crew safe from the breech block’s recoil. A single non-commissioned officer sat in front of me in the tank commander’s seat.
“Come on in,” he said. He handed me a hard-shelled helmet with distinctly large, noise-cancelling earphones. “Here, cadet, put this on.” The next time he spoke, I heard his voice through the helmet’s speakers via the tank’s intercom system. He pointed to a long white flap of metal that hung down by my right thigh. “That’s the switch to the ammunition door. Hit that with your knee, and the door opens hydraulically. You’re gonna grab a round, turn it so that the point is facing towards the breech block, and then punch it in. You understand me? Don’t push it with your fingers. Punch it, so that you don’t get a finger caught when the breech comes up. You ready?”
“Yes, sergeant.”
“Load sabot.”
I hit the switch, and the ammo door wooshed open. The rounds were each 120mm in diameter, maybe seven or eight inches across, held by spring-loaded brackets. I hit one of the brackets, and a round popped out. I caught the baseplate with one hand and used the other to pull it down from the rack. That round was heavy. It must have weighed forty-five pounds in all, and it would have stood taller than my waist had I set it down on its base plate.
“Believe it or not,” the sergeant said, “that round is almost fully combustible. The only thing left after it fires is the metal base plate. Even the cartridge itself is made of cellulose, to aid in propulsion. Now slam that thing into the breech block. Punch it!”
I turned the round awkwardly, aimed the point into the breech, and then punched the base plate with a closed fist. The breech slammed shut.
The sergeant smiled. “That’s the way. Now hit that handle and yell, ‘Up!’ That lets the rest of the crew know that the gun is armed.”
I slammed the handle. “Up!”
“Now stand back. Believe me, you don’t want to be standing in the way when this monster fires. It’ll knock you into next week!”
The sergeant turned and began talking the cadet in the gunner’s seat through firing the main gun. I huddled back from the breech block, though there wasn’t a lot of space. The guard rails should have made it impossible for me to stand where I didn’t belong, but I believed what the sergeant had told me about the gun’s recoil. I let myself be wary.
The tank fired. It wasn’t as loud as I’d expected down inside the turret, but the breech slammed almost all the way back to the turret’s rear wall. It would have squashed me for sure if I’d somehow gotten in its way.
The NCO saw me staring. “Tanks are dangerous, cadet. They’re made to kill, and they don’t care who. That’s why you’ve always got to be careful. Now let’s switch it up.”
The cadet in the gunner’s seat climbed out, and I climbed down to take his place. One of my classmates followed me down into the loader’s hatch, receiving the instructions that I myself had just heard.
“Up!” he cried when the main gun was loaded again.
“Okay, put your eye to the sight and grab the cadillacs. Those are the little handles below the sight. They move the gun like a steering wheel using the tank’s hydraulics. Put the reticle on the target, and once it’s center-of-mass, hit the red button at the top of the handles. That will trigger the laser range finder, telling the computer how far it is to the target. The computer will figure a firing solution, adjust the angle of the gun, and then you’re ready to rock. Got it?”
“Yes, sergeant!”
“Put the reticle on the target and lase.”
I maneuvered the cadillacs, swinging the main gun down and around until the firing reticle lay center-of-mass on a large wooden cutout shaped like an enemy tank. The entire turret moved as I steered the gun. Once I had a sight picture, I hit the red button with my thumb. I couldn’t see the laser, but a digital display at the bottom of my view flashed red. 1200 yards. The breech block jumped as the computer adjusted the gun’s firing angle. In the back of my mind, I realized that I knew the ballistic equations that the computer was figuring. We’d done them in Calculus class.
“Twelve hundred yards,” I said.
“When you’re ready,” the NCO replied,” yell, ‘On the way!’ Then squeeze the trigger.”
“On the way!”
I squeezed, and the breech block leaped through its recoil. My sight picture evaporated in a cloud of dust, but this quickly cleared. The target was gone.
“Target! Cease fire!” the NCO yelled. “Good job, cadet. One shot, one kill.”
My smile spread from ear to ear. I knew what I wanted to do in the Army.
I’d declared myself a European History major as a second semester plebe, following in the footsteps of Colonel Wheeler, by far my favorite Academy professor. It was only in the wake of my decision to branch Armor, however, that I realized that all of my favorite professors had themselves come from Armor Branch, the Mounted Combat Arm of Decision. This included Colonel Wheeler, obviously, but it was also true of most of my other history professors as well.
I realized belatedly that Armor officers were thinkers first, and that this had legitimate value. As an institution, West Point embraced a tendency to spout “Hooah Ranger!” nonsense, but that was just one aspect of actual military life. The best officers I knew, the ones that I not only liked but whom I actually wanted to emulate myself, were thinkers first. That I thought of myself as a thinker as well went without saying. Perhaps “Hooah Ranger!” held primacy of place amongst West Point’s most vocal officers and cadets, but Armor branch’s quieter “one shot, one kill” made much more sense to me as a way of life and death.
The Army could keep all that light infantry stuff. I wanted heavy metal.
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